It’s a Barbie world—it’s also Greta Gerwig’s world—and we’re happy to be living in it.
Gerwig is now the first-ever solo female director to helm a billion-dollar movie, as Barbie surpassed that major milestone this past weekend. Gerwig’s gangbusters take on Mattel’s iconic doll has nabbed $459 million in North America and $572 million internationally, putting Gerwig in the exclusive billion-dollar club and making her the only solo female director in it. Frozen and Frozen 2‘s Jennifer Lee co-directed with Chris Buck, and Captain Marvel‘s Anna Boden co-directed with Ryan Fleck.
Barbie‘s unbelievable success was also achieved at warp speed—Gerwig’s film hit the milestone a mere 17 days after its premiere, making it the fastest film in Warner Bros.’s 100-year history to do so, vanquishing Harry Potter and Deathly Hallows: Part 2, which had the previous record of 19 days.
The reasons for Barbie‘s success begin with Gerwig—or, to be as factual as possible, they begin with star and producer Margot Robbie, who recruited Gerwig to write and direct. Gerwig and her partner Noah Baumbach co-wrote the script, and then Gerwig directed what has become a true cinematic phenomenon. The phenomenon has been aided by Gerwig and her starry cast, a best-in-class marketing campaign, incredible word of mouth, rave reviews from critics, and, of course, the spectacle of Barbenheimer, the rabid film fans who were clamoring for the release of both Barbie and Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer in the same weekend.
Barbie now joins Spider-Man: No Way Home, Top Gun: Maverick, Jurassic World: Dominion, and Avatar: The Way of Water as films that crossed the billion-dollar threshold during the pandemic era.
“This is a watershed moment for Barbie, and no one but Greta Gerwig could have brought this cross-generational icon and her world to life in such a funny, emotional, and entertaining story, one that is resonating with all four quadrants of moviegoers and literally turning the entire world pink,” said Jeff Goldstein and Andrew Cripps, Warner Bros. presidents of domestic and international distribution, respectively, in a joint press statement. “Long lines and repeat viewings prove that movies are back in a big, big way, and we look forward to seeing just how far ‘Barbie’ can go in the real world.”
Barbie remained number one at the box office this past weekend—it’s third in a row—even with competition from Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem, Meg 2: The Trench, and Oppenheimer.
Featured image: Caption: (L-r) RYAN GOSLING, MARGOT ROBBIE and Director/Writer GRETA GERWIG on the set of Warner Bros. Pictures’ “BARBIE,” a Warner Bros. Pictures release. Photo Credit: Jaap Buitendijk
The spirits have materialized for Disney’s latest comedy adventure Haunted Mansion. Everyone’s favorite spectral residents, from the hatchet-wielding Bride to the Hatbox Ghost, are coming out of their coffins for a swinging good time. The film fleshes out the skeletal stories of the spooky spirits who haunt Disney theme parks around the world. VFX Supervisor Edwin Rivera, who hails from visual effects studio DNEG, cast the classic characters in a new light.
“One of the things we added to our ghosts is this thing we called ‘ectoplasmic effervescence’ —it’s a mouthful,” he laughed. “We were trying to mimic bioluminescent algae. If you’re not disturbing it, they don’t light up, but as you move your hand through them, they start to light up. Our ghosts have the same thing. As they move through their ghostly realms, they started to give off these particles that lit up very much like bioluminescence.”
There’s an authenticity to the scares that adds chills to the atmosphere. Tangible creations laid the foundation for the ethereal. “Justin Simien, our director, very much wanted to keep the movie grounded,” Rivera said. “He wanted real sets. He wanted real actors dressed up as ghosts walking around so that it feels real. There’s a feeling that The Shining or The Ring has that maybe some other movies don’t because there’s this creepy person in the room coming at you. It started from that point, then that gave us the basis of we want to make it feel real like you’re actually there. This is something that, as fantastical as it seems, it at least visually looks like it’s actually happening.”
Turning human actors into tortured souls was an intensive process. Footage was layered together to capture real performances before transforming them into translucent beings floating through the mansion.
“We would scan their bodies, so we had a CG model,” Rivera explained. “We track that model to their bodies, and that would give us the opportunity to be able to generate the bioluminescent particles. We knew exactly where their body was at any given moment, so then we could create the CG skeleton underneath that was revealed in those transparent spots. We also made sure that we shot clean passes of every scene without any of the actors. Every single time. We had what was behind the actor; then we could reveal that through the empty spots in their body on the face or legs or whatnot.”
Despite being long dead, these ghosts are simply glowing and boast familiar – yet updated – designs. The textures are spectacularly creepy. Rivera’s team made excellent use of dim and deteriorating details to give the spirits depth.
“Adding a transparency to the shadow areas where you can see that they’re see-through and there’s skeletal structure underneath that’s creepy and decrepit,” Rivera added. “All those little elements were used to enhance what was already there without being distracting.”
The ride employs some impressive optical illusions that originally debuted in 1969, but a mix of practical effects and modern technology sends the images soaring for the film. Perhaps the most famous gag from the attraction is the medium Madame Leota (Jamie Lee Curtis). Rather than gazing into a crystal ball, she floats inside one. Rivera’s crew was committed to finding the right technique to channel her.
“Early on, we talked about maybe having somebody’s head actually in the ball in the middle of a table,” he recalled. “I think there’s a romantic quality to practical effects, right? Very quickly, we found that that was impractical, so we completely scanned Jamie Lee Curtis’ head. She’s a completely CG character. We did a full motion capture scan of her as she’s delivering her lines because then you get all the subtle little eye twitches and facial movements that are specific to her and make you recognize her as her, and then added CG hair and CG lighting for the CG environment that she’s in. She’s completely CG, but all of her acting is as she delivered it when we captured it.”
Perhaps the most recognizable portraits in the mansion are the four unfortunate souls who are hiding deadly surprises just out of frame. As the doorless chamber stretches, their hazards are revealed. Ben (LaKeith Stanfield) and Travis (Chase Dillon) soon find that the deathtraps aren’t satisfied to stay on the canvas.
“It started off as something very simple, just the stretching room that had the element of danger just because it’s inherently dangerous to be that high up. As we went along, the thinking was we kind of have to kick this up a notch,” Rivera revealed. “The request was maybe we have these different zones mimic the different things that are happening in the paintings. We have alligators, we have dynamite to mask the guy in boxer shorts, and we have these gnarly tombstones coming through and the quicksand. All those different things correlate to the paintings and add the danger and crank up the incentive for these characters to escape through the roof.”
While the chamber stretches up, the hallway stretches out. A normal passageway by day, the characters are stuck in an endless corridor after midnight.
“DNEG did a great job creating all the interiors,” Rivera praised. “The endless hallway was only twenty feet long, and they had to make it look like it was miles long. We only built the first floor. One of the more iconic rooms is the dining room. We built the first floor, so anything above that in all the different directions, that was all DNEG.”
While the most chilling frights lay inside, the stately manor’s architecture was enhanced by Rivera’s team. “Anytime you see the exterior of the house, that’s 90 percent CG because we only built the first floor – the porch pretty much and the staircase. Anything above and beyond that is completely CG. Anytime you ever see anything of the house from the outside, that’s 90 percent CG. The idea is for you to take it for granted.”
The mansion truly earns its frightful reputation. From disembodied footprints to the eyes of statues following you, everywhere you look, you will spot evidence of hauntings. The film features a detail from the ride in nearly every shot. All the references are impossible to take in on first viewing, and some are craftily hidden in the background.
“I think it’s important to have the things that no one notices because it creates the backdrop and the feeling of the scene, but not the focus,” Rivera noted. “This is the mood, this is the room, but then there’s an actor there. You don’t want to take away from them. You want to be respectful of them. When you don’t notice it, I think that’s a win for VFX.”
The happy haunts of Haunted Mansion are now materializing at a theater near you.
For more stories on 20th Century Studios, Searchlight Pictures, Marvel Studios and what’s streaming or coming to Disney+, check these out:
A slew of new series and returning favorites are coming to you this fall in what is, admittedly, a pretty wild TV season considering the simultaneous strikes. But, playing the optimist, we’re hoping a resolution is in the offing, and we’ll all be able to watch new and returning series knowing that things will be back to normal. Hope springs eternal for the film and TV enthusiast.
Onto the upcoming fall season, which includes adaptations of bestselling novels, sprawling fantasy epics, gripping crime dramas, and the ever-expanding Marvel Cinematic Universe, which is now well into its TV run as new and returning series come to Disney+.
Below, we take a look at seven upcoming series; by no means an exhaustive list, but one that offers a little something for everyone.
Starring: Rosamund Pike, Daniel Henney, Zoë Robins, Madaleine Madden.
Quick Peek: Lovers of fantasy, adventure, and Rosamund Pike (a Ven diagram that captures a lot of people!) — look no further than the second season of The Wheel of Time. If you aren’t yet familiar with the series, the action follows Moiraine (Pike), a member of a magical organization who is trying to find the reincarnation of the Dragon, a powerful individual who has the potential to save the world—or destroy it. This season, we see the main characters in the aftermath of the battle with the Dark One, preparing to face off against evil once again.
Where to Watch: Prime Video.
Power Book IV: Force (season 2)
Release date: September 1
Created by: Gary Lennon.
Starring: Joseph Sikora, Isaac Keys, Lili Simmons, Shane Harper.
Quick Peek: After cutting ties with New York, Tommy Egan (Joseph Sikora) heads to the Second City, where he’s on a fresh quest to seize control of the drug world in Chicago. The second season opens with Tommy seeking to avenge the death of his former business partner, amping up the already sky-high stakes as he continues his dangerous mission to become the most powerful drug dealer of all. Be careful what you wish for, Tommy!
Quick Peek: Inspired by the classic French story about gentleman thief Arsène Lupin, the third season of this crime drama unlocks another piece of the puzzle of the life of the beloved character, played by the enormously charismatic Sy. Season three promises more thievery and ingenious disguises and will give Lupin’s cute canine companion a bigger role in the action. Woof!
Where to Watch: Netflix.
Loki (season 2)
Release date: October 6
Created by: Michael Waldron.
Starring: Tom Hiddleston, Sophia Di Martino, Owen Wilson, Gugu Mbatha-Raw.
Quick Peek: In season one, the God of Mischief (Hiddleston) found himself a warden of the Time Variance Authority and ended up engaged in a series of increasingly dangerous capers, all of which took place after the events in Avengers: Endgame, and all of which presented Loki with bizarre permutations of himself, calling into question everything he thought he knew. Season two will continue to play in the multiverse, as Loki, his buddy Mobius (Owen Wilson), and his paramour (of sorts) Sylvia (Sophia Di Martino) find fresh adventures awaiting them in their timeless corner of the MCU.
Where to Watch: Disney+
Lessons in Chemistry
Release date: October 13
Created by: Lee Eisenberg.
Starring: Brie Larson, Lewis Pullman, Stephanie Koenig, Aja Naomi King.
Quick Peek: Based on the best-selling debut novel from Bonnie Garmus, Lessons in Chemistry details the story of Elizabeth Zott (Larson), who is forced to balance her professional life as a scientist with her new domestic role as a single mother. She accepts a job on a TV cooking show teaching recipes to bored yet eager housewives, all while yearning to return to her actual dream of pursuing science. Stellar cast, stellar source material, and one of fall’s most hotly anticipated new series.
