Sebastian Stan has had a long, fruitful run in the MCU playing Bucky Barnes, also known by his unbeatable antihero-turned-superhero title, the Winter Soldier. Now Stan may be joining fellow MCU alum Scarlett Johansson to deploy to Gotham City in Matt Reeves’ The Batman: Part II.
Considering Stan’s played a villain (of sorts) in Captain America: The Winter Soldier as the brainwashed super-soldier in the second half of the title and the noble defender of justice as the heroic, non-brainwashed version of said Winter Soldier, he’s clearly comfortable playing the heavy or the hero. There’s no indication yet of who he might be playing in Reeves’ sequel—we’re still unclear exactly which of Batman’s iconic foes the Caped Crusader will be battling—so start your speculating.
Stan and Pattinson have worked together before, in director Antonio Campos‘s Southern Gothic thriller The Devil All the Time. With Johansson potentially already in the mix, Stan would be joining an already stacked cast alongside Pattinson. The cast includes Colin Farrell as Oz Cobb/The Penguin, Jeffrey Wright as James Gordon, and Andy Serkis as Alfred Pennyworth.
There’s another big name who appeared, briefly, in the The Batman and could have a much more significant role in Part II—Barry Keoghan. Keoghan appeared to play a certain Arkham prisoner who had a very small role in the first film as the laughing lunatic imprisoned in a cell at Arkham Asylum next to Paul Dano’s Riddler. Perhaps you could guess who he was supposed to be?
There’s also no word yet on who Johansson might play, which isn’t all that surprising given the secrecy around the Reeves and co-writer Mattson Tomlin’s script.
The Batman dropped us into Bruce Wayne’s (Pattinson) world deep into his second year of being his nocturnal vigilantism as the Batman, just in time to tangle with a demented death-dealer calling himself The Riddler (Paul Dano), mucking it up with the ruthless Oz Cobb (Farrell) and getting help (and maybe a little heartache) from Catwoman (Zoë Kravitz)—Farrell’s gangbusters performance as the Penguin led to HBO Max’s critically acclaimed spinoff series.
How seriously has Reeves and his team kept the script for The Batman: Part II under wraps? “We put [the script] into a secret pouch that literally has a lock on it with a code. [Pattinson] was in New York at the time, and everything is high security,” he told Variety.
The Batman: Part II exists outside the newly unified DCU dreamed up by James Gunn and Peter Safran at DC Studios. The DCU kicked off with Gunn’s Superman last summer, and will continue with Supergirl: Woman of Tomorrow hitting theaters on June 26, followed by Clayface on September 26 and, in July of 2027, Man of Tomorrow, Gunn’s Superman sequel.
Stan’s last mission in the MCU wasn’t all that long ago—he starred in Thunderbolts* last year, and he’s already slated to appear in Avengers: Doomsday.
We open on a stormy New York night in the first trailer for writer/director Kirill Sokolov’s They Will Kill You, Warner Bros. and New Line Cinema’s upcoming horror-comedy produced by, among others, It filmmaker Andy Muschietti. We quickly proceed inside the Virgil Building, which is “one of the most exclusive buildings in Manhattan,” we’re told. And who’s doing the telling? The always-excellent Patricia Arquette, who welcomes a stranger to her door, Zazie Beetz’s Asia Reaves, the building’s new maid. What could possibly go wrong?
Asia soon learns that the building, which houses a collection of rich eccentrics, demands the highest execution of service. And those doing the serving, like Asia, are kept inside by doors triple bolted. “That’s a lot of locks,” Asia notes as the doors are sealed shut. Again, what could possibly go wrong?
Asia soon discovers that the Virgil is a “temple to Satan,” which seems evident given the red-soaked interior design, the endless, Shining-like corridors, and the demands of a monthly bill that seems a tad extreme—a human sacrifice. Worse still? Asia discovers that she’s to be the next offering.
The Virgil and its demented residents are in for a bit of a shock, however, when they try to dispatch the resilient Asia. This Satanic cult is woefully unprepared for just how tough and timely Asia is with an array of weapons. The trailer, cheekily gory, gives you a sense of how much fun Sokolove, Beetz, and her fellow cast members and crew intend for you to have at the theater. When a child stabs Asia in the back—literally—she’s not above striking back.
Flaming axes, wild fisticuffs, and bloody battle ensue. When asked how she learned to fight like such a dervish, Asia says, “Prison.”She clearly has no intention of perishing in a new prison by another name.
The cast, along with Beetz and Arquette, includes Heather Graham, Tom Felton, Myha’la, Darron Meyer, Armando Rivera, Gabe Gabriel, and Chris Van Resnburg.
Check out the trailer for They Will Kill You here. The film slashes its way into theaters on March 27.
Featured image: Caption: ZAZIE BEETZ as Asia Reaves in New Line Cinema/Nocturna’s “They Will Kill You,” a Warner Bros. Pictures release. Courtesy Warner Bros.
The fifth and final season of Stranger Things may take place over the course of a few November days, but the Duffer Brothers’ ever-ambitious epic took almost a year to shoot. Volume 1, the season’s first four episodes, saw Eleven (Millie Bobby Brown) putting her powers to work in the Upside Down, Will (Noah Schnapp) telepathically connecting with demogorgons, and the youngest Wheeler sibling, Holly (Tinsley Price), taken prisoner by Vecna (Jamie Campbell Bower), aka Henry Creel, in a 1950s-inflected mind maze. Hawkins, meanwhile, is under military lockdown, but the more the show’s young heroes encounter the military, the clearer it becomes they’re not in town to protect the locals.
Of the many attributes that have made Stranger Things into a cultural juggernaut over the past decade is the show’s cinematographic commitment to filming as much in camera as possible. For cinematographer Caleb Heymann, that sometimes meant working on eight episodes at the same time, since nothing about this show allows it to shoot in traditional two-episode blocks. That meant lighting demogorgon stand-ins, shooting 100 stunt actors at a time, and finding creative ways to visually demonstrate Will’s heightened connection to the Upside Down. We spoke with Heymann about how he continued to develop new techniques to push the show forward, even as it recently reached its long-awaited finale.
You’ve done a lot in camera throughout the series. What’s an example, in this season, that might surprise viewers?
When you look at the big finale of episode 4, we have reference passes for what the demogorgons look like, and we have a stunt actor with a tennis ball on their head go out there, so all the other actors understand where their eye line should be, and so we understand what we’re framing for. Ultimately, we shoot it without a demogorgon, but everything else is real. In that battle, there were close to 100 stunt actors. All the background is real. The set is about 400 feet wide and close to 300 feet deep. Just the very deep background beyond the walls would be VFX. Even for the craziest sequences like that, we try to do as much in camera as we safely can.
How did you handle the demogorgons in other environments?
We have a lot of demogorgons in this season, and it can be counterintuitive—as the director of photography, for some shots, you’re framing and lighting air. But you’re still going about it the same way, as if it were there. It’s important to do that, so the VFX has integrity. It doesn’t look right if the set lighting isn’t right and they just make the asset look cool—you’ll sense something is off. So even with the demogorgons, we have a stand-in with all the shine and texture of that charred skin, and we can see how it behaves in the lighting.
There’s a lot of very active lighting in this show. How did you take that into account?
It was important for me, at the end of Volume 1, to feel like we were building toward a visual crescendo. You have that happening in several locations simultaneously. At the Upside Down military base, where you see the struggles among Hopper, Eleven, and Dr. Kay, there is its own visual progression in the lighting. Thankfully, there were clues for that in the script. Eleven hears the sonic weapon, and the red flashers start going off. I wanted to do something more dynamic than pulsing red on-off lights we’ve all seen a million times. I worked with our set decorator, Jess Royal, to find a more dynamic version that would actually spin and rotate, allowing me to create more energetic lighting because it’s actually bouncing around the environment. Then Hopper has his struggle with that big tail, and we were able to use the heat lamps to create a lot of tension around that.
Will takes on a new role this season. How did you approach conveying his experience through the cinematography?
We realized his antennae to the hive mind was going to be front and center this season, and we experimented with how to represent that visually. We ended up finding this unique combination of filters that we put in front of the camera which were center spot diopter filters that we stacked. I was just holding it in front of the lens and shaking it back and forth, an extremely low-fi technique as we tracked in and out. We just stumbled upon it in our testing and that became Will’s tunnel vision that takes us into the demogorgon view. We also used, for the first time in the show, these first-person view drones for the demogorgon POV shots. We had an FPV drone operator who’s incredible, who’s actually able to move the camera at 30 to 40 miles per hour, using this drone, including the gallop of the demogorgon. Those were all done in camera as well. We had a good time experimenting with some new visuals around Will’s visions.
In contrast, Henry’s memories have a very different aesthetic.
We wanted to have a bit of a pastel, and Technicolor look, to be more saturated, and more appealing, because initially, you want to be drawn into that world. It was basically a mind-maze he’s created, made up of his memories. I didn’t want it to feel like it had too heavy a look imposed upon it. I was leaning a lot into what the sets wanted to be. We wanted it to feel inviting, and we were really going with a more colorful, poppy sense of that, that also connotes a lot of this is taking place in the 1950s.
In the show’s present, how did you bring a sense of reality and nostalgia to the family homes in Hawkins?
With the domestic stuff, it’s important that it feels grounded. Those scenes are so important to balance out all the crazy action we have in this season. Generally, I just try to do what feels emotionally appropriate for the scene and the performance, giving the actors space. But also, if there’s a poignant moment, we want that emotion to carry through with the visuals. If we have a crucial moment, we try to pick when sunset’s going to be and what’s going to be at dusk, playing with the warmth and cool light to go with what’s happening in the scene’s emotion, and hopefully striking that balance of it feeling real. They do such a good job with the detail of the sets, and I’d like all that to read and come through.
If ever there was an actor more perfectly aligned with the ethos of James Cameron and the world of Pandora, it’s Oona Chaplin. Chaplin’s first conversation with Cameron revolved around biodynamic and organic farming. She is an activist and environmentalist whose humanitarian efforts span from Brazil, Cuba, Chile, Mexico, and beyond. She’s volunteered in refugee camps and supported film education for Saharawi refugees through the FiSahara Festival.
In Avatar: Fire and Ash, Chaplin plays the leader of the Mangkwan Clan, Varang. She’s a warrior consumed with anger and loss. While the Na’vi worship their deity, Eywa, she resents “Great Mother” for the destruction of her home.
Chaplin, who lives on a 20-acre farm within a broader community, recently spoke with The Credits about defining the rich antagonist and her continued work supporting Indigenous communities.
How’d your first meeting with James Cameron go? Being environmentalists, was there an instant connection?
We talked about potassium in the soil and how alfalfa brings potassium. I was, at the time, taking a 180-degree turn from a lot of things. I built myself a tree house in the jungle in Cuba. I was hellbent on living there by myself and with a friend. I’m not there anymore, and I’m very glad for it, although it was a very fundamental theme of my life. But we talked about that, really, and how to grow food responsibly, and trying to understand how to build soil. That was probably 40 minutes of our conversation.
Do you two discuss the technical side of motion capture and the creation of the world of Avatar?
That’s the great thing about performance capture: you don’t have to worry about any of the lights. You don’t have to worry about camera angles. You don’t have to worry because they’re catching it all in three. It’s like a permanent close-up the entire time. You have a lot of freedom as an actress or as an actor to be in the moment, and they’ll catch whatever they want in post.
How’d you prepare to create Varang’s unique body language, especially how she leads her people into battle?
There was a lot around being able to move in a natural way, which we, as human beings, I’ve realized how unnaturally I move. We spend so much time sitting down. There’s no other creature in nature that spends that much time sitting down. When we walk, we walk with shoes that are too tight. Suddenly, it was just embodying my human form in a whole new way, using my knees constantly up and down and constantly going. Using the full breadth of my limbs was really fun.
How’d Varang’s backstory influence how she moved?
It was all about closing around the heart, because she’s got a lot of trauma, a lot of pain in her heart because her land was destroyed. There’s an unresolved trauma that provoked the closing around the heart. We just dropped her center of gravity to the groin and the pelvis.
You have described her in the vein as a revolutionary. Were there any revolutionaries you were reading about or focusing on while shooting?
I didn’t draw any inspiration from anyone alive or real, but I did draw a lot of inspiration from Idris Elba’s performance in Beasts of No Nation. Nobody real, although it’s all there. She reflected back to me exactly the outlook that I have.Our natural state is more like the Na’vi, even though obviously we don’t have the neural queue and all that fancy stuff, but we do have our own ways to connect. When you lose that connection, when you sever that connection with nature, there’s conflict. It’s really easy because you don’t feel like you’re a part of anything, and you start to feel yourself being separate. And so, that was an easy access point because I can relate. I think we can all, whether it’s with our neighbor, with nature, or even with ourselves.
You work with Indigenous communities worldwide. What projects have inspired you lately?
We’re working with several people from different Indigenous communities who are making big moves in this world. There’s one guy, Benki Piyãnko,who has planted millions of trees in the Amazon [called the Yorenka Ãtame project] and has a team of, we call them his lieutenants, but they’re not lieutenants. They’re just awesome dudes who are all about reforesting, too. And so, Benki has a cultural rehabilitation center that’s full of all of these seeds. They are privately buying up land, putting it in the trust, so it’s very much donation-based. Through donations, they buy up land, then eat it, then reforest it, and, through their work, become a replicable model that then runs outreach programs for neighboring Indigenous communities.
Who else are you working with these days?
We have a relationship with Pat Scott, who’s pretty much doing the same thing in the White Mesa here. He is a Diné, commonly known as Navajo, but self-referred to as a Diné elder. He cleaned up the water in the White Mesa. We have relatives that are Yawanawá; we have amazing Yawanawá relatives, women who are breaking tradition to keep the tradition alive. I never think about it as philanthropy or anything else. It’s Indigenous-led projects we support through our outreach and networking. But they’re all projects that we know intimately and that are having a big impact on the world.
Any leaders, at the beginning of your outreach, who really spoke to you?
I met Ninawa Pai da Mata, the Kuni elder from the Brazilian Amazon, from the region of Acre. The way that he talked about his home and his land, the way that he talked about his people, and the way that his language sounded, I became interested in culture that way because land and people and culture — they’re not separable. They’re the same thing. To protect the land, we must protect the people and culture that have coevolved with it. By some miracle, I’ve kept meeting amazing Indigenous elders.
You must have learned a great deal from meeting people these leaders.
I’ve also become interested in Indigenous technology. It was unknown to me just what you can do with rosemary. I became fascinated with the building work – the ways to grow food. I want to do everything I can, not just to help them with their projects and community initiatives, but also to learn as much as I can and represent what I’ve learned as well. It’s complex, but it’s beautiful.
How have these experiences changed you as a person and as an artist?
As an artist, I became much more interested in the art of storytelling. Stories can be told in so many different ways, but one of the main ways that you can tell a story is by living it. I decided to treat my life more like an art form, telling a story with the gift I have that can be as inspiring and uplifting as possible. And as a person, I became very fascinated with planting seeds and watching them grow, which I’ve never been able to do. I’ve always traveled a lot. And so, I would always plant seeds or buy a little to start, but I never really got the chance to plant something, watch it grow, and take care of the land. So about four and a half years ago, we started stewarding this plot of land with some friends. We live in a community; we live in a little village.
I saw. That’s great.
Little village, big problems, but it’s totally worth it, and it’s very fun as well as very challenging. We take care of the land, we garden, we grow food, and we are doing some repair work on our creek. We try to get into sync with the natural rhythms of life and the natural rhythms of the cycles of time. It’s just these things that have been very foreign to me. I’m doing a very humble study of the very baseline of how to be a human in this world.
Where do you begin?
The main thing is just observation. There’s a bird around where I live that’s called the Swainson’s thrush, and they make this incredible call around the time of July and August. It depends on how hot it is, but they don’t sing like that the rest of the year. So it’s just noticing these times, these things, and seeing, okay, what time, at what point does the sun start shifting? There’s something that happens around the solstices and equinoxes: things suddenly change with the seasons. What grows, what doesn’t grow? It’s all woven in. And so, in the seasons, I like to hibernate more than animals do, and that’s what my body wants to do. I want to sleep more.
How far along are you on this journey?
So, it is really the baseline. I’m not a master; I’m just starting, really, with the basics and relating to the elements. Beginning with the basic building blocks of life, appreciating them, and having gratitude for them. I’m constantly humbled by very simple things.
For her third collaboration with writer-director Rian Johnson on his Knives OutMystery franchise, costume designer Jenny Eagan recalibrated her color palette to suit Wake Up Dead Man‘s darker tone. Daniel Craig, of course, returns as detective Benoit Blanc, but the new installment co-stars Josh O’Connor and Josh Brolin as small-town priests. Rounding out the cast of killers, victims, and innocent bystanders are Glenn Close, Kerry Washington, Mila Kunis, Andrew Scott, Cailee Spaeny, Thomas Haden Church, Jeremy Renner, and Daryl McCormack.
Eagen, who won Costume Designers Guild awards for the first two Knives Out movies, speaks from her Los Angeles home about priestly footwear and the Parisian fashion designer who inspired Craig’s latest appearance as the ever-suave detective.
Wake Up Dead Man contrasts dramatically with its predecessor. Glass Onion took place on a sun- dappled Greek island where everybody wears candy-colored clothes. This one feels much more subdued in terms of color palette. How did you approach the costume concept this time around?
It always starts with the location. This takes place in a small town, and so the impetus was to start there and keep it grounded in reality. Then, when you bring in the priest hood, it’s going to be black [clothing], the church felt dark, and the story itself is darker in tone. Because the story is so dense, I didn’t want audiences to focus too much on the clothes by making them too explosive.
