“Joaquin was just so incredible,” is how Vanessa Kirby succinctly sums up working alongside Joaquin Phoenix in a new video for Ridley Scott’s eagerly anticipated epic Napoleon. Phoenix plays the titular conquerer and eventual emperor of France —his second time playing an emperor, mind you—he first ruled the world as Roman Emperor Commodus in Scott’s 2000 epic Gladiator—as Scott takes us into the dangerous world of late 18th century France. “Scenes with him just felt really authentic,” Kirby continues, “he was unbelievable about capturing the idiosyncratic, psychological portrait of this unpredictable personality.”
“I cast Joaquin because he was passionate,” Scott says. “When you’re doing a film with Joaquin, he comes alive; he’s evolving into Napoleon Bonaparte.”
“It’s really amazing to watch him touch the really dark places,” Kirby adds. “I could really see him tucking into that kind of psyche.”
Napoleon will take viewers back to France in 1793 in the midst of intense, bloody turmoil as the Jacobins have seized control of the National Convention and are instituting a series of radical measures. An example must be made, and a relatively unknown Napoleon Bonaparte is given a fresh assignment to defend the nation at all costs, and in turn, his ruthlessness serves him well. We see the makings of the French general who will go on to wage some of history’s most infamous battles, using his almost supernatural strategic gifts to build what seems to be an unbeatable army. As his victories mount and his acclaim rise, the General will eventually seize the throne for himself.
Along with Phoenix and Kirby, who plays Josephine, Napoleon’s lover and future Empress, the cast includes Tahar Rahim as Paul Barras, Ben Miles as Caulaincourt, Ludivine Sagnier as Theresa Cabarrus, Matthew Needham as Lucien Bonaparte, Youssef Kerkour as Marshal Davout, Phil Cornwell as Sanson ‘The Bourreau,’ Edouard Philipponnat as Tsar Alexander, Paul Rhys as Talleyrand, John Hollingworth as Marshall Ney, Gavin Spokes as Moulins and Mark Bonnar as Jean-Andoche Junot.
“I’m the first to admit when I made a mistake,” Napoleon says at the end of the first trailer, “I simply never do.” History proved the conqueror wrong, but Scott aims to deliver a film up to the challenge of depicting a man who really did believe himself flawless until, of course, his flaws undid him.
Check out the new vignette below. Napoleon hits theaters on November 22
Here’s the official synopsis:
Napoleon is a spectacle-filled action epic that details the checkered rise and fall of the iconic French Emperor Napoleon Bonaparte, played by Oscar®-winner Joaquin Phoenix. Against a stunning backdrop of large-scale filmmaking orchestrated by legendary director Ridley Scott, the film captures Bonaparte’s relentless journey to power through the prism of his addictive, volatile relationship with his one true love, Josephine, showcasing his visionary military and political tactics against some of the most dynamic practical battle sequences ever filmed.
Featured image: Napoleon (JOAQUIN PHOENIX, center) looks onto the battlefield in Apple Original Films and Columbia Pictures theatrical release of NAPOLEON. Photo by: Aidan Monaghan
“The character of Ernest Burkhart I found absolutely fascinating,” Leonardo DiCaprio says at the top of this new video detailing his Killers of the Flower Moon role. DiCaprio has, of course, re-teamed with director Martin Scorsese for the epic crime saga in a film adapted from investigative journalist David Grann’s captivating 2017 book of the same name. Yet Scorsese and his co-writer Eric Roth refocused their version on the relationship between DiCaprio’s Burkhart and Mollie Kyle (Lily Gladstone), a member of the Osage Nation of Oklahoma. While Burkhart’s feelings for Mollie might be genuine, he is part of a wave of white people who have descended upon the Osage after the revelation that their land sat atop vast oil reserves, making them immensely rich. Steered by his uncle William Hale (Robert De Niro), Burkhart’s relationship with Mollie, whom he eventually marries, carries the benefit of putting Ernest, and, by extension, William, on the path of riches. “We mix these families together, and that estate money flows in the right direction,” Hale says in a previous trailer. “It’ll come to us.”
While Ernest’s true feelings for Mollie grow, so, too, does his uncle’s influence as a series of brazen murders of the Osage people spread. This will eventually come to the attention of the U.S. Government, which sends Texas Ranger Tom White (Jesse Plemons) to investigate.
“Working with Leo and watching this master create this character, it’s unbelievable,” says Gladstone. The character DiCpario’s playing, however, is all too believable.
“I just love money,” Ernest says at one point in the film. “I love it as much as I love my wife.”
Check out the character chronicle video below. Killers of the Flower Moon hits theaters on October 20:
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The first trailer for Leave The World Behind is here, a perfect marriage of material and film talent. The movie is based on Rumaan Alam’s sizzling novel, one of 2020’s must-reads, a genuinely riveting story about two families facing the prospect of complete societal collapse while sequestered together in a house in the Hamptons. Alam’s novel dropped, of course, in the middle of the pandemic, and its story about a society falling apart just outside the front door felt all too resonant. Now, Mr. Robot creator Sam Esmail has adapted Alam’s novel for the screen, and he’s brought along a sensational cast and crew to help him deliver the thrills and chills that were so plentiful in the novel.
Julia Roberts and Ethan Hawke are Amanda and Clay Standford, a husband and wife who rent a beautiful home in the Hamptons with their kids for a weekend of bougie relaxation. Their idyll is interrupted by two strangers—G.H. (Mahershala Ali) and his daughter Ruth (Myha’la)—and they come bearing bad news. There’s been a cyberattack, and they’ve arrived seeing refuge. And before the Standfords can balk at the likelihood of any of this being real, G.H. reveals that he actually owns the house, so yeah, they’re staying. The tension between these two families and the growing horror of what’s happening out in the world is what drives Leave The World Behind towards its climax.
You couldn’t ask for a better cast—not for nothing, Kevin Bacon has a small but important role—and Esmail has proven himself a master of the techno-thriller. While the world may have stabilized compared to how bleak and terrifying things were when the book first came out in October 2020, we still live in uncertain times. Leave The World Behind, at the very least, reminds us that things could always be worse.
Check out the trailer below. Leave The World Behind will play in select theaters in November and then will stream on Netflix on December 8:
Here’s the official synopsis:
n this apocalyptic thriller from award-winning writer and director Sam Esmail (Mr. Robot), Amanda (Academy Award winner Julia Roberts) and her husband Clay (Academy Award nominee Ethan Hawke), rent a luxurious home for the weekend with their kids, Archie (Charlie Evans) and Rose (Farrah Mackenzie). Their vacation is soon upended when two strangers — G.H. (Academy Award winner Mahershala Ali) and his daughter Ruth (Myha’la) — arrive in the night, bearing news of a mysterious cyberattack and seeking refuge in the house they claim is theirs. The two families reckon with a looming disaster that grows more terrifying by the minute, forcing everyone to come to terms with their places in a collapsing world. Based on the National Book Award-nominated novel by Rumaan Alam, LEAVE THE WORLD BEHIND is produced by Esmail Corp, Red Om Films, and executive produced by Higher Ground Productions.