Where to Watch: Apple TV+
All the Light We Cannot See
Release date: November 2
Created by: Shawn Levy and Steven Knight.
Starring: Aria Mia Loberti, Louis Hofman, Hugh Laurie, Mark Ruffalo.
Quick Peek: Travel back to the ravages of World War II in this heartfelt tale based on Anthony Doerr’s best-selling 2014 novel. The series follows the story of Marie-Laure (Aria Mia Loberti), a blind French teen who crosses paths with a German soldier as they struggle to survive in war-torn Europe. In their own ways, they must come to understand hope, sorrow, and what human connection really means as their world is being torn apart. Have tissues at hand.
Starring: Alaqua Cox, K. Devery Jacobs, Charlie Cox, Vincent D’Onofrio.
Quick Peek: After the events of Hawkeye, Maya Lopez (Alaqua Cox) deals with the aftermath of her actions as a cog in Kingpin (Vincent D’Onofrio)’s criminal empire. Set in New York City, Maya must embrace what community and family really represent by reconnecting with her Native American heritage and confronting her past, which includes some dastardly deeds and some very powerful enemies. Charlie Cox’s Matt Murdock/Daredevil will also be in play, before he stars in his own new series, Daredevil: Born Again. As we said, the Marvel Cinematic Universe now includes the TV realm.
Where to Watch: Disney+
Featured image: Episode 8. Brie Larson in “Lessons in Chemistry,” premiering October 13, 2023 on Apple TV+.
These days, action movies are hardly lacking — you’ve got John Wick, Ethan Hunt, the Fast & Furious family, the heroes of RRR, and whoever the next James Bond will be — yet we did have one quibble; we needed more man-versus-prehistoric monster shark action. Ever since 2018’s The Meg swam into our lives, we realized there’s a certain center in our brain that seems to demand a single thing; Jason Statham fighting the biggest shark that ever lived. Period. Like the titular Megalodon, our appetite could never truly be whet. Luckily, the latest installment of The Meg franchise has arrived.
Meg 2: The Trench promises viewers an old-school summer blockbuster that leans in—way, way in—to the sublime absurdity of its premise. Before we dive into the deep end of what to expect in the sequel, it is necessary to remember and reflect on the original, now streaming on Hulu. Directed by Ben Wheatley and Jon Turteltaub, The Meg follows a group of researchers who discover a Megalodon in the depths of the ocean and attempt to resist its ferocious attacks against them.
Professional deep sea diver Jonas Taylor (Jason Statham) opens the movie on a submarine performing a rescue mission. Amidst vibrant blues and yellows, he helps eight crew members escape from an unknown predator that only he is able to see. Folks, he’s afraid. He has every right to be afraid. What he’s seen makes the great white in Jaws look like Nemo.
Caption: JASON STATHAM as Jonas Taylor in Warner Bros. Pictures’ and Gravity Pictures’ science fiction action thriller “THE MEG,” a Gravity Pictures release for China, and a Warner Bros. Pictures release throughout the rest of the world. Photo Credit: Courtesy of Warner Bros. Pictures
For those unfamiliar with the megalodon, one thing to know is that its immensity cannot be overstated. The ancient shark could reach up to 62 feet in length and grew teeth of around 7 inches long. The Meg’s chompers, in combination with their exceptionally large jaws, were enough to easily swallow two adult people side by side. The prehistoric shark has been featured in a few other films like Jurassic Shark (2012), Megalodon (a 2018 TV movie), Megalodon Rising (2021), and The Black Demon (2023)—but it’s safe to say the Warner Bros. franchise has given the megalodon the kind of robust CGI makeover it’s never previously enjoyed.
Back to The Meg, we fast forward five years later; billionaire Jack Morris (Rainn Wilson) travels to his investment Mana One, a marine biology research facility at the Mariana Trench, where he is promised a look at their most recent discovery. Under a layer of hydrogen, the crew uncovers an entire ecosystem untouched by humanity, with hundreds of species ripe for exploration. Of course, one of these species is the bloodthirsty Megalodon, who, once unleashed, begins terrorizing everything it can get its enormous teeth on. Think Jurassic Park meets Jaws meets Cocaine Bear(the Meg wants to eat as badly as Cokey, or Pablo Escobear, wanted more cocaine.)
Though Taylor was deemed a madman and a coward after his rescue mission freakout five years prior, the leaders of the lab know they need his help if they want to survive. He reluctantly agrees, and together, the group faces off against the beasts — yes, it turns out there are two — until the Megs finally meet their demise. Or so they think.
The existence of Meg 2: The Trench means that Taylor’s job isn’t finished, and a fresh bloodbath is imminent. Taylor and his friends are in for yet another major battle against the Megalodons, only now they’re much closer to shore.
The trailer for the new film reveals what made the original so appealing; The unstoppable force of a prehistoric shark against the immovable object of Statham’s balletic grace and gruff charm. We get a clear view of just how ferocious Megalodons have been over the last 65 million years when a scar-faced Meg jumps on the shore and devours a T-Rex just thirty seconds into the new trailer. If you’re keeping score, the Meg has now mocked Jaws’s size and taken out Jurassic Park’s reigning king (not counting the beloved velociraptors or the hybrid dinosaurs that have been such monsters in the Jurassic World franchise.) In addition, the Megs have begun hunting in packs, modifying their solitary killing behaviors in the original.
Meg 2: The Trench also offers new ancient creatures coming into play, like what seems to be a Kraken (because honestly, why not) and primeval lizards. There are helicopters doing death-defying tricks, a la Mission: Impossible. There is Jason Statham riding a giant wave in a super sick jet ski. Pure. Cinema.
The Meg franchise exists to entertain. If it doesn’t quite have the existential horror of the original Jaws, which is okay. The Meg is Jaw’s roided out, utterly lunatic distant cousin. In Jaws, a simple concept like a shark attack was remolded and magnified into a Moby-Dick-like struggle with nature. Spielberg essentially gave birth to the modern summer blockbuster with little more than a wonky mechanical shark and our fear of what we can’t see (Jaws infamously made viewers nearly insane with tension without showing the actual shark all that much.) But like Jaws, The Meg and Meg 2: The Trench are best enjoyed in a group, in a theater, where our fears as almost matched by the size of the screen.
Meg 2: The Trench is in theaters now.
For more on Warner Bros., HBO, and Max, check out these stories:
Writer/director Clement Virgo followed his instincts when he returned to feature filmmaking. Since his last feature, Poor Boy’s Game (2007), Virgo has been directing TV, working more or less nonstop. He’s directed episodes of Empire, Netflix’s Dahmer- Monster: The Jeffrey Dahmer Story, and OWN’s megachurch drama Greenleaf. He was thinking about getting back into features when a friend handed him a copy of David Chariandy’s novel “Brother,” about two Trinidadian immigrants in the Toronto suburb of Scarborough during a smotheringly hot summer in 1991.
“I just knew I had to make it,” Virgo says. “I knew the feelings in the novel, and I knew a way into it.”
Virgo’s adaptation is a gorgeously wrought, quietly powerful return to filmmaking. He marshalls all of his gifts and his years of experience to tell the story of two brothers, Francis (Aaron Pierre) and Michael (Lamar Johnson), deftly teasing out their story along three separate timelines, covering some twenty years of their life in Scarborough to a staggering climax, complete with a gorgeous coda. Brother stays with you—the performances, the recurring motifs, the soundscape (both composer Todor Kobakov’s score and the hip hop that’s such a huge part of Francis’s life), the specificity. In Virgo’s hands, the whole thing appears effortless, the mark of an artist who focuses his efforts on the right things.
Clement screened the film at a Motion Picture Association event this past May in Washington, D.C., co-hosted by the Canadian Embassy, in recognition of the MPA’s partnership with the Black Screen Office. We spoke to Virgo about returning to filmmaking with such an assured, devastating new movie, why specificity creates intimacy between a viewer and a film’s subjects and more.
L-r: John Gibson (Vice President, External and Multicultural Affairs, MPA), Damon D’Oliviera (Partner/Producer, Conquering Lion Pictures), Joan Jenkinson (Executive Director, Black Screen Office), Charles Rivkin (Chairman and CEO, MPA), Wendy Noss (President, MPA-Canada), Clement Virgo (Director), Aeschylus Poulos (President/Producer, Hawkeye Pictures)
It was one of those novels that just spoke to me. Like a lot of artists, you don’t know why you’re drawn to something, but this spoke to me in a visceral way and caught me at a time when I wanted to go back to being a filmmaker. I knew the feelings in the novel, and I knew a way into it.
You thread three storylines in such a subtle way, and I’m curious how difficult that was at the scripting stage.
I was very conscious of trying to do something structurally new for me. The great thing about attempting that is that I’m not the first person to try it. I went back and looked at certain films that I thought were very successful at it. I looked at The Godfather Part II, which had that parallel storyline between the father and son. I looked at Manchester by the Sea, which I thought was a beautifully structured film. I find screenplays are really about structure, and once I found the architecture for the story and how each moment and each timeline influences the next and informs what we just saw, I had it. Filmmakers have been playing with structure and time since Orson Welles and D.W. Griffith.
The performances you get from Aaron Pierre and Lamar Johnson are so powerful. As someone who has worked with actors for decades now, I’d love to hear how you managed your relationship with them.
In terms of process, I think every actor has a different methodology for how they work. One of the great things about working in television is that sometimes you haven’t had a chance to meet the actor, and the first time you do is on set. If it’s an ongoing series, you even haven’t cast them, so you don’t have a rapport. So you have to figure out very quickly what they need and what motivates them, and how to be a great audience for them. The great actors are very creative, and if you stay open to that, you get great ideas from them. They make the character so much richer than what you’ve written on the page. And Aaron Pierre and Lamar Johnson brought great ideas to Francis and Michael.
And how were you a good audience for them?
It was to try to help guide them in a subtle way. It’s a cliche, but it’s really a collaboration; it’s trying to be thoughtful and emotionally intelligent about how to inspire, when to push, when to leave them alone, when to encourage, and when to shut up. It’s all the things that you do in any relationship, you’re trying to figure out how to be a good partner and collaborator.
L-r: Aaron Pierre and Clement Virgo on the set of “Brother.”
Your film manages to show, often through the unspoken physicality of how Francis and Michael go through the world, the impact of all the forces arrayed against them—the police, their relationship with their hardworking but often absent mother (a wonderful Marsha Stephanie Blake), their being Jamaican immigrants in a Toronto suburb. I’m wondering how much of that direction and how much is pure performance?
I think it’s really a bunch of different things. It’s cinema in terms of what is the image saying? What are you communicating with that image? What’s the body language, what’s the behavior telling you or not telling you? And how do I, as an audience member, interpret that image? The films that I love communicate through pure cinema. I think that’s the difference between television and film. I just read something that Christopher Nolan said about cinema that’s really interesting. He said that a lot of people think cinema is about plot, but it’s really an audiovisual experience. I thought about that for hours after because it’s true. As a filmmaker, what you’re trying to do is communicate a feeling, a tone. You’re trying to immerse the audience in an experience. Everything is story.
L-r: Lamar Johnson, Aaron Pierre, and Clement Virgo on the set of “Brother.”
Every constituent part within a film is telling one story?
