The recent Star Wars Celebration in London included some major (and long-awaited) news about the future of the franchise’s feature films. It’s been four years since J.J. Abrams’s Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker (2019), and Lucasfilm president Kathleen Kennedy revealed the shape of the galaxy’s upcoming feature landscape. One big reveal was the continuation of Rey (Daisy Ridley)’s story in a new movie from Oscar-winning documentarian (and Ms. Marvel director) Sharmeen Obaid-Chinoy, which will focus on Rey’s attempts to re-build the Jedi order after the events in Rise of Skywalker. The script is being taken over by Peaky Blinders creator Steven Knight after an initial draft from Damon Lindelof and Justin Britt-Gibson.
The Obaid-Chinoy film focused on Rey was one of three upcoming features Kennedy revealed. A second film comes from Davie Filioni, once George Lucas’s protégé, who has helped steer the animated corner of the Star Wars world and the highly successful launch of their live-action series on Disney+, beginning with The Mandalorian. Filioni will be directing his first feature film and tying together storylines from the live-action series, including The Mandalorian and the upcoming Rosaria Dawson-led Ahsoka, with a film focused on the growing war between the New Republic and the Imperial Remnant.
This brings us to the third film Kennedy teased—one to be directed by James Mangold. Mangold knows a thing or two about taking on existing franchises and making them his own while still satisfying the hardcore fans. His 2017 film Logan is considered one of the better superhero films ever made, giving us a grizzled Wolverine (Hugh Jackman) in his final days. His next film is Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny, the fifth film in the franchise and the only one to be directed by someone other than Steven Spielberg. Mangold is more than capable of stepping into the Star Wars galaxy, but what makes his inclusion even more exciting is he’s taking on a film that will allow him to explore the most ancient era ever depicted in a Star Wars film, one that takes place long (long) before the events in the overarching Skywalker Saga that animated George Lucas’s film or any of the films or series that we’ve seen thus far.
How far in the past will Mangold’s film be set? Try 25,000 years before any of the events depicted in any Star Wars film, animated or live-action series with a story focused on the very beginnings of the Force.
Speaking to ScreenRant, Mangold spoke about what excited him about a project he’s thought of as Star Wars Zero:
“The idea of where it all started. To make a Star Wars Zero, if you will. ‘Where was the Force born?’ To me, a movie always has to have a question to answer. Some singular thing that you can say it’s about. Not just connecting the plot of who built this when and who’s gonna defeat, but what’s it about? And to me, this is about this discovery.”
This is a beautiful way to envision a Star Wars Zero film that gets away from the pillars of the franchise—the Death Star, lightsabers, rebels, and the various incarnations of the Empire—to explore the fundamental elements that lie beneath the surface of Star Wars. Mangold has mentioned that he’s imagining his film as a Biblical epic akin to The Ten Commandments, exploring where the Force came from and how people learned to use it.
As Mangold himself said, what interests him in a film beyond plot mechanics and story arcs is what is at the heart of the story and what’s driving the character’s actions. There has been an endless amount of digital ink spilled over the way Geroge Lucas and the filmmakers who have followed him have treated the Force, who has it and why, whether it’s a universal energy that anyone can tap into, or, whether it’s connected to an individual’s Midi-chlorian count or lineage. As Mangold did with Logan, dredging up a deeply personal, bittersweet epic about the humanity raging inside an aging, ailing mutant’s heart, so, too, will he likely do with the first people to come into contact with the Force. We’re guessing that however Mangold depicts how the Force was discovered and harnessed, it’ll be the why of it all that will interest him most. And will, in turn, will offer Star Wars fans something new in the galaxy.
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Directors Tyler Gillet and Matt Bettinelli-Olpin have been on a roll. Their last three films have been critical and commercial successes, and they’ve all come more or less one right after the other—Ready or Not (2019), Scream(2022), and Scream VI(2023). The directors, along with producing partner Chad Villella, are a filmmaking trio known as Radio Silence, and now they’re taking their talents to Universal to direct and produce a new horror film.
Bettinelli-Olpin and Gillett will once again share directing duties, with Villella producing, and they’ll also work once again with Paul Neinstein, James Vanderbilt, and William Sherak of Project X Entertainment, their partners on the last two Scream movies. Producer Tripp Vinson, who worked with Radio Silence on Ready or Not, is producing as well.
So what’s this mysterious new horror film about? Universal is keeping quiet, but we do know the project had a title at one point—Dracula’s Daughter—which had centered on some very doomed kidnappers snagging a group of young people, one of whom was, you guessed it, the kid of the most iconic vampire of them all. Yikes.
Universal says the film will be in the same spirit as Leigh Whannell’s taut, tense 2020 thriller The Invisible Man, yet can also dip into the comedy, too, as Adam McKay’s upcoming Renfield does, casting its eye on Dracula’s long-suffering lackey. Universal says they’re aiming for movies that offer “a unique take on legendary monster lore and will represent a fresh, new direction for how to celebrate these classic characters.”
Dracula’s Daughter was, a very long time ago, a classic Universal horror film. It bowed in 1936, five years after the iconic Dracula. For now, the Radio Silence team can enjoy the success of Scream VI, which recently passed the $100 million mark at the domestic box office, before they set their sights on their new home at Universal.
Featured image: Director Matt Bettinelli-Olpin, left, and Director Tyler Gillett on the set of Paramount Pictures and Spyglass Media Group’s “Scream VI.”
If you’re a Succession fan, you’ve either seen this past Sunday’s shocking third episode, “Connor’s Wedding,” or you’re currently on a 30-day silent retreat or plying your trade on the International Space Station (cool, by the way). And yet, out of an abundance of caution, spoilers ahead.
Still here? Great. So obviously, in order to pull off the shocking death of patriarch Logan Roy (Brian Cox) that rocked the Succession-watching world in the third episode, the Succession team had to make sure there were no leaks beforehand. The leak is a major threat to today’s entertainment landscape and has already necessitated major rewrites and headaches for creatives (just ask Quentin Tarantino how he feels about his Hateful Eight script leaking) and turned TV creators and filmmakers into novice spies as they try to keep their secrets from spilling. So how did Succession‘s writers try to lock down the shocker that Logan Roy was going to exit this mortal coil in the third episode (and not, as many might have expected, the 9th or 10th?) Georgia Pritchett, a producer and writer on the show, revealed on Twitter that the Succession staff relied on a code word when planning Logan’s demise to try and confuse any would-be leakers. And the code word could not have been more perfect, in our humble opinion, and nodded at another legendary, er, lion of HBO drama—Larry David.
This was a tough secret to keep! We decided it in the #Succession writers’ room in Jan 22. So nobody found out we used code on the whiteboards. Larry David meant Logan Dies. So episode 403 said Connor’s Wedding, Larry David. Mind you, that would also have been a great episode. pic.twitter.com/VH1HuHCFOC
Yet Larry David wasn’t the only ruse the Succession team used to throw looky-loos off the scent of Logan’s fatal plane trip in the third episode. The episode’s director, Mark Mylod, told Varietythat Brian Cox continued to film after episode three wrapped to make it seem like Logan was still going strong deeper into the season. As Mylod revealed, this meant Brian Cox was on set for his own character’s funeral.
It’s all in the name of creating great TV, of which episode three was in spades. With Logan Roy finally out of the picture and Succession barreling towards the promise in its title and the end of its run, we’re grateful they managed to keep his death a surprise. Even if they’ve been telling us it was coming since Logan’s stroke in the very first episode.
First, the trailer for director Nia DaCosta’s The Marvels just landed, and now, Marvel Studios has released the first images from the film. Together, these give us a sense of what DaCosta and her talented cast and crew are up to in the second film to focus on Brie Larson’s Carol Danvers/Captain Marvel. As we’ve known for a while now (and the film’s title makes clear), Captain Marvel will have new allies along for the ride, although the trailer revealed (as did the finale of Ms. Marvel) that it won’t be as simple as three superpowered forces for good teaming up. In fact, The Marvels will find Captain Marvel, Iman Vellani’s Kamala Khan (also known as Ms. Marvel), and Teyonah Parris’s Monica Rambeau very much at odds. Or, to put it more clearly, it’ll find them incapable of occupying the same place at the same time.
The images include a look at Parris as the adult Monica Rambeau, a character first introduced as a child in the original Captain Marvel (played by Akira Akbar) and then as an adult in WandaVision, which The Marvels screenwriter Megan McDonnell worked on. They also include two shots of Vellani’s Kamala Khan, introduced in her own Disney+ series Ms. Marvel. The problem for our three heroes is that anytime they use their superpowers, they swap places with each other. This makes it particularly hard to form a cohesive super-team, let alone for one of them to function as a proper superhero at all. That’ll make fighting the film’s big bad that much harder.