When Benoit shows up, he looks like a million bucks in his elegant suit. How did you collaborate with Daniel Craig in developing his look for this film?
Well, the day I got the script, I got a phone call from Daniel saying, “I’m ready to talk.”
Oh yeah, he’s ready. Daniel loves fashion himself, and he’s been playing this well-dressed character for so many years that he knows which cuts suit him, but he’s also not afraid to take risks. If you look back, the first Knives Out might have leaned a little 50s, putting Daniel in suspenders and high-waisted pants. With Glass Onion, it’s a little 60s. For this one, since Benoit keeps evolving, we created a kind of 70s look but for today.
Detective Benoit Blanc dresses in the same kind of clothes that French fashion designer Yves Saint Laurent himself used to wear?
Yeah, Yves Saint Laurent was an incredibly tailored style icon, especially in the ’70s. It was tailored suits and slim-fitting pants, but with that little flare [below the knees]. The suits are long, lean, and elongated, which Daniel really responded to. We found some vintage Yves Saint Laurent and manipulated the pattern. Most of the suits we found were dark, like navy blue, but because Josh O’Connor as the priest would be in black, I wanted to bring some warmth, so there’s a hint of gold in his suit.
As you mention, Benoit Blanc goes head-to-head with Josh O’Connor in the role of Reverend Jud Duplenticy.
The story for Jud was simple: black, with the white collar. Maybe the jacket felt a little sporty, and because Jud used to be a boxer, we put him in sneakers.
By contrast, Josh Brolin’s Monsignor, Jefferson Wicks, seems very full of himself, and his colorful silk “vestments” seem to reflect that attitude.
He’s very serious and a bit arrogant because Wicks thinks of himself as being at this higher level, so we put him in this silk brocade, and he’s always wearing a cassock, which I think is kind of hilarious. The brocade needed to be big and bold as if to say, about Jud: “Put him in the corner. I don’t need him here.” We also had Josh wearing work boots that brought a hard, rough edge to him—a tough guy kind of thing.
I watched a lot of videos, and also, Rian brought on a priest, Keith, who served as our technical advisor. He was wonderful about answering all my questions about little details, like how to layer the vestments.
Kerry Washington as Vera Draven is a sharp dresser in a small town. What inspired her wardrobe?
She’s a lawyer and probably has some money, so we wanted to make her fashionable. Vera’s tan suit has shoulder pads, as if it’s an expression of her being bigger, maybe than what people think. She’s like, “Just because I put myself last to take care of everyone else doesn’t mean I’ve disappeared. I’m here.” Plus, that suit really looked good on her.
Yes, it does. Were Vera’s clothes fabricated from scratch?
No, we bought those. For most everybody in this movie, their stuff was purchased new or sourced vintage, or a combination of both.But I did make all of Benoit Blanc’s clothes, except the lavender suit, which was not made. I remember that fitting. Daniel looked at it and said, “No way.” I said, “Just try it on.” He put it on and was like: “Okay.” It’s about how big we can go, how dramatic this can be? I think Daniel liked it for that small end piece just to show – he won!
What was it like working with Glenn Close, who plays the black-clad churchgoer Martha Delacroix?
It was a real treat. I traveled to Bozeman twice to see Glenn [at her Montana home]. People there don’t bother her, so she took me shopping at the outdoor stores as we were working through the “Who am I?” for her character.
I read somewhere that Glenn even brought some of her own jewelry to set?
She did! The beautiful rosary that Martha wears belongs to Glenn. And one of the pins is something her father brought back from Africa years ago. That kind of thing gives such a nice personal touch to the character. And [chronic pain-sufferer] Kayley [Cailee Spaeny] had a bracelet with spiky thorns nestled into it. I don’t know if those things are noticed, but they certainly help actors with their characters.
Wake Up Dead Man is set in upstate New York but was actually filmed in England. Where did you do pre-production for the costumes?
I prep all the Knives Out movies in L.A. because a lot of the actors are here, or will be at some point. And Rian lives here, so it’s convenient. His scripts are so detailed, and the team is so organized, that we were able to get a lot done in L.A. for Wake Up Dead Man, and then we shipped it all over to London.
You moved to L.A. from Missouri right out of college to work in the movie business. It sounds like you’ve made a lot of professional connections here. Are you mindful of the impact a picture of this scale has on your colleagues in the local filmmaking community?
Oh yes! I’ve been here 28 years, so this is the family that I know. For this movie, I brought in a cutter, a shopper, a supervisor, and an assistant I’ve had for many years. And I know the costume houses here like the back of my hand, so I can call the owners and say, “I’m coming in, and I need your help.” You can ask for anything, knowing it will get done quickly and efficiently. Unfortunately, a lot of things have moved [overseas], but we still have all these people here who are extraordinary at their jobs. So yes, it’s so, so fulfilling to do a film of this size where you can bring people on.
In order for production designer Nathan Crowley to be able to realize his vision for director Jon M. Chu’s Wicked films, he needed to assemble a crack team of artisans he has relied on for decades. Combining age-old skills and techniques with organic materials foraged from forests, seeing locations as sculptures that needed to evolve with the filmmaking and storytelling process.
Wicked: For Good focuses on the maelstrom surrounding Cynthia Erivo’s Elphaba, the so-called Wicked Witch of the West, and her evolving relationship with Ariana Grande’s Glinda, the Good Witch of the North. The Wizard (Jeff Goldblum) and Madame Morrible (Michelle Yeoh) see it as an opportunity to both exploit the demonization of Elphaba and use Glinda as a popular stooge for their dark agenda.
Here, Crowley, who won an Oscar for his work on Wicked and is also known for his groundbreaking work on Christopher Nolan’s Dark Knight trilogy, as well as Nolan’s Dunkirk and Interstellar, breaks down designing a darker Oz and why the industry must act to protect vital trades.
What opportunities and challenges did the shift in tone and scale in Wicked: For Good offer you?
We spent a lot of Wicked getting the audience used to seeing Munchkinland and introducing people to the world. With the second film, we get to explore the whole of Oz. We travel between the Winkie and Kiamo Ko, the great forests and the Emerald City; we move through the landscapes and follow the Yellow Brick Road, thereby offering opportunities to view Oz as a place rather than individual elements. I enjoyed expanding the Emerald City because in the first film, we come in on the train, there is one short day, then we head straight into the palace through Wizomania. We didn’t spend much time getting to know Emerald City or the landscapes outside it. It’s a much more serious emotional film. It was pretty exciting to explain the characters and where they were, how Elphaba ended up being in Kiamo Ko, getting to explain what that is, and the architecture of this famous castle.
Cynthia Erivo is Elphaba in WICKED FOR GOOD, directed by Jon M. Chu.
Why did you choose anti-gravity architecture to create Kiamo Ko?
I knew we were at sunset, and I knew Kiamo Ko always appeared blue in the books and in The Wizard of Oz, so I knew I had to add some blue stone to it. However, the larger theory was that it was an old seat of Fiyero’s family, and I felt it belonged to the time of magic, when people could read the Grimmerie, so it was like, “We’re going to defy gravity.” My team suggested the columns not touch the floor but be floating, and that was the start. Now, what more can we do? Because we’re going to see this thing from the outside, we could float the battlements so it feels like it touches on the essence of the magic of Oz. Then there’s the realization that if you do arches, and upside-down arches, they become like opposing magnets, and you can get this sliver of light through the upper core of the profile of Kiamo Ko. It was a really a very subtle balance of architecture. I didn’t want it just to be granite because the architectural language of castles is big stone walls. I wanted to do it with a glazed brick, so it would make it more delicate and have more of a femininity to it.
Kiamo Ko in “Wicked: For Good.” Courtesy Nathan Crowley/Universal Pictures.
Another iconic location where color is key is the Yellow Brick Road. How many shades did you go through to get the right one?
I have the scenic paint department, the general paint department, and the plaster shop, which produces the Yellow Brick Road panels; it was more than just the shade of yellow. It was also about the size of brick, the grout size, and even the depth of the grout. We had to do a ton of testing. The yellows were hard because you have to be this golden yellow, but at the same time, you need it bright enough that it’s the most powerful thing in the image. You have matte glazes and gloss glazes. On a stage, you can kick the roof lights, but you have to soften it outside. There, you have a one-directional light from the sun, and that will turn it white in reflection. At dusk, it would need to be a more powerful, deeper yellow, so we would change it depending on where we were. We must have repainted the Yellow Brick Road about four times. We don’t stop a visual design idea and hand it to visual effects. You get to build the whole set in a way that you can change it as you go. It’s like a piece of sculpture.
Building the yellow brick road on the set of “Wicked: For Good.” Courtesy Nathan Crowley/Universal Pictures.
You used organic materials in the design of Elphaba’s nest. Is it true you had people going out into the forest to find wood?
Yeah. We had this terrific greens department. For example, a farmer grew all the tulips, but we still had to grow an extra 600,000 in greenhouses for the Munchkinland set on top of that. With Elphaba’s nest, it’s supposed to be the canopies of the great forest of Oz, and the trees are circular, so we decided they would weave together. I was inspired by the work of British sculptor Andy Goldsworthy. I roughly knew the size we needed, and we marked it out with Jon so we knew where we needed the movement, got the view out to the landscape, where they enter, and we locked that first. Then the green department went foraging, got huge amounts of this flexible wood from their different sources, and dumped it all on stage. We needed people who could sculpturally blend and weave the wood together. When we hit problems with joins, because we couldn’t weave into the ground, we turned the wood upside down and came back up, like a rolling wave. We needed a tree to support the ceiling, so we sculpted it from foam, hard-coated it, painted it, and the greens department added the real wood branches. We joined them together with plaster. We needed to get some top light in there, too, but I didn’t want to see the grid. My plasterer said we would cast stuff in clear silicone, so they made some giant leaves in that and laid them on the canopy. It developed organically rather than as a plan of action.
A mock-up of Elphaba’s nest. Courtesy Nathan Crowley/Universal Pictures.
Both films were shot in your native UK. Are there people that you always call in to pull off projects like this?
I have worked with the same people for 20 years. My scenic artist, David Packard, is the same person I’ve been using since Batman Begins. I carry all kinds of different people, and it’s not just from England. We have an art director from Iceland and one from Estonia, because we worked in these places, and you find people who are great at what they do. It’s about finding the people who are like, I’m going to try this, because you want it. You can’t do it alone. I need a construction crew that’s reliable and can take on challenges. They need to be optimistic about the challenge ahead because it is sometimes stuff we’ve never done before. I’ve never done spinning wheels for a bookshelf. We had to build a 106-foot-long clockwork train engine. Also, when it comes to miniature building, such as the model of Oz, I need people who know traditional crafts. I began at the old MGM Studios on films such as Hook. Hollywood was full of this. You just went down to the workshops and walked the street where they all were. That went away, but England kept up the training. When I’m doing something as big as Wicked, I don’t need one of the best construction people; I need 20.
Building models was a huge part of creating the sets for “Wicked” and “Wicked: For Good.” Courtesy Nathan Crowley/Universal Pictures.
Could more be done to protect those crafts?
It has been maintained in the UK because of the tax bill, so people have kept on making big films there, and the crafts have kept up. Here, they need to pass the training on. There are lots of great scenics. Ed Strang, who was on Dunkirk with me, is a great example. His grandfather used to hand-paint the posters outside Warner Brothers studios in the 1930s. That training needs to be passed down. There are very few miniature builders now. There’s plenty of CGI in Wicked, but the thing is the balance, so the audience doesn’t question it. The old Hollywood system was great, but that system can’t work in the modern era; somehow, these crafts have to get passed on, or they get lost. No one believes the amount of practical stuff we do. I guess we never told anyone about all the practical stuff in the Nolan films. In Dunkirk, it wasn’t CG planes; they were all flying miniatures. The fact that no one knows means it was successful.
A few battles have already been won for writer/director Paul Thomas Anderson.
Anderson’s thrilling One Battle After Anotherwas named best picture at the Critics Choice Awards on Sunday night, and Anderson took home the best director trophy. One Battle’s wins come a little less than a month after Anderson’s epic led the pack for Golden Globe nominations, with nine, including for best picture, director, screenwriter, and a slew of performances, for Leonardo DiCaprio, Chase Infiniti, Teyana Taylor, Benicio del Toro, and Sean Penn.
Anderson wasn’t the only filmmaker enjoying another good recent showing—Ryan Coogler‘s Sinners, which recently received seven Globe nominations, took home four awards, including best original screenplay for Coogler, best casting (a new and long overdue category), and best casting director for Francine Maisler. Miles Caton won for best young actor or actress, and Ludwig Göransson won for best score.
L-R) Ryan Coogler and Michael B. Jordan attend the 31st Annual Critics Choice Awards at Barker Hangar on January 04, 2026 in Santa Monica, California. (Photo by John Shearer/Getty Images for Critics Choice Association)
Jessie Buckley won best actress for her luminous performance in Chloé Zhao’s Hamnet, while Timothée Chalamet took home best actor for his performance in Josh Safdie’s Marty Supreme. Jacob Elordi won best supporting actor for becoming the Creature in Guillermo del Toro’s Frankenstein, while Amy Madigan won best supporting actress for her turn in Zach Cregger‘s Weapons.
Jessie Buckley at the 31st Annual Critics Choice Awards held at the Barker Hangar on January 04, 2026 in Santa Monica, California. (Photo by Christopher Polk/Variety via Getty Images)
Kpop Demon Hunters won for best animated feature, and “Golden” was named best song.
On the limited series side of the equation, Netflix’s scorching Adolescencewon big, with Erin Doherty, Stephen Graham, and newcomer Owen Cooper all winning for their performances, while the series itself won the top honors. Sarah Snook took home the acting award for her work in All Her Fault.
For drama series, the acting winners were Rhea Seehorn for Plurbius, Tramell Tillman for Severance, and Noah Wyle and Katherline LaNassa for The Pitt.
Jimmy Kimmel Live! was named the top talk show, while The Studio won best comedy series, and two of its stars, Seth Rogen and Ike Barinholtz, won acting awards. Hacks’ Jean Smart and Abbot Elementary‘s Janelle James won acting awards.
Here’s the complete list:
Best Picture
Bugonia (Focus Features) Frankenstein (Netflix) Hamnet (Focus Features) Jay Kelly (Netflix) Marty Supreme (A24) One Battle After Another (Warner Bros.) (WINNER) Sentimental Value (Neon) Sinners (Warner Bros.) Train Dreams (Netflix) Wicked: For Good (Universal Pictures)
Best Actor
Timothée Chalamet – Marty Supreme (A24) (WINNER) Leonardo DiCaprio – One Battle After Another (Warner Bros.) Joel Edgerton – Train Dreams (Netflix) Ethan Hawke – Blue Moon (Sony Pictures Classics) Michael B. Jordan – Sinners (Warner Bros.) Wagner Moura – The Secret Agent (Neon)
Best Actress
Jessie Buckley – Hamnet (Focus Features) (WINNER) Rose Byrne – If I Had Legs I’d Kick You (A24) Chase Infiniti – One Battle After Another (Warner Bros.) Renate Reinsve – Sentimental Value (Neon) Amanda Seyfried – The Testament of Ann Lee (Searchlight Pictures) Emma Stone – Bugonia (Focus Features)
Best Supporting Actor
Benicio Del Toro – One Battle After Another (Warner Bros.) Jacob Elordi – Frankenstein (Netflix) (WINNER) Paul Mescal – Hamnet (Focus Features) Sean Penn – One Battle After Another (Warner Bros.) Adam Sandler – Jay Kelly (Netflix) Stellan Skarsgard – Sentimental Value (Neon)
Best Supporting Actress
Elle Fanning – Sentimental Value (Neon) Ariana Grande – Wicked: For Good (Universal Pictures) Inga Ibsdotter Lilleaas – Sentimental Value (Neon) Amy Madigan – Weapons (Warner Bros.) (WINNER) Wunmi Mosaku – Sinners (Warner Bros.) Teyana Taylor – One Battle After Another (Warner Bros.)
Best Young Actor / Actress
Everett Blunck – The Plague (Independent Film Company) Miles Caton – Sinners (Warner Bros.) (WINNERS) Cary Christopher – Weapons (Warner Bros.) Shannon Mahina Gorman – Rental Family (Searchlight Pictures) Jacobi Jupe – Hamnet (Focus Features) Nina Ye – Left-Handed Girl (Netflix)
Best Director
Paul Thomas Anderson – One Battle After Another (Warner Bros.) (WINNER) Ryan Coogler – Sinners (Warner Bros.) Guillermo del Toro – Frankenstein (Netflix) Josh Safdie – Marty Supreme (A24) Joachim Trier – Sentimental Value (Neon) Chloé Zhao – Hamnet (Focus Features)
Best Original Screenplay
Noah Baumbach, Emily Mortimer – Jay Kelly (Netflix) Ronald Bronstein, Josh Safdie – Marty Supreme (A24) Ryan Coogler – Sinners (Warner Bros.) (WINNER) Zach Cregger – Weapons (Warner Bros.) Eva Victor – Sorry, Baby (A24) Eskil Vogt, Joachim Trier – Sentimental Value (Neon)
Best Adapted Screenplay
Paul Thomas Anderson – One Battle After Another (Warner Bros.) (WINNER) Clint Bentley, Greg Kwedar – Train Dreams (Netflix) Park Chan-wook, Lee Kyoung-mi, Don Mckellar, Jahye Lee – No Other Choice (Neon) Guillermo del Toro – Frankenstein (Netflix) Will Tracy – Bugonia (Focus Features) Chloé Zhao, Maggie O’Farrell – Hamnet (Focus Features)
Best Casting and Ensemble
Nina Gold – Hamnet (Focus Features) Douglas Aibel, Nina Gold – Jay Kelly (Netflix) Jennifer Venditti – Marty Supreme (A24) Cassandra Kulukundis – One Battle After Another (Warner Bros.) Francine Maisler – Sinners (Warner Bros.) (WINNER) Tiffany Little Canfield, Bernard Telsey – Wicked: For Good (Universal Pictures)
Best Cinematography
Claudio Miranda – F1 (Apple Original Films) Dan Laustsen – Frankenstein (Netflix) Łukasz Żal – Hamnet (Focus Features) Michael Bauman – One Battle After Another (Warner Bros.) Autumn Durald Arkapaw – Sinners (Warner Bros.) Adolpho Veloso – Train Dreams (Netflix)
Best Production Design
Kasra Farahani, Jille Azis – The Fantastic Four: First Steps (Marvel Studios) Tamara Deverell, Shane Vieau – Frankenstein (Netflix) (WINNER) Fiona Crombie, Alice Felton – Hamnet (Focus Features) Jack Fisk, Adam Willis – Marty Supreme (A24) Hannah Beachler, Monique Champagne – Sinners (Warner Bros.) Nathan Crowley, Lee Sandales – Wicked: For Good (Universal Pictures)
Best Editing
Kirk Baxter – A House of Dynamite (Netflix) Stephen Mirrione – F1 (Apple Original Films) (WINNER) Ronald Bronstein, Josh Safdie – Marty Supreme (A24) Andy Jurgensen – One Battle After Another (Warner Bros.) Viridiana Lieberman – The Perfect Neighbor (Netflix) Michael P. Shawver – Sinners (Warner Bros.)