The costumes are story. The set design is story. The lighting is story. You’re trying to communicate non-verbally and have the audience feel something and take something away from the film. How Aaron Pierre walks into a room, what he’s wearing, is the camera with him and subjective, or is it watching him and slowly moving in? It’s all the language and tricks of cinema. Sometimes that stuff is intuitive. You don’t know why you do it. I think most writers and filmmakers, most artists, actually, are trying to create meaning out of their own lives. It’s kind of impossible to hide who you are in your work.
L-r: Lamar Johnson and Aaron Pierre in “Brother.” Credit: Guy Godfree
You made one crucial change in your adaptation, switching the brothers from Trinidadian to Jamaican immigrants. Can you talk about that a bit?
I didn’t want to have to think about it. I didn’t want to intellectualize it, I just wanted to make choices in the moment that felt intuitive. I think that’s the hardest thing, as an artist and a writer, is to get to a place where it’s just pure impulse and instinct. With my background, being born and growing up in Jamaica, I didn’t have to think about the details, I just had to recall and try to communicate and be as specific as I could. I’ve never been a schoolboy in Paris in 1963, but when you see The 400 Blows, it’s so specific to that experience you recognize your own humanity in that story. I’m trying to communicate a collective humanity, and the more specific I am to my own experience, the more it will hopefully translate, and you’ll see your own humanity in my story.
Let’s end with the recurring motif in Brothers, which is Francis and Michael climbing the electrical tower. Can you tell me about filming that?
We filmed it here in Toronto, there’s a decommissioned hydro tower weigh station where there’s no electricity. We got permission from the provincial government to go in and be able to shoot there. We couldn’t climb the tower for real, so it’s a combination of the real space and what we built on our own and with CGI to create that sense of height and jeopardy. But that image is how DavidChariandy starts his novel, and I thought it was a beautiful metaphor for the brothers to use that as a visual motif. I’m assuming the audience is going to think something dreadful is going to happen when they’re climbing that tower, but of course, you try to twist that expectation. They get to the top, and it’s like looking out into the future. It’s a MacGuffin, like Rosebud in Citizen Kane or the Lost Ark in Raiders of the Lost Ark; when an object or piece of architecture has meaning in a film, I always find that quite powerful. Like in Mad Max: Fury Road, the image of Charlize Theron falling to her knees in the middle of the desert after that long journey, with the wind blowing sand around her. When I make a film, I think in images.
Lamar Johnson and Aaron Pierre in “Brother.” Credit: Guy Godfree.
Featured image: L-r: Lamar Johnson and Aaron Pierre in “Brother.” Credit: Guy Godfree
There is an argument to be made that there could be an investigative series starring Paramount’s senior vice president of archives Andrea Kalas and costume and prop archivist Randall Thropp. Among their myriad of responsibilities for the vast archives of one of Hollywood’s most legendary studios, Kalas and Thropp are often called upon to act as asset sleuths, uncovering iconic (and lesser known) props, costumes, and more from Paramount’s 111 history that were scattered across the globe before the archives department was created.
They’re also quick to tip their caps to their equally passionate colleagues, like costumer and restorer Betsey Potter, who might be called upon to recreate a dress worn by Barbara Stanwyck in The Lady Eve, while music archivist Liz Kirkscey might piece together a piece played in an old film, on her piano, which she has in her office.
We spoke to Kalas and Thropp about their roles in Paramount’s Archive Department, why their work is not just about preserving the past but helping filmmakers and TV creators make the next future hit, and how some of the most memorable costumes of all time used to be re-used—again and again—before the archives department existed.
You’re both in constant contact with some of cinema’s most enduring objects and images, which sounds pretty amazing.
Andrea Kalas: It’s just a complete privilege to be able to work around all these different amazing objects that represent so many different kinds of creativity. When Olivia Newton-John died, for instance, it was so sad, and I immediately thought of the moment when we were restoring Grease, and we had the opportunity to listen to just the vocal track because we were re-mixing it. Listening to her voice so clearly, with no accompaniment, you got this amazing view into her talent. That comes true all the time working in archives.
And Paramount has some of the most iconic films of all time…
Kalas: Seeing, for example, the production design that Dean Tavourlaris did for The Godfather, where the New York street is so incredibly detailed and composed with this true craftsman’s ability, or a music score and hearing the work of these incredible musicians. This is why, in my opinion, movies are the greatest art form ever, right? They’re every art form. And so having that ability to work in the archives, you just get exposure to that kind of thing every day.
Sticking with The Godfather (1972) for a second, what happens to some of those iconic pieces of the wardrobe, considering that film long predates the archives department? Did actors take them home back then?
Randall Thropp: That’s a good question. We don’t know. We have done quite the search, trying to track down where some of this stuff has gone; every now and then, a piece will show up in an auction, and if we can buy it, we’ll try to buy it. But really, it’s amazing—they just kind of evaporated. I would love to have one of the key principal pieces from The Godfather in the collection. Supposedly, things went back into the costume department, but there’s no trace of that. Again, there was no archive then; there was nobody setting things aside and considering them important at that time. That’s something that’s just happened over the last probably twenty years or so that studio archives have become repositories for some of these great pieces.
Kalas: Once upon a time, every studio was making sixty movies a year, so everything existed on this one lot and was being constantly used and reused. Tons of costumes and jewelry that could have been used in many, many movies. Then, as we moved away from that kind of factory manufacturing of movies on the lot to location shooting and other things, the idea of keeping things around for reusing them went away. After a while, the old idea of actually having a costume shop at all started to fade. Then, a lot of those costumes were sold and auctioned off, creating the collector’s market that still exists today. And that’s one of the challenges for us; we will try to acquire back a piece if we see it on auction, but they’re very, very pricey. It’s a much bigger investigation into how Hollywood studios have changed and to trace wear costumes and props when over time.
It’s wild to think of an iconic costume, like the tuxedo Marlon Brando is wearing at the beginning of The Godfather, popping up in another movie on another actor.
Kalas: Or it might have been rented, and they returned it to the rental shop.
Turning to props for a second, I have to ask—do you have a favorite prop, Randall?
Thropp: One of my favorite pieces I have on display is a butter gun that was carried by Antonio Banderas in the SpongeBob Movie: A Sponge out of Water (2015). It was the first prop that I received that was made on a 3D printer, and it’s a very heavy piece, but it’s so beautifully crafted. That’s my appreciation for what I’ve been able to save and do is a celebration of creative people.
Antonio Banderas in “The Spongebob Movie: Sponge Out of Water.” Courtesy Paramount Pictures.
Can you talk me through a couple more standout props and costumes?
Randall Thropp: I’m very proud of the historical collection I was able to build because a lot of the costumes were still in the rental department. Then, when they dismantled the rental department, I was able to go through and pull what I could identify and what I felt were key pieces or important pieces. We had very few props and the props that we did have had been squirreled away under a stage. The props were downstairs, like from TheAddams Family (1991), and there were some very good pieces from Addams Family Values (1993), too. Barbara Stanwyck’s dress from The Lady Eve (1941), the one she wore when she trips Henry Fonda in an iconic scene. Cary Grant’s sport coat from To Catch a Thief (1955), one of Roy Rogers’s fringed jackets from Son of Paleface (1952), and of course, there’s Lyda Roberti, who is pretty much forgotten now, but she was in a film called Million Dollar Legs (1932), we have a dress that’s in need of restoration because it’s a quite heavy beaded dress that she wears when she comes down the stairs and sings a song that she’s the hottest thing. It’s so weird, I love that movie.
Roy Rogers in “Son of Paleface.” Courtesy Paramount Pictures.
And were any of these pieces reused in other films?
Thropp: The Barbara Stanwyck dress from The Lady Eve. She has a beaded Bolero top that Edith Head had designed with that outfit, and over the years, I’ve found at least three different actresses wearing that for publicity photos. It was used in the big costume ball scene in To Catch a Thief, there’s a woman who’s supposed to be the hostess, and she’s barely seen, but she’s in this enormous green ball gown. That gown was originally designed for Casanova’s Big Night for a featured actress. And then Edith Head reused that, with different jewelry, for To Catch a Thief. And then somebody else reused it, but we don’t know where, and they replaced the whole backside of the dress. Then Betsy Potter, who does our costume restorations, meticulously dyed and matched this green fabric to match the backside of the dress because someone had taken the backside off and made it a yellow-green.
Any favorite costumes or props from the modern Paramount era?
Thropp: There were some really interesting props from the Transformers franchise, also from Mission: Impossible. I love Mission: Impossible props because they are small; most of them are handheld because they’re props that you would conceal, not something big and bulky because you’re going to be carrying them in your pocket. Also, Star Trek had some really great things over the years.
Ving Rhames and Simon Pegg in Mission: Impossible Dead Reckoning Part One from Paramount Pictures and Skydance.
Andrea, any particular favorites of yours?
Kalas: One of my favorite costumes is one Randall actually put together from the amazing film Double Indemnity (1944). Randall noticed the different pieces that make up the costume that Barbara Stanwyck wears in the supermarket scene—there’s a skirt, there’s a vest, and there’s a blouse. And Randall put it together. But I do have a really corny answer to this question, which is my favorite thing in the archive is the actual archivists who work in it. Randall’s amazing, our music archivist, Liz Kirkscey is amazing—she has a piano in her office, as you do when you’re a music archivist. Her knowledge of the story of music in Hollywood is so comprehensive and incredible. And Charlotte Barker, who heads up our preservation restoration group and who knows our library and does an incredible job of restoring and preserving films. Other studios have different archives sort of scattered around, we’re all under one roof.
And if I pressed the issue and asked you for one absolute favorite, non-human piece of the archive?
Kalas: I think Sunset Boulevard (1950) because it also stars the Paramount lot. We worked on restoring it a few years back, and it just kept rising and rising in my mind in terms of how great it was at just every level. And one of my favorite stories about Sunset Boulevard is we actually reached out to the cinematographer’s son, who’s in real estate. We brought him in – just wanted to express our gratitude to somebody who was related to the great John Seitz. And I said to him, ‘You could really argue that your father invented film noir cinematography.’ And he said, ‘Well, you know, actually, he was just really glad for a job. He got fired from Fox because he was shooting an actress too well, and they didn’t like the actress. A totally Hollywood story, and he just told us very matter-of-factly. And you have to remember that in addition to the great work that you see, there’s also the rough and tumble side of everyday work too, and I just loved that story.
Returning, a final time, to The Godfather. In 2022, Paramount Plus released The Offer, which was centered on the incredible story behind getting Francis Ford Coppola’s masterpiece made. And it made me think how for archives, you’re not just about preserving history, but you’re often called upon to help current filmmakers and TV creators with their work. Can you speak to that a bit?
Thropp: For The Offer, we worked with them to try and identify what the Paramount back lot looked like then and what the security guards would have been wearing at that time. And so we did a lot of research for The Offer with the production designer [Laurence Bennett].
Kalas: One of my favorite things is when a director actually comes to us and says they want to watch some movies that will help them think about how to approach their new movie. We’ll hold screenings, and they’ll watch films that might have the same style or some sort of thing that they want, and I love that.
For more of our interview series with archivists, check these out:
Julio Torres, the exquisitely singular Salvadorian writer, comedian, television creator, and actor, is gearing up to reveal the newest edition to his sui generis output — Problemista. Torres’ upcoming—although sadly postponed—A24 film gives audiences yet another look into his beautiful mind, the same mind that wrote what might be the perfect Tweet back when Twitter’s logo was a blue bird, and the site had a, um, slightly different vibe: “The letter Q comes up waaaaay too early in the alphabet,” he wrote. “We’re not ready for it where it’s currently placed. It belongs with fellow avant-garde acts, X, Y and Z, deep in after the mainstream.” This is the kind of thing Torres can (and possibly did) write in his sleep.