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Featured image: LEAVE THE WORLD BEHIND (2023) Mahershela Ali as G.H., Myha’la Herrold as Ruth, Julia Roberts as Amanda and Ethan Hawke as Clay. CR: JoJo Whilden
By now, it’s understood that Greta Gerwig’s Barbie and Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer, forever linked thanks to their simultaneous premiere dates as the box office phenomenon Barbenheimer, is likely the biggest positive story of the year in cinema. With the writer’s strike officially over and the actor’s guild meeting with the studios again today to restart negotiations, one hopes we can focus on yet more positive news in the coming days and weeks. For Nolan, the news about his masterpiece just keeps getting better and better, as Oppenheimer continues to reach milestones that even he might not have dared to dream when he was creating his rich, nuanced, three-hour-long biopic about J. Robert Oppenheimer (Cillian Murphy), the father of the atomic bomb.
Oppenheimer has now made a staggering $611 million at the domestic box office, a huge haul for a movie about such a complicated figure that includes no superheroes and was based on no widely beloved intellectual property. As astonishing as the number is, it’s also what the film is doing overseas that is so impressive. Oppenheimer is now the highest-grossing film in Nolan’s career in 64 international markets, fueling it to $933 million at the worldwide box office and counting. While it might just miss reaching the billion-dollar threshold, Oppenheimer is a massive hit by every metric. A long, oft-technical, complicated movie about a historic figure many people knew little about is not supposed to be the type of movie that enchants audiences all over the globe, but such is the power of Nolan’s cinematic voice, and the incredible work of his talented cast and crew, that it’s done just that.
Producer Emma Thomas has already said that we won’t be seeing Oppenheimer on VOD or streaming until sometime in late November, meaning there’s still some theatrical runway left for the film. Nolan has long been a major supporter of the 70mm format, which, of course, can only be seen on a very big screen, so Oppenheimer continues to play at venues that can screen his film in that format, like New York City’s AMC Lincoln Square, which has its IMAX 70mm screen. If you still haven’t seen the film, or if you haven’t yet seen it in 70mm and have a theater capable near you, you’ve still got time.
On Sunday night, the one and only Beyoncé released the trailer for her concert documentary on the final stop of her world-beating global tour. The new movie, Renaissance: A Film By Beyoncé, tracks the superstar’s most successful tour to date, with Bey dropping the trailer in Kansas City. The doc will arrive in theaters in the U.S., Canada, and Mexico on December 1 and will be released in additional cities around the world later.
The doc promises to give viewers an inside look at how one of the hardest-working women in music history put together her globe-trotting, historic production. “It is about Beyoncé’s intention, hard work, involvement in every aspect of the production, her creative mind and purpose to create her legacy, and master her craft,” the doc’s synopsis reads. The tour has reached some 2.7 million fans around the world, some of whom crossed borders and oceans to make it to one of the stops.
The Renaissance World Tour kicked off on May 10 in Stockholm and has gone to play in Brussels, Cardiff, Edinburgh, Sunderland, London, Amsterdam, Paris, Marseille, Barcelona, Cologne, Hamburg, Frankfurt, Warsaw, Toronto, Philadelphia, Nashville, Louisville, Minneapolis, Chicago, Detroit, East Rutherford, Boston, Washington D.C., Charlotte, Atlanta, Tampa, Miami, St. Louis, Phoenix, Las Vegas, San Francisco, Inglewood, Vancouver, Seattle, Dallas, Houston, New Orleans, and Kansas City. According to Billboard, so far, the Renaissance World Tour has grossed $461.3 million, making it the highest-grossing tour of all time.
Tickets are now officially on sale. This is the first doc to capture one of Beyoncé’s tours since the Netflix film Homecoming, which was centered on her performance at the 2018 Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival performance. Beyoncé’s last film was her 2020 Black Is King, which she wrote, produced and directed based on her music for The Lion King.
Beyoncé’s tour and her coming are playing out while another megastar, Taylor Swift, is also in the middle of her own tour and also has a concert film coming out. Swift’s The Eras Tourdocumentary comes to theaters on October 13. While Beyoncé was playing Kansas City and dropping this trailer, Swift was in New Jersey, watching the Kansas Chiefs and her new boyfriend, Travis Kelce, play the New York Jets. Swift has gone on record in the past as being a Philadelphia Eagles fan (in the song “Gold Rush,” her Eagels t-shirt makes an appearance), but that is a discussion for another time—and probably another website.
Check out the trailer below. Renaissance: A Film By Beyoncé hits theaters on December 1:
Here’s the synopsis:
RENAISSANCE: A FILM BY BEYONCÉ accentuates the journey of RENAISSANCE WORLD TOUR, from its inception, to the opening in Stockholm, Sweden, to the finale in Kansas City, Missouri. It is about Beyoncé’s intention, hard work, involvement in every aspect of the production, her creative mind and purpose to create her legacy, and master her craft. Received with extraordinary acclaim, Beyoncé’s RENAISSANCE WORLD TOUR created a sanctuary for freedom, and shared joy, for more than 2.7 million fans.
Featured image: LOS ANGELES, CALIFORNIA – FEBRUARY 05: Beyoncé accepts the Best Dance/Electronic Music Album award for “Renaissance” onstage during the 65th GRAMMY Awards at Crypto.com Arena on February 05, 2023 in Los Angeles, California. (Photo by Kevin Winter/Getty Images for The Recording Academy)
You’ll soon be able to book your return ticket to Panem as The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes nears its mid-November premiere date. Lionsgate has teased the upcoming prequel from longtime Hunger Games director Francis Lawrence with two new teasers and now a fresh batch of images from the film. The images include a look at a young Coriolanus Snow (Tom Blyth), some 64 years before the events in the original trilogy, as well as the head gamemaker, Dr. Volumnia Gaul (Viola Davis). We also get new peeks at Lucy Gray Baird (Rachel Zegler), the tribute from District 12 who will fall under the mentorship of Coriolanus as she prepares for the 10th Annual Games.
Also pictured below are Lucretius “Lucky” Flickerman (Jason Schwartzman), Coriolanus’s Academy classmates Clemensia Dovecote (Ashley Liao) and Sejanus Plinth (Josh Andrés Rivera), and dean of the Academy Casca Highbottom (Peter Dinklage).
The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes will be centered on the relationship between Coriolanus and Lucy. The former was an orphan in the Capitol, and now, at 18 years old, he is attempting to salvage his family’s reputation by becoming a mentor in the 10th annual Hunger Games. Being paired with Lucy will change everything for them both. Yet it’s important to note that Lucy is not simply a proto version of Katniss Everdeen, the often stoic, heroic hero of the original trilogy, played by (of course) Jennifer Lawrence. Lucy will take a different, more intellectual approach to the games than Katniss did.
Check out the new images below. The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes arrives in theaters on November 17.