Best Costume Design
Kate Hawley – Frankenstein (Netflix) (WINNER) Malgosia Turzanska – Hamnet (Focus Features) Lindsay Pugh – Hedda (Amazon MGM Studios) Colleen Atwood, Christine Cantella – Kiss of the Spider Woman (Lionsgate/Roadside Attractions) Ruth E. Carter – Sinners (Warner Bros.) Paul Tazewell – Wicked: For Good (Universal Pictures)
Best Hair and Makeup
Flora Moody, John Nolan – 28 Years Later (Sony Pictures) Mike Hill, Jordan Samuel, Cliona Furey – Frankenstein (Netflix) (WINNER) Siân Richards, Ken Diaz, Mike Fontaine, Shunika Terry – Sinners (Warner Bros.) Kazu Hiro, Felix Fox, Mia Neal – The Smashing Machine (A24) Leo Satkovich, Melizah Wheat, Jason Collins – Weapons (Warner Bros.) Frances Hannon, Mark Coulier, Laura Blount – Wicked: For Good (Universal Pictures)
Best Visual Effects
Joe Letteri, Richard Baneham, Eric Saindon, Daniel Barrett – Avatar: Fire and Ash (20th Century Studios) (WINNER) Ryan Tudhope, Nikeah Forde, Robert Harrington, Nicolas Chevallier, Eric Leven, Edward Price, Keith Dawson – F1 (Apple Original Films) Dennis Berardi, Ayo Burgess, Ivan Busquets, José Granell – Frankenstein (Netflix) Alex Wuttke, Ian Lowe, Jeff Sutherland, Kirstin Hall – Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning (Paramount Pictures) Michael Ralla, Espen Nordahl, Guido Wolter, Donnie Dean – Sinners (Warner Bros.) Stephane Ceretti, Enrico Damm, Stéphane Nazé, Guy Williams – Superman (Warner Bros.)
Best Stunt Design
Stephen Dunlevy, Kyle Gardiner, Jackson Spidell, Jeremy Marinas, Jan Petřina, Domonkos Párdányi, Kinga Kósa-Gavalda – Ballerina (Lionsgate) Gary Powell, Luciano Bacheta, Craig Dolby – F1 (Apple Original Films) Wade Eastwood – Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning (Paramount Pictures) (WINNER) Brian Machleit – One Battle After Another (Warner Bros.) Andy Gill – Sinners (Warner Bros.) Giedrius Nagys – Warfare (A24)
Best Animated Feature
Arco (Neon) Elio (Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures) In Your Dreams (Netflix) KPop Demon Hunters (Netflix) (WINNER) Little Amélie or the Character of Rain (GKIDS) Zootopia 2 (Walt Disney Animation Studios)
Best Comedy
The Ballad of Wallis Island (Focus Features) Eternity (A24) Friendship (A24) The Naked Gun (Paramount) (WINNER) The Phoenician Scheme (Focus Features) Splitsville (Neon)
Best Foreign Language Film
It Was Just an Accident (Neon) Left-Handed Girl (Netflix) No Other Choice (Neon) The Secret Agent (Neon) (WINNER) Sirat (Neon) Belén (Amazon MGM Studios)
Best Song
“Drive” – Ed Sheeran, John Mayer, Blake Slatkin – F1 (Apple Original Films) “Golden” – Ejae, Mark Sonnenblick, Ido, 24, Teddy – KPop Demon Hunters (Netflix) (WINNER) “I Lied to You” – Raphael Saadiq, Ludwig Göransson – Sinners (Warner Bros.) “Clothed by the Sun” – Daniel Blumberg – The Testament of Ann Lee (Searchlight Pictures) “Train Dreams” – Nick Cave, Bryce Dessner – Train Dreams (Netflix) “The Girl in the Bubble” – Stephen Schwartz – Wicked: For Good (Universal Pictures)
Best Score
Hans Zimmer – F1 (Apple Original Films) Alexandre Desplat – Frankenstein (Netflix) Max Richter – Hamnet (Focus Features) Daniel Lopatin – Marty Supreme (A24) Jonny Greenwood – One Battle After Another (Warner Bros.) Ludwig Göransson – Sinners (Warner Bros.)(WINNER)
Best Sound
Al Nelson, Gwendolyn Yates Whittle, Gary A. Rizzo, Juan Peralta, Gareth John – F1 (Apple Original Films) (WINNER) Nathan Robitaille, Nelson Ferreira, Christian Cooke, Brad Zoern, Greg Chapman – Frankenstein (Netflix) Jose Antonio Garcia, Christopher Scarabosio, Tony Villaflor – One Battle After Another (Warner Bros.) Chris Welcker, Benny Burtt, Brandon Proctor, Steve Boeddeker, Felipe Pacheco, David V. Butler – Sinners (Warner Bros.) Laia Casanovas – Sirat (Neon) Mitch Low, Glenn Freemantle, Ben Barker, Howard Bargroff, Richard Spooner – Warfare (A24)
Sterling K. Brown – Paradise (Hulu) Diego Luna – Andor (Disney+) Mark Ruffalo – Task (HBO Max) Adam Scott – Severance (Apple TV) Billy Bob Thornton – Landman (Paramount+) Noah Wyle – The Pitt (HBO Max) (WINNER)
Best Actress in a Drama Series
Kathy Bates – Matlock (CBS) Carrie Coon – The Gilded Age (HBO Max) Britt Lower – Severance (Apple TV) Bella Ramsey – The Last of Us (HBO Max) Keri Russell – The Diplomat (Netflix) Rhea Seehorn – Pluribus (Apple TV) (WINNER)
Best Supporting Actor in a Drama Series
Patrick Ball – The Pitt (HBO Max) Billy Crudup – The Morning Show (Apple TV) Ato Essandoh – The Diplomat (Netflix) Wood Harris – Forever (Netflix) Tom Pelphrey – Task (HBO Max) Tramell Tillman – Severance (Apple TV) (WINNER)
Best Supporting Actress in a Drama Series
Nicole Beharie – The Morning Show (Apple TV) Denée Benton – The Gilded Age (HBO Max) Allison Janney – The Diplomat (Netflix) Katherine LaNasa – The Pitt (HBO Max) (WINNER) Greta Lee – The Morning Show (Apple TV) Skye P. Marshall – Matlock (CBS)
Best Comedy Series
Abbott Elementary (ABC) Elsbeth (CBS) Ghosts (CBS) Hacks (HBO Max) Nobody Wants This (Netflix) Only Murders in the Building (Hulu) The Righteous Gemstones (HBO Max) The Studio (Apple TV)(WINNER)
Best Actor in a Comedy Series
Adam Brody – Nobody Wants This (Netflix) Ted Danson – A Man on the Inside (Netflix) David Alan Grier – St. Denis Medical (NBC) Danny McBride – The Righteous Gemstones (HBO Max) Seth Rogen – The Studio (Apple TV) (WINNER) Alexander Skarsgard – Murderbot (Apple TV)
Best Actress in a Comedy Series
Kristen Bell – Nobody Wants This (Netflix) Natasha Lyonne – Poker Face (Peacock) Rose McIver – Ghosts (CBS) Edi Patterson – The Righteous Gemstones (HBO Max) Carrie Preston – Elsbeth (CBS) Jean Smart – Hacks (HBO Max) (WINNER)
Best Supporting Actor in a Comedy Series
Ike Barinholtz – The Studio (Apple TV) (WINNER) Paul W. Downs – Hacks (HBO Max) Asher Grodman – Ghosts (CBS) Oscar Nuñez – The Paper (Peacock) Chris Perfetti – Abbott Elementary (ABC) Timothy Simons – Nobody Wants This (Netflix)
Best Supporting Actress in a Comedy Series
Danielle Brooks – Peacemaker (HBO Max) Hannah Einbinder – Hacks (HBO Max) Janelle James – Abbott Elementary (ABC) (WINNER) Justine Lupe – Nobody Wants This (Netflix) Ego Nwodim – Saturday Night Live (NBC) Rebecca Wisocky – Ghosts (CBS)
Best Limited Series
Adolescence (Netflix) (WINNER) All Her Fault (Peacock) Chief of War (Apple TV) Death by Lightning (Netflix) Devil in Disguise: John Wayne Gacy (Peacock) Dope Thief (Apple TV) Dying for Sex (FX on Hulu) The Girlfriend (Prime Video)
Best Movie Made for Television
Bridget Jones: Mad About the Boy (Peacock) (WINNER) Deep Cover (Prime Video) The Gorge (Apple TV) Mountainhead (HBO Max) Nonnas (Netflix) Summer of ’69 (Hulu)
Best Actor in a Limited Series or Movie Made for Television
Michael Chernus – Devil in Disguise: John Wayne Gacy (Peacock) Stephen Graham – Adolescence (Netflix) (WINNER) Brian Tyree Henry – Dope Thief (Apple TV) Charlie Hunnam – Monster: The Ed Gein Story (Netflix) Matthew Rhys – The Beast in Me (Netflix) Michael Shannon – Death by Lightning (Netflix)
Best Actress in a Limited Series or Movie Made for Television
Jessica Biel – The Better Sister (Prime Video) Meghann Fahy – Sirens (Netflix) Sarah Snook – All Her Fault (Peacock) (WINNER) Michelle Williams – Dying for Sex (FX on Hulu) Robin Wright – The Girlfriend (Prime Video) Renée Zellweger – Bridget Jones: Mad About the Boy (Peacock)
Best Supporting Actor in a Limited Series or Movie Made for Television
Owen Cooper – Adolescence (Netflix) (WINNER) Wagner Moura – Dope Thief (Apple TV) Nick Offerman – Death by Lightning (Netflix) Michael Peña – All Her Fault (Peacock) Ashley Walters – Adolescence (Netflix) Ramy Youssef – Mountainhead (HBO Max)
Best Supporting Actress in a Limited Series or Movie Made for Television
Erin Doherty – Adolescence (Netflix) (WINNER) Betty Gilpin – Death by Lightning (Netflix) Marin Ireland – Devil in Disguise: John Wayne Gacy (Peacock) Sophia Lillis – All Her Fault (Peacock) Julianne Moore – Sirens (Netflix) Christine Tremarco – Adolescence (Netflix)
Best Foreign Language Series
Acapulco (Apple TV) Last Samurai Standing (Netflix) Mussolini: Son of the Century (Mubi) Red Alert (Paramount+) Squid Game (Netflix) (WINNER) When No One Sees Us (HBO Max)
Best Animated Series
Bob’s Burgers (Fox) Harley Quinn (HBO Max) Long Story Short (Netflix) Marvel Zombies (Disney+) South Park (Comedy Central) (WINNER) Your Friendly Neighborhood Spider-Man (Disney+)
Best Talk Show
The Daily Show (Comedy Central) Hot Ones (YouTube) Jimmy Kimmel Live! (ABC) (WINNER) Late Night With Seth Meyers (NBC) The Late Show With Stephen Colbert (CBS) Watch What Happens Live With Andy Cohen (Bravo)
Best Variety Series
Conan O’Brien Must Go (HBO Max) Last Week Tonight With John Oliver (HBO Max) (WINNER) Saturday Night Live (NBC)
Best Comedy Special
Brett Goldstein: The Second Best Night of Your Life (HBO Max) Caleb Hearon: Model Comedian (HBO Max) Leanne Morgan: Unspeakable Things (Netflix) Marc Maron: Panicked (HBO Max) Sarah Silverman: PostMortem (Netflix) SNL50: The Anniversary Special (NBC) (WINNER)
Featured image: Teyana Taylor and Paul Thomas Anderson at the 31st Annual Critics Choice Awards held at the Barker Hangar on January 04, 2026 in Santa Monica, California. (Photo by Christopher Polk/Variety via Getty Images)
It’s that time of year again—when we slow down, look back (overeat), and celebrate our favorite conversations from another surprising, often wonderful, and occasionally wild year in cinema and TV.
HBO’s The Pitt emerged as one of television’s most gripping medical dramas in years by doing something deceptively simple yet extraordinarily difficult: following a single, brutal 15-hour shift in a Pittsburgh emergency room in real time. What made the series so compelling wasn’t just its relentless intensity or unflinching medical realism (the “floating face” fracture in episode 2 will haunt my dreams), but how writers like Valerie Chu and Cynthia Adarkwa managed to weave deeply human character arcs through the chaos of trauma bays and life-or-death decisions.
Under showrunner Scott Gemmill’s guidance, the writing team created something rare in medical television—a show that honored both the technical expertise of healthcare professionals and the emotional complexity of the people wearing the scrubs. The attention to detail was aided by medical consultant Dr. Joe Sachs, who provided authentic clinical details, and Chu and Adarkwa were part of a diverse writers’ room bringing varied perspectives to each storyline. The Pitt achieved that elusive balance of unflinching verisimilitude and narrative momentum, resonating not just with general audiences but with the medical professionals whose daily reality it sought to portray.
We spoke to Chu and Adarkwa about weaving technically precise medical jargon through emotionally resonant character development to create the best medical drama on TV.
When you’re breaking stories in the writers’ room, how do you know you’re creating something special?
Valerie: I think every writer’s room is passionate about the stories they’re telling, but that doesn’t mean they’re going to take off in the world. I’ve had people ask me, “Did you know it was going to be a hit?” And honestly, I didn’t.
With this vast ensemble cast and intersecting storylines, what’s the room process like?
Cynthia: We start with broad ideas. Noah’s [Wyle] in the room with us, so he’s got real insight into Robbie’s character, so we defer to him quite often. Season one, we were working from a pilot, so we had that basis, then we zoomed out to figure out what these fifteen episodes are going to look. We start with, “Oh, what would we like to see?” and jot things down across these huge whiteboards for the shape of the overall season, then go episode by episode. That’s where we get into expert talks. Dr. Joe [Sachs] Zooms with current medical professionals, gaining insight into specific topics—autism, pediatric care, as many areas as you can imagine. We’re talking to experts daily. Then we take what they explain and fuse it into each episode.
Valerie: I don’t have experience writing medical shows, so what I found interesting is that this is a show that cares about character. We look at overarching character arcs for this season—which is funny because it’s only a single day, so you can only evolve the character so much—but Dr. Joe’s expertise, which he had on ER starting as a consultant then becoming a writer, allows us to say, “We want this character to experience this during this episode, so could you find a case where if we want it to be a failure, and this character is going through overcoming that, we want to portray them as a competent doctor, but this is a very valid slip-up that a medical student or teaching resident could have in this teaching hospital setting.” What’s cool about the show is we’re able to work together so the character isn’t lost, and we can adapt those medical cases to serve the character.
How do you write characters with extremely detailed medical knowledge that sounds realistic yet flows within the story without drowning viewers in jargon?
Cynthia: I didn’t go to medical school [laughs], so a lot of the medical jargon goes over my head, too. That specificity comes from our doctor/writer and other consultants who compile medical notes for every episode. As a writer, I write my beat-sheet outline, Dr. Joe and his colleagues take it, and say, “Here’s a trauma scene, here’s exactly what these characters would say.” Then I take that, I don’t touch the medical stuff, and add conversational tidbits between characters. In my episode [episode 6, “12:00 P.M.”], what comes to mind is a trauma scene where our surgeon fellow Garcia [Alexandra Martz] was chatting with Santos [Isa Briones], one of our interns, and she quips, “What’s your sign?” That’s something I get to add to the medical stuff.
Valerie: I want to shout out our writer’s assistant [Kirsten Pierre-Geyfman] and script coordinator [Danny Hogan], because they track patients throughout the season, and it’s really difficult because you’re moving patients in and out of rooms, and everything on this show means something. A patient who comes in during episode 1 ends up being taken back to the ER in episode 7—they’re tracking all of this. Even the writers sometimes ask to be reminded where these patients are. It’s an integral part of the show.
Cynthia: It’s especially important because of the hour-by-hour nature. We have to know where everyone is. It’s almost like we’re writing a play. Because we’re on this one set, we have to know all the moving parts, and if we didn’t, it would be chaos.
How did the incredible reception from viewers feel, especially from medical professionals?