Problemista details the story of Alejandro (Torres), an aspiring toy designer who is having a hard time turning his bespoke creations into reality in New York City. Compounding Alejandro’s trouble is the fact his work visa is running out, and it’s a new gig assisting the art world cast off Elizabeth (Tilda Swinton) that proves to be his potential lifeline to stay in the country and finally see his dreams come true. Torres knows how to use dreaminess, haze, and ambiguity to make both comedic and dramatic points in his works, and Problemista seems to demonstrate the continuation of his style. Problemista finds Torres plumbing his experiences as an immigrant artist struggling in New York City, dealing with all the pressures of trying to make it in the notoriously unforgiving metropolis, amplified tenfold by the Kafkaesque lunacy of the U.S. Immigration system. It’s a story Torres was quite literally born to tell.
The development of Torres’ offbeat, surreal sensibility—one that somehow always manages to hit you in unexpectedly emotional ways—started garnering mass attention back in his Saturday Night Live days, when he wrote some of the most sublimely weird, hysterical sketches and digital shorts during his five year run from 2016 to 2021. While an SNL sketch is often a shaggy thing, at its best hilarious because it’s both genuinely funny and because those involved, no matter how committed, can seem as amused as the viewer, two of Torres’ most iconic sketches are masterclasses in narrative precision.
Long before starring in the modern phenomenon that is Barbie, Ryan Gosling turned in a deeply hilarious performance in Torres’ overwhelmingly popular and now iconic digital short “Papyrus.” The sketch follows a man who is deeply, pathologically troubled by the fact that the original Avatar, a massive blockbuster (this was well before Avatar: The Way of Water) used the most basic font they could think of for their logo (can you guess what font they chose?). The idea, which Torres suggested during an SNL Monday morning pitch meeting, was based on another of his hilarious Tweets: “Every day I wake up and remember that Avatar, a huge international blockbuster, used the Papyrus font for their logo and no one stopped them.”
It took a bit of doing from Tweet to pitch to iconic digital short—and a big boost from Gosling, who saw the cinematic potential in the storyline and honed in on a lonely, obsessive man brooding over the grotesqueness of Avatar using Papyrus—but Torres, Gosling and their collaborators got there. Gosling plays Steven, a man haunted by recurring dreams of the man responsible for choosing such a generic font for Avatar‘s logo. Steven tries to work out his anger with his therapist (played by Kate McKinnon)—“He just highlighted Avatar. He clicked the drop-down menu, and then he just randomly selected Papyrus.” Steven’s friend (Chris Redd) tries to assuage his growing monomania by pointing out that they made some slight modifications to the font in the Avatar logo, to no avail. Steven is consumed by the crime and eventually tracks down the graphic designer responsible (Kyle Mooney), screaming, “I know what you did.” An all-time classic was born out of a completely random but phenomenally precise observation Torres had.
In “The Actress,” Torres went even further afield and delivered something deliciously offbeat. Emma Stone (Gosling’s La La Land co-star, no less) is a dedicated (if desperate) actress preparing for a role. What we’ll learn is the role is a minuscule one in a gay porn. We watch Stone’s desperate performer rifling through the “woman bin” to find bits and pieces of her character “Deirdre,” seeing her whole life unfurl before her eyes. Torres plays up the preposterous nature of her inner conflict and creates a captivating narrative that is not only funny but weirdly poignant.
Torres then branched out from SNL in his next project, his HBO series Los Espookys, which he created with the comedian Ana Fabrega and SNL alum Fred Armisen. A primarily Spanish-language show, the dark comedy series follows the adventures of a friend group who turn their adoration for horror into a strange yet alluring business, allowing them to provide frights to those who need them.
Los Espookys is distinctly dreamy, boasting hazy visuals and a synth-laden soundtrack that accentuates the ethereal feel of the series, mixed with brilliantly crafted practical effects. The characters and their motivations are quite surreal — one is a gore enthusiast, another is an heir to a chocolate empire, and another is the group’s “test dummy” who ensures their various horror ventures actually work. Together, this eccentric dream team showcases aspects of raw humanity—the good, the bad, and especially, the ugly—that Torres often highlights, one way or another, in his work.
From here, we arrive back at Problemista. This being a Torres story, it seems a fairly safe bet that this won’t be the classic rags-to-riches/immigrant makes it big story that audiences have grown accustomed to. For one, the film employs novel effects to explore ideas around immigration and displacement — once people’s visas have expired, they literally vanish off the face of the earth. Furthermore, the maze of obtaining legal citizenship is imagined as a literal series of dimly lit office rooms that Alejandro must climb through to stay in the U.S. Again, Kafkaesque, only perhaps it’s more accurate to call it Torresian.
According to Torres, parts of Problemistacome from his lived experience. While not necessarily stemming directly from his own life story, he inserts certain personal, emotional pins into the film. The Kafkaesque bureaucracy of U.S. immigration was certainly a part of Torres’ life, and the scars associated with that experience and its mundane cruelty towards those trying to make it through never completely fade.
Problemista takes what is important to Torres — his Latin heritage, vibrancy, friendship and family, and perhaps most importantly, dreaming — and injects it into one film. Torres asks audiences to ask themselves what lengths they would go to realize their innermost wishes, even at the expense of their comfort and their understanding of the world around them. Alejandro wants so badly to create and so desperately to find joy, but first, he must simply survive the U.S. Immigration system.
Problemista‘s August 4 release was delayed due to the SAG-AFTRA and WGA strikes. When it eventually comes out, with suggest you see it. If you’re not yet a Torres fan, you will be.
Julio Torres and Tilda Swinton in “Problemista.” Courtesy A24.
Featured image: NEW YORK, NEW YORK – SEPTEMBER 08: Julio Torres attends ‘Opening Ceremony 20th Anniversary: Design Of Two Decades’ at Schimanski on September 08, 2022 in New York City. (Photo by Santiago Felipe/Getty Images)
The weapon-wielding mutated reptilian darlings of New York City are back fighting crime in the newest rendition of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles series. This fresh installment from director Jeff Rowe, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem, will hit theaters on August 2, and the film boasts some serious talent, including Seth Rogen (he co-stars, co-wrote, and co-produced the film), Jackie Chan, and John Cena, as well as up-and-coming star Ayo Edebiri (The Bear).
The most recent trailer revealed that Mutant Mayhem will embrace a dark yet dynamic aesthetic, with lively characters juxtaposing gritty scenes of New York back alleys and streets. Mutant Mayhem aims to tell an epic story of acceptance and the demands of responsibility — the turtle team is forced to reckon with saving the same humans who shamed them into living in the sewers.
This new vision for TMNT hints at a level of complexity and depth of inner conflict that has been the hallmark of a recent spate of excellent animated films. Those include Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse (2023), Puss in Boots: The Last Wish (2022), and Guillermo del Toro’s Oscar-winning Pinocchio (2022). Each of these films has been lauded as brilliant for their fictive yet poignant representations of the life experience of their central characters, delving into some of our deepest fears and concerns.
Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse furthers the same nuanced depiction of the loneliness in entering adulthood that was so abundant in the Oscar-winning Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse (2018). Miles Morales (Shameik Moore) has gotten used to his role as Spider-Man but finds the secrecy around his hero duties too much to bear. He yearns for someone who understands him — the real him — but even when Gwen Stacy (Hailee Steinfeld) returns to his life, things are not the same.
Gwen Stacy (Hailee Steinfeld) and Miles Morales (Shameik Moore) in Columbia Pictures and Sony Pictures Animations’ SPIDER-MAN™: ACROSS THE SPIDER-VERSE.
The overlooked Puss in Boots: The Last Wish interplays mesmerizing action sequences with a wicked manifestation of Death that plagues the main character. The famed hero-cat Puss in Boots (Antonio Banderas) is now on his last life after wasting away his other eight on idiotic dares and shows of bravado. Now, the arrogant kitty is being hunted by Death (Wagner Moura), imagined as a grinning white wolf carrying two sickles. Puss journeys far and wide to wish upon a star for his lives again — but it may be too little, too late.
Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio takes the classic Italian tale and fashioned it into a commentary on encroaching fascism and the core essence of humanity. The Oscar-winning visionary placed the actions of the film within the fascist reign of dictator Benito Mussolini, thus informing the pressures put on the characters and their consistent confrontations with death. The film isn’t afraid to dabble in the dark, and the result is a rich, even heartbreaking meditation on grief, painstakingly crafted at every level.
Oscar-winning filmmakers like Del Toro and Spider-Verse’s Phil Lord and Chris Miller are just a few examples of ambitious artists who are increasingly recognizing the storytelling potential of animation as a medium. Joining their ranks are the aforementioned Seth Rogen in TMNT and One Night in Miami screenwriter Kemp Powers (among others) in Across the Spider-Verse, and they’re crafting films exploring vastly different genres and themes. Animation holds numerous useful advantages for filmmakers used to live-action, including the possibility for specific, fantasy-driven aesthetics and high-intensity, moving shots that simply may not be possible in live-action productions.
A visual development image featuring Pavitr Prabhakar, aka Spider-Man India, Gwen Stacy and Miles Morales fighting The Spot in the city of Mumbattan on Earth-50101 – a kaleidoscopic hybrid of Mumbai and Manhattanfor Columbia Pictures and Sony Pictures Animations’ SPIDER-MAN™: ACROSS THE SPIDER-VERSE.
CGI offers increasingly magical-seeming abilities to create whatever an artist dreams in vivid, photo-realistic visuals, yet some of the newest entries also deploy technology to achieve more old-school effects, as well as more painstaking forms, from stop-animation to hand drawing, culminating in a bounty of varying styles. And because animation allows for ultimate creativity in expression, filmmakers can use animated features to ask profound questions in unconventional ways. Can the blue, life-giving fairy in Pinocchio be a haunting, sphinxlike Wood Sprite who bestows insight into eternal life? Sure, Guillermo del Toro says, of course she can.
True, our current animation renaissance follows previous eras in which animation once again proved what a formidable medium it is, reinvented time and again by studios including Pixar, Disney, and DreamWorks. This new era, reveling in everything from old-school technique, hyper-realism, to exuberantly saturated comic book colors, is the latest evolution in an overarching genre called animation that is as old as cinema itself.
I, for one, saw Puss in Boots: The Last Wish around three times when it first came out and would one hundred percent see it again. Between the incredible voice acting and the witty dialogue, The Last Wish still appeals to me, even as a 20-year-old.
Animation isn’t so much a genre as a tool for conveying stories of varying complexity and themes. You can do anything with it, create any kind of story you want to tell. Often, animated films are sequestered into their own category, reserved for children’s tales or adult humor that is crass and lacking in substance. But, as Guillermo del Toro pointed out in his Golden Globe Award speech in January, “Animation is cinema. Animation is not a genre for kids, it is a medium.”
So, with all this in mind, curious viewers may give a few hours of their time to some captivating, animated projects deserving of more recognition. For one, audiences can look into the suspenseful and unsettling Netflix film The House (2022), a three-part anthology centering around the residents of the same house at different points in time. Also on Netflix, their Emmy-winning anthology series Love Death + Robots is a fascinating (if at times harrowing) watch, featuring a collection of short stories that span across several genres like science fiction, comedy, and horror. Heck, consummate filmmaker David Fincher co-created the series.