Tom Blyth as Coriolanus Snow and Viola Davis as Dr Volumnia Gaul in The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes. Photo Credit: Murray CloseTom Blyth as Coriolanus Snow and Rachel Zegler as Lucy Gray Baird in The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes. Photo Credit: Murray ClosePeter Dinklage as Casca Highbottom in The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes. Photo Credit: Murray CloseJason Schwartzman as Lucretius ‘Lucky’ Flickerman in The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes. Photo Credit: Murray CloseHunter Schafer as Tigris Snow in The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes. Photo Credit: Murray CloseHonor Gillies as Barb Azure, Konstantin Taffet as Clerk Carmine and Rachel Zegler as Lucy Gray Baird in The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes. Photo Credit: Murray CloseRachel Zegler as Lucy Gray Baird. Courtesy of Lionsgate.Tom Blyth as Coriolanus Snow and Ashley Liao as Clemensia Dovecote. Courtesy Lionsgate.“The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes.” Courtesy of Lionsgate.Josh Andrés Rivera as Sejanus Plinth and Tom Blyth as Coriolanus Snow in The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes. Photo Credit: Courtesy of LionsgateDirector Francis Lawrence in The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes. Photo Credit: Murray CloseTom Blyth as Coriolanus Snow and Rachel Zegler as Lucy Gray Baird in The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes. Photo Credit: Murray Close
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Two new teasers for the upcoming The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes have arrived, inviting us back to Panem some 64 years before the events in the original film trilogy. The new teasers reveal a citadel in its early days, preparing for the 10th Annual Hunger Games. The first teaser is an Academy Orientation Video, led by some of Panem’s most aggressively “patriotic” members. They include Casca Highbottom (Peter Dinklage), the dean of the Academy, Dr. Volumnia Gaul (Viola Davis), the head gamemaker, and two seniors at the academy: Sejanus Plinth (Josh Andrés Rivera) and a young man named Coriolanus Snow (Tom Blyth), who you and I both know will become the despotic ruler of Panem in the coming decades. The second video is a news broadcast led by Lucretius “Lucky” Flickerman (Jason Schwartzman), reminding viewers that the annual Hunger Games, in which each district puts up two tributes to compete in the deadly competition, is meant to keep the peace in Panem.
The upcoming prequel, based on a prequel novel by the creator of the whole shebang, novelist Suzanne Collins, was directed by seasoned Hunger Games helmer Francis Lawrence. Joining the abovementioned cast is Rachel Zegler as Lucy Gracy Bair, a young woman who becomes one of District 12’s tributes. She’s ultimately paired with Coriolanus Snow as she prepares for the games. Snow, meanwhile, is driven to salvage his parent’s reputation in the Capitol, and knowing what we do about the man he becomes, there’s no question he’ll stop at nothing to achieve his aims.
The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds & Snakes his theaters on November 17.
Check out the Academy Orientation video here:
Check out Jason Schwartzman as Lucretius “Lucky” Flickerman anchoring a news update on the 10th Annual Hunger Games:
Here’s the official synopsis for The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes:
“Years before he would become the tyrannical President of Panem, 18-year-old Coriolanus Snow (Blyth) is the last hope for his fading lineage, a once-proud family that has fallen from grace in a post-war Capitol. With the 10th annual Hunger Games fast approaching, the young Snow is alarmed when he is assigned to mentor Lucy Gray Baird (Zegler), the girl tribute from impoverished District 12. But, after Lucy Gray commands all of Panem’s attention by defiantly singing during the reaping ceremony, Snow thinks he might be able to turn the odds in their favor. Uniting their instincts for showmanship and newfound political savvy, Snow and Lucy’s race against time to survive will ultimately reveal who is a songbird and a snake.”
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Featured image: Tom Blyth as Coriolanus Snow and Viola Davis as Dr Volumnia Gaul in The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes. Photo Credit: Murray Close
When writer-director Gareth Edwards finished Rogue One, he took a road trip to his girlfriend’s home in Iowa. Along the way, he noticed a Japanese factory in the middle of a cornfield and started dreaming up a new story. Seven years later, Edwards has delivered The Creator. Set in 2065, the movie pits American humans against highly evolved AI robots from “New Asia.”
Starring John David Washington, The Creator (in theaters Sept. 29) unfolds across a succession of spectacular set pieces conceived by production designer James Clyne. Drawing on his early collaborations with Steven Spielberg on A.I. and Minority Report, the Bay Area designer says he and Edwards aimed for a rich mix of influences. “Rather than trying to anticipate where we’ll be thirty or forty years from now, which is nearly impossible, we wanted to go into this sort of future-past, something Blade Runner did really well by fusing fifties noir with eighties tech noir. In our film, you might see a phone on the wall or a turntable in someone’s home. And Gareth purchased a lot of nineties Japanese electronics on eBay that were retrofitted here. Along with all the sci-fi tropes, we wanted The Creator to feel fresh and timeless.”
Speaking from Los Angeles ahead of the film’s red carpet Hollywood premiere, Clyne walked The Credits through a few examples of The Creator‘s eye-popping science fiction.
How did you guys come up with the AI cops in this movie? It’s hard to tell where the head leaves off and the helmet begins.
Gareth wanted to see negative space with all the robots so that when an AI cop turns around in profile, it’s impossible to have them in makeup or some kind of practical effect. We gave the AI cops a wide brim, almost like a visor, with a strong logo on top, and then had some heavy tech giving the robots audio-visual so they can communicate with other robots through Wi-Fi or whatever.
The suicide bomber robots that attack midway through the movie don’t resemble humans at all. They look more like oil drums fitted with robotic legs. What did you have in mind there?
We thought the oil drum look was a great way to make the robot feel dangerous, like a detonator bomb, with caution stripes. Apocalypse Now was a big influence on how we looked at design in general for this film, so we included some very simple Vietnam War-era looks.
How did you film the oil drum robot as it clomps down the bridge toward its target?
We had a stuntman in a black leotard wearing markers to track his movements. He had a pole mounted on his back with a marker showing the robot’s height because it was quite tall. The stunt man running to the bridge and walking up to Alphie — that was shot practically, and then we designed and built the robot digitally in post.
The child robot Alphie, played by Madeline Yuna Voyles, has a human face, but then it gets weird.
We wanted to retain the face so our actors could emote and be unencumbered by anything on top of their faces, but we also wanted to show that Alphie’s a hybrid of human and robot. So then it’s “Okay, if we leave the face alone, where can we take our bigger swing?” One way to do that was to leave off the back portion of the head as if you’ve left off the back of a VCR or something.
That’s the back of the head. What about that cylinder boring clean through the middle of Alphie’s skull?
From the beginning, Gareth wanted a metal ring that you could see all the way through. If you notice, there are multiple rings inside of the hole, which spin at different speeds depending on what Alphie’s feeling when she’s upset or having different emotions. It’s like the mechanical version of a thought bubble in a cartoon.
Then there’s the flying schooner, which almost summons up Viking ships from the 1200s, with the prow, the mast — what inspired this airborne vehicle?
We call it the hover boat, and it goes back to our design language throughout. We could have made it look like a flamingo or a stingray, but we wanted this to feel like an old ship that you might see off the waters of Railay Beach in Thailand, with a keel and a mast and a sail. We shot the actors on this pirate ship-looking boat that’s used to ferry tourists around and figured out all the futuristic design stuff later. It’s this almost backward way of making a movie.
The V-shaped aircraft looks ominous. How did you come up with this airborne weaponry?
It’s a flying military weapon we call the NOMAD, an acronym for North American Orbital… something. The shape itself went through probably 1,000 different sketches that Gareth and I looked at. Finally, I showed him a picture of this bird of prey from the Pink Floyd film The Wall, which has an animated sequence with this black eagle or falcon hovering in the air. Our bird of prey has a menacing, evil presence, but it’s also very graphic and simple.
Also intimidating is the gargantuan tank that rumbles across the jungle midway through the movie. What did you have in mind with the monster tank?
The tank seemed never to be big enough for Gareth until we got to this final design because he wanted something that looked like it could roll over a whole village. We both grew up on robot tech, and I loved the early cartoons that came from Japan, dubbed in English. So, we both wanted to lean into this anime and manga aesthetic as much as we could. The bright colors were part of the look, too. The Americans were so confident in their machines that they didn’t have to camouflage them. It’s like, “We’re here, and there’s nothing you can do about it.”
What about the soldiers’ firearms?