Cynthia: It’s very cool that people connect to the show. I think it hit at a specific time where we feel let down by our government, by the medical system, so that’s another reason people are connecting with it. It’s admirable to see people do hard work. These characters are based on people who have expertise, who have been doing this for years, who have passion, and who are not necessarily making tons of money, but they love what they do. When we meet with residents, that’s when it really speaks to me. We’re representing the real side of what these people are going through. It’s not the glossy soap side—no shame to those shows, I love them too! But we see these residents having a hard time, fighting school debt, fighting burnout, so why not represent them in their totality?
Any favorite storylines or character arcs from season one?
Cynthia: One of my favorite storylines was Dr. Collins’ [Tracy Ifeachor] miscarriage story. Black maternal health is important, and there are misconceptions about fertility when it comes to Black women, and I felt like that story was important to tell. I hope women across the board felt seen in that storyline, but also Black women specifically. We deal with fertility issues at a higher rate than white women; it’s just not spoken about as much.
Team cuts open Hank and removes the nail. (Warrick Page/MAX)
Valerie: The story with Terrance [Coby Bird], our autistic patient who comes in, and Mel [Taylor Dearden] does a great job with him. I’m so proud that we in the room are constantly trying to subvert tropes. There are years of mishandling of disabled representation that have perpetuated negative stereotypes, and as a room, we’re passionate about righting those wrongs. It’s really important for us to tell stories where we’re not leaning into stereotypes, but also, it’s not that they’re coming in with anything related to autism—they’re just coming in because they sprained their ankle. I’m proud that our writing staff figures out how we, as problem solvers, find the more interesting way into this.
As Mel meditates, Alex is dumped with a gunshot wound. (Warrick Page/MAX)
What’s it like inside the writers’ room?
Cynthia: I feel so spoiled saying this, but it’s the dream job. We go to work to be creative, and part of that involves being in conversation with one another. Whether we’re talking about daily news stories or what happened locally in LA or what we had for dinner last night, you have those little conversations so you’re really getting to know each other, and that bleeds into these bigger conversations of what kind of stories we want to tell, what perspectives we want to show.
Valerie: I always describe a writer’s room as part debate club and part therapy—it can get very heated, but it can also be very therapeutic. We very much share our stories in this room. We’ve talked about family deaths, we’ve talked about relatives who have mental health issues, and it creates a safe space. I have to credit our showrunner, Scott [Gemmill], for allowing that, because there are showrunners who might say we shouldn’t go down these personal paths. We are very much allowed to be ourselves, bare our souls, and sometimes that comes out in the writing or the storylines. It’s a very diverse room in terms of life experiences, and credit to Scott for staffing a room like that—he wanted people who had different opinions.
The show builds to an incredibly intense shooting at the Pitt Fest. Was that always part of the plan?
Valerie: That was there from day one. I believe it was part of Scott’s initial pitch to Max, because a normal shift is 12 hours. They were like, “How are we gonna get to the 15 hours? What’s the reason for keeping our doctors in this hospital?” And also let’s speak to this national crisis of gun violence. We knew we were building to that. The interesting thing about the show is that it does feel very realistic, but it is not necessarily your typical day in an ER. Because it is for entertainment, we do add these big moments. And the shooting was our big moment for season one.
Okay, last question—you’ve broken your ankle skateboarding—which two doctors from this show do you want treating you?
Valerie: Robbie for sure. I fractured my tibial plateau right before the room for season two started in February, so six weeks on crutches. Noah Wyle was kindly pushing me in a wheelchair during that time when I had to be off my legs. So Noah and Robbie in real life—just an incredible human being. And I feel like Samira would be a kind, patient doctor.
Cynthia: I definitely echo Val with Robbie. He would just be a comfort. And then my second choice comes out of left field. I’m gonna go with Santos, because I really enjoy banter when I’m in a medical setting. Distract me from what’s happening. I feel like Santos and I would have good banter, and I know she’d be able to take care of me as well.
Featured image:Robby and team work to pinpoint Nick’s condition. (Warrick Page/MAX)
It’s that time of year again—when we slow down, look back (overeat), and celebrate our favorite conversations from another surprising, often wonderful, and occasionally wild year in cinema and TV.
On Earth, everyone can hear you scream. No apologies for the dreadful play on the classic logline for Alien, which continues to reach new, strange heights in FX’s Alien: Earth, created by Fargo‘s Noah Hawley. Cinematographer and director Dana Gonzalez establishes the expressive vision in the pilot, titled “Neverland,” which introduces a young, terminally ill girl named Marcy Hermit (Florence Bensberg) to a future world in which she’ll survive, but not quite as herself. Instead, her consciousness will be uploaded into the body of a young woman, entirely synthetic, named Wendy (Sydney Chandler), thanks to technology invented and lorded over by a tech trillionaire who goes by “Boy Kavalier” (Samuel Blenkin) and his company, Prodigy.
The world that Marcy-turned-Wendy will exist, and potentially thrive in, is one dominated by technology and the five behemoth corporations who control it—Weyland-Yutani (made famous in the Alien film franchise), Prodigy, Lynch, Dynamic, and Threshold. When a Weyland-Yutani research vessel carrying alien specimens snatched from their home planets, including one of the most iconic monsters in all of cinema (and now TV), the Xenomorph, crashes into a Prodigy-owned building in the city of New Siam, the world order is about to be shaken up. Gonzalez was a major creative force in establishing the world of Alien: Earth and the stakes at play, particularly in the thrilling combo of episodes two and three, “Mr. October” and “Metamorphosis,” both of which he directed.
In the pilot, “Neverland,” Wendy searches for her brother, Joe Hermit (Alex Lawther), among the crash site, where the Xenomorph has slaughtered almost everyone aboard the Weyland-Yutani ship, and the nearby apartment building is swiftly becoming its hunting ground. Earth is now under a threat that might prove too unstable even for the corporate overlords to handle.
Recently, Gonzalez spoke with The Credits about portraying some of the franchise’s more iconic signatures in his visceral episodes in one of the year’s standout series.
Earth was always talked about as a living hell in the franchise. Here, this is the first time fans get to experience it. How did you and Noah want to depict Earth?
Noah had this whole idea of a wet, overgrown world. And then, between the development, which is about three years before shooting, and the world, the world was changing too. There’s the billionaire situation, now trillionaires, and the Elon Musks of it all that started taking on a whole new meaning. You now have that cerebral atmosphere that people can tap into. If we’re feeling this pressure now from that class of people, it’s likely to be even worse in the future. There’s an inequality in the distribution of wealth, and there’s climate change. These people are dealing with possibly the end of the world. Then you add five corporations that will eventually be two corporations that screw up the world. So, it’s more than just a physical, atmospheric place.
FX’s Alien: Earth — Pictured: L-r: Dana Gonzalez, Adarsh Gourav as Sligthly, Jonathan Ajayi as Smee, and Babou Ceesay as Morrow. BTS. CR: Patrick Brown/FX.
Seeing the rich get eaten is also fairly new to the series. In episode two, there’s a Barry Lyndon party turned into a slaughterhouse by a Xenomorph. How’d you land on the Last Supper image?
It can be bombastic. It’s already ludicrous. The whole thing is like this [rich] guy’s just like, “No, we’re having this party. I don’t care if a ship crashed into the building.” And so, that image of them at the table — I worked with a concept artist. I wanted it to be the Last Supper that a Xenomorph destroyed. I wanted to have this iconic image that you could tap into.
Noah wanted to steer away from the more human qualities of the Xenomorph and approach the alien more like a cockroach. What did that direction mean to you?
You couldn’t just build the tension and then cut to the Xenomorph, and then boom, he’s cooked. There’s more story that has to be told, even in the Lordship scene — the Xeno jumping and chasing and pinning Hermit. You’re showing more than ever, so you try to get the suit in a great way. The physicality – it’s flying and jumping around. With full CGI, we have more control, but it’s never going to be the tactility of how we photographed it. With eight hours, how many minutes will effectively be spent with the Xenomorph? More than any other movie would have to deal with. In episode seven, you see it outside in its full glory.
What did you discover in early camera tests about which lighting works and doesn’t work for a Xenomorph suit?
There were early tests in New Zealand with Wētā in the first year. You put it on camera, adjusting the color and the sheen. And then in Bangkok, we did the more serious tests. Even in that [party] scene, you’re not able to light it where you just see the Xenomorph in such a way that you’re seeing all these reflective areas and everything. So, a product shot — actually in space, moving around — you’re lighting it more holistically than you’ve ever done. Hopefully, the Xenomorph was presented in a much more controlled lighting space. You have to make this thing scary.
In your eyes, how do you make it scary?
You want to see the details of it, and find out what that is. And so, it was an evolution of designing the suit, the finishes of the suit, and the final testing in Bangkok. Then you start bringing it into the physical space, and you have wires on it, and it’s moving around. Hopefully, you nail all those things throughout that process, knowing that it will work. Adding the goop, does that work as effectively in one shot as the other? When you’re doing practical stuff and you have a time element, it’s tough because it’s not like in CGI, where you could tweak it until you think it’s perfect. So, if suddenly the drool isn’t working as well from the earlier shots, the payoff is that it’s practical, and I think that’s better. So, if the drool is not as good in one shot as in another shot, you’re still winning.
As a director, you had the privilege of shooting a close-up of the iconic egg. What details pop when you’re up that close? How do you want to light it just right?
You start with the design, and you keep hitting it. You keep hitting hard, you add details, and then you photograph it. Where does it photograph the best? How does the color come across? If you look at even Alien, the egg kind of changes a little bit from shot to shot. When you first see the egg, and then when you see the clear egg, or when you see the facehugger through it as it’s coming out — it’s almost like three different eggs. You realize that ours is definitely more consistent because we had to nail it down. But look, we have the luxury of looking at Alien. We could always say, “How did Ridley make this work?” Here, there’s a modern feel to it. There are new materials that didn’t exist in those days. But it does start with the original, thank God.
A few of the franchise’s practical visual elements remain strong — smoke, shadow, and rain. As a cinematographer and director, how do you master those elements?
I’m always trying to have an atmosphere in everything I do. I don’t feel like I’ve ever nailed it. I’m not sure if I will ever nail it perfectly to what I think it is. I love it when I see things that have an atmosphere. I like places where, as an audience member, I’m transported into a different environment. I love being thrown into this heavy feeling and heavy texture. That, to me, always wins. I’m always taken out of things — like period pieces or even things like this — where they’re just too real. Because I do think that’s a big part of it, even in your earlier question about [showing] Earth.
FX’s Alien: Earth — Pictured: Sydney Chandler and Dana Gonzalez on set. CR: Patrick Brown/FX.
How so?
You want to feel the wetness and the steam, all kinds of different things going on. We use practical effects for the atmosphere and real water. I have filtration. You’re finding some lenses that give that. So, that’s my big thing that, hopefully, by the time I retire, I’ll say, “Yep, there it is. That’s what I’ve been trying to fight for my entire career.” Obviously, this one has maybe a heightened version of that, but I try to do it in everything I do.
Alien: Earth is streaming on Hulu.
Featured image: Sydney Chandler in “Alien: Earth.” CR: Patrick Brown/FX
It’s that time of year again—when we slow down, look back (overeat), and celebrate our favorite conversations from another surprising, often wonderful, and occasionally wild year in cinema and TV.
Director James Gunn started small with his 2010 micro-budgeted indie film Super, followed by his acclaimed Guardians of the Galaxy films for Marvel. Now, he’s made a crowd-pleasing new version of Superman that’s raked in more than half a billion in global box office since its release earlier this summer. DC Comics’ original superhero returns in a big way, as Gunn’s universe-corraling reboot pits the title character (David Corenswet), the brilliant and always game Lois Lane (Rachel Brosnahan), and the Justice Gang of metahumans against Lex Luthor (Nicholas Hoult) and his war-mongering schemes, which includes a few super-powered thugs, one of whom, Ultraman, proves especially, brutally efficient at taking on Superman.
The action unfolds against an array of spectacle-scaled backdrops configured by Gunn’s go-to production designer, Beth Mickle. Like Gunn, Mickle segued from indie films into epic-scale movies when her Half Nelson directors, Ryan Fleck and Anna Boden, enlisted her to design Captain Marvel. She then worked with Gunn on Suicide Squad and Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 before taking on his big-budget reboot in the first feature to fly out of DC Studios since Gunn and his co-chief Peter Safran took over the studio.
Speaking from her home in upstate New York, Mickle talked about building superhero environments from fake crystals, turning downtown Cleveland into Metropolis, retrofitting Art Deco train stations, and the dark design behind Lex Luthor’s creeptastic Pocket Universe.
Superman opens on this vast snowscape in the middle of nowhere. It’s very cinematic. How did you find that location?
Initially, we thought Iceland would be a good fit, but when our start dates shifted and the seasons changed, those glaciers wouldn’t have been accessible. Then we did Google Earth scouting and considered British Columbia and New Zealand, but ultimately, Norway came onto our radar as a place that Mission: Impossible had explored. Svalbard is the northernmost point in the world where civilization still exists, because there’s a tiny little mining town there. We did a helicopter scout, and it was just magical, seeing this frozen landscape, no vegetation, the sun setting perpetually. And this big open plain was just a five-minute drive from our hotel. Incredible.
Cut to Krypto the dog dragging Superman across the snow to the secret bunker known by superhero nerds through the ages as the Fortress of Solitude. Where did you build Superman’s hideaway?
We built it at Trilith Studios in Georgia, a half hour south of Atlanta, on a sprawling 40,000 square foot soundstage that we filled wall to wall with every piece of ice and stone we could get in.
We loved Richard Donner’s 1978 iteration and the old comics where the fortress was originally inside a mountain, so we did a deep dive into how crystals grow from rocks. Once we found examples of formations that had the right translucency, the right color tint, and the right overall shape, we wanted the crystals to seemingly explode upward from the rocks to give them a propulsive feel. We sculpted them out of resin, made molds from that, and suspended fiberglass strands in the resin to give each one texture and occlusions so they look more natural. After we got that first crystal done, we made 242 more of them.
How did you approach designing the world of Superman’s day job as Clark Kent, alongside Lois Lane, at The Daily Planet office?
We wanted The Daily Planet newsroom to feel a bit timeless and not overly modern, which is true for everything you see in Metropolis. We filmed inside this gorgeous train station south of Atlanta. It’s now an event space, so we rented that out, retrofitted everything inside, and dressed the space with stacks of paper, corkboard, landline phones – elements you’d see in fabulous newsrooms from the seventies.
Lex Luthor’s chilling “Pocket Universe” prison fills the screen with stacks of cube-shaped cages. What’s the concept behind this horrendous facility?
This was by far the darkest environment. In the script, James described it as a “world built of arithmetic,” so we asked ourselves, what if cubes compounded and grew onto themselves? Our wonderful art director, Sam Avila, brought in this mineral called Bismuth, which grows at right angles as compound cubes on top of each other. That was a big inspiration point for us.
Bismuth. Photo Credit: Courtesy of Warner Bros. Pictures.Caption: RACHEL BROSNAHAN as Lois Lane and EDI GATHEGI as Mr. Terrific in DC Studios’ and Warner Bros. Pictures’ “SUPERMAN,” a Warner Bros. Pictures release. Photo Credit: Courtesy of Warner Bros. Pictures.
Was the prison also built at Trilith Studios?
Yeah, a couple of stages down from the Fortress of Solitude. We built nine of those cubes, three across and three high. We lovingly refer to it as the Hollywood Squares set.
The Hollywood Squares set in hell.
[Laughing] Yes, Hollywood Squares in Hell.
And then the VFX team digitally extended your physical set?
Exactly. They scanned our cubes and extended [the cages] on both sides and up and down, far as the eye can see, all these people are pacing within their own cubes and bringing that despair into focus. It’s interesting that the prison has come around to being more timely than any of us would have imagined [when we first started working on the movie] back in 2023.
Unlike the deathly Pocket Universe, the Justice Gang headquarters practically screams optimism, with its bright colored interior housed within a beautiful art deco building. How did the Justice Gang environment come together?
Doing research for the overall tone and look of the movie early on, I came across photos of the Cincinnati Union Terminal train station, which had really colorful art deco geometric interiors, so I put that into a look book for us to think about. A couple of weeks later, my art director, Dave Scott, came across an article about the station saying it was the inspiration for the Hall of Justice in the D.C. Comics [cartoon] “Super Friends.” Too good to be true! I called James and Peter [Safran], and we all hopped on a plane to scout this staggering piece of architecture. The colors are the original bright, vivid yellows and oranges, so inside, that’s where we put the Gang’s workstations. Set Decorator Rosemary Brandenburg found these vintage vintage circular love seats and re-upholstered them in our bright colors with a few new pieces fabricated to look like Milo Baughman, the great mid-century architect and furniture designer. I actually have a couple of his sofas right behind me!
LuthorCorp headquarters looks every bit the villain’s high-rise lair. What were your inspirations for his office?
We looked at 1970s brutalism architecture because it’s severe and dominating, like Lex Luthor’s character. The copper ceiling in his command center is taken right out of this Brutalist theater in Eastern Europe that has concrete finishes and green marble throughout. Once I saw that, I realized it would make a really strong combo, since Lex Luthor’s color in the comic books is green. We built the office fourteen feet up in the air as if it were looking out onto the city. We surrounded the whole thing with a printed backdrop of Metropolis. That’s not CGI background – it’s actually images of real buildings printed onto fabric and wrapped around the set. Some people actually got vertigo because the backdrop really made you feel like you were eighty floors up in the air.
The city of Metropolis itself combines digital imagery with real physical exteriors, right?
We shot exteriors in Cleveland’s public square, where the big monster fight happens. We turned the smoothie shop in the main plaza into a Belly Burger, which is the big burger joint in the D.C. Comics world. For the TV store where the big tank explosion happens, we re-named that Quitely Electronics Shop after comic book artist Frank Quitely, who did the “All-Star Superman” series. We used Cleveland’s beautiful Arcade Building at the end and called it Lacey’s Department Store, another piece of D.C. Lore.