Finally, as mentioned before, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem is coming out soon — see these beloved turtles save the day on August 2 in theaters.
Featured image: Spider-Punk (Daniel Kaluuya) in Columbia Pictures and Sony Pictures Animations’ SPIDER-MAN™: ACROSS THE SPIDER-VERSE.
In the world of Chupa, Jonás Cuarón, renowned co-writer of Gravity and writer-director of Desierto, invites young viewers on a thrilling adventure immersed in the Latin American legend of the Chupacabras. With a vision to create a universally beloved character akin to the iconic creatures from Gremlins or E.T., Chupa not only presents a captivating story but also serves as a gateway for bicultural children to explore their cultural roots and cultivate a deeper appreciation for their Latin American heritage.
For those unacquainted with the subject, “El Chupacabras” emerged as a legendary creature during the 1990s in Mexico. It captivated the media and sparked discussions that traversed the boundaries of rumor and reality. Whispers of its origins can be traced back to Puerto Rico, but they swiftly took hold throughout the region, enthralling the public with its terrifying nature. Its name, “goat-sucker” in English, derives from the creature’s supposed thirst for the blood of livestock, particularly goats. As children of the 90s in Latin America, we were intimately acquainted with the spine-tingling fear that “El Chupacabras” evoked. These enigmatic creatures loomed large in our collective consciousness.
Some argue that the extensive media coverage surrounding the “Chupacabras” phenomenon in Mexico served as a strategic distraction, diverting public attention away from pressing economic and political issues of the time. While the truth behind the origin of the myth remains elusive, Cuarón’s imaginative reinterpretation of “El Chupacabras” as an enchanting creature is precisely the narrative we didn’t know we needed.
In Chupa, available for streaming on Netflix, we follow the journey of Alex, skillfully portrayed by Evan Whitten (Destroyer, The Resident). Alex is a young Mexican-American boy who finds himself reluctantly embarking on a trip to Mexico to visit his grandfather in the wake of his father’s passing. Portraying the vibrant character of “abuelo Chava,” an aging former “Lucha Libre ” wrestler, is the Oscar-nominated Mexican star Demián Bichir (Better Life, Che: Guerrilla).
During his time in Mexico, Alex’s path crosses with that of a cute koala-like baby Chupacabra. The extraordinary creature forms a close bond with him, leading them on a thrilling adventure. However, their friendship faces a formidable threat in the form of the cunning Richard Quinn, portrayed by Christian Slater (Mr. Robot, He Was A Quiet Man). Driven by his own ulterior motives, Mr. Quinn seeks to exploit Chupa for biomedical purposes, placing Alex and his newfound Mexican family in a race against time to protect the creature.
In their quest to reunite the Chupa with its family, Alex is joined by his charming cousin Memo, played by the talented Nickolas Verdugo (Breakwater, The Prank Panel). Alongside Memo is Luna, portrayed by newcomer Ashley Ciarra.
If while watching Chupa, you detect echoes of Indiana Jones and other films from the 80’s Amblin era, your intuition is correct. Cuarón has been open about his nostalgic homage to those beloved adventure classics. As an ardent fan himself, Cuarón masterfully captures the spirit and excitement that defined those iconic movies.
In an interview with Pop Culture, Cuarón refers to the time during the pandemic he spent watching films with his children as inspiration for creating Chupa. “A lot of the films we watched are movies that I grew up with, E.T., Jurassic Park, Gremlins, so I suddenly became very excited to be able to make a movie like that for my kids.”
Upon encountering the Chupa project, the director had the realization that it embodied that same essence he admired in the classic Amblin films: The story of a kid and his bond with a magical creature. “I became even more excited because I grew up in Mexico in the ’90s, so I was well aware of the myth,” he told Pop Culture. “And as a kid, I heard about it all over the news… I realized that this project would allow me to do a big fantastical movie for kids, but that will portray the context of where I grew up in. And that was important to me.”
And he certainly succeeded in portraying that context. Within the tapestry of Chupa, one finds a myriad of details that instantly resonate with any Mexican who grew up in the ‘90s. In Memo’s room, we find a “Pepscilindro,” a collectible promotional bottle by Pepsi that became a coveted treasure for Mexican children. The music of “La Maldita Vecindad,” an essential part of the soundtrack of the era, feels even more nostalgic when it’s played aboard the iconic “vocho,” the Mexican Volkswagen Beetle. These cultural signifiers and many more serve as a testament to the film’s commitment to authenticity and capturing the essence of ’90s Mexico.
Throughout the movie, we witness Alex’s struggle with his bicultural identity, providing a relatable and authentic representation for young viewers. Prior to his journey to Mexico, we witness Alex being ridiculed for his lunch – picadillo, a traditional Mexican dish. “It’s just hamburger meat,” Alex defensively explains, but once he arrives back home, he adamantly rejects any association with his Mexican heritage. This portrayal offers a glimpse into the profound struggle faced by children and, indeed, individuals of all ages who wrestle with the contrasting influences of their multicultural upbringing.
When it first came out, the film sparked some buzz regarding its title. The name “Chupa” that Alex chooses for his furry friend can have sexual connotations throughout Latin America and even all the way to the Philippines. The controversy about the name is even addressed within the universe of the film, as the bright bilingual cousin Luna remarks, “You know it means sucker, right?” not fully getting into the subject. However, Cuarón defended his choice of title, explaining that it’s the type of name that an innocent American boy, who doesn’t really speak Spanish, would choose.
As the credits roll, Chupa leaves a lasting impact. As Alex navigates his bicultural identity and forms an extraordinary bond with the adorable Chupacabra, he emerges as a full-fledged hero. Chupa reminds us that heroes come in all shapes and from all backgrounds, empowering children to embrace their unique identities and celebrate their diverse experiences. With its touch of magic and abundance of family love, Chupa is a must-see film that offers an extraordinary blend of adventure, mythology, and cultural pride.
For more on big titles on Netflix, check these out:
As it is, Tom Cruise’s new Mission: Impossible movie (now playing) runs a hefty two hours and forty-three minutes, but what people see in theaters actually represents a very slimmed-down version of the original cut that director Christopher McQuarrie screened for his friends. “It ran four hours,” says Cruise’s go-to editor Eddie Hamilton. “We watched it in a screening room with 40 people, and it was two and a half hours to Venice. Then we had snacks and came back for the last hour and a half.”
Hamilton, who earned an Oscar nomination for Cruise’s Top Gun: Maverick and cut previous Mission: Impossible entries Rogue One and Fallout, faced an embarrassment of riches in the Dead Reckoning Part One rough cut. High-energy performances, eye-popping stunts, and locations like Abu Dubai, Rome, Venice, and Norway filled the screen. For the seasoned editor, the challenge came in streamlining all that footage into the summer popcorn movie that has so far grossed $370 million and critical acclaim.
Speaking from his home in London, Hamilton explains the tricks of the trade he used to reckon with Dead Reckoning‘s car chases, motorcycle stunts, and multiple character arcs.
Dead Reckoning throws many plates up in the air — new villains, old villains, the “cruciform key” Macguffin, Ethan Hunt’s gang, plus the addition of Hayley Atwell’s new pickpocket femme fatale character Grace. How do you balance all that plot information with emotional beats?
That’s the push-pull we deal with every single day. Especially on a long movie like this, you have to make sure that there’s no air. We discussed it all the time with Chris McQuarrie being like: “I’m feeling air, I’m feeling air.” I’ve been working on the movie for three years, I’ve watched it 700 times and seen it iterate day after day, compressing, compressing, compressing.
Hayley Atwell and Tom Cruise in Mission: Impossible Dead Reckoning Part One from Paramount Pictures and Skydance.
You like to keep things moving.
But you can get to the point where you compress it too much. Right at the end of the movie, Ethan Hunt’s talking to the henchwoman Paris, where she’s lying there going, “Why did you spare my life?” We did an ultra-tight version of that scene where I cut all the air out. I came back the next day and watched it again with Chris. We went, “Woah. There’s no emotion at all. I don’t feel anything. It’s just information,” And information is the death of emotion.
The movie’s first big set piece at the airport introduces Hayley Atwell’s character Grace, plus multiple bad guys, surveillance cameras, cutbacks to Luther and his laptop, and you’ve got Benji racing around trying to find a ticking bomb, and Ethan Hunt’s in the middle of it all. That’s a lot of moving parts!
The airport scene was filmed partially at a real airport in Abu Dhabi. It was phenomenally difficult, but Chris doesn’t worry too much about figuring everything out on the page or even on set. The actors give us a lot of flavors, he collects the ingredients, and then we bake the cake in the editing room. That sequence took weeks of work. We had to intercut between Luther and Ethan and Grace and Paris and the buyer while also making sure the graphics on Benji’s laptop are designed so that your eye is guided around the screen. The first time never works. We throw it all out, and it still doesn’t work. It’s an evolutionary process. Honestly, I was working on that scene for two years.
Hayley Atwell and Esai Morales in Mission: Impossible Dead Reckoning Part One from Paramount Pictures and Skydance.
Complex sequences seem to have become part of Mission: Impossible’s DNA.
If you think back to the opera scene in Rogue Nation, there’s all this cross-cutting to keep each character “alive,” so it’s similar in that way to the airport sequence. Chris likes to challenge himself with complicated sequences because he knows that when we sit together in the edit, we will refine it until we eventually get there.
Tom Cruise, Ving Rhames and Simon Pegg in Mission: Impossible Dead Reckoning Part One from Paramount Pictures and Skydance.
Can you give an example of what it means to “refine” the raw footage?
It often involves going back and getting little close-ups of people, little bits of information. Or in the case of Hayley Atwell, she was finding her character every day. Is Grace scared? Confident? Flirty with Tom? Wily? There were times when she was a bit too confident, a bit smug, and we dialed that down. We modulated Hayley’s performance all the way through.
Tom Cruise and Hayley Atwell in Mission: Impossible Dead Reckoning Part One from Paramount Pictures and Skydance.
Were you present on set to make edits during production?
Yes, some of the time. I’d have a feed on my iPad, and on day two of the production, I’m working on day one footage, knowing it’s going to be rough and everything’s going to change. But you’ve got to start somewhere. I went through dailies and watched everything. We had 780 hours of footage on this movie.
The car chases in Rome looked phenomenal. How did you piece that footage together?
I’m thrilled with the way it turned out, but the Rome sequence took weeks of careful work to make sure [the action] landed correctly. You have to understand that Tom Cruise and Hayley Atwell are in a two-shot the entire time. You’re not cutting to create chemistry — you’re allowing their behavior to play out in a two-shot. One of our touchstone movies was What’s Up Doc.
Hayley Atwell and Tom Cruise in Mission: Impossible Dead Reckoning Part One from Paramount Pictures and Skydance.
The screwball comedy with Barbara Streisand?
Yeah. Chris loved that film and really embraced that approach in the Fiat and, before that, the BMW chase where Ethan’s handcuffed to Grace, and he’s driving one-handed. We filmed so much cool stuff but ended up compressing it because we kept getting feedback from the audience that it was just too long. Tom would always tell us, “You’ve always got to leave the audience wanting more,” so that became our mantra. We said, “Okay, we’re going to dive back into the chase sequence and take out more until it’s the right length.” Chris and Tom listen to the audience very carefully. They want to make mass entertainment for people in every country on the planet.