Wētā [Workshop] did the main armory for the hero guns, but we still needed to populate the background guys with weapons. In order to save budget, we literally bought Nerf guns and painted them black or silver. Then, we cut them in half and extended the guns. Ken Watanabe’s character Harun holds a bazooka that I designed based on a yellow and orange Nerf bazooka. We designed a new front end to it, but in reality, Ken’s holding a Nerf gun.
The New Asia cities look amazing, surreal, and yet somewhat familiar. How did you decide on the architecture?
Lilac City is an amalgamation of Tokyo, Bangkok and Beijing. The lower levels are kind of untouched cityscape, but then, as you get higher, I pushed for buildings that would go almost horizontal. Rather than going vertical 100 stories up, our buildings [turn] at a 45-degree angle, then go across and back down to create bridges, which would probably be an impossible engineering feat today.
All this futuristic design embeds itself in a very timely story, given our society’s mixed feelings about AI. How do you see The Creator playing into that conversation?
I think The Creator is an allegory for everything being so contentious in our world today. It’s less about the fear of AI and more about somebody who may not look just like you. They may have different ideas, but they still have emotions and thoughts, and they want to take care of their families. Of course, there’s this fun design and tech and sci-fi, but the bigger idea has to do with how to get along with your fellow man, woman, or entity — whatever form that may take.
Now that the writer’s strike has officially ended, filmmakers, studio bosses, and more will be able to speak a lot more freely and enthusiastically about upcoming projects. (Negotiations to end the actor’s strike will resume on October 2.) One of those individuals who was ready to give some updates on future projects was James Gunn, the co-chief of DC Studios, who is currently in pre-production in Superman: Legacy, the first big film to be released under the new DC Universe banner he and co-chief Peter Safran have unveiled.
Gunn gave some much-wanted updates and clarifications on Threads on Wednesday to fans eager to know more about the new DCU. Some of these questions were about which actors from DC projects of the past would be keeping their roles in the new DCU.
Gunn clarified that the first project that will officially fall under the DCU banner is Creature Commandos, an animated series that will air on Max that tracks a group of military superhumans made up of a human leader, Frankenstein’s monster, the Bride of Frankenstein, a werewolf, and more.
“Nothing is canon until Creature Commandos next year — a sort of aperitif to the DCU — & then a deeper dive into the universe with Superman: Legacy after that,” Gunn answered on Threads. “It’s a very human drive to want to understand everything all the time, but I think its okay to be confused on what’s happening in the DCU since no one has seen anything from the DCU yet.”
Gunn then added an important caveat about who will be playing whom in the DCU. “And, yes, some actors will be playing characters they’ve played in other stories & some plot points might be consistent with plot points from the dozens of films, shows & animated projects that have come from DC in the past. But nothing is canon until CC and Legacy.”
One of those performers from the former DC who will be keeping their roles is Viola Davis, who will continue to play Amanda Waller, both in Creature Commandos and in her own upcoming live-action series Waller. Davis is joined in Creature Commandos by David Harbour (Frankenstein’s monster), Frank Grillo (Rick Flag Sr.), Maria Bakalova (Ilana Rostovic), Alan Tudyk (Doctor Phosphorus), Zoe Chao (Nina Mazursky), and more.
A Blue Beetlefan wanted to know if the film, which starred Xolo Maridueña as a recent college grad who comes into contact with an alien scarab and becomes the titular superhero, would be a part of Gunn’s DCU. “Xolo Maridueña will continue playing Blue Beetle in the DCU, as Viola Davis will Amanda Waller, and John Cena will Peacemaker,” Gunn replied.
So, there’s a bit of clarity on how the DCU is shaping up in the near term. We still have one more project from the pre-Gunn and Safran era of DC Studios coming our way, Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom, which premieres on December 20.
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Featured image: HOLLYWOOD, CALIFORNIA – AUGUST 15: James Gunn, Co-Chairman & CEO, DC Studios, attends the Warner Bros. Pictures and DC Studios “Blue Beetle” Los Angeles Special Screening at TCL Chinese Theatre on August 15, 2023 in Hollywood, California. (Photo by Charley Gallay/Getty Images for Warner Bros and DC Films)
Donyale Luna was a whimsical invention. Born Peggy Ann Freeman in Detroit, she molded herself into a star. Luna conceived of and then captured remote dreams of glamour, fame, and adventure in the fashion industry. A tragically forgotten figure, the new documentary Donyale Luna: Supermodel – from director Nailah Jefferson – is a much-needed exploration into the making of an icon.
Composer Kelly Mac absorbs and reflects the complexity of Luna’s life through the film’s score. Luna embodied conflicting ideals that only made her more mysterious. As the first Black model to land on the cover of both Harper’s Bazaar and Vogue, Luna’s impact was profound, yet her essence was ethereal. Her accent was undefined, and her race unspoken.
“We wanted to capture her spirit in a few different themes. We started with these piano sketches,” Mac explained. “The piano just felt right for her because, ultimately, she’s an innocent girl. She’s just a small-town girl from Detroit. She ends up living this kind of grand and fabulous life. We just wanted to stay true to her, but at the same time, my team and I come from this world of pop record production, and we work with a lot of synth sounds and drum samples and things like that.”
The film is segmented by periods of Luna’s life defined by the cities she was primarily living in. From Detroit, she moved to New York, then on to London, Paris, and Rome. Each city is channeled through Mac’s music.
Courtesy of Kelly Mac.
“She is definitely running away to these different cities and different locations a lot. That presented this fun challenge for us,” Mac noted. “When she first moves to New York City, it’s this departure from everything else that we had seen in the film. We had these traditional piano and synth scores in the background. When we get to New York, we tried to incorporate that, but it didn’t quite fit. It felt like the music was too pretty or too light for all these scenes of New York. We see these montages of gritty New York in the 60s. We were trying to figure out a way to get the tone right. We ended up trying a few different things and landed on using the rhythm section for the first time. So, we get drums and bass and the gritty B-3 organ, these syncopated synth horn stabs. Those elements represent the grittiness of New York, but we also wanted to tie it into the rest of the score to keep things cohesive. We ended up layering in these sweeping strings that represent what Donyale is feeling as she’s moving to New York. Her whole world is opening up, and these strings represent the feeling that she has as her world opens up.”
Photograph by Luigi Cazzaniga/HBO
As Luna’s career advanced, she worked her way into the stratosphere of trendsetting circles. Yet, her success hit a blockade in America amid the civil rights movement of the 1960s. Although her work was known at the highest levels in the U.S., painful conversations in the film reveal that she faced racism that kept her from securing top-tier bookings. Confident in her star power, Luna went abroad for greater opportunities.
“One thing that was really cool was how we used themes throughout the project to paint the story of Donyale and everything she was going through. We settled on these piano melodies that are really repetitive and arpeggiated that represent how she was running from her past and running from her pain,” Mac observed. “She was growing up in Detroit and then was made fun of for her look and then ended up running to New York and London and into fashion modeling. Getting on the cover of these magazines and then getting immediately knocked down. Then she ends up running away from all that. So, she is just constantly trying to find an escape with fashion and with art in general. We were trying to paint that picture of her and all the pressures she must have been thinking and pondering in her mind as she was experiencing this. The melodies kind of portray that and hopefully paint that picture.”
Photograph by Luigi Cazzaniga/HBO
Luna burned fast and bright, passing away very young, shortly after her daughter was born. In an extremely personal quest to understand the mother she never knew, Dream Cazzaniga delivers passages from Luna’s journal. Mac’s music, at times, echoes like an artistic interpretation of the emotional readings. The atmospheric melodies capture Luna’s celestial quality.