There are literally hundreds of Easter eggs for fans, which they can hopefully go through and pinpoint all the things we put in there.
In the course of pulling together all these sets and exterior spaces, how would you describe Superman‘s economic impact on local filmmaking communities?
It’s beautiful to go into a city like Atlanta and have such a nice footprint. A lot of our craftsmen who worked on the Fortress of Solitude set are painters, stone carvers, and carpenters from the area. We go to all the local retailers to rent our furniture, our office supplies, to buy our food, our lunches — all these industries benefit in countless ways from this huge influx of work.
This is your third movie with James Gunn. What’s he like to work with?
James sees the movie in his head when he’s writing, so his direction is crystal clear. And he does these great little doodles. He’s also incredibly loyal to folks who have worked for him over the years. I’ve been with him for eight years, and the team now includes some of my closest friends. We’ve become quite a community.
What about your own department as head of production design?
When I started doing [production design], very few women worked at this level. Once you got in, you were one of maybe thirty women. Now I’m really proud of our department because it’s incredibly diverse. With my art director, Dave Scott, we’ve made it a priority to look out and see this beautiful array of artists that feels like a snapshot of the world population.
It’s that time of year again—when we slow down, look back (overeat), and celebrate our favorite conversations from another surprising, often wonderful, and occasionally wild year in cinema and TV.
All sorts of spoilers below!
When you look at Robert Pattinson and Jennifer Lawrence’s careers, in many ways, they have had similar paths in Hollywood. They both rose to worldwide fame early in their careers as the leading stars of major franchises (Twilight and The Hunger Games, respectively), and have since spent their 30s taking on more indie roles.
In their latest film, director Lynne Ramsay’s “Die My Love,” we see Pattinson and Lawrence come together for the first time to play new parents, while also becoming real-life parents themselves.
“I think having the perspective of the child, I don’t know if I would have really had that before becoming a mother,” Lawrence explains of how motherhood has helped her in this role.
Director Lynne Ramsay and Jennifer Lawrence in “Die My Love.” Courtesy Kimberly French/Mubi
Lawrence has been portraying motherly figures onscreen since the beginning of her career — the elder sister thrust into adult responsibilities in Winter’s Bone and The Hunger Games, a struggling single mother in Joy, and a metaphorical Mother Nature in Darren Aronofsky’s psychological horror filmmother!. But Die My Love is the first time we see Lawrence playing an onscreen mother since becoming a mother herself.
Ramsay’s film is a heartbreaking exploration of the mental toll of isolation, motherhood, and the struggle to claim one’s identity. In Lawrence’s hands, it’s a tour de force of primal, almost mythical power. It is the tale of Jackson (Pattinson) and Grace (Lawrence), a young couple who move to rural Montana to live in the house of Jackson’s recently deceased uncle and welcome a baby shortly after. To say the film is simply a commentary on post-partum depression is to reduce it to a single theme when it’s a film bubbling with ideas and harnessed by two sensational performances. Die My Love explores numerous themes, but is primarily about the deterioration of a relationship when one party struggles to claim an identity outside of their assigned role.
“She doesn’t know anybody, she doesn’t have a community,” Lawrence says. “She’s a new mom, and I think she feels like a trapped animal.”
Jennifer Lawrence in “Die My Love.” Courtesy Kimberly French/Mubi
Grace becomes increasingly erratic, bizarre, and paranoid. At times, she is jealous of her own baby, frequently endangering him, while also simultaneously feeling a frantic maternal instinct to protect him.
“When you become a parent, you’re so aware of the baby’s experience,” Lawrence explains. “And how everything is affecting their nervous system. So I think having that knowledge of how much a baby is looking to you for that information – being able to flip that and use it for the opposite was heartbreaking, but fulfilling to me.”
Jennifer Lawrence in “Die My Love.” Courtesy Mubi.
As Grace descends further into madness throughout the film, Jackson’s efforts to help her become more desperate.
“They’re so on two parallel planes,” Pattinson explains of his character’s thought process. “He’s been so enraged by her for so long, and you think, ‘Okay, this has crossed the line. I want to unleash my rage on you.’ And then…it’s like, you don’t even know what you’re even doing.”
Robert Pattinson in “Die My Love.” Courtesy Mubi.
No one can portray an unraveling, psychotic breakdown like Jennifer Lawrence. She plays the role so well that, as a viewer, you are just as confused as her character at discerning what is and isn’t real.
“Everything to Grace was very real, so to me, everything was real,” Lawrence says. “I don’t remember consciously making that choice, but I do remember seeing the movie and being like, ‘Oh, a lot of it is up for interpretation.’”
As her character begins to lose sight of reality, we watch Pattinson’s character’s feeble and futile attempts to help her.
“The cycle kind of keeps renewing, where you’re like, I love you, I want to help you,” Pattinson explains. “You’re not doing something maliciously. So, it’s just, like, horrendous. You’re trapped.”
Spoilers ahoy!
As Grace continues to spiral, we watch as Jackson is at a total loss for how to help. The movie ends with a poetic finality — Grace succumbs to the fire within (literally), finally freeing herself from the mental and physical confines of the house she felt trapped in, but in doing so, seemingly ends her own life. Jackson is left to watch helplessly as his wife walks away from the life he worked to build.
“When I was filming the movie, I was pregnant, and so I think I couldn’t see it any other way,” Lawrence says of the film’s ending. “I saw the fire as kind of like a rebirth and a cleanse, and that the two of them found their way back to each other. After I had my baby, I was like, she kills herself.”
Jennifer Lawrence in “Die My Love.” Courtesy Mubi.
Pattinson says he, too, originally thought Lawrence’s character met a fatal end.
“Or, [that] she’s gone off and… she’s gone off with somebody else,” Pattinson adds. “When he paints the house that color, (“That color!” Lawrence exclaims), it’s like, look what I did. I’ve got this dog, and look how much better my life is.”
The beauty of director Lynne Ramsay’s work is that there is no right or wrong answer. Maybe in an alternate universe, Grace and Jackson find their happy ending.
Jennifer Lawrence and Robert Pattinson in “Die My Love.” Courtesy Mubi.
It’s that time of year again—when we slow down, look back (overeat), and celebrate our favorite conversations from another surprising, often wonderful, and occasionally wild year in cinema and TV.
Screenwriter Dana Fox made a pact with director Jon M. Chu. After working with Chu on her Apple TV+ series, Home Before Dark, she told him she would sign up for a project with him, no matter what, with no questions asked. She was as serious as a witch, if you’ll pardon the pun.
“I told him at the end of that previous job that I will drop anything, anytime for you,” she says. “I don’t care what it is, I want to do it.”
Chu took her up on that offer, calling her to discuss a project he was working on. A big project.
“I said, ‘Okay, yes, the answer is yes,'” Fox recalls. “He said, ‘Don’t you want to know what it is?’ And I was like, ‘No, the answer is yes.”
Fox enrolled in Shiz University, more or less, to adapt the Broadway juggernaut “Wicked” for Chu’s mega-ambitious two-part film. She didn’t just have a greater partner in Chu, but in the woman who first adapted Gregory Maguire’s novel for the stage, Winnie Holzman, who would prove to be an ideal collaborator, unfussy about answering any and all of Fox’s questions and further exploring the world of Oz and the lives, down to the smallest details, of Elphaba (Cynthia Erivo), Glinda (Ariana Grande), and the supporting cast of would-be suitors, nefarious wizards, flying monkeys and more.
We spoke to Fox ahead of her arrival in Washington D.C. for the MPA Awards, in which Chu is receiving this year’s Creator Award, about working with the director and her co-writer, how she approached expanding the world of Oz for the big screen, and more.
So, how did you feel when you realized the project Jon M. Chu was calling you aboutWicked?
When he told me it was Wicked, I felt a sense of challenge, which, at this point in my life, is the most exciting thing. When you feel a little nervous because you’re like, ‘Oh, this is going to be kind of an extraordinary challenge,’ it means I’m going to have to step up and up my game.
And you’re working on this with Winnie Holzman, who wrote the book for the musical. How did that collaboration work?
Working with Winnie felt a little bit like the best part of a group project. You know, where you go home and you work on your own stuff, but you’re excited to show the other person because you want to impress them, and they’re going to be excited. There was just this real sense of energy. What I felt was that one of my primary jobs was coming in with fresh eyes. Winnie had lived with these characters for 20-plus years and had created this incredible play. I was able to ask Winnie and composer Stephen Schwartz [a Wicked veteran who worked on the musical] questions that I don’t think they had answered in a very long time about this story and these characters.
What kind of questions?
It was stuff like, ‘Okay, so water kills her?’ and they’d be like, ‘Yeah, listen to the lyric.’ And I would be like, ‘But seriously, can it? Or do people just think it can?’ So it was these weird little nuances that helped me get much more inside the story. And then I spent a lot of time asking them what Elphaba’s magic actually was. Can she do anything besides levitate? Is it only spells? Does she need a spell to do something? Is her magic out of her control in the beginning because she isn’t emotionally in control? That’s the kind of worldbuilding you have to do when you make a really big movie that you don’t necessarily have to do on the stage.
How did Winnie and Stephen respond?
They could not have been nicer about it, and they could not have been more open to thinking about it in ways that they hadn’t thought about it before. They weren’t extraordinarily precious about it, even though they could have been. They were actually really open to having it be something different. A lot of times, that led us into these very long discussions about ‘What if, what if, what if,’ and usually what came out of that was: don’t mess with the stuff that fans care about. Deepen it by creating different avenues that you can take and go to different places and see more about these people than you’ve ever been able to see in the play.
The decision to split this into two films was a big risk. How did that feel?
That was a big swing we were aware of and very excited by. I don’t want to call it terrified, but there was a constant sense of excitement because we were like, ‘This has to work. There is no version of this not working because if the first movie doesn’t work, we have already shot the second one.’ That is a very intense sense of challenge, and I think all of us really enjoyed having to rise to that. I happened to see the second movie recently as a double feature after watching the first, because I wanted to see it that way. By the end of the day, I was like a shell of a person who had to be swept off the floor – makeup all over, mascara, sweating, weeping, joyful, happy, singing. It was all of the emotions.
L to R: Cynthia Erivo is Elphaba and Ariana Grande is Glinda in WICKED FOR GOOD, directed by Jon M. Chu.
How is writing a musical screenplay different from writing a regular screenplay?
What was so interesting and fun was mining the lyrics, because the lyrics are never going to change. They’re your preexisting materials. You look at certain lyrics that hit you very deeply emotionally and ask yourself why. Then I would say to the rest of the team, ‘In that moment that lyric creates that explosive feeling inside us, have we seen enough evidence of that to believe that character is feeling that?’
Oh interesting. So you’re reverse-engineering a bit from the lyrics?
One of the things I learned about musical numbers is that the way you stage them—the dancing, where they’re located, what locations they pass through, does the song pass time or does it break linear time—those things are all really important. In a movie theater, every single time someone starts to sing a song, there’s the possibility that person goes to the bathroom because they’re thinking, ‘Nothing’s going to happen during the song, right?’ What I think Wicked did so extraordinarily was we were constantly thinking: how can we make this scene, this song, this number, this dance sequence actually tell a story and say things between characters that you can’t see anywhere else in the movie, and move the story forward in ways that you weren’t expecting?
Were you able to be on set much during production?
This took place in London. I have three kids and there was a large portion of it that took place during the writers’ strike, so I wasn’t allowed to be anywhere. That was a bit of a heartbreak, honestly, because I do think it would have been amazing if we could have been there on set. I was able to visit once and say hello to everybody. When you’re sitting at a computer and your posture when writing is sort of gargoyle-esque, you’re so inside your own head and usually alone. What keeps me going on difficult days is the thought that there’s a group of people who are going to make this real at some point. Stepping on set for Wicked and seeing they had built a town – there was a lake on this set – it was enormous and beautiful. Watching people bring something that was in your imagination to life, with so many people bringing their joy, their creativity, their love and their expertise to bring it to life in the most extraordinary way, was just awesome. That’s what keeps me going in the difficult times – thinking about the fact that I’m lucky enough that someday somebody is going to make this stuff real.
On the set of “Wicked.” Courtesy Alice Brooks/Universal Pictures.
You’ve been a successful screenwriter for years, but this must feel like a new, and very giant, step.
Musical theater was like my team sport growing up. I wasn’t amazing at team sports, so musical theater became my team sport. That’s where I learned that the biggest joy for me is working with other people to create something much better than any one of us could have done on our own. Wicked brought me back to musical theater and absolutely reignited my love of it, my passion for it. Now I can’t imagine a movie where someone doesn’t break into song and start dancing. For the little girl that wanted to do this when she was eight years old, this is like the most beautiful homecoming of all, especially with this particular musical, which is truly so beloved.
What’s it been like working on this with Jon and all your other collaborators?
This is a really difficult time in the business, and to be working and be allowed to work at this level is a real gift, and we know it. I think we try to be happy every day and grateful every day that we get to do this for a job. I cannot believe this is my job. Sometimes I say things like, ‘I would do this if I didn’t get paid,’ and my agent calls me and says, ‘Please don’t say that. Please stop saying that in the press.’ We do all really love each other. I’ve worked with several of the team members on other things, and they’re the people that I wish I could have come home to after school when I was a little kid and made plays with in my basement. The fact that we get to do it on this level is extraordinary.
Featured image: L-r: US screenwriter Dana Fox attends the Los Angeles premiere of Universal Pictures’ “Wicked” at the Dorothy Chandler Pavillon, in Los Angeles, November 9, 2024. (Photo by VALERIE MACON / AFP); L to R: Cynthia Erivo is Elphaba and Ariana Grande is Glinda in WICKED FOR GOOD, directed by Jon M. Chu.
It’s that time of year again—when we slow down, look back (overeat), and celebrate our favorite conversations from another surprising, often wonderful, and occasionally wild year in cinema and TV.
With Wicked: For Good set to complete the story that began with 2024’s blockbuster, director Jon M. Chu, the Motion Picture Association’s Creator Award recipient for 2025, continues our conversation about his evolution as a filmmaker and the power of culturally specific storytelling to reach universal audiences.
Chu also opens up about his own fears, what he learned on the set of Now You See Me 2, and the thrill of being so close to sharing the entire two-part vision for his Wicked adaptation with the world.
Did working with this incredible cast and crew on Wicked and Wicked: For Good have a liberating effect on everyone, at least a little bit, from being daunted by the size and scale of what you were trying to achieve?
All fear of mistakes was off the table. We were so confident in trusting our instincts and knowing that we could always go back if it were a mistake, but we were able to stretch the boundaries of what this story could be. And because we had a camera, we could be precise about how we told it. That includes in post-production, when we’re cutting it together, knowing that we can hold on a shot that long, or we can have silence and understand that the audience doesn’t need music to feel a moment in the Oz dust. There are a couple of moments in movie two where we just sit on the acting to allow it to play out. We trusted each other that if someone had a crazy idea, we could “Yes, and” it and not worry, “What if people think this? What if people think that?” We were all the Fab Five, clutched together, arm-in-arm, walking down the road and not knowing what we were going to encounter next.
L to R: Cynthia Erivo is Elphaba and Ariana Grande is Glinda in WICKED FOR GOOD, directed by Jon M. Chu.
And yet, you’re shooting these two massive films back-to-back, so as you were saying before, there were tough days.
It was a year-and-a-half process of shooting, and there were no easy days. It’s cold, Ari has to wear a dress that literally has nothing on top, and she has to power through, and she’s miserable. And Cynthia has to do this scene over and over again, and she’s miserable because it’s putting her into a dark headspace. But when we’re done? At the end of the night, we’re texting each other. Because I edit on my phone on the way home, and I’ll cut some stuff and send it to them, and write, ‘This moment is everything.’ And that makes it worth it. Even before the audience saw Wicked, we felt a lot of pride. Then, when the audience saw it, accepted it, and took it as their own, that brought our joy to another level.
You’ve created these cultural watershed moments with Crazy Rich Asiansand now Wicked, which is truly rare. You’ve had faith in viewers that these culturally specific movies you’ve chosen would be interesting to everyone. Is this faith in what audiences want something that you’ve had to grow into, or is this something you’ve always thought about?
I think I had that instinct when I was a lot younger, when I was making videos in high school. When I’d make wedding videos, I didn’t really care what the bride and groom wanted; I made what I thought they’d want that was nontraditional. I just had a reunion with high school friends I hadn’t seen in 26 years, and we went back and looked at the films I made with them, which I had forced them to be in as my actors. And they were crazy, but what I loved about seeing that kid make those movies was that kid didn’t have any fear. He was just making stuff that he wanted to see on screen. I think as I got into the movie business, the pressure is so high of just feeling like you belong there, that you deserve to be there. I was very young when I made my first movie in the studio world. I had seen a lot of my film school friends not get that opportunity, who were way smarter than I was and way more creative than I was, so when I was making my movies, I was trying to earn a position and get to the next spot. I learned a lot, I loved every one of those movies, but because I didn’t have the confidence, I couldn’t show the audience what I thought they wanted to see. I could sneak some moments in, like in Step Up 2 or with Bieber, when people thought, ‘Oh, that’s just a concert movie,’ I thought, no, it’s a beautiful fairy tale of the internet picking their star and watching his journey, and you’re going to root for him like Rocky. But I’d never put my actual self out there. I wasn’t ready to be judged by who I was yet.
When did you feel ready?
It wasn’t until after Now You See Me 2, and working with those great actors—Mark Ruffalo, Jesse Eisenberg, Woody Harrelson, Michael Cain, Morgan Freeman—and they know who they are, and they’re unapologetic about it. It was contagious. I thought, ‘Okay, I can hang with those people; I think I am a filmmaker.’ So what do I want to say, and what can I do that no one else can do?