Hayley Atwell and Tom Cruise in Mission: Impossible Dead Reckoning Part One from Paramount Pictures and Skydance.
Can you talk a bit more about editing the action in Rome so it would track for an audience?
The trick is any time you cut to Tom and Hayley reacting in the car, you can then jump to any location without losing the audience, apart from locals. We cut to Ethan, and he turns right; we’re in a different part of the city, and who cares? Sometimes we’d take one chase and combine it with another one, and you don’t even notice that we’re in two different parts of the city. So we do cheat. But we’re constantly trying to keep this dynamic energy going with pressure from the other characters and the gags while we’re balancing all of that with Tom’s precision driving, where he carefully knocks over scooters or drives into some tiny alley. We cut out quite a bit of cool stuff, so we’re going to do a deleted shots reel for the DVD where you can see all these bits in a montage.
For the grand finale, you’ve got Tom Cruise and his motorcycle flying through the air to land on a speeding train – – pretty spectacular. Were you on set when they shot that?
Yeah. In September 2020, I was in Norway when they filmed the jump, but it’s always about the emotional state, isn’t it? Because it doesn’t matter if someone does a stunt if you don’t have an emotional connection to the characters and the stakes, and why people are doing what they’re doing. How much of the story do we see before we see Ethan on the motorbike? How often do we cut to Grace and the White Widow on the train? To get all those pieces balanced correctly, you have to work really hard to make everything smooth and emotional, so you’re not bumped off the ride.
Tom Cruise plays Ethan Hunt in Mission: Impossible Dead Reckoning – Part One from Paramount Pictures and Skydance.Tom Cruise in Mission: Impossible Dead Reckoning Part One from Paramount Pictures and Skydance.
You clearly place a premium on paring the story down to its essence.
You have to be utterly ruthless. Even in the last week of the edit, I’d say to Chris, “We’ve got to cut this; we’ve got to cut that.” This was stuff that Chris was very fond of, but he was like, “If it can go, it must go.” It’s the art of getting the maximum amount of story into the minimum amount of screen time. That’s what you’re aiming for. That’s the holy grail.
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Tim Burton’s first foray into television, Wednesday, took the world by storm—and garnered 12 Emmy nominations in the process—enrapturing viewers with its dark wit, fantastic characters, and unmistakable Burtonesque aesthetic. The show’s record-breaking popularity has been further fueled by its viral dance scene, cementing its status as a cultural phenomenon. With all those Emmy nominations and the announcement of a second season, fans of the series are buzzing with excitement. So, as we await the not-nearly-imminent-enough debut, let us delve into the reasons why Wednesday worked.
A recap for those who have yet to experience the eerie world of Wednesday. The show follows the rebellious Addams’ teenage daughter, played by Jenna Ortega (Scream 6, You), as she navigates life and a series of mysterious killings as a new student at the Nevermore Academy. A high school whose student body includes sirens, gargoyles, werewolves, shapeshifters, and psychics. Inextricably linked to the academy’s history as the site of her parents’ fateful meeting, Wednesday confronts a series of supernatural occurrences while discovering her previously unknown abilities.
Since its debut in November 2022, Wednesday has become a worldwide sensation, breaking audience records in 90 countries and ranking as the second most-watched series on Netflix of all time. It joins the ranks of only two other shows, Stranger Things season 4 and Squid Game, to surpass the one billion watched hours milestone. The show’s choreographed dance scene, created by Ortega herself, became a viral sensation on TikTok, with millions of users participating, including legendary performers like Madonna and Lady Gaga. These moments have helped solidify Wednesday’s place as an instant cult classic and set the stage for a highly-anticipated second season.
Jenna Ortega’s portrayal of Wednesday Addams makes Wednesday a must-see series. Audiences and critics alike have heaped praise on Ortega’s performance. Notably, Burton himself lauded Ortega’s performance, saying that they were lucky to have landed her. Burton is such a believer in Ortega’s star power he’s cast her in his upcoming sequel to Beetlejuice as the daughter of Winona Ryder’s Lydia Deetz. But nailing her role as the deadpan daughter of the Addams family was never a given, and she had big shoes to fill—Ortega had to contend with the legacy of Christina Ricci’s unforgettable portrayal of Wednesday in the 1990s film adaptation of The Addams Family. Yet she won over Ricci herself, who praised Ortega’s portrayal and said she’s “truly incredible at making Wednesday a modern badass.”
Ortega’s dedication to the role is evident in her commitment to performing her own stunts and learning new skills such as fencing, archery, playing cello, canoeing, and even a little bit of German to lend authenticity to her character. Ortega’s dry sense of humor and innate understanding of Wednesday’s worldview only added to the depth and authenticity of her performance.
Burton’s vision for the series took a significant step towards fair representation by casting Jenna Ortega, a Mexican and Puerto Rican actress, as the first Latina to portray the character. While the Addams family is of mixed heritage, this is the first time the character of Wednesday is being portrayed by a Latina. Wednesday’s ethnicity is only one aspect of her character, not the defining trait of it. However, the show does celebrate her heritage through nods to La Cultura, such as when Gomez, her father (played by Luis Guzmán), affectionately calls her his little “tormenta” (storm in Spanish) or when Wednesday mentions Día De Los Muertos. For gothic Latinas everywhere, this representation is long overdue, challenging common stereotypes in media of Latinas being overly emotional and perpetually bubbly. Ortega’s performance as a complex, multi-dimensional Latina character will undoubtedly inspire a new generation of Latinas who have not seen themselves represented on screen in that way before.
Another powerful reason to watch Wednesday? Its timely and resonant message of acceptance of others and self-ownership.
The show highlights the commonalities between people despite apparent differences. The so-called “freaks” in society are often more normal than we realize, while those who appear to be the most “normie” among us possess a little bit of a freak inside.
Wednesday’s unwavering commitment to individuality serves as a beacon of hope in a world that can often feel stiflingly homogenous. As an outcast among outcasts, Wednesday remains true to herself, quirks and all. For anyone who has ever felt misunderstood or set apart, watching her unapologetically embrace her deadpan, multitalented persona without blinking an eye (literally) feels like receiving a “permission slip” to embrace our own weirdness and be our most authentic selves.
Furthermore, Wednesday presents a captivating storyline that explores the complex relationship between Wednesday and her mother, Morticia, played by Catherine Zeta-Jones. Morticia was an incredibly popular and beloved student during her time at Nevermore, while Wednesday is the polar opposite – an outlier among outliers. This only fuels Wednesday’s desire to step out of her mother’s shadow, adamantly rejecting the idea of following in her footsteps, i.e., leading a life filled with marriage and domesticity.
The exploration of their conflict provides viewers with an opportunity to reflect on their own parent-child relationships, particularly within Latinx culture, where the principle of family loyalty holds paramount significance and diverging from our parents’ aspirations is viewed as a grave disrespect. Nonetheless, despite their seemingly disparate goals, Wednesday and her mother share a supernatural bond that transcends their differences. This signifies a deep-rooted connection that we will hopefully get to explore more in the second season.
Ortega has given us some hints about what we can expect in the second season. Less romance and more dark twists appear to be in line for the upcoming episodes. If the show follows the timeline of the first season, we can anticipate the release to be sometime around the middle of 2024. This gives us ample time to catch up on season one and prepare for another spooky ride.
Donald Glover is hopping back in the Millennium Falcon.
Glover is set to reprise his role as Lando Calrissian, which he first took on in the Star Wars spinoff film Solo: A Star Wars Story back in 2018, for Disney+’s upcoming new series Lando. Glover will star and co-write alongside his brother Steven Glover, The Hollywood Reporterhas confirmed. The deal was struck prior to the writer’s strike, which began in May. Previously, Haunted Mansion and Dear White People director Justin Simien was attached, but he moved on before the Glover brothers signed on.
Glover’s portrayal of the young Lando Calrissian (played in the original Star Wars trilogy, as well as in the most recent, by Billy Dee Williams) was the rare case of a performer fitting perfectly into a role made iconic by somebody else before. He has the natural charm and sense of mischief that Williams first brought to the role when he appeared as Han Solo’s brother-in-smuggling in The Empire Strikes Back.
Glover had this to say back in April to GQ: “I’m not interested in doing anything that is going to be a waste of my time or just a paycheck. I would much rather spend time with people I enjoy. It just has to be the right thing, which I think it could be. Lando is definitely somebody I’d like to hang out with. We’re talking about it. That’s as much as I can say.”
Now, THR says that the deal is on. The next step, hopefully, is that there’s a resolution soon to the simultaneous SAG-AFTRA and WGA strikes, and the Glover brothers, along with everybody else in the industry, can get back to doing what they love.
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When Chris Nolan wrapped Tenet in 2919, actor Robert Pattinson gave him a book of J. Robert Oppenheimer speeches as a parting gift. That tome led Nolan to Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin’s “American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer.” For the next three years, Nolan used the Pulitzer Prize-winning biography as the foundation for what critics are hailing as his most mature, emotional work.
Oppenheimer stars Cillian Murphy (Peaky Blinders) as the brilliant physicist who was tapped to run the Manhattan Project, the United States ultimately successful effort to build the atomic bomb. Oppenheimer and his team developed the weapons of mass destruction that were dropped on Nagasaki and Hiroshima. Nolan told The Credits that he thinks, despite never publicly apologizing or expressing any guilt over the horror his weapons caused, “all of his actions from 1945 onwards are the actions of somebody truly suffering under an immense weight of shame and guilt.”
Several months before he started filming, Nolan called Oscar-winning composer Ludwig Göransson. “Chris never talks about what he’s working on,” says Göransson, who previously scored Tenet. “The phone call is out of the blue. ‘Hey, I’ve got a script—do you want to read it tomorrow?’ I had no idea what to expect. I go over and read the script. It was a jaw-dropping moment like you’re watching the world through Oppenheimer’s eyes, living the world through his mind. And I realized that’s what the music needs to do. It needs to channel the whole spectrum of his emotions. That was a big challenge: How do you put all these different types of emotions into the music?”
The answers can be heard in Göransson’s intense orchestrations for Oppenheimer, co-starring Matt Damon, Emily Blunt, and Florence Pugh, among others. Göransson, who spoke to The Credits about his Black Panther: Wakanda Forever music, talked about how he collaborated with his violinist wife, skipped traditional percussion, and faced one of the biggest challenges of his career by setting imagery of atomic particles to music.
With Black Panther, you cited the singer Baaba Maal as a key inspiration. In creating the music of Oppenheimer, did you also have someone like that who helped focus your efforts?
Yeah, it was actually my wife Serena Göransson.
How so?
She’s a very accomplished violin player, and one of Chris’s first ideas for the music was that he wanted solo violin to portray the character of Robert Oppenheimer. Especially since it’s a fretless instrument, the violin can go from the most melodic, romantic tone to a neurotic horrific manic vibrato within a split second, so I worked a lot with Serena on this. Experimenting with Serena and doing this music together was a great opportunity.
The string section produces this signature motif that sounds like something the layman might call a “smear.” What do you call that effect?