And who is that big bad? The images also reveal Zawe Ashton as Dar-Benn, the film’s main villain, alongside Daniel Ings as Ty-Rone. The film will also see the return of longtime MCU stalwart and Captain Marvel co-star Samuel L. Jackson as Nick Fury, as well as Mohan Kapur as Yusuf Khan, Park Seo-joon, Caroline Simonnet, and Jessica Zhou.
Check out the images below. The Marvels hits theaters on November 10.
The trailer for director Nia DaCosta’s The Marvels has landed, revealing the return of Brie Larson as arguably the MCU’s most potent superhero, Captain Marvel. Yet The Marvels, as its title suggests, is about more than just Larson’s superpowered Carol Danvers—now, Captain Marvel has two new allies in Iman Vellani’s Kamala Khan (also known as Ms. Marvel) and Teyonah Parris’s Monica Rambeau. We’ve met both Vellani’s Kamala Khan and Parris’s Monica Rambeau before; the former in the Disney+ series Ms. Marvel, the latter is a grown-up version of a character we met as a child (played by Akira Akbar) in the first Captain Marvel, while Parris herself made her debut as the adult Monica Rambeau in WandaVision (on which The Marvels screenwriter Megan McDonnell worked).
The trailer reveals just how messed up things are going to get for these three Marvels. Set to the cosmic beat of the Beastie Boy’s “Intergalactic,” The Marvels trailer shows how our three superheroes are literally at cross purposes with each other—whenever one of them uses their powers, they switch locations with each other. This inconvenient dislocation situation was teased at the end of Ms. Marvel, and given the full runtime of a feature film, there’s no end to the mischief it will cause.
Also on hand are Samuel L. Jackson returning as Nick Fury, Mohan Kapur as Yusuf Khan, Zawe Ashton, Park Seo-joon, Caroline Simonnet, and Jessica Zhou. The Marvels will follow Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 (May 5) as Marvel’s Phase 5 continues apace. On the small screen, the second season of Loki and the first season of Secret Invasion, starring two of the original Captain Marvel‘s stars, Jackson as Nick Fury and Ben Mendelsohn as his Skrull buddy Talos, will stream on Disney+.
Check out the trailer below. The Marvels hits theaters on November 10.
Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thievesis a fantasy nerd’s dream. Directors John Francis Daley and Jonathan Goldsteinpacked the film with human characters as colorful as the variety of creatures, both animated and practical, that populate its fantastical world. It’s a modern adventure and throwback fantasy film. Crucially, it looks terrific.
The world is tangible, thanks in part to the exceptional minds at Industrial Light & Magic. Both Ben Snow, the production VFX supervisor, and Todd Vaziri, the compositing supervisor, helped make the world of Dungeons & Dragons not only believable but gleefully playful. Look no further than the company’s work on the Owlbear – as advertised, it’s half-owl, half-bear – which the camera breathlessly tries to keep up with.
Recently, Snow and Vaziri explained how the team accomplished the Owlbear and the film’s seamless blend of digital and practical effects.
ILM did beautiful work with the Owlbear. With all the feathers, fur, and other challenges involved, how’d you get that character just right?
Todd: I would add that more than feathers, there are also wet feathers and wet fur. Particularly from a simulation point of view, there are so many points of a potential collision. With each individual feather, we have a sense in our mind of how birds move, react, and all this to simulate those to be as incredibly accurate as possible. As with almost everything with visual effects, we try to do it the physically accurate way first. When computers start exploding, and we realize our render times and simulation times are going through the roof, we have to chip away at it and figure out the best way to achieve the desired effect without, for lack of a better term, recreating an entire universe that is physically accurate.
How did you pull it off?
Todd: When two feathers intersect, there’s gonna be a lot of dynamic interactions there. They will separate, they will blend, they will merge, and they will comb away. They will then get bent and disturbed. All of those things we have to keep in mind with something like Owlbear. Usually, we don’t see creatures of that size and mass feathered. How are we going to use the feathers to our advantage to help sell the massive scale of this creature? It’s a balancing act between trying to keep something that feels real and also not breaking the bank in terms of the expense of rendering and simulations.
The Owlbear in “Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves.” Courtesy Paramount Pictures.
Beyond striving for physical accuracy with the Owlbear, how about creating a sense of personality for the creatures? What are the nuances that give it soul?
Ben: I think Kevin Martel, our animation supervisor at ILM, and the team of animators did a good job with getting that personality. It was one of the first sequences we shot because we were concerned about it. It was key that we pulled that off just to give Doric (Sophia Lillis), the shapeshifter, her due since she’s the Owlbear. Kevin Martel and [visual effects supervisor] Scott Benza did some good exploration of that fairly early as we were going along to try and get the personality right [for Doric].
Todd: I want to compliment Ben and the directors and how they designed the sequence in a way to make it feel like this is a large wild animal. There’s an element of danger there. At no point in that sequence did the camera ever go through the legs of Owlbear and arrive on the shoulder and hang out on the shoulder to be a little bit more stylized, which would’ve been better for a different movie. Here, not doing that lends a certain amount of authenticity. The way Benza and Kevin Martel designed these shots with the animation to make it feel heavy and powerful when it starts grabbing soldiers and flinging them around in its teeth, you feel the weight. It’s still dynamic, but it still feels big. The camera operator doesn’t know exactly which way that swing’s going to go. It all worked for a nice bit of spontaneity to the sequence as opposed to being super stylized.
Were there practical stunts mixed into that sequence?
Ben: We shot some practical stunts as well. I know we replaced at least one of those. Did we use a lot of the practicals?
Todd: It goes back-to-back from a CG soldier to the stunt performers and then enhances their performance. If the Owlbear was supposed to smack one of the stunt people, who were then pulled back on wires, we accelerated a few frames at the very beginning to give it that extra energy.
There’s such a strong balance between practical and digital effects in this movie. Legacy did wonderful work with the puppets and practical creatures. How closely did Legacy and ILM collaborate?
Ben: We’ve worked with Shane Mahan and the Legacy team on a bunch of films going back decades, like Iron Man and Galaxy Quest. It was a great collaboration with them because, in addition to doing the practical effects, they did a lot of work on the creature design as well, even if they were going to be computer graphics. For example, they did the corpses in the graveyard sequence. Shane would come up and say, “Look, we’re going to do this. The guy’s got a nose, but can you help us get rid of the nose?”
The practical effects make the visual effects that much more effective, then?
Ben: I think the balance is interesting because the directors leaned into the practical effects. We were gonna go back in and do a bit of post-correction on some bits, just to manipulate the faces maybe to match the ADR or the dialogue better. But in the end, the directors leaned into it a little bit, feeling that it worked with our aesthetic, much like it does in a Star Wars film when they have a practical creature. The audience seems to enjoy that, and certainly, the actors enjoyed having that tangible thing on set. I really like the blend because it keeps the audience guessing, how did they do this or that?
Todd: Especially a movie like this where it has a twinkle in its eye. It’s leaning into the fantasy aspect. Again, with the Owlbear or something, we still tried to design the sequence so that there was spontaneity. With the practical creatures or people on set, it allows for improvisation, and it allows for spontaneity.
What’s your relationship with imperfections in digital effects? As you said, Ben, the directors wanted to preserve some of those happy accidents or imperfections you easily could’ve perfected, so is it always a case-by-case basis?
Ben: My definite desire is for the audience not to be questioning the visual effects. We can fix virtually anything in post. John Francis Daley and Jonathan Goldstein were terrific in this regard, in that if there was a problem that was due to the photography, then they’d say, “Oh, what’s this thing here?” For example, if it turns out to be a slight lens flare, we would pull up the take and say, “Oh, it was from here on the plate.” They would say, “Good, then keep it.” There’s a certain language that we, as viewers, get used to with filmmaking, warts and all, which I think is good.
Todd: We’re always striving for plausibility and believability, like Ben said, to sell the fact these events are happening in front of a camera. We’ve developed a cinematic vocabulary over a hundred years of filmmaking. The audience can’t particularly articulate why they believe something was photographed in front of a camera. Sometimes, particularly with computer graphics, we strive for clinical perfection. There’s something about us that’s, like, we need to make this perfect from a clinical point of view. In all of filmmaking, there is no perfection. Some high-quality images and sequences flow together, but some things happen in movies that are imperfect. It’s the happy accidents, the things that we all understand as a filmed piece of art. They need to be considered as part of the filmmaking process. It’s all in service of telling the story, so the audience can absorb what the characters are going through and feel the emotions and the momentum of a scene.
Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thievesis now playing in theaters.
Justice Smith plays Simon, Chris Pine plays Edgin, Sophia Lillis plays Doric and Michelle Rodriguez plays Holga in Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves from Paramount Pictures and eOne.
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Succession’s third episode of its fourth season delivered a death blow felt around the world (for fans of HBO’s hit series, at least). It goes without saying that this article will be a pallbearer to spoilers, so if you haven’t watched the episode yet, stop reading.