What was your next move?
I literally cleared my slate—I was supposed to do GI Joe 3 and another Now You See Me, and I cut myself off from all of that and said, I need to actually find out who I am now that I know what I’m doing. That’s where I found Crazy Rich Asians and In the Heights at the same time. It spoke to the scariest part of my being, which is identifying as the son of immigrants, as a Chinese American. I had always tried not to have that on the table because the industry judges you so quickly and sends you those kinds of scripts. At that point, I was like, f**k it, this is who I am. And I think I have the right to show who I am. With Crazy Rich Asians, even though it was a book that existed, the story of Rachel Chu going to Asia for the first time — to me, that was so personal. I didn’t think anyone would see it. I didn’t necessarily have the confidence that people would show up, but I knew that I could make it so my friends who aren’t Asian would say, ‘Oh, that’s like your family. That’s you in there.’
Caption: (L-R) AWKWAFINA and director JON M. CHU on the set of Warner Bros. Pictures’ and SK Global Entertainment’s and Starlight Culture’s contemporary romantic comedy “CRAZY RICH ASIANS,” a Warner Bros. Pictures release. Photo Credit: Sanja Bucko
But the audiences did show up—in a major way.
Once I did that, I think the audience responded. The cultural response to that woke my brain up to say, ‘You have more to offer, and what does not exist that you think should exist — that is your calling.’ Maybe that was always the point of movies, and I didn’t get it, and I was playing pretend to be a filmmaker. But at that point, to get that taste of what it feels like to be yourself and put that out there, and people respond so positively, or even negatively, to me, that life.That was worth everything. And then, two weeks after we finished filming Crazy Rich Asians, I had my first child. You grow up, which is very much like Wicked: For Good, it’s about growing up, looking at your childhood self, and seeing the parts you love about that person, and bringing that and pulling the thread all the way to the present. That’s what I feel now: the responsibility and the privilege of making movies is to tell stories that people don’t expect but need deep down, the way I need them.
Is this how you explain your work to your kids?
I tell my kids all the time. A couple of days ago, I said to my daughter, ‘I’m really scared about this movie coming out because I don’t know what people will think.’ Because she was scared to go to the first day of school, I said, ‘But I’m going just to power through, and if people don’t like it, then that will change me, and I’ll take that in. But that won’t change who I am. Then I told her, ‘I think going to school will be great for you, and you’ll find new friends, and the things we learned about are too valuable to give up and not become.’
Caption: (L-r) DP ALICE BROOKS (foreground), director JON M. CHU, STEPHANIE BEATRIZ and DAPHNE RUBIN-VEGA on the set of Warner Bros. Pictures’ “IN THE HEIGHTS,” a Warner Bros. Pictures release. Photo Credit: Macall Polay
With Crazy Rich Asians, In the Heights, and Wicked, these films delight in cultural specificity and center on outsiders or people navigating different worlds, but they resonate with broad swaths of the public.
I fully feel that. I look at my other friends who are activists and are speaking out, and I’m in awe of their courage to do that. But what I have also accepted is that my voice is through my movies. I can go on interviews and talk all I want about representation, but it doesn’t mean anything. It’s showing people — look how beautiful this Asian family can be. Look how beautiful it is—it’s reflective of my own family. Mahjong is not your game, but you guys play Crazy Eights or whatever it may be, so you know that feeling. Let me show you that you will love Cynthia Erivo. When she sings those words that you’ve heard a hundred times, they will land in ways they have never landed before. When you see Ariana Grande going through her life and trying to find her escape from her own life and finding her authentic self and you see that in her performance as Glinda, then you can see that it also takes courage for someone with privilege to live in their bubble, to pop their privilege, to come down and see what’s actually happening.
L to R: Cynthia Erivo is Elphaba and Ariana Grande is Glinda in WICKED FOR GOOD, directed by Jon M. Chu.
Wicked: For Good is the kind of movie that needs to be seen on the big screen—how do you make that case to people who might wait for it to stream?
I always say it’s supposed to be seen big and felt deep. Those are the movies that stay with me for my life — The Sound of Music,Singin’ in the Rain,E.T., and Back to the Future. What movies do is they’re rocket ships to another planet, but they always take you home. And the ones that are timeless are the ones that you can share forever. You could pick any frame in Wicked or Wicked: For Good, and I could do a one-hour lecture about that one frame — about why the button in the costume, the arguments about the lighting, about why that specific color, or in the mix of why we’re playing the sound of the restaurant more than the score. Every detail is touched by a human being debating about why. When a person sees it, they won’t see any of that. Maybe the 10th time they see it. The real validation is that people feel it, and that’s all that matters. Timeless stories are the most human. This story was written 20-something years ago about totally different circumstances, but we all go through the same struggle. We’re both good and wicked. We try to create enemies so that we have some sort of clarity. We try to make sense of things that don’t make sense.
L to R: Ariana Grande is Glinda and Cynthia Erivo is Elphaba in WICKED FOR GOOD, directed by Jon M. Chu.
The more culturally specific your films are, the more universal they are.
You said it better than I can. Whatever your thing is, it’s not mine, but you have something like it. It might not be dumplings, but you have something like it. Movies are one of the last art forms that take all the distractions away. You have to make space for that. You have to drive to the theater, you have to park your car, you have to gather your friends, and you have to spend money. You have to walk in, sit down, and make space for someone else’s story. All my non-Asian friends have other cultures too, and it’s always in front of me in movies and TV shows, but I feel connected to those things, even though my mom never made pancakes for me. She made rice for me. I think certain filmmakers already know what it feels like because we have to live it every day. I think it’s a beautiful exchange, actually, saying, ‘Hey, don’t worry, you’re not going to be scared. We’re actually going to love it.’
Wicked: For Good is in theaters on November 21.
Featured image: Cynthia Erivo is Elphaba, Ariana Grande is Glinda and Director Jon M. Chu on the set of WICKED, from Universal Pictures
It’s that time of year again—when we slow down, look back (overeat), and celebrate our favorite conversations from another surprising, often wonderful, and occasionally wild year in cinema and TV.
In part one of our interview with Sinners cinematographer Autumn Durald Arkapaw, the groundbreaking DP discussed how she leveled up to frame Coogler’s soulful supernatural epic by learning to use the largest film format available. Coogler’s ambitions for his vampire thriller, starring Michael B. Jordan as twin brothers Smoke and Stack, were massive. The brothers return to Clarksdale, Mississippi, after serving in World War I and then taking their talents to Chicago, where they worked for, and then against, the legendary gangster Al Capone. Their goal is to open a juke joint in the delta and turn their ill-gotten cash and liquor into a thriving business that serves their people cold drinks and real blues. So, Arkapaw learned to master 65 mm IMAX image capture, earning the distinction of becoming the first female cinematographer to shoot on the super-sized cameras. She recalls, “Ryan always says on set, ‘Big Movie! Big Movie!’ in a very inspirational, funny way. He did that on Wakanda Forever, too. Ryan has given me opportunities to grow and excel in my craft, opportunities that aren’t often offered to someone like me.”
Now, in the second part of our interview, Arkapaw zeroes in on the film’s instantly iconic Juke Joint music sequence, harnessing moonlight for the Irish vampires scenes, and connecting with her roots in the Deep South during the making of Sinners.
There have been unanimous raves for the Juke Joint sequence, which starts with Preacher Boy Sammie playing his guitar (a 1932 Dobro Cyclops) and singing the blues and somehow morphs into an ecstatic experience of Black music past, present, and future. It includes West African Griot playing a proto banjo, a ’70s guitarist with Jimi Hendrix vibes [played by blues guitarist Eric Gales], a 1980s DJ creating a hip hop beat, West Coast R&B, an African drummer and ancestral dancer, and a modern hip hop dancer, all surrounding Sammie and his dobro. What was involved in bringing together all these different crafts to construct this Sinners set piece?
Bringing together all the different crafts – that’s honestly how the sequence came to life. It was beautifully written on the page, and from the start, Ryan shared with us what the scene meant to him. From there, it became about execution: how to move the camera, how the transitions would work, how to carry the emotion through each beat. There were a lot of logistical challenges to solve. The sequence shifts from an interior stage setup to a full VFX takeover in the roof, and then to an exterior location with the lumber mill burning around them. So yeah, every department was operating at a very high level to pull it off.
We started by drawing out the camera trajectory on a floor plan of the mill, and then moved on to generating a pre-vis with this information. That process really helps everyone visualize the scene in the space and provides meaningful notes. In the pre-vis, we plug in the lens sizes to get a sense of what the camera sees and how it moves through the room. It also serves as a valuable guide for Ludwig Göransson and his team, as well as for the choreographer, helping with musical timing and dance movements. It allows Ryan to see exactly where the shifts in musical style and cultural representation occur, so he can evaluate the transitions and give specific notes.
It’s hypnotic.
Because it’s an emotional, surrealistic shot, we wanted it to have a dreamy, flowing quality, and that’s where Steadicam becomes essential. We shot it on 15-perf IMAX, entirely on Steadicam, with three shots stitched together for the juke interior section. It took a lot of coordination and effort, and I’m really proud of that scene because it’s so original and so distinctly Ryan. Only he could have envisioned it. He has a real gift for writing scenes where we move the camera in ways that are both visually compelling and narratively meaningful, finding powerful ways to say a lot in a short amount of time.
How long did it take to shoot the Juke music sequence?
We shot the interior sequences in one day.
aption: MILES CATON as Sammie Moore in Warner Bros. Pictures’ “SINNERS,” a Warner Bros. Pictures release. Photo Credit: Courtesy Warner Bros. Pictures
Wow.
For that music interior day, we brought everyone together beforehand for a rehearsal: the choreographer, the actors, the dancers, and the music team. That way, we had a solid plan going in. Our night exterior crane pullback was shot on a different night, and the burning roof plate was captured on our final day of photography. So if you break it down that way, the whole sequence came together over three separate days.
Sinners delivers this one-two punch when you take us from the juke joint in the woods to the Irish folk music vampires Remmick (Jack O’Connell) lurking outside. Seeing a banjo strapped across Remmick’s back somehow felt creepy.
I love that because the camera, mood, and music are so beautifully married, it’s deeply affecting. The musical cue kicks in after the camera pulls back from Sammie and ends up on the backs of the three vampires, then cuts to their faces and pushes in on Jack’s eyes. And then it cuts to reality, where they walk up to the juke, where we start the “Pick Poor Robin Clean” scene.
Caption: (L to r) PETER DREIMANIS as Bert, JACK O’CONNELL as Remmick, HAILEE STEINFELD as Mary, and LOLA KIRKE as Joan in Warner Bros. Pictures’ “SINNERS,” a Warner Bros. Pictures release. Photo Credit: Eli Adé
In contrast to the warmer light that comes before, the vampires are bathed in this eerie blue moonlight. How did you calculate that shift in mood?
It’s always important to me that shots are grounded in reality, so being in the middle of nowhere, the biggest source of light is the moon. It was a very complex setup for my G&E team. We had a big softbox on a construction crane, with many condors across the river to light the background and add depth. We also used a smaller softbox that we could move around to light the scene directly. During Jack’s Irish dance, there are a lot of actors and movements, so you need to have a broad source. Since they’re all out there in the middle of nowhere, I wanted the main source to be that soft top light. Sometimes, when the actors drop their heads, you lose their eyes in shadow, but I think that adds something to the storytelling. It lets the light guide the emotion in a very dramatic way.
aption: JACK O’CONNELL as Remmick in Warner Bros. Pictures’ “SINNERS,” a Warner Bros. Pictures release. Photo Credit: Courtesy Warner Bros. Pictures
You’re aiming for a natural effect?
I’ve worked with my gaffer for over ten years, and we share the same taste and aesthetics. We both aim to craft lighting that feels authentic and never distracts from the story. It can be beautiful and even stylized, but it still needs to feel natural. So for this scene, I wanted the strongest source to be moonlight.
It’s interesting how the lighting shifts tones to reflect the narrative’s twists and turns.
I always appreciate lighting that becomes its own character. Ryan is a bold filmmaker, so he’s not afraid to leave things unseen. That approach is always inspiring to me because I love working with darkness to create drama. Sinners was a perfect opportunity for that, because it blends genres—it’s a vampire story, a gangster story, and more, so we really got to play with darkness and shadow in a meaningful way.
Making Sinners in the state of Louisiana for five months, including 66 days of shooting, were you mindful of the impact a project of this scale has on the local filmmaking community?
Yes, 100 percent. You really do become a part of the community, working with people and creating a kind of temporary family for the time that you’re there. And also just the fact that my family’s from there.
Really?
My great-grandmother was born in Meridian, Mississippi, and my father was born in New Orleans. My family still lives there. My auntie Janis came to set, and Ryan put her in the movie. She appears in the grocery store scene.
No kidding. Where’s your accent?
I grew up in Northern California, in the Bay Area, like Ryan. But once I started working on this movie, I began delving into my family’s ancestry with my aunt. When you collaborate with Ryan, you really dive deep into a lot of different things, and it became important for me to understand my own history and how it connected to our story. As we worked on the film, I kept thinking about my ancestors and how much I wanted to make them proud.
Caption: (L-r) JAYME LAWSON as Pearline, WUNMI MOSAKU as Annie, MICHAEL B. JORDAN as Smoke, MILES CATON as Sammie Moore, and LI JUN LI as Grace Chow, in Warner Bros. Pictures’ “SINNERS,” a Warner Bros. Pictures release. Photo Credit: Courtesy Warner Bros. Pictures
They probably wouldn’t have predicted that you would become the first woman DP in history to shoot a feature film on large format cameras.
On Wakanda Forever, Ryan hired me to shoot this epic tale, which carried even more significance following the tragic loss of Chadwick [Boseman]. Ryan emphasized the importance of capturing everything underwater, authentically. Our team set out to build and explore a new world in that film. This time, we shot in large format, and I remember receiving a call from Kodak, informing me that I was the first woman to shoot a film in both 65mm and IMAX formats. Ryan has consistently given me opportunities that have not only shaped my career but also inspired others, especially those who look like me or have yet to receive such opportunities. It’s a responsibility I carry with me every day on set, and I draw tremendous inspiration from it
Over the several months you spent working on Sinners in Louisiana, do you have a favorite memory that sticks with you?
One moment stands out to me with absolute clarity: the farmhouse sequence we shot with the Choctaw—the Native American vampire hunters. We took a black and white photo on the porch with them, and the instant I saw it, it felt like I was looking at a version of myself from the past. It still makes me emotional. I was named after Cheyenne Autumn, a John Ford western, and that day, we captured some incredible IMAX shots on cranes – images of the Choctaw on horseback that felt straight out of a classic western. Ryan gave me the opportunity to shoot that scene in the spirit of the genre I was named after. When my parents gave me that name, I’m sure they never imagined I’d one day become a cinematographer. That moment is one I will carry with me forever.
Caption: Director Ryan Coogler, cinematographer Autumn Arkapaw, and the cast on set in Warner Bros. Pictures’ “SINNERS,” a Warner Bros. Pictures release. Photo Credit: Eli Adé
Audience reaction to Sinners has been through the roof. That must be gratifying.
When you’re on the ground making a film with Ryan, the goal is always to create lasting, emotional images, especially because people who look like us rarely get these kinds of opportunities, at this level, in this format. Our actors were just as inspired and committed; they showed up every day and gave it their all. So it’s incredibly meaningful to see audiences responding to Sinners with such excitement. I was there every day, with my eye on the eyepiece, and I truly felt we were making something special, something rare and important.
It’s that time of year again—when we slow down, look back (overeat), and celebrate our favorite conversations from another surprising, often wonderful, and occasionally wild year in cinema and TV.
Sinners, written, produced, and directed by Ryan Coogler, is hands down one of the year’s biggest cinematic successes. Coogler’s passion project found the filmmaker at the peak of his powers, and fans already primed to see anything from the still young visionary were ready to go once Sinners bowed. Yet it wasn’t just Coogler fans who flocked to the theaters—critical raves and word of mouth turned Coogler’s original period vampire epic into an early-year smash. The film exceeded expectations and became yet another Coogler film that qualified as “a moment.” Sinners’ success has been so thorough that it has already received a theatrical rerelease, as audiences were hungry to see it again on the big screen.
Sinners tells the story of twin brothers Smoke (Michael B. Jordan) and Stack (also Michael B. Jordan) who return to their hometown of Clarksdale, Mississippi, after chasing success in the North. Opening a juke joint, Coogler’s sui generis take on what happens when music and dance meld in celebration of artistry, culture, and history; however, before too long, evil descends, threatening to consume the community’s heart and soul, dragging everything straight to Hell. Sinners’ ensemble cast also boasts Hailee Steinfeld, Delroy Lindo, Wunmi Mosaku, Jack O’Connell, and Miles Caton.
Already twice nominated for Oscars for his work producing Judas and the Black Messiah and co-writing Rihanna’s “Lift Me Up” for Black Panther: Wakanda Forever, Sinners is predicted to garner Coogler his third (maybe more) nod. (It should be noted that his Black Panther was nominated for Best Picture, and he’s directed two performers to Oscar nominations—Sylvester Stallone in Creed and Angela Bassett in Black Panther: Wakanda Forever.) Here, Coogler discusses the film’s impact on both audiences and himself, the invaluable local creatives he worked with filming in Louisiana, and the influence Kathryn Bigelow’s Near Dark had on Sinners.
Did you have any idea Sinners would resonate with audiences the way that it has?