I would call it string glissandos. It’s these micro-tonal glissandos where one violin goes down, and maybe two go up to create a kind of cluster. You hear violins in horror movies played in this way, but I talked to Chris about this: what if you take that idea and play [the glissando] with the most romantic, beautiful tone? You can tell the audience that something horrific is about to happen and kind of dive down [imitating the ominous “smear” glissando], but then you land on a beautiful note, a haunting note. That is what we wanted to embellish about Oppenheimer’s personality. His confidence is pretty high, but he also has some inner demons.
Having worked on Tenet and now Oppenheimer, what’s it like collaborating with Chris Nolan?
Chris has a crystal-clear image of what he wants to achieve and how he wants to get there. That being said, he’s incredibly open to my input, so there’s this exchange of ideas that allows us to push the boundaries of what we can do. And one thing that makes the work so successful is that he invites me into the project early on.
L-r: Ludwig Göransson and Christopher Nolan. Courtesy Universal Pictures.L to R: Emily Blunt (as Kitty Oppenheimer) with writer, director, and producer Christopher Nolan and Cillian Murphy (as J. Robert Oppenheimer) on the set of OPPENHEIMER.
How early?
For about three months before he started production, I’d meet with Chris once a week and show him about ten minutes of [new] music. By the time he went off to shoot the film, Chris already has three hours of my music.
The music at this point would be in demo form, right?
Yes. Maybe the first months, it was just violin experiments, going into the studio with Serena and recording this microtonal “smear.” In the second month, I started writing themes on piano, violin, strings, and harp. I’d record these melodies and textures as demos.
During pre-production, did you get to see any concept art or visual information?
A couple of weeks after I read the script, Chris invited me to a screening at an IMAX theater to watch visual effects he’d made with Andrew Jackson, experiments with atoms swirling around, and that kind of stuff. I go into this darkened theater and get hit in the face with fluorescent lights and things I’d never seen before. It had a big impact on me: “I want the music to sound like that.”
Once Nolan started principal photography, did you get dailies or any footage of what he’d been capturing?
No. Sometimes I’d get a phone call, “Hey, this one piece we worked on, can you change the ending to an up note, or can you add a minute to this or put more tempo on it?” After three months of shooting, Chris gets back and goes into the editing booth with Jennifer Lame, and they start cutting the movie. They used all the existing music I had written.
Wow! All those music cues you created during pre-production wound up in the rough cut?
Yeah. When I see the rough cut, all my music was already in there, which is great because most filmmakers put together a first cut using a temp score that takes music from already existing movies. I think that creates difficulties down the line because you’re taking [musical] DNA from a world that already exists. It seems to me not a very creative way to work.
Where did you record the final score?
We took two hours and fortysomething minutes of music to the scoring stage at Warner Brothers and recorded it in five days with the Hollywood Studio Orchestra, which has some of the best musicians in the world. At its peak, we were 40 string players, eight horns, three trombones, one tuba, three trumpets, and a harp.
All those instruments but no percussion?
No drums. One of the first things Chris and I talked about is that we didn’t want to have any sense of military nuance to Oppenheimer’s character because that’s not where he’s coming from. We didn’t want that [drum sound] to drive his character at all.
L to R: Matt Damon is Leslie Groves and Cillian Murphy is J. Robert Oppenheimer in OPPENHEIMER, written, produced, and directed by Christopher Nolan.
Did you use other methods to get that driving feel typically provided by percussion?
We had footsteps, we had the stomping, we had the bomb going off — so much more of a visceral experience. It was cool to see how the music and the sound design went hand in hand with each other. Also, we had the cellists use a technique called collegno, where they [rotate] their bows and use them like sticks, which creates a percussive sound during the nuclear reactor sequence. And then there’s this metallic ticking, which sounds like someone’s tapping a pencil on the bomb — that’s one of our musicians hitting a little metallic thing, almost like a cup.
What was the most challenging piece of music to record?
The piece of music with the atoms swirling. I never thought we’d be able to record that in one continuous take because there are 21 tempo changes. But my wife has been sitting in on these recording sessions for twenty years, and she knows the musicians. She said, “I think you can do it; We just have to give them a different type of click in their headphones so when they record, they get the new tempo before it happens.” On the third day, we gave the musicians a different click in their headphones, and they did the whole piece of music in one take with all those tempo changes.
It must be exciting to hear this huge orchestra of world-class players performing your music live.
One of my favorite parts of the process is seeing how it all comes alive. When you have forty or fifty people in a room together, creating this ambiance in the air — it’s something that’ll never be replaced by computers. The music changed when we started recording with live musicians. They made everything so much more dynamic.
Featured image: L to R: Matt Damon is Leslie Groves and Cillian Murphy is J. Robert Oppenheimer in OPPENHEIMER, written, produced, and directed by Christopher Nolan.
Halloween director David Gordon Green has tapped into another iconic horror franchise to scare the living daylights out of us. After expertly taking on The Shape in his ripping Halloween trilogy, Green turns his eye toward arguably the most iconic horror franchise of them all. It was exactly 50 years ago this Fall that The Exorcist landed in theaters and shocked audiences across the globe. Now, the first trailer for Green’s The Exorcist: Believer reveals what happens when Green and horror shop extraordinaire Blumhouse team up to take on the most iconic horror franchise of all time and tap into our most primal fears.
The film follows Victor Fielding (Leslie Odom Jr.) 12 years after the death of his pregnant wife in an earthquake in Haiti. Victor has been raising his daughter, Angela (Lidya Jewett), on his own. Things are about to get very, very bad for them both.
Soon Angela and her new friend, Katherine (Olivia Marcum), disappear in the woods. Not good. Creep things happen in the woods; just ask anyone who’s met the Blair Witch. When they return three days later, something is definitely not right—they have no memory of what happened to them out there, but they’ve brought something back with them. Confronting a force he can’t explain or understand but knows he cannot face alone, Victor seeks out the one person who has seen something like this before, Chris MacNeil (Ellen Burstyn). Thus, The Exorcist: Believer connects to the original film through Burstyn’s MacNeil, who is still processing what happened to her daughter Regan 50 years ago.
Joining the aforementioned cast are a slew of excellent performers, including Ann Dowd as Victor and Angela’s neighbor and Jennifer Nettles and Norbert Leo Butz as the parents of Katherine, Angela’s friend.
The original The Exorcist was based on William Peter Blatty’s best-selling book, and it went on to become a totemic piece of horror filmmaking, setting box office records and nabbing 10 Academy Awards, including becoming the first horror film ever nominated for Best Picture.
David Gordon Green directs from a screenplay he co-wrote with Peter Sattler from a story he wrote alongside his Halloween collaborators Scott Teems and Danny McBride (Halloween trilogy).
Check out the trailer below. The Exorcist: Believer hits theaters on October 13.
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When we spoke to Oppenheimer writer/director Christopher Nolan, his passion for getting inside the experience of J. Robert Oppenheimer (Cillian Murphy) before, during, and after he led the Manhattan Project and created the atomic bomb was, unsurprisingly, vividly evident. And when you have a star director marshaling all of his storytelling gifts to tell the tale of one man’s life, both his crowning achievement and what might have been his most profound mistake, that passion created a tremendous amount of pressure on Cillian Murphy to give a performance worthy of the subject and Nolan’s vision. The reviews have made clear that Murphy pulled it off, as the philosophical leaning, contradictory, and brilliant physicist Murphy gave the role everything he had. It wasn’t only critics and viewers who have been, excuse the pun, blown away by what Murphy accomplished, but his fellow actors, too.
“I have never witnessed a greater sacrifice by a lead actor in my career,” Robert Downey Jr. told People magazine.
“He knew it was going to be a behemoth ask when Chris called him,” Downey Jr. said. “But I think he also had the humility that is required to survive playing a role like this. We’d be like, ‘Hey, we got a three-day weekend. Maybe we’ll go antiquing in Santa Fe. What are you going to do?’ ‘Oh, I have to learn 30,000 words of Dutch. Have a nice time.’ But that’s the nature of the ask.”
Downey Jr. plays Oppenheimer’s chief antagonist, the equally brilliant Lewis Strauss, chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission, who would go on to persecute Oppenheimer, claiming he was a Soviet spy. They spar in many scenes together. Another of Murphy’s collaborators, Florence Pugh, who plays Jean Tatlock, a key figure in Oppenheimer’s life, was equally impressed.
“Chris had one of the most incredible leads in Cillian,” Florence Pugh told People. “He is an actor that I have been watching for quite some time and have been desperate to work with for ages. You’d have to be mad to say no. It was truly one of the best experiences that I’ve had. Working with him was hugely impressive. Every single day he shows up knowing every single possible way, intonation, [and] inflection of how to bring this character to life. That was hugely impressive to me. There’s a reason why he is one of the greats.”
Another fellow performer, Matt Damon, who plays Lieutenant General Leslie Groves Jr., the man who directed the Manhattan Project and enlisted Oppenehimer’s help, understood why Murphy couldn’t enjoy a nice meal with his colleagues.
“Of course he didn’t want to come and have dinner with us,” Matt Damon told People in a previous cast interview. “He couldn’t. His brain was just too full.” In that same interview, Emily Blunt, who plays fellow Kitty Oppenheimer, a fellow physicist who suffered greatly because of and on behalf of her husband, agreed. “The sheer volume of what he had to take on and shoulder is so monumental.”
It was in that cast interview with People that Murphy also admitted the pressure he felt. “You know that when you have those big roles, that responsibility, you feel it’s kind of overwhelming.”
The pressure has been released. Oppenheimer is a critical and commercial smash. There are hundreds of reasons why, hundreds of people who made it so, but none besides Christoper Nolan loom quite so large as Cillian Murphy.
Featured image: L to R: Florence Pugh is Jean Tatlock and Cillian Murphy is J. Robert Oppenheimer in OPPENHEIMER, written, produced, and directed by Christopher Nolan.
How do you turn a human into a doll? Or, let’s reverse that—how do you turn the most iconic doll ever made into a human? These were the intermingled questions makeup and hair designer Ivana Primorac had to answer for co-writer and director Greta Gerwig’s history-making new film Barbie. Reader? She succeeded.
Primorac has worked on a slew of excellent, disparate projects, from the Winston Churchill biopic The Darkest Hour to HBO’s brilliantly executed crime series Mare of Easttown to Netflix’s magisterial The Crown. She first worked with Gerwig on Little Women, her critically acclaimed adaptation of Louisa May Alcott’s novel, and now adds Gerwig’s critically acclaimed imagining of the near-perfect world of Mattel’s iconic doll falling apart to her CV. Her job required working with countless wigs, custom eyebrows, body paint, hordes of lipstick, and body waxing—we’re looking at you, Kens.
Caption: (L-r) EMMA MACKEY as Barbie, NCUTI GATWA as Ken, SIMU LIU as Ken, MARGOT ROBBIE as Barbie, RYAN GOSLING as Ken and KINGSLEY BEN-ADIR as Ken in Warner Bros. Pictures’ “BARBIE,” a Warner Bros. Pictures release. Photo Credit: Courtesy Warner Bros. Pictures
“I think in any creative process, you go through every possibility, [which was the case] when we were trying to figure out what defines a doll versus a human,” Primorac says. “We discovered that the scale and proportion of the Barbie world is slightly out of whack. The ceiling of the Dreamhouse is just above her head, and her lipstick and toys are slightly too large. But in a kid’s imagination, it’s incredibly perfect and beautiful. So we started working on the fun proportions and scale and very quickly realized there is no plastic hair, and the skin doesn’t have to look plastic.”