Episode three, “Connor’s Wedding,” found the four Roy siblings gathered on a boat to celebrate (we use this term loosely) Connor (Alan Ruck)’s wedding to Willa (Justine Lupe). Dear old dad Logan Roy (Brian Cox) was making no effort to attend; he was off to Sweden to try and save the GoJo deal with Lukas Mattson (Alexander Skarsgård). Before leaving, he pulled a classic Logan and enlisted his youngest son, Roman (Kiernan Culkin), to fire longtime WayStar employee Gerri (J. Smith-Cameron), someone Logan knows Roman has feelings for. The Roy children—Roman, Shiv (Sarah Snook), and Kendall (Jeremy Strong) are still at war with their father over the fate of the company Logan built, and as the old lion boards the plane to Sweden, he still seems very much in control.
If you’re still reading, you know what happens next. Succession creator Jessie Armstrong managed to make something that should have felt inevitable since the series’ first episode still feel shocking—Logan suffers some kind of medical emergency on the plane (crucially, off-screen), and before Connor can even say “I do,” Tom (Matthew Macfayden) is calling first Shiv (she doesn’t pick up), then Roman to let them know that their father is sick. Very sick. In fact, he’s unconscious. No, worse—he’s not breathing. Roman and Kendall are desperate for solid information; is Logan okay? Will he be okay? Can he speak? Who is taking care of him? Where is the plane? Is he breathing? Is his heart beating? Who is in charge here?
The poetry of this grim scene, the children of a billionaire founder of a mass media and communications company struggling to find out any concrete information about whether their father is actually among the living or not, was potent. So was the fact that despite Logan’s poor health serving as the very first engine in the family’s now years-long power struggle, the idea that Logan might die in episode three was a shock. Then there’s the simple fact that Brian Cox is a powerhouse performer and the sun upon which the series orbits around, so surely you don’t kill off his character before the series finale. Right? Yet as the episode circled around the largely un-seen Logan’s fate and his plane reversed course and made its way back towards Teterboro airport, the reality of the situation began to set in for the Roy children and viewers simultaneously—Logan Roy was dead.
The director of the episode, Mark Mylod, is a Succession veteran and the man responsible for landing the plane. Speaking with Varietyabout the responsibility of taking on such an uppercut of an episode, Mylod said creator Jesse Armstrong told him about the idea as they were prepping season three.
“That’s when he first told me about this idea, that it should happen early in the season in an episode slot that you would not necessarily expect, and this idea of actually creating, hopefully, great drama out of mundanity — you know, the inconvenience of it all,” Mylod told Variety. “Which just seemed wonderful to me.”
They took this idea to some of HBO’s top people—Casey Bloys, Nora Skinner, Francesca Orsi—and they backed the narrative stroke of delivering Logan’s death early into the season. A bold move for all the aforementioned reasons. Yet that didn’t mean all involved weren’t still a little worried about killing off a character as formidable as Logan Roy and ending the Succession tenure of a performer as skilled and charismatic as Brian Cox.
“Brian is an incredible actor, and this is an incredibly powerful character in modern television drama,” Mylod told Variety. “Not to over-aggrandize ourselves, but he’s got a lot of heft. So it’s a huge and scary choice to actually kill off that character. “
The decision to kill off Logan Roy so early into the season is bold; the decision to do so off-camera, and make his death so anti-climatic, is even bolder. But as Mylod explains the thinking behind it, it also makes tremendous sense. “Once it landed on this idea of the inconvenience of it — the lack of drama, if you like — it just felt so real. With a sudden death in the modern age, it’s a phone call or a text, or even an email. It isn’t a Shakespearean death scene,” Mylod told Variety.
“In terms of the structure of how we handle and tell the story of this huge character’s death, it just seems so interesting and fresh to focus on the frustration of trying to get the information,” Mylod continued. “Our story revolves around a media empire; it revolves around information and eyeballs. And this idea of the irony of not being able to get that information, apart from the wonderful device of putting the audience somewhat into the heads of the characters and their frustration of: ‘Is this really happening? What’s happening? What’s happening?’”
And that is precisely how it felt; you were suddenly inside the heads of the Roy children, and that’s a strange place to be considering how alien their lived experiences are to 99.99% of Succession viewers. While the daddy issues and squabbling and sniping of the Roy children is something plenty of viewers can likely relate to, they’ve never been entirely likable, and their concerns and issues outside of the fundamental ones (“Does daddy even love me?”) have been those of the obscenely rich. The key is that they’ve always been watchable, yet for the first time in Succession, their confusion and pain felt not only watchable but relatable and tragic.
For a full accounting of the approach to Logan’s death, we recommend you read the full interview with Mark Mylod here.
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The official trailer for Disney’s Peter Pan & Wendy has arrived, revealing our longest glimpse yet of what visionary director David Lowery (The Green Knight) has cooked up with his adaptation of J.M. Barrie’s iconic novel and the equally iconic 1953 animated movie.
The trailer reveals a young, timid girl named Wendy Darling (Ever Anderson) who wants nothing more than to be able to stay safe inside her childhood home. This desire, however, is challenged by an encounter with Peter Pan (Alexander Molony), the boy who simply refused to ever grow up. Wendy ends up leaving her childhood home, alongside her brothers and everyone’s favorite fairy, Tinker Bell (Yara Shahidi) and joins Peter on a trip to the wondrous world of Neverland. It’s there she comes face-to-face with evil incarnate, Captain Hook (Jude Law), who will test Wendy and her friends in ways she never dreamed of.
Lowery is a singularly talented filmmaker, and he seems ideally suited to give us a fresh vision of Neverland, both its wonders and its dangers. Joining Anderson, Molony, Law, and Shahidi are Joshua Pickering and Jacobi Jupe as John and Michael Darling, Jim Gaffigan as Smea, Noah Matthews Matofsky as Slightly, Sebastian Billingsley-Rodriguez as Nibs, Caelan Edie as Tootles, and Diana Tsoy as Birdie.
Check out the official trailer below. Peter Pan & Wendy arrives on Disney+ on April 28.
Here’s the official synopsis from Disney+”
A Disney+ Original movie, “Peter Pan & Wendy” is a live-action reimagining of the J.M. Barrie novel and the 1953 animated classic, directed by David Lowery (“The Green Knight,” “Pete’s Dragon”), streaming 2023, only on Disney+. Directed by David Lowery (“The Green Knight,” “Pete’s Dragon”), the film introduces Wendy Darling, a young girl afraid to leave her childhood home behind who meets Peter Pan, a boy who refuses to grow up. Alongside her brothers and a tiny fairy, Tinker Bell, she travels with Peter to the magical world of Neverland. There, she encounters an evil pirate captain, Captain Hook, and embarks on a thrilling and dangerous adventure that will change her life forever. The film stars Jude Law (“Fantastic Beasts: The Secrets of Dumbledore”), Alexander Molony (“The Reluctant Landlord”), Ever Anderson (“Resident Evil: The Final Chapter”), Yara Shahidi (“Grown-ish”), Alyssa Wapanatâhk, Joshua Pickering (“A Discovery of Witches”), Jacobi Jupe, Molly Parker (“House of Cards”), Alan Tudyk (“Rogue One: A Star Wars Story”), and Jim Gaffigan (“The Jim Gaffigan Show”). “Peter Pan and Wendy” is directed by David Lowery from a screenplay by David Lowery & Toby Halbrooks (“The Green Knight”) based on the novel by J. M. Barrie and the animated film “Peter Pan.” The producer is Jim Whitaker (“Pete’s Dragon”), with Adam Borba (“A Wrinkle in Time”), Thomas M. Hammel (“Thor: Ragnarok”), and Toby Halbrooks serving as executive producers.
For more stories on Century Studios, Searchlight Pictures, Marvel Studios and what’s streaming or coming to
How dark is too dark? For fans of Peaky Blinders, the BAFTA-winning period crime series created by Steven Knight, bleak is better. In adapting Charles Dickens’s “Great Expectations,” Knight ramped up the vice and violence for a six-part FX/Hulu series running through April 23) that introduces opium, sadomasochism, attempted suicide, prostitution, F-bombs, and literal butchery to Dickens’ 19th-century novel-centered on the poor but clever orphan Pip. After being groomed by the wealthy Miss Havisham (Olivia Colman) and her chilly adopted daughter Estella (Chloe Lee/Shalom Brune-Franklin), Pip (Tom Sweet/ Fionn Whitehead) travels to London in hopes of becoming a “gentleman” under the wing of the amoral lawyer Mr. Jaggers (Ashley Thomas).
Knight’s stylized take on Great Expectations gains force through the edgy visuals captured by cinematographer Dan Atherton. “The darkness — that’s what I loved about the script,” says Atherton. “I wanted to honor that because Steven Knight’s story lets you go to dark places, and as a cinematographer, that’s a joy.”