Photograph by Luigi Cazzaniga/HBO
“We started the process with just sort of these PDFs of Donyale where we would see what she looked like. Just these images of her. That immediately would strike emotions of she’s otherworldly or extraterrestrial even,” Mac revealed. “Then we worked with these rough cuts, and we ended up pivoting quite a lot. We went from rough cut to fine cut and ultimately to the locked cut, where we were able to score more granularly. Throughout most of the process, we were working with a rough cut. So, we were creating these themes and these soundscapes that we would give to the director and music editor, and they would edit things in. We were trying to get the emotional tone right first, and once the tone was right, we could branch out from there and add in more layers and make sure we were hitting certain moments in the film.”
Mac’s work extends beyond the screen as CEO and Founder of Kelly Mac Music. Her company provides music services for media, such as original music composition, music supervision, songwriting, and licensing.
“I have this background where I have a lot of classical training and can work in those worlds and exist in those spaces, but I’ve also worked with artists that have no musical training at all and don’t speak the language of music theory and work based off of feeling,” Mac explained. “I’m able to bridge both worlds, and that’s where I like to exist is in these places where I can work on media projects but bring this sort of hip hop and R&B pop influence to what I’m doing.”
Classically trained on the trumpet, Mac studied contemporary music and production at Berklee College of Music in Boston. She began creating scores for big bands and jazz ensembles while doing record production with artists outside of school. Her work led her to opportunities scoring the music for BET+ comedy film Block Party and the Essence Magazine docuseries Time of Essence.
“I definitely think it’s an honor to be able to be in the spaces I’ve been in,” Mac reflected. “I got to a point in my journey as a composer that I had so much work coming in that I couldn’t possibly do it all myself. I just ended up knowing a lot of producers and emerging artists and people graduating from schools that were looking for work. It seemed like a natural process to bring them into the company. They had the right DNA for what we do, and their music sensibility matched what we do, and they’re reliable people and are great to work with. It just made sense to bring them along.”
Donyale Luna: Supermodel is now streaming on Max.
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A big fan of classic film noir and thrillers, Grant Singer knew that when it was time to make the leap from directing music videos for the likes of The Weeknd and Lorde to features, he wanted it to be a film filled with twists where every turn is clouded in mystery. Reptile delivers exactly that.
Premiering September 29 on Netflix, Singer’s first directing effort begins with a murder. Real estate agent Summer Elswick (Matilda Lutz) is found stabbed to death in a house she is preparing to show. Tom Nichols (Benicio Del Toro), a detective with a murky past of his own, is assigned to investigate. Initial suspicion falls upon Will Grady (Justin Timberlake), Summer’s boyfriend and boss, who runs the local real estate empire with his mother Camille (Frances Fisher). After all, he found the body. As the investigation unfolds, the suspect list expands to include Summer’s estranged husband, Sam Gifford (Karl Glusman), and a creepy local (Michael Carmen Pitt), whose obsessive interest in the murder uncovers a sordid relationship with the Grady family.
The more Tom digs for answers, the more questions arise about the disturbing details that led to Summer’s death. The uncertainty of the case starts to leak into his personal life, causing Tom to confront past demons and doubt everyone around him, from his fellow officers to his wife Judy (Alicia Silverstone).
Springing from his desire to make a film that evokes a feeling of deceit, Singer described Reptile as a multifaceted deception — both in the experience of the characters and in the storytelling itself. In addition to directing duties, he co-wrote the screenplay with Benjamin Brewer and Del Toro (his first feature writing credit). In deference to the only recently resolved WGA and SAG-AFTRA strikes, the conversation with Singer concentrated on the directing process. In a recent interview via Zoom, Singer talks about the difference between a music video and a thriller, the art of keeping it simple, and how to generate suspense without really trying.
How did you choose Reptile for your feature-directing debut?
I’m very inspired by movies from the past. I love Hitchcock.I am very influenced by movies like In Cold Blood, The Night of the Hunter, and Serpico. They’re very different from one another, but I think, subconsciously, they are movies that have moved me throughout my life. It made me want to make a crime thriller, sort of contemporary noir. I wanted it to be a film that both felt classical but modern at the end of the day.
Talk about your path to get to this point.
For many years, I was a music video and commercial director. I’m from the generation that looked up to filmmakers who made that leap — Spike Jonze, David Fincher, Michel Gondry, Mark Romanek — all those amazing directors. I felt there’d be a path if I were to start with music videos. This felt like the right opportunity to take that step and pursue my dream of making a movie.
How did Reptile differ from past experiences?
There’s this idea that music videos have to be a spectacle…this big, iconic visual thing that matches the cultural moment of the piece of music. And I think that, in many ways, I was rebelling against that with this film. I wanted to make something a little bit more restrained. I was trying to do something aesthetically removed from my music video work — almost reintroduce myself to what I was interested in with film.
As I mentioned, I love classic filmmaking. I love very simple pans, beautiful dolly shots or boom-ups. I love the restraint of the composition. When you make a film, at least in my experience, it’s like you start from a blank canvas. You think about what you want to do. But when you’re on set, and you’re with these actors, you kind of start fresh. I’m sure I absorbed things that felt intuitively right to me. And I took those things and applied them to this movie — things that I knew would tell the story in the right way.
How did your music video experience help?
You begin to develop your aesthetic, your style… how you like to shoot. That came about through directing music videos. I’m always trying to find that balance between composition and shooting things so that they feel immersive, like you’re in a moment.
Let’s talk about the missing moments. Reptile leaves a lot to the imagination. Talk about the decision to leave some things unanswered.
I wanted to make a film that evoked the feeling of not knowing. Oftentimes, the true crime stories that are the most hidden tend to be the most lasting. So how do you make a film that evokes this feeling, that poses questions, but is still satisfying and rewarding for the viewer? It’s this real elegant card trick as to what you end up revealing and what stays a mystery.
The funny thing about this film is that when we started showing it, people would say, “Wow! It’s really suspenseful.” And I was like, “Okay, cool. That’s amazing.” But when I was directing the scene, I wasn’t thinking, “Damn, how do I make this suspenseful?” It was just in my head. I felt how it should be shot and went with it. I didn’t question myself. Sometimes, doubt or fear can be the enemy of a filmmaker. You question your decisions and are left with nothing right. If there’s a key, it’s following your vision.
I love one-word titles. Reptile felt bold and unique, unlike any other movie that I could think of. There’s a shedding of skin in the film where characters are introduced as one thing and revealed to be something else. Reptile felt like a beautiful and interesting metaphor. It came to me and just stuck.
The title fits the way the story progresses.
I knew that I wanted to make a film that sort of began with—I won’t say a day in the life—but essentially the experience of two characters. Then, you pass the baton and introduce another character. And then, as the film unfolds—unravels—what you perceive in those first opening minutes changes depending on what happens throughout the rest of the movie.
There’s a premonition right from the first line of the movie. Summer opens a kitchen cabinet and jumps. We don’t see what she sees. When she asks Will what it is, he answers, “It must have been a rat.” If you actually go through the movie scene by scene, you’ll see clues and hints everywhere as to what ends up happening. We’re trying to portray the hunter as the hunted. Coppola did that so beautifully in The Conversation.