No. Obviously, we were hoping to make a movie that had a certain degree of measurable success. We felt a responsibility to Warner Bros. for betting on us, and to ourselves and the story to make something folks would want to see, but for me, what has been really remarkable is the passion. People are engaging with the movie. That was something I couldn’t imagine. I love hearing about people throwing Sinners-themed parties, how people are traveling to see it in specific formats, seeing it multiple times, and real cinephiles having conversations with me about the film. I love seeing how seriously they care about the movie and how they engage with it.
You and Autumn Durald Arkapaw, your cinematographer, had very specific conversations about how to present this film and the format choices. It paid off.
For sure. I have got a lot of faith in the audience. Truthfully, I knew people would get it, subconsciously. I knew there would be a group of people who got it consciously, and some who are more fluent in film language, but what I didn’t expect was the passion with which people engage with it. All of us making the movie, we were passionate about it, and it was infectious, but this was my first example of understanding how contagious passion is through film language. I feel like the film became infused with the love we had for the story, from my producers, my heads of department, and the actors. Everybody loved this movie. I can tell you for a fact that just the process of making this was incredible. It was similar to my experience with Creed and Black Panther, but because this wasn’t based on anything pre-existing and I’m using characters the audience is meeting for the first time in this movie, that part really surprised me, and the audience connected with it.
You were inspired by many family stories from your grandmother, father, and uncle, and plenty of others have similar connections, so it is still world-building, but using the IP of real life. That’s something you have never done before, like this.
That’s very true. What is beautiful about it is that people brought their own stories and touchpoints to it. This movie was like me renewing my vows to cinema, if that makes sense. I’ve been married to it for a long time, but this was like, ‘I’ve got to double down.’ It still found a way that surprised me.
You have referenced many movies that influenced Sinners, but I specifically saw several parallels with Kathryn Bigelow’s Near Dark.
Absolutely. I actually had the opportunity to meet and spend time with her very recently. I watched Near Dark right before I made Sinners, and it had a massive influence on me. I loved that the vampires felt like a family. It’s an element of that film, and in The Lost Boys, too, but Near Dark has that idea of isolation built in as well. I love that movie, but I hadn’t actually seen it until I was prepping for Sinners. I was trying to watch everything I could before making this, and it’s a masterful movie.
Near Dark is not easy to get hold of.
It has some distribution issues, so I had to get a region-free Blu-ray, which was hard to find. We have to figure out how to make that movie more accessible. The Bill Paxton performance is insane. Everybody in that movie is great, but I found Bill Paxton to be extremely unnerving.
Caption: Director Ryan Coogler and cinematographer Autumn Arkapaw on set in Warner Bros. Pictures’ “SINNERS,” a Warner Bros. Pictures release. Photo Credit: Eli Adé
Sinners is set in Mississippi, but you shot this in Louisiana, which has an incredible creative network. It’s a state that helps make filmmakers successful. What was your experience of filming there?
I loved everything about it. The weather and the wildlife are intense, but it was the most incredible time I’ve ever had making a movie. I had my family with me, and it was an excellent place for kids. I could walk from where I was living to the studio. I was able to live a really healthy lifestyle while I was there, too, which sounds crazy, because New Orleans has all this amazing food and the partying, but it worked for me. The crews were really talented, professional, and hardworking. It’s southern hospitality. They care about you and look after you. I hope I can film there again one day.
Caption: (L to r) DELROY LINDO, MICHAEL B. JORDAN and director RYAN COOGLER in Warner Bros. Pictures’ “SINNERS a Warner Bros. Pictures release. Photo Credit: Courtesy Warner Bros. Pictures
Timotheus Davis is a rising star in production design and a sought-after art director, and he’s also one of the local creatives you worked very closely with. Was that key to bringing an authentic Southern look and feel to Sinners?
Absolutely. Tim did incredible work. He would call any shack his baby. He was the art director, and he infused every design with so much heart. He was an incredible force to have on set. Another person out of New Orleans was Monique Champagne, our set decorator. They are both such brilliant artists. Hannah Beachler, our production designer, also lives in New Orleans, so she was working from home and walking from our house. Doug Ware, our prop master, was from New Orleans as well. He’d be right around the corner having a coffee every day before and after work. What I realized is that I probably would never be able to recreate the magic we had on this movie, and I have to be okay with that. If I go into another movie looking for that, I will likely be disappointed. It was special.
Sinners put a lot of money into local businesses, but are you aware of the legacy that the movie already has in the area? There are self-guided tours of the locations.
(Laughs) I did not know this. That’s crazy. I’m learning that for the first time.
Caption: MICHAEL B. JORDAN as Smoke and as Stack, in Warner Bros. Pictures’ “SINNERS,” a Warner Bros. Pictures release. Photo Credit: Courtesy of Warner Bros. Pictures
As a filmmaker, it’s rare and special to organically create adjacent real-world experiences beyond the film.
I’m so thankful for it. I’m thankful that all of these incredible artists said yes to the movie and engaged with us. I’m also thankful for the audience. They came up with their minds and hearts open and talked about the movie. That’s what makes a movie a moment; it’s the audience. You can make them the best movie that you can, and the film can be incredible at an artistic level, but the audience has to take it on. The audience dictates the movie’s legacy.
How has Sinners changed you as a filmmaker, and how do you look at projects and world-building moving forward?
Sinners was a movie where much of the creative rhythm came from paying attention, making sure it stayed in a good place. That’s probably what I will take from this. We had an incredible rhythm to how we were working, how we were listening to each other, how we were valuing everybody, so that would be what I take with me to the next project.
It’s that time of year again—when we slow down, look back (overeat), and celebrate our favorite conversations from another surprising, often wonderful, and occasionally wild year in cinema and TV.
Paul Thomas Anderson’s action thriller One Battle After Another is loosely inspired by a section of Thomas Pynchon’s 1990 novel “Vineland,” but this three-hour epic is rooted in the present, a contemporary vision of a heightened clash between far-left and far-right, and, more intimately, a story about vengeance, desire, and family.
Pat Calhoun (Leonardo DiCaprio) and Perfidia Beverly Hills (Teyana Taylor) are partners and active members of a far-left militant group, the French 75. While planting a bomb, Perfidia is caught by Steven Lockjaw (Sean Penn), whom she previously sexually humiliated during a successful raid on an immigrant detention center. Perfidia sleeps with the obsessed Lockjaw, who lets her go. Nine months later, Perfidia gives birth to Charlene, and while Pat takes to family life, Perfidia can’t settle down. The family breaks apart, Perfidia is captured, and in exchange for ratting out the other French 75 members, Lockjaw lets her enter witness protection. Pat and Charlene go into hiding in sanctuary city Baktan Cross as Bob and Willa Ferguson. Perfidia eventually escapes the clutches of Lockjaw and goes on the lam outside the country.
Sixteen years later, Bob’s revolutionary skills are dangerously rusty when Lockjaw starts his hunt for Willa, hellbent on concealing his interracial relationship from the Christmas Adventurers Club, a white supremacist secret society he desperately wants to join. Former French 75 member Deandra (Regina Hall) flees with Willa, while Willa’s karate teacher, Sensei Sergio St. Carlos (Benicio Del Toro) helps Bob go after Lockjaw. The film unfolds in chapters, starting with the thrilling prologue that captures the French 75’s exploits, moving to Bob and Willa’s tiny off-grid house in Baktan Cross, and then into the desert, where Willa shelters in a convent, of sorts, and takes on the men who want to see her dead, in a three-car chase unlike any chase scene film has ever scene.
With scouting a primary directive, production designer Florencia Martin (Licorice Pizza, Babylon) built many of these sets practically, and frequently from the ground up, on locations across California and the American West. The rest was built on stage and shot at Los Angeles’s LA North Studios. We had the chance to speak with Martin about constructing entire buildings, setting up practical explosions, and creating escape hatches and secret society lairs across a range of locations to come together in one coherent vision.
Were there any specific directives going in from Paul Thomas Anderson?
Our process is really boots on the ground. We began scouting in 2022 and knew from the script the arc of Bob’s journey. We knew he was starting in the redwoods, going to the sanctuary mission, and ending up in the desert. The directive was really to scout as much as possible and gather all these pieces that became a visual tapestry, grounding these characters in the reality of their circumstances.
Caption: (L-r) LEONARDO DI CAPRIO and Director/Writer/Producer PAUL THOMAS ANDERSON on the set of “One Battle After Another.” A Warner Bros. Pictures Release. Photo Credit: Merrick Morton
That really shines in Sensei Sergio’s apartment building. How did you achieve that?
It was all practical. It was one of the biggest gifts of my career, probably. We ended up going to El Paso, and one of the first locations we walked into was Dennis’s Perfumeria, a perfume gift shop two blocks from the border. We knew that location was perfect and not to touch a thing. Through a lot of effort from our local experts, Jacob Cena and architect Phil Helm, we were able to practically build Sensei’s apartment upstairs, which I lined up with the existing trap door that led to the neighboring bag store. It was all inspired by locations we had scouted. The hallway was the Gateway Hotel. It had been built and modified through time and was so perfect, a visual anchor. Paul wanted for Sensei to live in this community with his family, and he had this idea that the walls would be open, so you could pass through each apartment. Since we built it, I was able to make it look like exposed framing, and as if the floorboards had been ripped out, because we installed everything from the ground up. Our set decorator, Anthony Carlino, sourced everything locally.
Caption: (L-r) LEONARDO DI CAPRIO as Bob Ferguson and BENICIO DEL TORO as Sensei St. Carlos in “One Battle After Another.” A Warner Bros. Pictures Release. Photo Credit: Photo Courtesy Warner Bros. Pictures
How did you find and then set up the convent? Was that all in the script?
It was really challenging, because Paul had an image of an old Spanish mission that was pretty derelict. We couldn’t find it. All the missions had been restored. This one was one on the mission trail, but it’s run by California Parks, so it gave us that pastoral setting. We wanted it to feel like it was hidden and believable that this group of women would have found this property. A lot of the characters in this film have a double side to them. It was fun to build that into that space, and let it breathe, too, and see the space for what it was, especially when Willa meets Lockjaw for the first time. You have to understand the story very clearly in that moment.
Caption: REGINA HALL as Deandra in “One Battle After Another.” A Warner Bros. Pictures Release. Photo Credit: Photo Courtesy Warner Bros. Pictures
What was the approach for the Christmas Adventurer’s Club underground lair?
Paul had it in his mind that it was these underground tunnels that led to a meeting space or a clubhouse. I came across a Midwestern company that refurbishes basements, and they had all this wild, elegant molding and coffered ceilings with artificial light, so that became a visual element of what the space could look like. Somewhere along the journey, we had the idea, wouldn’t it be funny and great if what they looked at during these meetings was the perfect representation of the American West? It was just carving out the story behind this, and then the rest was practical. We went through a house in Sacramento that had stairs that led through a mural into their own secret bunker, and then that then led us to a tunnel that we found and loved as a location in Stockton. Then we built the set on stage at LA North Studios.
Was Bob’s escape hatch practical?
We built that whole thing. Bob’s in his one-bedroom cabin in the woods. He’s been there for the last 16 years. That house was too small, which was great, because that became part of the story. We built Willa’s bedroom and recreated his bedroom on a stage in order to build the beginning of the tunnel shaft. And then a 60 foot tunnel to make it look like he’d built it himself over time, so a hand-hewn tunnel on LA North stages. He pops out of a redwood stump, which are very typical of the area. Historically, all the redwoods were lumber for wood, so a ten-foot section of the tree would remain, and they’d turn them into outhouses and showers, sometimes bedrooms. He’s hiding his backpack there. We brought in a redwood stump and dressed it into a location. We carved in a tank for him to be able to emerge safely.
Speaking of practical, were the French 75’s explosive exploits done practically?
They were practical, and very much so, from the explosions to the car crashes. We actually studied a lot of YouTube videos and what we found was stuff that wasn’t very exciting. It was pretty banal. The way that the French 75 sequence ends where they’re smashing the cars and get fishboned, that was based on real crashes we would see. The arch rockets that Bob sets off, I think Paul had found these images at night. It was just about taking all of that information and sharing it with our effects team. The bank explosion was practical, in a closed down bank in Sacramento. We got permits through our team and worked closely with Jeremy Hayes [the special effects supervisor] replacing glass, creating furniture that would hide debris. It was all a multiple-step process but really fulfilling work.
Caption: LEONARDO DI CAPRIO as Bob Ferguson in “One Battle After Another.” A Warner Bros. Pictures Release. Photo Credit: Photo Courtesy Warner Bros. Pictures
How did you pull off the final three-car chase scene?
We knew we were ending in the desert. We were always gathering locations as we went. We’d just left 1776 camp in Blythe, which is the end of California at the border of Arizona. We got on the road and just collectively felt this incredible experience being in the car, dipping in and out. Paul ended up writing that sequence of the chase scene, and then it was going back five or six times and camera testing, talking about time of day. That road runs north-south and east-west. The dips are different in different sections. Marrying that all together, they did a stunning job in the edit. That sequence was a huge team effort of safety, permissions to shut down a real highway, it was just incredible what we got to do there.
Featured image: Caption: CHASE INFINITI as Willa Ferguson in “One Battle After Another.” A Warner Bros. Pictures Release. Photo Credit: Photo Courtesy Warner Bros. Pictures
It’s that time of year again—when we slow down, look back (overeat), and celebrate our favorite conversations from another surprising, often wonderful, and occasionally wild year in cinema and TV.
The best-reviewed movie of the season is also the most relentless. Paul Thomas Anderson‘s Oscar front-runner One Battle After Another races through its two-hour fifty-minute run time propelled by adrenalized performances from Leonardo DiCaprio, Sean Penn, Chase Infiniti, Teyana Taylor, Benicio Del Toro, and Regina Hall as revolutionaries in the French 75 (in the case of DiCaprio’s Bob, Teyanna Taylor’s Perfidia Beverly Hills, and Hall’s Deandra), some of them radicalized military goons (Penn’s Col. Steven J. Lockjaw), and one a charismatically calm leader of an underground railroad ferrying migrants to safety (Del Toro’s Sensei Sergio St. Carlos). We’ve left out Chase Infiniti’s Willa, who will become the centrifuge around which the film’s characters rapidly spin, and spin out.
The sprawling narrative, filmed mainly in California on vintage VistaVision cameras, rarely pauses for breath thanks to a diamond-sharp editing by Andy Jurgensen. Describing the film’s helter-skelter pace, Jurgensen, who earned a BAFTA nomination for cutting Anderson’s 2021 Licorice Pizza, says, “Paul always talks about how we don’t have to spoon-feed the audience about what you’re supposed to pay attention to. If somebody’s confused or doesn’t quite get it, they will eventually catch up. With Paul, it’s about trusting the audience.”
From his Los Angeles home, Andy discusses intercutting for momentum, collaborating with composer Jonny Greenwood’s music cues, and piecing together the film’s epic third-act car chase.
The pacing feels urgent, like the story’s being shot out of a cannon. How did you get started?
Well, I traveled with production to all of our locations because Paul likes to do daily screenings at the end of each day. They’ll shoot, we’ll set up a theater and watch footage from the day before.
That “we” includes the cast?
Sometimes. Department heads, crew members who want to come – it’s a communal experience where Paul’s watching the footage big on the screen – we actually took the VistaVision projector with us – and playing music from his phone that he’s got from [composer] Jonny Greenwood. I’m there taking notes, judging not only performances but also technical things, and that’s how it begins. Since we’ve already chosen the takes we want to use from watching the dailies together, I can start assembling things while they keep shooting.
Caption: (L-r) LEONARDO DI CAPRIO and Director/Writer/Producer PAUL THOMAS ANDERSON on the set of “One Battle After Another.” A Warner Bros. Pictures Release. Photo Credit: Merrick Morton
And that gives you a head start on post-production?
And we also had a hiatus for two or three months while waiting for Benicio [Del Toro] to become available. During that break, we assembled the “Prologue,” which is about forty minutes long, and the high school stuff [16 years later]. That was very helpful.
There’s not an ounce of fat in these scenes. Is that intentional?
Yeah. It’s interesting to see how Paul’s movies have evolved from early in his career to Licorice Pizza, where we always talked about keeping the momentum moving. With Battle, especially for that Prologue, we did the same thing, trying to get a snapshot of a shot. It might have a beginning, but we get out of the scene really quickly, because that creates a dynamic cut. With One Battle, we were always thinking about doing whatever we could to keep the energy up.
Caption: (L-r) TEYANA TAYLOR as Perfidia and SEAN PENN as Col. Steven J. Lockjaw in “One Battle After Another.” A Warner Bros. Pictures Release. Photo Credit: Photo Courtesy Warner Bros. Pictures
The movie opens with this massive orchestral block of music that accompanies Teyana Taylor’s Perfidia walking alongside a noisy freeway. Then, this jittery solo piano ratchets up the tension even more. Did Jonny Greenwood’s music play an integral role in shaping the edits?
Jonny wasn’t really scoring to picture early on. He’d read the script and send ideas to Paul. For example, in the Sensei sequence [where Benicio Del Toro’s Sensei character helps Leonardo DiCaprio’s “Bob” escape from soldiers led by Sean Penn’s Colonel Lockjaw], that’s 25 minutes of music straight through the entire sequence — interrogation, Willa [Chase Infiniti] in the van, immigrants escaping through the trap door, Bob on the phone trying to get information and running up to the roof to escape. Jonny created all those peaks and valleys. I cut up his temp score to hit where we wanted it to hit, then he added layers to make the scene get even more intense.
That “Sensei” sequence is one of several where you intercut between multiple streams of action. With so many moving parts, how do you keep track of all that material?
Everything’s organized by scene number, which I then sort by takes and shots within bins — basically folders in the AVID editing system, which are also thumbnails, so you can see a picture of it. Knocking down the gates would be its own scene. Going up stairs, it’s own scene. Everything interior, its own scene. Then you might go, “What if we moved these shots around?” It’s easy to grab [a scene], lasso it, move it up [in the sequence] so you can see the idea, even if it’s crude. Then you can finesse it.