Atherton attended National Film & Television School and, in 2020, won the British Society of Cinematographers’ prestigious BSC Short Film Award for The Passenger. Hired by Expectations director Brady Hood, his former classmate, Atherton operated the camera himself and spent 110 days shooting the series’ first four episodes at locations throughout England.
Speaking from his home in London, Atherton delves into Great Expectations‘ ghostly atmosphere, describes how he made Miss Havisham look creepy from inside a 16th-century castle, exalts the 2006 movie Children of Men, and explains the meaning of “mud re-set.”
Great Expectations features gorgeous costumes in the grand tradition of period dramas , yet your cinematography is anything but traditional in the way it pushes the story to interesting places
Thank you.
For example, in Episode One, we see Pip in this vast marsh that’s stripped of nearly all color. What were you aiming for in rendering this frosty, bleached-out, fog-shrouded landscape, and how did you achieve it?
We stripped back a lot of the color to make it feel ghostly. That’s how we wanted to introduce this atmosphere and make it feel mysterious, where anything could be behind those clouds and this mist. We shot on real marshland in Essex, with a green screen behind it so they add a bit more atmosphere in post.
How did you achieve that bleached-out look?
It was mainly done in the color grade.
How does that work?
It dates back to film time when you had your red channel, your blue channel, and your green channel. If you mess around and put more blue in the red channel, it creates this unusual color effect on the costumes, the skin tone, the makeup. So in post, we achieved these looks digitally by mixing the channels. The colorist Toby Tomkins and I looked at references from [cinematographer] Bruno Delbonnel and [colorist] Peter Doyle. We found a channel mix for the marsh that gave it that ghostly feel. We had different mixes for different locations — London, Miss Havisham’s, the marshes, and Pip’s home — each had a different channel mix.
“GREAT EXPECTATIONS” — Episode 1 — Pictured (L-R): Tom Sweet as “Young Pip,” Matt Berry as “Mr. Pumblechook” CR: Miya Mizuno/FX
Early on, you capture this epic mud brawl between two escaped convicts. There’s muck flying all over the place!
That scene was never meant to be as muddy. It’s only because it rained loads the night before, so the ditch we were going to shoot in turned into a mud pool. The actors just go with it, the costume team goes with it, the cameras go with it – we lost a lot of shoes! And you can just imagine mud re-sets.
Mud re-sets?
After each take, they’d have to re-set the mud to make it look like our characters had just gotten there. This was right at the beginning of production, so that [mud fight] sort of set the tone for the rest of the shoot [laughing].
In contrast to the mud and the frosty marsh, you go with this warm, naturalistic look whenever Pip visits his friend Biddy, where the frame suddenly lights up with green grass and blue sky. Was this contrast built into the design?
Yes totally. It was a very conscious effort and not just Biddy – we saw home versus London versus Havisham’s [mansion] as three very different worlds. And it starts with the lighting. At home, candlelight informs the key on the face with warm light, whereas in London, candlelight never keys the characters’ faces. It’s sunlight, and this dark cool ambiance takes over. Subtle differences in the lighting help make the two spaces feel different.
It feels almost like a fairy tale when Pip shows up at the gates of Miss Havisham’s mansion and meets Estella for the first time, with snow gently falling all around. What were you going for there?
That scene needed to feel a little romantic, so we used snow cannons to create this floaty snow when Estella comes to the gate and the music swells. Here’s Pip, there’s Estella, and then BANG!—we cut indoors to Miss Havisham, the daylight’s stripped away, and it’s very dark.
“GREAT EXPECTATIONS” — Episode 2 — Pictured (L-R): Shalom Brune-Franklin as “Estella,” Fionn Whitehead as “Pip.” CR: Miya Mizuno/FX“GREAT EXPECTATIONS” — Episode 2 — Pictured (L-R): Olivia Colman as “Miss Havisham,” Fionn Whitehead as “Pip.” CR: Miya Mizuno/FX
You shot Miss Havisham’s drawing room scenes inside Shirburn Castle, built in the 16th century. How did you set up the lighting for those creepy sequences?
In the script and the book, all the shutters in Miss Havisham’s drawing room are closed. To me, that meant she needs candlelight and firelight. But during our costume and makeup tests, firelight made Miss Havisham seem warm and familiar, crossing over too much with the feeling of home. I decided to open up slits of daylight, allowing small soft pools of daylight to come through and sort of wrap around her face. Putting stark sunlight on Miss Havisham made her feel a bit dead and also made the costumes sing a little bit more. With little hints of firelight to pick up her earrings and crown.
Olivia Colman is terrifying as Miss Havisham. Is she the type of actor who goes from zero to sixty when the director calls “action,” or does she need to stay in character between takes?
The former, for sure. Olivia’s very funny. She’d make me laugh just before they call action, and I’d have to stop laughing to keep the camera from shaking while she and Fionn, who played Pip, would snap into character like that [snapping fingers]. Olivia wasn’t precious at all. She’s fun, bubbly and a really giving person.
“GREAT EXPECTATIONS” — BTS — Pictured: Director of photographyDan Atherton. CR: Miya Mizuno/FX
You operated the A camera yourself on Great Expectations. What do you enjoy about operating?
I suppose what drew me to Steven’s script is it’s about how your mentors can be bad for you and f*** you up. Estella with Miss Havisham and Pip with Jaggers. To capture the energy in those performances, I’d push the camera in really close on the two heads together, and then I could swivel left and right to show their reactions. And all of that was improv in that I’m just responding with the camera to what the actors are doing, and this goes to Brady [Hood]’s vision. He wanted to create a certain energy, an immediacy that you couldn’t achieve from just doing cuts from a shot and reverse shot.
“GREAT EXPECTATIONS” — Episode 3 — Pictured (L-R): aAshley Thomas as “Jaggers,” Fionn Whitehead as “Pip.” CR: Miya Mizuno/FX
What kind of camera did you use?
The ARRI Alexa Mini LF with Supreme Prime lenses. It’s lightweight, and it fits on the [Steadicam stabilizing device] ZeeGee. That allowed me to operate handheld and carry [the rig] for 110 days.
Did you and director Brady Hook reference other films when you conceptualized your approach to Great Expectations?
One of my favorite films is [Alfonso Cuaron’s 2006 sci-fi thriller] Children of Men. Cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki‘s work is amazing and very relevant to this project because the nature of a period drama is that you’ve got a lot of costumes, an art department, and visual effects to the point where it becomes like the proscenium of a theater. What we love about Children of Men is that it uses the wide angle lens, gets into the action and gives the camera the license to be its own narrator. In Great Expectations, the camera can transfer from one character transfer to another character to another piece of information in ways that help sell the atmosphere of Steven Knight’s world.
“GREAT EXPECTATIONS” — BTS — Pictured (L-R): Shalom Brune-Franklin as “Estella,” director of photography Dan Atherton. CR: Miya Mizuno/FX
By the time you enrolled at National Film & Television School to study cinematography, you’d already decided to become a DP. When did you first pick up a camera?
Growing up in the countryside, I was thirteen years old when my best friend got a miniDV camera for Christmas. We loved Scorsese films, so with another friend, the three of us would go into the village and make gangster films. I was the worst actor, so my character always died first, and I got lumped with the camera. Ever since then, I haven’t really let go of it.
New episodes of Great Expectations stream on Sundays on Hulu.
Featured image: “GREAT EXPECTATIONS” — Episode 3 — Pictured (L-R): Olivia Colman as “Miss Havisham,” Shalom Brune-Franklin as “Estella.” CR: Miya Mizuno/FX
For the first time ever, the animated portion of the Star Wars galaxy is getting the live-action treatment thanks to Dave Filoni’s upcoming new Disney+ series Ahsoka. The first trailer for the Rosario Dawson-led show was revealed at the Star Wars Celebration in London last week, unveiling at least a piece of the story Filoni and his team will be telling.
Part of that story will be a direct continuation of the character’s adventures during Filoni’s 2014 animated series Star Wars: Rebels, in which Ahsoka (voiced by Ashley Eckstein) and the rebel Mandalorian Sabine Wren (voiced by Tina Sircar) were searching for the missing Jedi Ezra Bridger (voiced by Taylor Gray) and the villainous Grand Admiral Thrawn (voiced by Lars Mikkelsen). In Ahsoka, Dawson’s titular rebel Jedi will once again be teaming up with Sabine Wren (Natasha Liu Bordizzo), with Ezra Bridger (Eman Esfandi) having a crucial role to play. Grand Admiral Thrawn returns, too, once again played by Lars Mikkelsen. Finding Thrawn will be one of the main missions for Ahsoka and Sabine Wren. The series will also feature Hayden Christensen’s Darth Vader—yet in what capacity we’re still not sure, considering that Ahsoka is set after Vader’s death in The Return of the Jedi.