A thinking man’s thriller…
The key word is ambiguity. A whodunit where everything gets solved may be entertaining while you’re watching, but then you forget about it. We wanted to make a film that poses questions and has mystery. We’re dropping clues throughout the movie. You could watch it maybe two or three times and glean more as you experience it. The hope is that you find them during a second or third viewing, and it makes the film even more satisfying.
Reptile streams on Netflix on September 29.
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Film fans rejoice anytime director Todd Haynes delivers a new feature. His last narrative work was 2019’s Dark Waters (his documentary The Velvet Underground was released in 2021), which feels like a lifetime ago considering all that’s happened since. Now, Netflix has revealed the first trailer for his latest, the dark comedy May December, which features his longtime collaborator, Julianne Moore, in a juicy role inspired by true events.
Moore stars as Gracie Atherton-Yoo, who, as the film begins, appears to be living her best life after 20 years in an idyllic marriage to Joe (Charles Melton), despite the fact that their union was a scandal that resulted in Graice going to prison. Gracie was 36 years old when she first met Joe…who was in 7th grade. Now, two decades later, the actress Elizabeth Berry (Natalie Portman) arrives at Gracie and Joe’s house to do research before she plays Gracie in a film. Thus, the tension in May December is set up—Elizabeth’s questioning and digging into Gracie and Joe’s past unearths uncomfortable truths, while Elizabeth insinuates herself into their lives, toying with Joe in the process.
It’s meaty material for a filmmaker of Haynes’ gifts and a story he lifted from real life. May December is loosely based on the story of Mary Kay Letourneau, an American teacher who was charged with having sexual relations with one of her 12-year-old students.
“Insecure people are very dangerous,” Gracie tells Elizabeth at one point in the trailer, as the stakes of the game afoot between them become clear.
“Haynes’ tonal playfulness has sometimes been overshadowed by the unerring consistency of his emotional textures, but here, in the funniest and least ‘stylized’ of his films, it’s easier than ever to appreciate his genius,” IndieWire’s Dave Ehrlich writes. While Variety’s Peter Debruge says, “Withholding moral judgment as best he can, Haynes keeps things more emotional than intellectual, trusting audiences to do that unpacking on their own.”
Haynes directors from a script by Samy Burch. Joining Moore, Portman, and Melton are Cory Michael Smith, Piper Curda, D.W. Moffett, Drew Scheid, Elizabeth Yu, Jocelyn Shelfo, Andrea Frankle, and Kelvin Han Yee.
Check out the trailer below. May December is in select theaters in November and arrives on Netflix on December 1.
Here’s the official logline:
Twenty years after their notorious tabloid romance gripped the nation, a married couple buckles under the pressure when an actress arrives to do research for a film about their past.
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Featured image: May December. (L to R) Natalie Portman as Elizabeth Berry and Julianne Moore as Gracie Atherton-Yoo in May December. Cr. Francois Duhamel / courtesy of Netflix
Co-writer/director Taika Waititi’s Next Goal Wins is finally nearing its premiere date, and a new trailer revealed by Searchlight Studios gives Waititi fans a glimpse at his long-simmering soccer film.
Waititi, who co-wrote the script with Iain Morris (The Inbetweeners), centers Michael Fassbender’s Thomas Rongen, a Dutch soccer coach tasked with taking on the world’s worst soccer team. Rongen is sent to coach the American Samoa national team after their humiliation at the feet of the Australians, who beat them 31-0 in an official FIFA match. Now, with the World Cup Qualifiers looming, Rongen wants to turn these underdogs into a cohesive team and help them recapture their love for the sport.
Waititi was moved to make the film after seeing the 2014 documentary of the same name by Mike Brett and Steven Jamison. Waititi began working on his sports drama while he was also working on Thor: Love and Thunder; however, pandemic delays and scheduling changes pushed Next Goal Wins to this November.
The wait is just about over, however. Joining Fassbender in the cast are Oscar Kightly, Kaimana (coming in for major plaudits from critics), David Fane, Rachel House, Beulah Koale, Will Arnett, Elisabeth Moss, Rhys Darby, Uli Latukefu, Chris Alosio, and Waititi himself.
Check out the new trailer below. Next Goal Wins premieres on November 17.
Here’s the official synopsis:
Directed by Academy Award Winner Taika Waititi (Jojo Rabbit, Thor: Ragnarok), NEXT GOAL WINS follows the American Samoa soccer team, infamous for their brutal 31-0 FIFA loss in 2001. With the World Cup Qualifiers approaching, the team hires down-on-his-luck, maverick coach Thomas Rongen (Michael Fassbender) hoping he will turn the world’s worst soccer team around in this heartfelt underdog comedy.
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In case you missed it yesterday, Adult Swim unveiled the first trailer for Rick and Morty season 7, which includes new voice talent for the two main characters. Those new voice actors replace co-creator Justin Roiland, who is no longer with the series after misconduct allegations.
So who are the new voice actors? For now, Adult Swim isn’t telling—their names will be revealed when the show premieres on October 15.
“We want the show to speak for itself,” an Adult Swim insider explained to The Hollywood Reporter. “We believe in the strength of the season and our new voices, and we want to preserve the viewing experience for fans.”
Season 7 boasts ten new episodes and will be a welcome relief to the legion of Rick and Morty fans who have been watching the real-life Roiland drama unfold for months. Roiland was stripped of his overall deal this past January after being charged with felony domestic abuse in Orange County, California. More troubling news about Roiland followed, including his sending abusive text messages to a fan and unprofessional workplace behavior. The felony charges were dropped in March, yet Roiland’s no longer a part of the series.
You’ll notice when you watch the new trailer that both Rick and Morty sound very similar. Adult Swim sought “sound-alike” voice talent and has promised that their personalities, intrapersonal relationship, and all the cosmic hijinx, high and low, Rick and Morty has brought to viewers for six previous seasons will remain unchanged.
Here’s how the official synopsis for season 7 depicts the changes that have been swirling behind the scenes of one of TV’s most audacious animated comedies:
“Rick and Morty are back and sounding more like themselves than ever! It’s season seven, and the possibilities are endless: what’s up with Jerry? EVIL Summer?! And will they ever go back to the high school?! Maybe not! But let’s find out! There’s probably less piss than last season. Rick and Morty, 100 years! Or at least until season 10!”
Check out the trailer for season 7 below. Rick and Morty returns on October 15 at 11 p.m. on Adult Swim:
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An astonishing 99% of Earth’s inhabitants are lost to history. Magnificent creatures who once roamed, flew, foraged, and swam are no more, yet in Netflix’s new Life on Our Planet, we can watch, with astonishing realism and detail, what their lives were like. The new series, produced by Steven Spielberg’s Amblin Television and narrated by Morgan Freeman, aims to retell the nearly four billion years worth of life on the blue planet with a little help from Industrial Light & Magic, the visual effects company that George Lucas founded. The first trailer for the series opens with a scene that looks straight out of Jurassic Park, with a triceratops peaceably foraging when a T-Rex comes bursting out of the tree line.
“This is the story of the great battles of survival,” Freeman narrates in his iconic baritone, “and the dynasties that would take over the world.” Life on Our Planet will map the unparalleled drama of life on our planet from the very beginning up to today, some 3.8 billion years worth of triumph and tragedy.
The team behind Life on Our Planet knows a thing or two about crafting award-worthy docuseries. Silverback Films, the folks behind Netflix’s Emmy-winning docuseries Our Planet.
The footage is stunning. The story couldn’t be more epic.