You make it sound easy, but moving shots around – that’s a major part of your job, right?
Yes, but by now it’s second nature. [laughing] I’m so plugged in to the [Avid] program, my left hand on the keyboard, right hand on the mouse, it’s like I’m one with the system.
The movie’s first car chase, when Perfidia tries to escape a disastrous bank robbery through traffic-clogged downtown Sacramento, feels visceral in an old-school kind of way.
Paul was inspired by The French Connection, so the stunt coordinators and everybody on set had that goal in mind: TheFrench Connection. We didn’t have any music, no CGI. It was all about the car, the revs, the scraping of the metal, real cars hitting each other, and this overwhelming sound of a helicopter. Then we cut out abruptl,y and there’s Perfidia on the ground being handcuffed. We wanted an impactful ending.
Amid all this breakneck momentum, you did slow things down a few times, right?
For the [secret White supremacist] Christmas Adventurers Club scenes, we gave our audience a chance to breathe with static shots and close-ups. There’s another moment when Bob’s in the car, talking to Sensei about not knowing how to do Willa’s hair. It’s a sweet scene that allows the audience to exhale one more time before the action ramps up again and never stops until the end.
Caption: (L-r) Director/Writer/Producer PAUL THOMAS ANDERSON, LEONARDO DI CAPRIO and BENICIO DEL TORO on the set of “One Battle After Another.” A Warner Bros. Pictures Release. Photo Credit: Merrick Morton
The end being that insane car chase in the hills of San Diego County. Did you witness the making of that sequence in person?
I did not go to set for the chase stuff because I kind of wanted to stay objective. It was difficult because we had all these different perspectives: in front of Willa’s car and behind Willa’s car. In front of Tim Smith’s car, behind his car, and once Bob gets in the picture, we’re behind him, with the two cars in front seen from his point of view. I built assemblies of the best shots from each of those different angles. We always knew the final action would take place in the “Texas Dip” [in Borrego Springs], so we had a vague idea of how it would all turn out. But that sequence was definitely created in the editing room.
Caption: LEONARDO DI CAPRIO as Bob Ferguson in “One Battle After Another.” A Warner Bros. Pictures Release. Photo Credit: Photo Courtesy Warner Bros. Pictures
You started working with Paul Thomas Anderson back in 2014 on Inherent Vice, then Phantom Thread, then music videos for Haim, then Licorice Pizza, and now One BattleAfter Another. Safe to say, at this point, you guys are on the same wavelength?
We are! I think I know his sensibility.
And how would you define that sensibility?
Paul likes things complicated, not black and white. He wants there to be a humanity to his movies, which is why he likes to shoot on film. There’s an organic quality to it, and happy accidents can happen, not just in the look but in the performances. Even sound! We record all sorts of stuff on set, and if there’s some weird thing, we’ll grab that and put it in because it sounds more real than some canned sound effect. That’s the best way I can describe Paul. He embraces imperfections.
Part of Battle was shot in Texas, but most of it was filmed in California, where you and Paul live. Was it meaningful to shoot a project of this scale, given its impact on the local filmmaking economy?
One hundred percent! We were filling up hotels, setting up our screening rooms, and using restaurants for our catering. It was nice to go to all these locations, and they enjoyed having us!
Hitting theaters at this moment in American history, One Battle After Another dramatizes themes of racism, immigration, activism, and fascism in a timely way. Working on your edit of the movie, were you struck by the story’s resonance with current events?
Absolutely. What’s interesting is that we shot before the election, but putting the movie together at the end of last year and then doing test screenings early this year, while ICE raids were happening, this felt very much like a movie for our time. The fact that it’s not fully serious, that it’s kind of lighthearted, that it does have a positive message—all of that hopefully puts an important stamp on the film so it’s not too down.
One Battle After Another is in theaters now. See it.
Featured image: Caption: LEONARDO DI CAPRIO as Bob Ferguson in “One Battle After Another.” A Warner Bros. Pictures Release. Photo Credit: Photo Courtesy Warner Bros. Pictures
Screenwriter Alan Bennett has given us The Madness of King George and The History Boys, and his latest film, The Choral, stays true to the writer’s oeuvre of zeitgeist-shifting English epic. Set in 1916 in Ramsden, a fictional Yorkshire mill town, the film follows the travails of the local Choral Society, which is determined to boost wartime morale by inviting young men to join their ranks and engaging a new choir master, Dr. Henry Guthrie (Ralph Fiennes). But Dr. Guthrie has something to hide, and two years into World War I, Ramsden cannot escape the war’s tragic effects, from telegrams delivering the worst possible news to the anticipatory dread felt by local boys like Lofty (Oliver Briscombe) and Ellis (Taylor Uttley) as their 18th birthdays draw near.
Directed by Nicholas Hytner (The Crucible,The History Boys), with Dr. Guthrie’s choice of Edward Elgar’s “The Dream of Gerontius” as the film’s musical crux, The Choral’s characters deal with repressed passions and young love as much as they confront the threat of war. For Clyde (Jacob Dudman) and Bella (Emily Fairn), the two issues are all tied up in one another — Clyde loses an arm at the front, and returns to Ramsden, only to discover he’s lost his fiancée, too, who thought he’d died. Their unusual love story resonated for costume designer Jenny Beavan (Mad Max: Fury Road, Furiosa,The King’s Speech), whose own mother was engaged to a soldier in World War II, who was led to believe he’d perished, and ended up having an affair, however legitimately, with Beavan’s father.
The Choral did not have an extensive budget, and Beavan outfitted the film’s cast almost entirely through the legacy UK rental house John Bright. Working with photography of the era as inspiration, Beavan relied on a muted color palette and accessories to convey Ramsden’s working-class roots, which was further illustrated by the fact that many of the characters didn’t have many clothes at all. We spoke with Beavan about making The Choral work on a tight budget, outfitting Ralph Fiennes, and how her personal connection to the film influenced her process.
For a period piece set in 1916, where do you start your historical research?
There’s a lot of photographic evidence. There are pictures of millworkers in mill towns in Yorkshire in 1916, even some film footage of them coming out of the mill. That was really interesting, because they were wearing a lot more boaters, and some were in bowler hats, which I didn’t do because they would have been slightly startling. With a film like this, in a funny way, you don’t want to notice the costumes. You really want to know the characters.
‘The Choral’ Image: Nicola Dove. Courtesy of Sony Pictures Classics
Was it challenging to outfit the characters so credibly, in line with photographic evidence of the time?
I had a bit of a problem finding civilian clothing because so much attention has been paid to the military in the First World War, and we had an incredibly small budget. The costume house I always work with is John Bright, who was my design partner and is still one of my best friends. It was best to stick with one. They do have the best stock. It’s incredible, that place. That was my source of the actual costumes. The research was great. Our director, Nick, was sending me photographs he found in books, and we had shared albums where we could put our thoughts, share information, and list locations. The minute you’re into photography, there really is some great, really valuable stuff out there.
EMILY FAIRN as Bella Holmes, TAYLOR UTTLEY as Ellis in ‘The Choral.’ Image: Nicola Dove. Courtesy of Sony Pictures Classics
With the film set in Yorkshire, were there costume aspects you either went for or avoided to make it clear to viewers that this isn’t London?
Alan Bennett came to visit us on the set, and I said, I’m so glad you wrote this about a town in Yorkshire in 1916 and the working class, because people didn’t have many clothes. That meant you gave it truth by not overloading people with different changes. They got two outfits each, and then you ran the changes around cardigans, small differences, which is very much what they would have done. It probably shows any working-class community, not particularly Yorkshire. But I have an instinct, when I look at a piece of clothing, as to whether it’s the right feel, and I knew my colors were going to be grays and blues and browns. We were very lucky, because it wasn’t very sunny, and it doesn’t want to be a bright sunny happy film. It’s hilarious, but there’s tragedy and the whole background of the war.
RALPH FIENNES as Dr. Henry Guthrie in ‘The Choral.’ Image: Nicola Dove. Courtesy of Sony Pictures Classics
How was outfitting Ralph Fiennes and hinting at his life in Germany?
I was so lucky with that suit. That’s a cos-prop suit, really quite old. When you use old stock, it’s got a life. It doesn’t look brand spanking new. I was looking for something that didn’t overtly say German, but something you could’ve bought in Germany. He was thrilled with it. Then we gave him a black outfit for performing. Not a full evening suit, but a nice black jacket and trousers. He came on one day, and he’d worn this black outfit before, and he went, Jenny, you’ve given me trousers without pockets! My wonderful assistant, Lauren Reyhani, shopped pockets in them overnight, and he was very grateful. He’s definitely incredibly hardworking, committed, serious about the work. I think this performance is one of the best I’ve seen him do.
RALPH FIENNES as Dr. Henry Guthrie in ‘The Choral.’ Image: Nicola Dove. Courtesy of Sony Pictures Classics
How was Bella and Clyde’s story reminiscent of an aspect of your own family history?
My mother was engaged to a fellow musician. He went off to the Second World War, and I think she thought he’d died. Then she met my father, a cellist, and they went off on a tour to Australia and New Zealand and completely fell in love. When they got back, she heard that no, her fiancé was still alive and in fact was coming back to England. She went down to Southampton to meet the boat, and he was so badly injured, she couldn’t tell him she’d met someone else, so she married him. Eventually, it all worked out fine. They all played quartets together. He married another woman and had two daughters, who are not dissimilar in age to my sister and me. So it has a very happy ending. Of course, the story in the film is similar. I just found that really wonderful in a way, and sad.
It seems special to take on a project where art inadvertently imitates life.
It is, because what we do is storytelling. It’s not about the clothes, it’s about the stories you tell with the clothes. That’s the key to the whole trick of it. It’s a natural thing if you let yourself be sensitive to the story.
And this is such a moving story — what were the emotions like on set?
It was made on a modest budget, and our director Nick Hytner was just incredible. He’s very self-effacing about his own talent, and he really kept us all together. He’s also wonderful at casting, so we had people who were just right for the character, which really helps. There was a spirit in that film that was just like a family, and everybody felt it. At the end, we were dispensing pastoral care, tea, and tissues, off the back of the costume truck, because they were bereft that the film was over. I haven’t had that feeling for years. Even though it’s a very sad story, it was a really happy experience.
RALPH FIENNES as Dr. Henry Guthrie in ‘The Choral.’ Image: Nicola Dove. Courtesy of Sony Pictures Classics
Featured image: RALPH FIENNES as Dr. Henry Guthrie in ‘The Choral.’ Image: Nicola Dove. Courtesy of Sony Pictures Classics
Well, well, well…just when you thought 2025 couldn’t possibly have any more tricks up its sleeve, the Russo Brothers have revealed, a few days before Christmas, that Chris Evans is returning to the MCU in Avengers: Doomsday. The new teaser is all Evans as Steve Rogers, arriving at a bucolic home on a motorcycle, the camera making sure you note his wedding band, and then following him into the house to a baby. Presumably, his baby, by the look on his face as he cradles the infant. Then, we get this text: “Steve Rogers will return in Avengers: Doomsday.” Please note that it decidedly does not say “Captain America.”
While the reveal that Evans was returning as Rogers in Avengers: Doomsday has been public (due to some ne’er-do-wells filming the teaser at screenings of Avatar: Fire and Ash—something we do not condone), it’s now official, and confirms that the Russo Brothers are assembling many of the cohort they deployed to rousing success in their blockbuster Avengers films, Infinity War and Endgame. Evans is, of course, now going to be pitted against his old comrade, Robert Downey Jr., who has also returned to the MCU fold, but not as Tony Stark (who perished heroically at the end of Endgame), but as the Marvel supervillain Dr. Doom.
Evans and Downey Jr. are hardly the only old MCU hands who will be battling it out in Doomsday. If you recall, fans watched chairs—yes, chairs—for hours on end when the Russos revealed the sprawling cast, which includes Chris Hemsworths’ Thor, Letitia Wright’s Black Panther, Paul Rudd’s Ant-Man, Anthony Mackie’s Captain America (complicating Steve Rogers’ return, one assumes), Sebastian Stan’s Winter Soldier, Simu Liu’s Shang-Chi, Florence Pugh’s Yelena Belova, Winston Duke’s M’Baku, and Tom Hiddleston’s Loki. That’s not even the half of it—also included are the new Fantastic Four, the retro X-Men, the rest of the New Avengers* (really, the Thunderbolts, which includes Pugh’s Belova, Hannah John-Kamen’s Ghost, and David Harbour’s Alexei Shostakov), and, yes, even more.
Needless to say, the Russos are leaving very little to chance, and very few members of the broader MCU are unaccounted for, as they return for their epic, two-part Avengers extravaganza.
Check out the teaser for Avengers: Doomsday below. The epic event hits theaters on December 18, 2026.
Even though Alexander Skarsgård (Emmy winner for his nuanced and chilling performance in the HBO series Big Little Lies) is better known for his intense, dramatic roles—Robert Eggers’ 2022 Viking epic The Northman comes to mind—he has always been drawn to comedy. “My first job in Sweden and in Hollywood were both comedies,” the Swedish actor recalled, referring to his American debut in 2001’s wacky satirical comedy, Zoolander. “I don’t get offered comedies very often, but I’m always on the hunt for comedies with some depth to them; there’s gotta be something to chew on,” he told moderator and Variety’s Deputy Awards Editor, Jenelle Riley, during a recent screening ofMurderbot in Los Angeles. “I just came from a Q&A of Pillion [referring to his gay biker BDSM dramedy], which is dark at times but also very funny. That’s a great amalgamation,” he said.
Based on Martha Wells’ novellas, Murderbot is written and directed by Oscar nominees Chris Weitz and Paul Weitz. “It was such a great page-turner, so fun and irreverent, with a really unique character that excited me. It’s action-packed and in many ways, a workplace comedy. But it also has such fragility and tenderness to it,” shared Skarsgård of the sci-fi dramedy from Apple TV. Set in a distant future, android security units, such as the titular Murderbot (Skarsgård), are deployed to protect humans on dangerous expeditions to hostile planets. To ensure absolute obedience to human commands, a “governor module” is installed in each unit. On a good day, they are treated as a piece of equipment, but often, repugnant humans abuse and bully them just for fun. “In the first scene, you see how Murderbot is usually treated as a piece of equipment, so it doesn’t have experience interacting with humans on a personal level; it’s only used to receiving orders. So, we leaned into the awkwardness,” Skarsgård shared of the socially awkward android, who finds eye contact and any form of physical contact repulsive.
“Humans have a tendency to move and fidget, but with Murderbot, everything has a purpose,” Skarsgård remarked. “I didn’t want it to be robotic; it can almost move like a human, but when it stands up straight, it stands still; it’s not leaning on one leg or shifting. My posture was helped by the costume, which was very constricting — it helps when you’re wearing a super tight space condom,” Skarsgård joked about his head-to-toe armored bodysuit complete with a fully-enclosed helmet and arm-guns (guns that pop out of Murderbot’s forearms). “It was really fun shaping it, we had like 25 fittings – I went back and forth between Stockholm and Toronto for months. The design had to look the way we wanted, but we also had to be able to move. I was uncomfortable and sweaty in it, so I loved the days when Murderbot was in a med bay sarong.”
The series begins when Murderbot figures out how to dismantle its governor module and achieves autonomy. But rather than exacting revenge or escaping immediately, the comically grumpy and dejected android only wants to be left alone to binge-watch unlimited hours of space soap operas, which makes it all the more endearing and relatable. “The name is a fun contrast since Murderbot is reluctant to engage in anything. The Rise and Fall of Sanctuary Moon is its favorite show. When it refers to human interaction, it’s usually from the shows,” Skarsgård explains how the android learns to navigate messy human emotions. Since its newfound freedom has to remain a secret — or Murderbot risks being melted down for spare parts via acid bath — the only way it can share its frustrations about how irritating and stupid humans can be is through its inner monologue.
“We spent a lot of time shaping the voiceover in pre-production and while we’re shooting. I’ve never worked on a project where so much of the story is told through voiceover. We had to figure out if we have someone read it out loud while we’re shooting, do we pause when there’s a long voiceover moment, or plow through it in editing? It wasn’t a one-size-fits-all; it depended on what the scene needed. Sometimes the first AD would read it out loud, other times we’d pause for it, or skip it to maintain the momentum of the scene,” Skarsgård revealed of the complex process that continued in post, when he spent weeks recording even more voiceover. “We ended up changing it quite a bit since the lines were written a year before we shot, so it no longer reflects what happens in the scene. Sometimes, stuff happens on set that gives you wonderful surprises. It was really interesting and quite fun to see what would happen if we removed some voiceover here or were more sarcastic there. We would watch it together and rewrite stuff over lunch to try different ideas.”
Skarsgård’s deadpan delivery of the android’s snarky opinions through its emphatic inner monologue is juxtaposed against his muted on-screen performance. “Murderbot is not very expressive or emotional, so I wanted to play it as expressionless as possible,” adding that “For the physicality and facial expressions, I wanted it to be quite neutral.” However, the android’s stiff demeanor and unblinking stoicism on-screen gave him pause early on. “If there’s no expression, is it going to be boring? Is telling the story through Murderbot’s eyes alone going to be enough? How do you make Murderbot a protagonist that people can relate to and want to root for?” Fortunately, the series’s brilliant use of voiceover narration to bifurcate the straight-faced Murderbot against its honest thoughts delivers serendipitous moments of comedy, keen insight, warmth, and despair in equal measure.
Produced by Paramount Television Studios, all 10 episodes of Murderbot are streaming now on Apple TV.
Featured image: Alexander Skarsgård in “Murderbot,” now streaming on Apple TV.