So who is Ahsoka? Ahsoka Tano was once a protégé of Anakin Skywalker, the man who, of course, became Darth Vader. She’s been searching for Grand Admiral Thrawn, both in Star Wars: Rebels and again here in the live-action series, and the reveal of Mikkelsen returning to play Thrawn was one of the big moments of the Star Wars Celebration’s Ahsoka panel. Thrawn was first created by author Timothy Zahn in his “Star Wars” novels of the 1990s, but he wasn’t made an official part of the canon until Filoni made him Star Wars: Rebels‘ big villain.
“He doesn’t have the Force, but it doesn’t matter. He will outsmart you and trap you,” Filoni said during the panel. Filoni also said that he and executive producer Jon Favreau have been in touch with Zahn and will continue to discuss this cerebral villain he created. “And I feel really feel privileged that Lars will bring him to life this way. We want to make sure we get it right.”
The new batch of images for the series doesn’t include a look at Thrawn, but they do offer good shots of some of the key players, including the droid Huyang (voiced by David Tennant), Shin Hati (Ivanna Sakhno), Baylan Skoll (Ray Stevenson), Hera Syndulla (Mary Elizabeth Winstead), and the aforementioned Sabine Wren (Natasha Liu Bordizzo). They’re all making their live-action debuts after first coming into the Star Wars galaxy as animated characters.
Ahsoka premieres on Disney+ this August. Check out the images below:
Girl honks boy. Boy gets revenge. Complications ensue.
Beef features Oscar-nominee Steven Yeun and comedian Ali Wong as star-crossed L.A. malcontents whose lives go haywire after a road rage incident. Created by Lee Sung Jin (Silicon Valley, 2 Broke Girls), who was tapped last week to write Marvel’s upcoming Thunderbolts movie, the ten-part Netflix series (streaming now) presents outwardly chill characters who are seething on the inside. Lee Sung Jin, AKA Sonny Lee, enlisted costume designer Helen Huang to figure out their clothes.
“I like thinking about people and society and how things work together visually,” says Huang, who moved from China to southern California’s San Gabriel Valley when she was six years old. As a kid, she wanted to be an archaeologist. “I love history, and that’s why I’m in costuming,” Huang continues. “For me, clothes are the medium, but what I really do is tell stories about people.”
Forgoing a career in archaeology, Huang studied painting at ArtCenter College of Design, interned for Vogue Magazine and styled commercials. She broke into television by emailing costume designer Debra McGuire for two years until the Friends veteran hired her for a show. Recent credits include the post-apocalyptic Station Eleven drama and the Paul Rudd-Will Ferrell two-hander The Shrink Next Door.
Speaking from New York City’s Silvercup Studios, where she’s working on HBO Max’s new series The Penguin, Huang explained how she pulled clothes from Goodwill, Norma Kamali and dozens of other sources on her mission to dress Beef characters in outfits tailored to their personalities.
The first time we see Ali Wong’s character Amy, she’s in the car wearing this quirky knit cap. What’s up with the hat?
I generally like hats for characters, although it depends on the director and the DP because sometimes they don’t want to light it. For Amy, it’s such a sort of optimistic-looking hat, and the flipped-up brim is kind of like a punctuation mark. The whole outfit is laidback, but the hat gives it an alertness and perkiness. Also, since it’s a knit hat, the texture is warm.
Amy avoids bright colors in her wardrobe. Why is that?
When I first talked to Sonny, I showed him mood boards and suggested we should put Amy in this white-creamy-khaki pared-back palette because she’s very controlled in what she presents to the world but not so controlled on the inside. It’s an interesting contradiction because she has a lot of internal aggression.
Amy owns an upscale boutique, so it makes sense that she would have sophisticated taste in clothes.
We wanted to dress Amy as a creative person. Most of her pants are wide-legged. We didn’t do any slim-fit things or denim because that doesn’t go with white on white palette. Amy does wear dresses, and she wears a lot of culottes. It’s not so much that we were trying to keep her feminine. It was more about using boutique designers that you don’t see often in L.A., like Cawley Studio, Heru, and Tori Birch. For one scene, we used an asymmetrical Norma Kamali top with pants that are really flowy, partly because of Ali’s natural proportions as a person but also because we liked playing with silhouettes on her, and she was willing to let us do that.
Amy’s husband George, played by Joseph Lee, comes across as this relaxed stay-at-home dad wearing loose-fitting sweaters. How did you arrive at his look?
Amy and George are both tasteful, and they only go to specific boutiques, so their clothes are very curated. George has this creative bubbling underneath that’s different from Amy, who’s more practical and economically driven. Sonny and I wanted to give George [clothes with] a little more print, a little more color. We also talked about how Asian men look internationally because, since I started my career, Asian people who come on shows are usually day players dressed to story — if you’re a scientist, we dress you like a scientist — but there’s not a lot of history or character involved. Since Beef has this all-Asian cast, we get to explore the main characters more as people. Japanese men, Korean men, and Chinese men are very stylish, especially Japanese men, so we had George wearing John Elliott and Nanushka. Through George, we wanted to look at these pockets of subcultures. Amy and George are in one pocket, and then Danny and his world are in another pocket.
So true. Steven Yeun’s Danny is a handyman who definitely does not do designer clothes!
I wanted Danny’s clothes to seem very lived in. The idea is that a lot of men stop buying clothes and re-wear the same things over and over again. Also, I often see men dressing the way they were until the age of 25, and then they stay inside that idea of themselves and don’t change any more. Danny wouldn’t have new clothes, so it was a lot of Goodwill.
Did you think about people from your own life when you dressed Danny?
My half-brothers were skaters from Torrance, so I wanted to bring in that skater element for Danny, even though he’s grown up now. We found vintage stickies and vintage jeans aged to look like they’re from the early 2000s. For Danny’s club look, we found an old DKNY shirt and an old pair of Calvin Klein black slacks at Goodwill. Sonny, the showrunner, gave us his 1999 Structure belt that he never threw away, so in a way, Danny’s whole outfit came out of our collective memory — people that we remembered, places we remembered, what I remember seeing guys wear at KTown clubs, things like that.
So even though Beef takes place in 2023, Danny dresses like it’s the early 2000s.
Ten, twenty years ago. Yeah.
You hadn’t worked previously with Lee Sung Jin. How did you get the job on Beef?
I asked my agents specifically for an Asian show, and they sent me Beef. I read his script and realized I want to do Beef because Sonny’s an amazing writer. It’s not about the immigrant experience. It’s about this universal thing of people having existential crises in their everyday lives, which I really enjoyed. It’s also visually very specific to the Asian community.
Everything Everywhere All at Once broke new ground for Asian American talent on the movie front. Before Beef came along, what had your experience been like in the TV space?
In general, since I’ve been working in this industry, I feel like there’s been something missing when people dress Asian characters — a lack of understanding. With Beef, it was very rewarding to work with production designer Grace Yun and mostly Asian heads of department because we had a shorthand. We were able to bring our understanding and memories to the show. When we did flashbacks for Amy and Danny, Ali and Steven sent me pictures of their parents when they first immigrated to America. It’s like, “These are more references than I need!” But it’s just because everyone wanted to be a part of having their story told. For me, Beef felt very special in its specificity.
Beef is streaming now on Netflix.
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A huge piece of news from the Star Wars galaxy has been revealed at the Star Wars Celebration in London on Friday. Lucasfilm president Kathleen Kennedy announced that the first film since Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker will again star Daisy Ridley as Rey and will be directed by Sharmeen Obaid-Chinoy (Ms. Marvel) from a script by Steven Knight (Peaky Blinders). The film will be set after the events in The Rise of Skywalker and center on Rey’s efforts to build a new Jedi Order.
The news is major on several fronts. Obaid-Chinoy becomes both the first woman and the first person of color to direct a Star Wars film. Hailing from Pakistan, Obaid-Chinoy already has two Oscars for her documentary shorts, Saving Face in 2011 and A Girl in the River: The Price of Forgiveness in 2015. She recently helmed two episodes of Ms. Marvel for Disney+.
The announcement confirms that Obaid-Chinoy will be the first filmmaker to steer a Star Wars feature into theaters in years as Kennedy has charted a course for a new generation of Star Wars films and filmmakers. There have been several high-profile projects that have come and gone (including Star Wars: Rogue Squadron from Wonder Woman director Patty Jenkins), and a few more that are currently in development. Those include Star Wars films from Thor: Love & Thunder director Taika Waititi and Deadpool 3 director Shawn Levy.
It seemed as if Ridley’s ride across the galaxy was over after The Rise of Skywalker, in which Rey, long unsure of her heritage and place in the galaxy, found out she was none other than a direct descendant of Emperor Palpatine. Her parents had abandoned her not because they were careless drunks, as Kylo Ren (Adam Driver) tried to convince her in The Last Jedi, but in order to protect her from him. It was a shocking discovery, and The Rise of Skywalker‘s climactic final battle found Rey being confronted with this news from Palpatine himself. In the end, Rey fought side-by-side with Kylo Ren, and the two of them finally defeated the Big Bad of Star Wars. It seemed like that would be the end of the Skywalker Saga.