Check out the trailer below. Life on Our Planet streams on Netflix on October 25:
Here’s the official synopsis:
This is the story of life’s epic battle to conquer and survive on planet Earth. Today there are 20 million species on our planet, yet what we see is just a snapshot in time — 99% of earth’s inhabitants are lost to our deep past. The story of what happened to these dynasties — their rise and their fall — is truly remarkable. In partnership with Industrial Light & Magic, the series uses the latest technology and science to bring long extinct creatures back to life, Life on Our Planet reveals the incredible story of life on our planet.
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“Killers of the Flower Moon was a series of murders of Osage men and women to bilk them after the discovery of oil on their land,” says director Martin Scorsese at the start of a new inside look featurette of his upcoming crime saga. “I was drawn to the idea of to tell this terribly tragic story that was never brought to national attention.”
Scorsese’s film is adapted from investigative journalist David Grann’s best-selling 2017 book of the same name. While Grann’s book was centered on Tom White, a former Texas Ranger who came to Oklahoma to investigate the murders (he’s played in the film by Jesse Plemmons), Scorsese and his screenwriter Eric Roth altered the focus of their story from the virtuous White, coming to Osage Nation to solve a crime, to both the perpetrators of the crime and on the Osage themselves.
“One of the keys that I was drawn to this work where friendship and love existed with latent extortion, exploitation, and murder,” says Scorsese.
Leonardo DiCaprio and Lily Gladstone in “Killers of the Flower Moon,” premiering October 20, 2023 on Apple TV+.
“Marty was obsessed with telling this story with the most honesty that he possibly could,” says Leonardo DiCaprio, who plays Ernest Burkhart, one of the white men who insinuates himself into the lives of the Osage Nation, specifically by marrying Mollie (Lily Gladstone), an Osage woman.
Ernest is encouraged to marry Mollie by his uncle, William Hale (Robert De Niro), who sees marriage as the least bloody way to separate the Osage from the wealth. “We mix these families together, and that estate money flows in the right direction,” Hale says in a previous trailer. “It’ll come to us.”
“Hale was a very enigmatic presence in Osage country,” says Lily Gladstone.
“He definitely represented somebody who wanted to take advantage of the situation at all costs,” DiCaprio adds.
“I wanted to do justice to the Osage so the audience feels the immensity of the tragedy,” Scorsese concludes.
Check out the featurette below. Killers of the Flower Moon arrives in theaters on October 20:
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Now that the early reactions have confirmed that writer/director Gareth Edwards (Godzilla, RogueOne) has pulled off something special with The Creator, all eyes will be on the full reviews when the embargo is lifted this week. Edwards’s new film then premieres this Friday, September 29, in what is one of the most eagerly anticipated films of the early fall. Two new TV spots hype the coming premiere, which had critics buzzing last week after the first press screenings let out.
Delivering a high-concept, original sci-fi blockbuster is a hard thing to do in the best of times and even harder when you’re trying to get them made in a climate that prefers its blockbusters to have built-in IP. Yet The Creator is precisely that, a brand new story from Edwards and his Rogue One collaborator Chris Weitz, and the early reactions have included adjectives like “masterful,” “soulful,” “visually stunning and emotional,” “absolutely radical,” and “one of the best new sci-fi epics in years.” a few of the descriptions being bandied about.
The Creator is centered on John David Washington’s Joshua, an ex-special forces agent grieving his wife’s disappearance (Gemma Chan) who is recruited to lead a team to take out a weapon with the potential to tip the scales of the war between humans and robots decidedly in the robots favor. The weapon was built by the architect of a robot rebellion against humanity that began with a nuclear detonation in Los Angeles and has led to an outright war between humanity and the robot world. Yet when Joshua finally makes contact with the weapon, it wears a near-human face. Her name is Alphie (Madeleine Yuna Voyles), and she’s a humanoid robot powered by artificial intelligence that makes it very difficult for Joshua to treat her as nothing more than a talking, all-powerful bomb.
Joining Washington, Voyles, and Chan is a top-notch cast that includes Ken Watanabe (Inception), Allison Janey (I, Tonya), and Sturgill Simpson (Dog).
Check out the new spots below. The Creator hits theaters on September 29:
Except for a glimpse of his back, we never once see Michael Jordan in person in Amazon Prime’s Air. This Ben Affleck-directed film, in which Affleck also stars as Nike founder Phil Knight, tracks the course of Nike’s surprise successful bid for an endorsement from the greatest basketball player of all time, leading to the 1980s creation of Air Jordan sneakers, which, four decades on, are a multi-billionaire dollar icon of fashion history.
But the people who made that possible behind the scenes look little like what you’d expect. Championing a partnership with Jordan is Sonny Vaccaro (Matt Damon), a middle-aged dude in trousers that make you wonder why the garment industry persists in manufacturing such pants. Knight wears suits when he isn’t working weekends in the signatures of early 1980s running gear, leggings under shorts, and abundant neon. On the other side of what becomes one of the most lucrative sportswear-sport star partnerships of all time isn’t Michael Jordan, but his mother, Deloris Jordan (Viola Davis), who leads meetings for her son dressed in feminine, crisply tailored suits. And forget about finding a trace of aesthetic, athletic DNA on the shoe design team, led by Peter Moore (Matthew Maher), who skateboards to work in full mid-life crisis leather and designs the Air Jordan prototype wearing vaguely Nordic striped knitwear.
The vision behind these workaday characters who made the Air Jordan possible came from costume designer Charlese Antoinette Jones (Judas and the Black Messiah, Astronomy Club), who was tasked with creating a sense of place among various corporate entities who represent an aesthetic far cry from a pair of Air Jordans or even athletic gear in general. We got to speak with Jones about the Nike of forty years ago, balancing snippets of historical archives with creative license, and her process for Deloris, by far the film’s most fashionable character and the real driving force behind the Nike-Michael Jordan partnership that came to be.
How did you figure out the broad strokes of the looks for Air’s main characters?
Ben had this really specific vision on how to showcase the difference between Nike, Adidas, and Converse. So, based on where we were, the color palette changed, and the styles of suiting and clothing changed. His biggest note to me was Nike’s a scrappy startup. That was the direction for how everyone’s dressed in the office. It’s less put together than Adidas, which is so sterile and so corporate. Nike doesn’t have a lot of money. People aren’t coming in there in thousand-dollar suits, and they’re not dressing over the top and wearing designer. They’re also not wearing Nike gear. During that time period, you’re not wearing gear you’d work out in to work. That’s a faux pas. Phil comes in, and he has a full running look on, but it’s supposed to be a Sunday, and Howard White [Chris Tucker] is dressed up because he just came from church. It was a lot more fun than having to put everyone in sports gear the entire film. We were always very clear: we’re not making a Nike commercial, we’re not making a Jordan commercial, we’re telling the story about how Michael Jordan became the greatest player of all time with the greatest shoe of all time, and how it changed the business.
What was your process like balancing archival research versus creative license?
It was a combination of both. We had an amazing researcher who found photos, and he also had information and notes about the real people, which was helpful. For some people, we might have had three or four photos. From there, I had to use my research and my knowledge of menswear during that period and just come up with ideas based on what was happening in the story. For example, the only photos we have of Peter Moore are of him in a black turtleneck, and it just didn’t work. His character was so interesting and so vibrant, and the way Matt Maher plays him is so interesting and so vibrant. So, I decided everyone who worked in the shoe lab would be a lot more colorful than the people upstairs working in the offices. They needed to be a little more fashion-forward, more stylish. I looked at a lot of images of Studio 54, various fashion weeks and magazines from the early 80s, and of artists like Basquiat and his friends. Peter Moore has on turquoise pants a lot. The shoe lab is its own world. The kooky sweater vests, the plaid shirts, the print on print — to me, that felt creative. With Deloris, there was tons of research. She liked to wear suits a lot, so I thought, let me play with that and push it further. Most of the costumes Ben wears as Phil Knight were recreated from research photos. And then Sonny, I got a lot of notes about him just being really casual. He’s a basketball scout. I love polos, and I love golf polos. The polos became their own character, which was a lot of fun. When the real Sonny came to set, his wife was like, did you steal that from his closet?