Now, however, Ridley will reprise the role that made her a superstar and do so under the direction of Obaid-Chinoy. It’s a big day in the Galaxy.
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As the official trailer for Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny begins, our beloved archeology professor (and part-time adventurer, you might have heard) is retiring. As the Rolling Stones’ deathless “Sympathy for the Devil” plays, Indy and his goddaughter Helena (Phoebe Waller-Bridge) head to a bar for a drink to celebrate. Yet while Indy’s begrudgingly thinking of the softer, greener pastures of retirement, Helena has other things on her mind—a dial that Indy had come across on a train during World War II. A dial, Helena says, “that could change the course of history.” This being Indy, adventure awaits, even if he’s long past his prime.
The pursuit of the Dial of Destiny will set the fifth Indiana Jones film into action, and with Ford and Waller-Bridge playing our two heroes and the great Mads Mikkelsen as the villain Jürgen Voller, we are in good hands. The trailer reveals Voller siccing his henchman, Klaber (Boyd Holbrook) on Indy and Helena, which includes a motorcycle chase that turns into Indy on horseback—on the New York subway—trying like hell to outrun the 6 train. Good news for Indy; the 6 is a local.
Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny was directed by the very talented James Mangold, the first person not named Steven Spielberg to helm an Indiana Jones film. The Dial of Destiny is the fifth film in the franchise, following Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981), The Temple of Doom (1984), The Last Crusade (1989), and The Kingdom of the Crystal Skull (2008).
The Dial of Destiny, Milkkelsen’s Voller enthuses, can correct Hitler’s mistakes. So yeah, Voller is a terrible guy, a proper Indy villain, and the stakes are humanity itself. Joining the aforementioned cast are Antonio Banderas as an Indy ally Renaldo, Thomas Kretschmann as Colonel Weber, Toby Jones as Basil (Helena’s father), and John Rhys-Davies as Sallah.
It’s a ripping trailer and will leave all Indiana Jones fans properly enthused to see Ford’s last go-round in one of his most iconic roles.
Check out the trailer below. Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny whips into theaters on June 30.
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Rosario Dawson’s Ahsoka Tano is one of the more intriguing characters in the Star Wars canon, and at long last, she’s got her own series. The first trailer for Ahsoka is here, revealing Dawson’s live-action take on a character who first appeared in the animated series Star Wars: The Clone Wars (voiced by Ashley Eckstein), at which point Dawson stepped as Ahsoka in season two of The Mandalorian. When Din Djarin met her during his adventures in season two, she was searching for Grand Admiral Thrawn. In Ahsoka, it seems as if her search will finally come to fruition. Danger surely follows.
The series follows the rebel Jedi as she charts a new course across a galaxy that’s starting to whisper with fresh troubles. A few of the folks Ahsoka will run across include Sabine Wren (Natasha Liu Bordizzo), a Mandalorian who is every bit the rebel as Ahsoka is. Another character that will factor prominently into the series along for the ride is the Jedi Ezra Bridger (Eman Esfandi)—he’d gone missing at the end of the animated series Star Wars: Rebels, and Ahsoka and Sabine had set out to find him. There is a good chance that Ahsoka will pick these two up on their mission.
Ahsoka also stars Mary Elizabeth Winstead as Captain Hera Syndulla, Ivanna Sakhno, and Ray Stevenson, who voiced the Mandalorian Gar Saxon in Clone Wars and Rebels and appears to be playing a villain here. The new series also boasts a very big name in the Star Wars galaxy—Hayden Christensen returns as Darth Vader, fresh off his stunning performance in Obi-Wan Kenobi. What’s interesting here is that Ahsoka is set after Darth Vader’s death, so he either appears as a Force Ghost or in a flashback.
Check out the trailer below. Ahsoka arrives on Disney+ in August:
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Welcome back to Derry; please stay away from the sewers and avoid all balloons. Enjoy your stay!
HBO Max has begun to fill out its cast for Welcome to Derry, its upcoming prequel to Andy Muschietti’s satisfyingly terrifying It and It: Chapter Two. Taylour Paige (Zola), Chris Chalk (Perry Mason), Jovan Adepo (Watchmen), and James Remar (Dexter) are all taking the trip up to Maine. Details on who they’re playing aren’t clear, but they’ll be joining a project led by It filmmakers Muschietti and Barbara Muschietti, the film’s producer (the Muschiettis are brother and sister).
The series will be set before the events in both It films, which were, of course, adapted from Stephen King’s novel. Jason Fuchs, a co-producer on It: Chapter Two, is writing the pilot, based on a story he conjured with the Muschiettis, and he’ll serve as co-showrunner alongside Brad Caleb Kane. Andy Muschietti will direct the pilot and several other episodes.
What’s also interesting is Welcome to Derry will mark the second Stephen King adaptation that Jovan Adepo has starred in. You can also see him in Paramount+’s The Stand, which was adapted from King’s novel.
We’ll share more about this series when we hear it.
For an interview with Taylour Paige, check out this story:
Featured image: Caption: BILL SKARSGÅRD as Pennywise in New Line Cinema’s horror thriller “IT CHAPTER TWO,” a Warner Bros. Pictures release. Photo Credit: Courtesy of Warner Bros. Pictures
It’s official—Joker: Folie à Deux has wrapped filming.
To celebrate the moment, co-writer and director Todd Phillips took to Instagram to share two images of his leads, Joaquin Phoenix as Arthur Fleck/the Joker and Lady Gaga as Harley Quinn. These are the most robust looks we’ve seen of the two scourges of Gotham in character yet.
“That’s a wrap,” Phillips wrote in his caption to his post. “Thanks to these two (+ the entire cast) and the BEST crew that the film industry has to offer. From top to bottom. Gonna crawl into a cave now (edit room) and put it all together.”
Lady Gaga wears a tattered coat and wears traces of eye makeup that is very much a staple of Harley Quinn’s look. Phoenix’s Arthur Fleck can be seen in what looks like a prisoner transfer bus, leaning against the caged window. These two are a match made in hell.
Phoenix earned himself an Oscar for Best Actor for his last outing as Arthur Fleck in the 2019 original film. He returns as the tormented would-be comedian turned antihero to Gotham, thanks to his violent and very public outburst at the end of Joker. Gaga is almost certainly playing Harley Quinn, the iconic partner-in-crime to the Joker and a woman known to suffer from her own battles with mental illness. As has been repeated many times on this site and elsewhere, the title Folie à Deux is the medical term for two or more people suffering from the same or similar mental disorder, which is precisely how you might describe the most demented relationship in all of comics.
The last time we got an official look at Gaga was when Phillips posted a close-up of her holding Phoenix’s face. The date of that photo? February 14. Phillips captioned the image, “Happy Valentine’s Day.”
Todd Phillips (@toddphillips) • Instagram photos and videos
245K Likes, 4,604 Comments – Todd Phillips (@toddphillips) on Instagram: “That’s a wrap. Thanks to these two (+ the entire cast) and the BEST crew that the film industry…”
The sequel will fall under the new DC Elseworlds banner within DC Studios bosses James Gunn and Peter Safran’s retooled unified DC universe. Joker: Folie à Deux is slated to hit theaters on October 4, 2024.
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Featured image: LOS ANGELES, CALIFORNIA – JANUARY 03: Director Todd Phillips attends the 20th Annual AFI Awards at Four Seasons Hotel Los Angeles at Beverly Hills on January 03, 2020 in Los Angeles, California. (Photo by Kevin Winter/Getty Images for AFI)
Ronan Hill has a way with dragons. The Belfast-based production sound mixer is best known for his tenure on HBO’s Game of Thrones, where he and the sound teams tuned the rich, resonating sonic palettes across its eight epic seasons, winning five Emmys along the way. Hill returns to familiar territory with Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves, from directors John Francis Daley and Jonathan Goldstein, a film that refreshingly spins the popular fantasy role-playing game with a cast of enjoyable characters led by Chris Pine as Edgin, a charming bard and master thief who teams up with Holga (Michelle Rodriquez), a Barbarian warrior, Simon (Justice Smith), a young sorcerer, and Doric (Sophia Lillis), a shape-shifting druid. They do battle with any number of beasts and baddies, including Sofina (Daisy Head), a Red Wizard with a serious mean streak.
The Credits caught up with Hill to discuss Dungeons & Dragons, reminisce about GoT, the art of mixing sound in big action set pieces, and more.
It’s fitting you mixed Honor Among Thieves following your work on Game of Thrones. Seems you’ve become the go-to Northern Ireland production sound mixer for epic fantasy.
I have been fortunate to attract good work. Dungeons & Dragons is a good example. It had many similar elements to Game of Thrones, being shot at Titanic Studios in Belfast. We had a few tricky costumes and a fair amount of location work. Some avid viewers may notice a revamp of the King’s Landing set used in Season 8 of Game of Thrones.
Oh wow, that must have brought back memories. Sticking with GoT for a moment, do you have a favorite experience?
There are so many memories. The Red Wedding,Hardhome, and Battle of the Bastards, to name but a few. There were so many locations familiar to me growing up, but there were also the locations when we traveled, like standing on a glacier in Iceland while shooting Beyond the Wall. This is something I wouldn’t expect to experience again.
Not sure how many people know this, but your brother Conleth was Lord Varys. Did you know what was going to happen to his character early on?
I knew everything that was going to happen in Season 8, having received all the scripts. I knew before my brother knew what Varys and all the characters’ fates would be. This was a mixed blessing. Firstly, being able to read the scripts and having the knowledge but secondly, being sworn to secrecy by my NDA. You’d never want to be responsible for that secrecy breach!
Honor Among Thieves has a large ensemble as well. Did the directors suggest anything in terms of the overall sound approach?
For the most part, as a production sound mixer, you’re there to record the dialogue and to ensure you tackle any issues which may cause problems. On a job of this scale, I would rarely engage with directors or producers unless I think their involvement can solve a problem I can’t solve alone.
The period wardrobe was created by costume designer Amanda Monk. Did you two address anything earlier to make lavalier placement more manageable?
The film was shot during Covid, and as a consequence, prep was very limited. We were advised to work using our best practices and experience to achieve the best results. We always have good cooperation from the costume department, and they were very helpful in finding lavalier positions that worked for both them and us.
Justice Smith plays Simon, Sophia Lillis plays Doric, Michelle Rodriguez plays Holga and Chris Pine plays Edgin in Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves from Paramount Pictures and eOne.
Honor Among Thieves has several thrilling action sequences. How did you approach the fighting sequences?
We are always looking for the best microphone positions, whether that is boom, plant, or lav. For action, this may mean asking the costume department to sow the lavs into clothes and ensure there is enough slack on the cable for the required action or stunts.
Speaking of “we,” who was on the sound team?
I had an excellent team and was fortunate to have two first assistants, a second assistant, and a trainee. Daniel McCabe was the key boom operator, Guillaume Beauron was our second boom operator, Jonathan Riddell was our second assistant, and Oscar Pescott was our trainee. This allowed us to have two booms on the floor, and Jonathan could concentrate on fitting the radio mics off-set, and Oscar managed headsets and gained more experience on any third boom and with the stereo pair.
One of the more intense battle scenes is when the heroes go underground to find an enchanted helmet. How did your team cover the scene?
This was a large SFX and VFX set with a part-set build. There were a lot of elements. Again, we are using lavs in the best-tested positions and taking full advantage of the green screens to get the booms as close as possible. It was a joy to see the finished scene.
Rege Jean Page plays Xenk, Michelle Rodriguez plays Holga, Chris Pine plays Edgin, Sophia Lillis plays Doric and Justice Smith plays Simon in Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves from Paramount Pictures and eOne.
For exterior locations, were there any hurdles in recording the production sound?
One scene that sticks out for me here was with Edgan and Holga on horseback. This was shot from a tracking vehicle. I had spotted the tracking vehicle earlier in the day and raised my concerns with directors John and Jonathan that it was not an electric vehicle and would be problematic. Later when we were preparing to shoot the scene, this became quite apparent as the vehicle was traveling uphill. John was not happy as he didn’t want to ADR the scene and, after a discussion, decided to flip the scene direction to descend the hill. The tracking vehicle driver also helped by freewheeling the vehicle down the hill so no engine was used, and we all went home happy!
Michelle Rodriguez plays Holga, Justice Smith plays Simon and Chris Pine plays Edgin in Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves from Paramount Pictures and eOne.
The film has plenty of funny moments as well. One, in particular, is a graveyard scene where the heroes dig up and speak to several corpses. How did that sequence take shape?
This may surprise you, but the corpses were real actors wearing radio mics and earpieces.
That’s some fantastic special effects makeup and VFX work going on. Everyone nailed that scene. Another entertaining sequence is the climactic battle with the Red Wizard. When VFX comes into play, what’s the best course for sound?
I’ll always have a second boom if there is any benefit. I will also have a stereo pair recording stereo effects for on-camera action or off-camera clean of dialogue to use as effects tracks. For the scenes on Ballintoy Beach, I had a stereo pair recording effects at different proximity to the sea at different tide levels throughout the day.
Daisy Head plays Sofina in Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves from Paramount Pictures and eOne.
When it comes to asking for a take for production sound, what is your advice for someone gaining experience?
The answer to this depends on a few things. I do use a private line from the mixer to pass on concerns. This should be done as soon as possible after the take, so we haven’t moved on. A certain amount of diplomacy is required as you don’t necessarily want the cast to become concerned or feel it encroaches on their performance. If you think going again will not improve the likelihood of getting it clean or will dilute performance, this needs to be weighed up. Some directors and cast can grasp an issue and adapt quickly, and some can’t. If it’s something you spot during a rehearsal that may be problematic, a quiet word with the director may sort it out before you turnover.
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Featured image: Michelle Rodriguez plays Holga, Justice Smith plays Simon and Chris Pine plays Edgin in Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves from Paramount Pictures and eOne.
Editor Nathan Orloff is the man who helped turn the mayhem in John Wick: Chapter Four into a beautiful, brutal ballet. It is the longest entry in the franchise, yet it moves with the grace and precision of a seasoned dancer. It’s not only an epic because of director Chad Stahelski’s action sequences; it’s the patient character moments that make all that action meaningful.
Take, for instance, the relationship between Akira (Rina Sawayama) and her father, Shimazu (Hiroyuki Sanada). Without their more personal, less plot-driven exchanges, the action in Osaka would have suffered. “We talked about cutting that for time,” Orloff said. “We had a lot of people that wanted the movie to be a lot shorter. There are moments like that you don’t technically need, but you’d care less about Shimazu and Akira. Those scenes are absolutely essential to making the emotionality of the film functional.”
Recently, Orloff took us behind the scenes of how he cut John Wick: Chapter Four so that it’s grand, acrobatically brutal set pieces also felt personal.
When you have all these moving pieces in a nearly three-hour film, where do you even start?
It’s taking a comb to the desert. You just go from the top, work it, and compress. I did a pass to make sure that in any dialogue scene, no one repeated an idea because there is a tendency to do that with writing. I tried to remove it anytime someone said something twice. I wanted to be ruthless for the audience, so they better catch everything.
And then your next passes?
With the other passes, sometimes it was hard because of incomplete visual effects to judge whether a stunt would work or this car hit would work. It wasn’t until we had some rough, like PlayStation two animatics, put into the Arc de Triomphe scene. It was then like, “Oh, if this is an A+ stunt and this is an A- stunt, and maybe that’s a B, maybe we get rid of the B.” You’re trying to sift out the stuff that’s not quite as great as everything else. And so, when you watch a movie over and over again, you’re raising the bar in terms of when do you feel drowsy? You’re making each scene sing as much as it possibly can.
Keanu Reeves as John Wick in John Wick: Chapter 4. Photo Credit: Murray Close
How much did the pace that editor Evan Schiff established with the previous Wick films influence you?
I definitely watched all three again right before coming on. So, I remember the first day of shooting was in Berlin. It was John walking across the bridge. I was like, “Oh, here we go. This is typical; it’s John’s walking and on a mission.” I put the music over it, and it was very, very John Wick. But my favorite experience with this movie is that slowly, over time, I stopped doing what I thought a John Wick movie would do and started doing what was best for this film. Those two in the Venn diagram, there is a 98% overlap, but there was this area where I was able to explore what was a little weirder in some cases.
Can you describe one of those cases?
Chad will talk about his Barry Lyndon scene in front of the Eiffel Tower, where everyone’s static in the background, and we have this duel at the end; it’s so Good, the Bad, and the Ugly. John Wick hadn’t done those sorts of scenes, so we had to go outside the territory of what John Wick films would do. I filled it in with what we wanted and what I wanted.
Ian McShane as Winston, Keanu Reeves as John Wick, Clancy Brown as Harbinger, Bill Skarsgård as Marquis, and Donnie Yen as Caine at the High Table in John Wick: Chapter 4. Photo Credit: Murray Close
The duel was epic.
The duel was just one of the most creative and inspirational sequences I’ve ever cut. I had to figure out how to make each shot feel different, how to make each hit work, and how to try to accomplish the fake out, even if the audience knew it was coming. It was so much fun because, obviously, it strays well outside what has been done before in the series.