Sonny’s signature polos are almost upstaged by his dad pants.
And they still make them, those pleat-front khakis. There are pieces that we made, there are pieces that we sourced that he wears, and there are pieces that are contemporary that are still in existence, like the Florsheim loaders. The pleat-front khakis are Dockers. For me, that’s a lot of fun to think oh wow, there are still men who dress like Sonny.
For a recent period piece like this, do you wind up doing more building or sourcing?
We built a lot. We built all of Ben’s costumes except for the poster tracksuit look — that was an actual Nike archival suit that I sourced. We built the majority of Chris Tucker’s suiting and shirting. We built a couple of Nike recreation polos for Sonny. We also built Deloris’s look when she goes to Beaverton — the blazer, the beautiful blouse. Her necklace was designed and made by me and a pearl vendor I work with. We built Peter Moore’s leather outfit that he skateboards in. It was a lot of fun. I would’ve built way more; we just didn’t have time. I’m grateful we were shooting in LA. I have amazing resources and relationships with vendors, and we were able to find some really great stuff that ended up going on camera that was from the period.
In terms of style, Deloris is the movie standout. How did you develop the range of fashion she wears?
The notes that I got about Deloris were that she was in charge and she was the boss. I wanted to make sure when she was out in the world with her son, with her husband, representing her family as a matriarch, she looked like she was in charge and she looked like she was the boss. She was really dressed up and really fashionable. Because we didn’t have a lot of time with her, I wanted to make a statement every time we saw her. She’s the only female lead in the film, as well. I wanted to play around with women’s fashion during that time, for a woman of her age from North Carolina, and showcase what I knew because my family is from North Carolina. A lot of the women in my family dress like that. So, it was a lot of fun to recall these things and be able to put them on Viola Davis. I loved that contrast when we’re at home versus when we’re out at work, especially as women of color. At home, you can be more relaxed. We don’t have to dress a certain way. Even her being able to make the deal in something comfortable in her home, I thought, was so profound. She’s asking for what her son deserves, and she’s in her kitchen, and she’s wearing pedal pushers and a pastel-printed blouse. It’s the quintessential 80s mom look, and she’s like, give my son his residuals, or it’s no deal.
Juno Temple has taken on a vastly different role from her lovable Ted Lasso character in Keeley Jones in the upcoming fifth season of Fargo. FX has revealed a new teaser for their deliciously demented anthology series, and it reveals Temple as Dorothy “Dot” Lyon, a seemingly typical Midwestern housewife who’s made some questionable decisions in her past, a past she’s tried to outrun. This being Fargo, her past is bound to not only catch up with her but surround her in the most intrusive way possible.
The teaser finds Dot talking on the phone in her kitchen, busily attending to a meal when there’s a knock on her door. A knock is rarely a good thing in Fargo. She puts the phone down and does what any seemingly typical Midwestern housewife would do; she grabs a gun, a taser, and a spiked bat.
Fargo season 5 boasts a stellar cast surrounding Temple. Jon Hamm plays North Dakota Sheriff Roy Tillman, a man who has been searching for Dot for a long time. Sam Spruell plays Ole Munch, a drifter whom Roy enlists to help him track down Dot. David Rysdahl plays Wayne, Dot’s husband. The woman Wayne turns to for help is his mother, Lorraine Lyon, played by Jennifer Jason Leigh. Lorraine is the CEO of the largest Debt Collection Agency in the country.
This is only a snapshot of who’s playing in the Fargo sandbox this season, one of our most reliably intriguing series.
Check out the teaser below. Fargo season 5 premieres on November 21 at 10 p.m. ET/PT on FX and streams on Hulu the next day.
Here’s the synopsis for season 5:
The latest installment of Fargo is set in Minnesota and North Dakota, 2019. After an unexpected series of events lands “Dorothy ‘Dot’ Lyon” (Juno Temple) in hot water with the authorities, this seemingly typical Midwestern housewife is suddenly plunged back into a life she thought she had left behind.
North Dakota Sheriff “Roy Tillman” (Jon Hamm) has been searching for Dot for a long time. A rancher, preacher and a constitutional lawman, Roy believes that he is the law and therefore is above the law. At his side is his loyal but feckless son, “Gator” (Joe Keery), who is desperate to prove himself to his larger-than-life father. Too bad he’s hopeless. So, when it comes to hunting Dot, Roy enlists “Ole Munch” (Sam Spruell), a shadowy drifter of mysterious origin.
With her deepest secrets beginning to unravel, Dot attempts to shield her family from her past, but her doting, well-meaning husband “Wayne” (David Rysdahl) keeps running to his mother, “Lorraine Lyon” (Jennifer Jason Leigh), for help. CEO of the largest Debt Collection Agency in the country, the “Queen of Debt” is unimpressed with her son’s choice in a wife and spares no opportunity to voice her disapproval. However, when Dot’s unusual behavior catches the attention of Minnesota Police Deputy “Indira Olmstead” (Richa Moorjani) and North Dakota Deputy “Witt Farr” (Lamorne Morris), Lorraine appoints her in-house counsel and primary advisor, “Danish Graves” (Dave Foley) to aid her daughter-in-law. Afterall, family is family. But Dot has an uncanny knack for survival. And with her back to the wall, she’s about to show why one should never provoke a mother Lyon.
Featured image: “FARGO” — Year 5 — Pictured: Juno Temple as Dorothy “Dot” Lyon. CR: Michelle Faye/FX
There’s a lean, mean, and deliciously well-made new thriller that’s officially arrived on Hulu, writer/director Brian Duffield’s alien invasion film No One Will Save You.
No One Will Save You is centered on Brynn (Kaitlyn Dever), a talented young woman who’s been alienated from her community and living in her childhood home, the only place she finds any real peace or comfort. That changes one night when she wakes up to some unsettling noises and finds out that it’s even worse than your typical, terrifying home invasion. Oh, it’s a home invasion, alright, but the invaders are not of this world.
One of the intriguing touches to Duffield’s vision is he takes the undeniably bright and likable Dever and gives her a script in which she turns in a nearly wordless performance. And Dever excels in the role.
“Just when you think you have a good handle on where things might be going next, Duffield spins around and spears those expectations in the head with the spire of a miniature church,” writes indieWire‘s David Ehrlich.
“No One Will Save You is so effective and innovative in its approach to a classic home-invasion thriller that it’s a must-see movie,” says Digital Spy‘s Ian Sandwell.
Let’s take a look at what some of the critics are saying. No One Will Save You is streaming on Hulu now:
‘No One Will Save You’ Review: It’s Alien vs. Dever in Hulu’s Clever and Nearly Wordless Invasion Thriller https://t.co/qhusUXOfMY
‘No One Will Save You’ Review – Brian Duffield Delivers Nerve-Fraying Sci-fi Twist to Home Invasion Horror, writes @HauntedMeg: https://t.co/y9XKA70Q4q