We also haven’t seen that repeated fall down the stairwell before. How’d you want to emphasize the repetition, as well as the physical comedy, there?
When I got the job, Chad imparted to me a bunch of different film influences. Some are Westerns, like the Man With No Name trilogy, Kurosawa films, and even Hollywood Old School musicals, like Singing in the Rain. One of the larger ones was Buster Keaton. We take so much influence from him with physical comedy. A part of the interesting thing about John Wick as a series is they’re hyper-violent in a lot of ways, but especially in this film, the blood is kind of misty, and with a few exceptions, it’s not grotesque; it’s like an adult Looney Tunes. And so, that’s where this Buster Keaton element comes in.
Keanu Reeves as John Wick, Donnie Yen as Caine, and Scott Adkins as Killa in John Wick: Chapter 4. Photo Credit: Murray Close
And the stair fall?
The stair fall was a fun opportunity, especially the second one. Everyone’s like, “Oh, he fell down the stairs. I can’t believe he had to go that far.” And then when he falls the second time, you’re like, “Oh my God.” We did this funny thing in sound design that made me so happy where it’s loud and fun and then gets quieter and quieter, and there’s more reverb and echo. It’s like Wile E. Coyote and Looney Tunes. I found that if you laughed, you bought that he was alive. If we were playing everything as dramatic and super serious, you’d be like, “Oh, he’s dead.” He can’t jump out of a three-story window, hit a van, and be alive if we took it a hundred percent seriously. It has to be a punchline.
Did you find yourself editing differently for each of the characters? Say for Akia (Rina Sawayama) or Kane (Donnie Yen) in the Osaka sequence, how’d you approach cutting their fight scenes differently from John Wick?
It’s like I had different brains when I cut them. Rina was a little more straightforward. I was just making it cool and threatening. I did something with Rina where I kept cutting a few frames behind or ahead where I normally would because it was like she was trying to keep up, especially with the knife. She was always barely making it.
With Keanu, I found the influence of “Singing in the Rain” and these old-school musicals where you’re cutting around the dancing. You’re not editing to emphasize the dancing, and it’s never editing on a punch. It’s punch, hit, as he reacts or slide, cut, move, next move. You’re doing it in between these beats.
And Donnie Yen’s blind character, Caine?
Donnie was a different beast. With the kitchen scenes, it was more pure fun, and I cut that as straightforward as it wanted to be. I also tried to just show how he was doing these things. I made this decision early on that stuck: when Donnie is fighting another main character, there’s no music. I wanted everyone to hear what Kane hears. I wanted people to hear that this is doable. It created this eeriness around Kane where he felt different than all the other characters. When there was this music, music, music, and the nunchucks, and then John gets up, there’s no music, and then Kane shows up; it’s just eerily quiet. To me, that is Kane’s world. We get an insight into his world because of that sound design choice.
Chad does not shoot traditional coverage and uses maybe two or three cameras at a time. What challenges does that give you?
When I first landed in Berlin, they went and shot the exhibition hall, which is the sequence with the Nunchucks. Chad shoots linearly. They shoot, and they sort of figure out how everything links together as they go. With that scene, I landed, I’m still jet-lagged, and I’m starting to cut the scene together, and I’m like, “What? How do I link this?” The coverage is shooting at the characters. It’s almost like a theater in terms of its presentation, which is very Buster Keaton and Singing in the Rain, where your camera is your best seat in the theater. What was important in cutting is the links between shots, the overlap of, okay, they’re finishing this action, so how much overlap in the next setup? When do I cut? How do I cut? How do I make that smooth? How do I make that effortless? So, Chad had an AVID in LA when we got back. He never edited anything himself. He would look at dailies, and there were times where, like in the exhibition hall, we would come back, and he’d be like, “That was the only way to put that together.” (Laughs) Once you crack it, that’s it.
Keanu Reeves as John Wick in John Wick 4. Photo Credit: Murray Close
On set, what other moments made you pause and think, how on Earth is this going to cut together?
The Arc de Triomphe. I was standing on this tarmac in an abandoned airport in Berlin, the Tegel Airport. They had these cones out for lanes and these weird-looking sleds with fake headlights for cars and pads on them. They were hitting these stuntmen. They told me they’re going to replace everything. I was like, “What do you mean we’re gonna replace everything?” It was so bananas. The geography of that was difficult because I didn’t have a background. I didn’t have an Arc. I’m obsessive about clarity in my editing. I believe you should be able to explain to a blind child every shot. Every shot is one sentence. Otherwise, random stuff is just happening. You need to be able to explain the narrative of an action scene simply in your mind. Geography and clarity are paramount. And when cutting that scene, and there’s no background, I couldn’t tell where any direction was. It was incredibly challenging. It was something that took a year to solidify. It was crazy. We were making changes to that sequence up until January.
Keanu Reeves as John Wick in John Wick 4. Photo Credit: Murray Close
John Wick: Chapter 4 is in theaters now.
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With John Wick: Chapter 4 kicking and punching its way to a franchise-best opening and nothing but love from the critics, the time is ripe for a little more from the Wick world. And who better to take the franchise in a new direction than Ana de Armas, the recent Oscar-nominee, who will be starring in the Wick spinoff Ballerina from director Len Wiseman. The film now has an official release date—June 7, 2024—and will find the rising star playing an assassin trained in the traditions of the Ruska Roma.
Like John Wick before here, our heroine is lured back into the assassin’s life after a personal tragedy, although unlike John Wick, who lost his dog in the first film, here our heroine loses her entire family. She will have plenty of reason to unleash her very particular set of skills.
Ballerina also boasts a great supporting cast—Anjelica Huston, Gabriel Byrne, Catalina Sandino Moreno, Norman Reedus, John Wick staple Ian McShane, and John Wick himself, Keanu Reeves, will make an appearance. The film also includes the late, great Lance Reddick, also a member of the Wickiverse.
Wiseman directs from a script by Shay Hatten and based on characters created by Derek Kolstad.
The Ballerina release date news comes on the heels of John Wick: Chapter 4 crossing the $250 million worldwide box office mark on Monday. There is plenty of appetite for the sensational action set pieces and the particular dark humor and mythology of the Wick World. With Ana de Armas in the lead role, there is a good chance Ballerina hits its mark and becomes a welcome addition to the Wick family.
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Featured image: LOS ANGELES, CALIFORNIA – FEBRUARY 26: Ana de Armas attends the 29th Annual Screen Actors Guild Awards at Fairmont Century Plaza on February 26, 2023 in Los Angeles, California. (Photo by Frazer Harrison/Getty Images)
Warner Bros. has just dropped the second and much longer look at co-writer/director Greta Gerwig’s live-action Barbie, revealing the star-studded, candy-colored live-action look at the decidedly weird life of Mattel’s iconic doll. Whereas the first trailer riffed on the iconic prehistoric “Dawn of Man” sequence in Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, the new trailer widens the lens and teases the larger cast. It also offers a few salient plot points for our heroine and her friends.
While Margot Robbie’s Barbie is, of course, the main attraction, the supporting cast is a deep and talented bench, including Ryan Gosling as the bottle blonde version of Ken. Yet he’s not the only Ken (nor is Robbie the only Barbie); in fact, Gosling’s Ken is in direct competition with Simu Liu’s Ken, and their rivalry will make up at least part of the plot.
As for those other Barbies, they include Issa Rae’s President Barbie, Dua Lipa’s Mermaid Barbie, Kate McKinnon’s gymnast Barbie, Nicola Coughlan’s diplomat Barbie, Alexandra Shipp’s writer Barbie, Ritu Arya’s journalist Barbie, Emma Mackey’s physicist Barbie, Sharon Rooney’s lawyer Barbie (there’s more), Hari Nef’s doctor Barbie, and Ana Cruz Kayne’s judge Barbie.
Joining the above cast of Kens and Barbies are Emerald Fennel’s Midge, Barbie’s longtime best friend, Will Ferrell, Ariana Greenblatt, America Ferrera, and Jamie Demetriou.
Gerwig said one of the things that drew her toward doing the film was terror, which she revealed on Dua Lipa’s podcast At Your Service: “It was something that was exciting because it was terrifying,” she said. “It felt like vertigo, starting to write it, like: ‘Where do you even begin, and what would be the story?’ And I think it was that feeling I had, knowing that it would be really interesting terror. Usually, that’s where the best stuff is, where you’re like, ‘I am terrified of that.’ Anything where you’re like, ‘This could be a career-ender — then you’re like, ‘I should probably do it.’”
Now she’s gone and done it, and Barbie is easily one of the most intriguing films on the 2023 slate.
Check out the second trailer below. Barbie hits theaters on July 21, 2023.
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Featured image: Caption: MARGOT ROBBIE as Barbie in Warner Bros. Pictures’ “BARBIE,” a Warner Bros. Pictures release. Photo Credit: Courtesy Warner Bros. Pictures