Caption: (L-r) RYAN GOSLING, MARGOT ROBBIE and Director/Writer GRETA GERWIG on the set of Warner Bros. Pictures’ “BARBIE,” a Warner Bros. Pictures release. Photo Credit: Jaap Buitendijk
The plan shifted towards defining what looks beautiful for each Barbie and Ken individually. “Instead of uniformity, we came to the individuality of every doll. So every single doll, every character, had to be designed individually. Each Barbie represents the best version of herself. So every actor had to be turned into the best version of themselves, and that would turn them into a doll,” says Primorac.
Caption: (L-r) HARI NEF as Barbie, ALEXANDRA SHIPP as Barbie, SHARON ROONEY as Barbie, ANA CRUZ KAYNE as Barbie, and EMMA MACKEY as Barbie in Warner Bros. Pictures’ “BARBIE,” a Warner Bros. Pictures release. Photo Credit: Jaap Buitendijk
Prep began a year before filming began with close collaboration among Gerwig, production designer Sarah Greenwood, and costume designer Jacqueline Durran. Toy maker Mattel provided the team with the entire Barbie archive, and Primorac also bought a number of vintage Barbie books for reference. Of crucial import to Primorac’s styling was the discussions she had with cinematographer Rodrigo Prieto. “Without Rodrigo, I don’t think I could have done this film,” she admits. “We tested a lot of different finishes and different makeup. For example, we had to find the kind of body makeup that wouldn’t come off on clothes. Every time I had any problems, he was the first person I could consult.”
Caption: (L-r) MARGOT ROBBIE as Barbie and RYAN GOSLING as Ken and in Warner Bros. Pictures’ “BARBIE,” a Warner Bros. Pictures release. (PRESS KIT). Photo Credit: Atsushi Nishijima
Prieto’s biggest hurdle was neutralizing the colorful world of Barbie Land so that the actors’ skin or hair didn’t look pink and that the surroundings wouldn’t transfer onto their wardrobes or bodies. Once the cinematographer chose the lenses and filters (Barbie was shot on the ARRI Alexa 65 with Panavision System 65 lenses), Primorac could then establish the hair and makeup techniques for each Barbie and Ken. Oh, and Ken’s friend Allan (Michael Cera) – one of several discontinued dolls that appear in the movie.
Margot Robbie, of course, plays Barbie, referred to as “Stereotypical Barbie” in the movie. She’s the O.G. Barbie, the one that debuted in 1959 with a striped black and white swimsuit, blonde hair, hooped earrings, blue eyeshadow, and red lipstick – a look that was recreated for the opening sequence (one that ingeniously riffed on the iconic prehistoric “Dawn of Man” sequence in Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey). Primorac rekindled the magic using standard yellow hair dye straight from the box. “We created it identically to the color of the doll with the blue eyeshadow and lipstick. It makes the image exact and slightly retro,” she says.
When the story shifts into Barbie Land and Barbie is in her Dreamhouse living her best life, her hair was altered to compliment Ken (played by Ryan Gosling). “We had to match the blonde of Margot and Ryan, so they looked nice together,” notes Primorac. The costumes Robbie wore also shifted the hair color, which was maintained using different wigs. The wardrobe changes included a cute pink gingham dress, a hip-hugging gold disco jumpsuit, a matching plaid tulle-like skirt and top, and a head-turning pink western outfit complete with a denim vest, flare jeans and cowboy hat. “We had to adjust her hair according to the lighting setups and costumes. So I was dipping the wigs in different toners at night to suit what was going to happen the next day,” says Primorac. “It was a laborious process keeping the hair the nicest kind of Nordic blonde that would suit Margot’s makeup and costumes.”
-Caption: (L-r) RYAN GOSLING as Ken and MARGOT ROBBIE as Barbie in Warner Bros. Pictures’ “BARBIE,” a Warner Bros. Pictures release. Photo Credit: Jaap Buitendijk-Caption: (L-r) MARGOT ROBBIE as Barbie and RYAN GOSLING as Ken and in Warner Bros. Pictures’ “BARBIE,” a Warner Bros. Pictures release. Photo Credit: Dale Robinette
Seventeen different Barbie and Ken characters make up the main cast, including Barbies played by Issa Rae, Alexandra Shipp, and Emma Mackey, and Kens played by Simu Liu, Kinglesy Ben-Adir, and Scott Evans. For each, body makeup avoided the plastic look you’d find on dolls and instead focused on “evening out the tones” around the knees, elbows, behind the ear, and heels. A look that Primorac suggests is unnatural to humans. For the majority of recreations, Primorac stylized individual looks that represented each actor. For smaller roles or the discontinued dolls, Primorac created exact replicas. The likes of Midge “Pregnant Barbie” (Emerald Fennell), Mermaid Barbie (Dua Lipa), Merman Ken (John Cena), and Sugar Daddy Ken (Rob Brydon) were drawn up to match the original dolls.
Caption: (L-r) MARGOT ROBBIE as Barbie, ALEXANDRA SHIPP as Barbie, MICHAEL CERA as Allan, ARIANA GREENBLATT as Sasha and AMERICA FERRERA as Gloria in Warner Bros. Pictures’ “BARBIE,” a Warner Bros. Pictures release. Photo Credit: Courtesy Warner Bros. PicturesCaption: (L-r) KINGSLEY BEN-ADIR as Ken, RYAN GOSLING as Ken, MARGOT ROBBIE as Barbie, SIMU LIU as Ken, NCUTI GATWA as Ken and SCOTT EVANS as Ken in Warner Bros. Pictures’ “BARBIE,” a Warner Bros. Pictures release. Photo Credit: Courtesy of Warner Bros. Pictures
One particular challenge for Primorac was the Barbie played by Kate McKinnon, dubbed “Weird Barbie,” a doll that was played with too much. “It was the hardest character to pinpoint because every time it became too punk or too fashionable,” she says. McKinnon’s Barbie has wildly chopped hair, drawings on her face, and is seemingly always in splits – a reference to Barbie dolls that would get thrown into a toy box and land with their legs splayed. “Her hair was made three times from scratch until we found what you see in the film. Conceptually, we thought of Totally Hair Barbie. Then we thought that kids would start chopping at her hair, so it has short bits and long bits. Then she had makeup underneath, and then the Sharpie marks came on top. It took a while to layer that look, so it looked like the kids took it too far and tossed her aside.”
Caption: (L-r) MARGOT ROBBIE as Barbie and KATE MCKINNON as Barbie in Warner Bros. Pictures’ “BARBIE,” a Warner Bros. Pictures release. Photo Credit: Courtesy of Warner Bros. PicturesCaption: KATE MCKINNON as Barbie in Warner Bros. Pictures’ “BARBIE,” a Warner Bros. Pictures release. Photo Credit: Courtesy Warner Bros. Pictures
Throughout the process, Primorac says she never felt like she was on a big-budget movie. “Greta is immersed with everyone, and you get to discuss everything together. She is so smart in what she wants to achieve. Story, to her, is the most important thing, no matter the size of the movie. She is a master at that and makes herself always available.”
And now, Gerwig has made history, thanks in no small part to the time and attention she gave to her talented collaborators like Primorac.
Featured image: Caption: (L-r) ANA CRUZ KAYNE as Barbie, SHARON ROONEY as Barbie, ALEXANDRA SHIPP as Barbie, MARGOT ROBBIE as Barbie, HARI NEF as Barbie and EMMA MACKEY as Barbie in Warner Bros. Pictures’ “BARBIE,” a Warner Bros. Pictures release. Photo Credit: Courtesy of Warner Bros. Pictures
David Dastmalchian is no stranger to the cinematic world of Christopher Nolan. In 2008, the Chicago-based theater actor caught a big break when he landed the role of a Joker stooge in Nolan’s now iconic The Dark Knight. Fifteen years later, Dastmalchian, now a seasoned character actor with a long list of small but potent roles in massive features, including Denis Villeneuve’s Blade Runner: 2049 and Dune and the upcoming Late Night with the Devil, reunited with Nolan for his epic drama Oppenheimer.
In Nolan’s masterful biopic about J. Robert Oppenheimer, time is a threat. The Nazis are working on building an atomic bomb, and in response, the United States government enlists Julius Robert Oppenheimer (a brilliant Cillian Murphy) and a team of scientists to beat them to the bomb. In Nolan’s intricately threaded script, the story covers the years of the Manhattan Project and many years later, after Oppenheimer’s creation was dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki when his political enemies questioned his loyalty in a long-brewing bid to do him in. Dastmalchian plays William Borden, a government man and one of Oppenheimer’s adversaries.
Prior to the SAG strike, Dastmalchian took the time to speak with The Credits about playing Borden, working with Nolan, and the fear that fuels him on set.
Before we get to Christopher Nolan, I’m curious about your collaboration with his longtime cinematographer Hoyte van Hoytema?
It’s a nice dance. He’s very present. He’s definitely there at the camera the whole time. He’s very quiet, and he’s very focused. He and Chris seem to have this shorthand together where they’re just constantly bouncing ideas off each other and figuring out solutions to the ways to get what they need. You feel really comfortable around him. At points, he was very, very close to me because of some of the shots that we were doing, and I loved it. I felt like we were doing a really special dance. Now that I’ve seen it, it’s such an achievement. He’s done such glorious work. I’ve been so lucky because I’ve worked with some of the world’s best cinematographers.
Christopher Nolan, Hoyte Van Hoytemm, Cillian Murphy on the set of “Oppenheimer.” Courtesy Melinda Sue Gordon/Universal Pictures
Since Nolan and Hoytema shot on 70mm IMAX film, did that change anything for you? Did you have to be more technically mindful?
I try not to allow the technicalities to affect the work, but that being said, you can’t help but feel a sense of great importance. Every frame and every photo negative that’s moving its way through this camera and sneaking its way through this giant incredible machine heightens your sense of tradition with the roots of cinema and the moving image. It also puts on a sense of importance to every moment. I try not to think about the technical aspects of it because I trust that the filmmakers are utilizing the tools that they need to tell the story we need to tell. In this one, for Chris to get to where he needed to be, he needed to push the film in a way that hasn’t been done yet.
Writer, director, and producer Christopher Nolan on the set of OPPENHEIMER. Courtesy Melinda Sue Gordon/Universal Pictures.
What initial conversations did you have with Nolan about his vision and what he needed from you as a performer?
It was such a beautiful map, this script. It was such an incredible document. It gave me all the clues and hints that I would need for my character, William Borden. And then the work is really on my shoulders to go and do the research on Borden and think what it was that he needed and what it was that he was trying to do with his life and his work. You know, passages of letters that he had written, thoughts he had, and interviews that he had done. And when I read “American Prometheus” in preparation for the film, I was able to get a lot of information about him.
OPPENHEIMER, written and directed by Christopher Nolan. Melinda Sue Gordon/Universal Pictures
How’d you feel on day one on set?
You’re terrified. You really have this pressure on yourself to make sure you’re giving this incredible director what he needs. It’s intimidating, but luckily, Chris gave me everything I needed in his incredible script. And then when he’s directing me on set, he’s very good at just knowing what an actor needs.
As you mentioned, the film is based on Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin’s “American Prometheus,” but Nolan made what changes he needed to turn this into the gripping biopic we now have. What was prepping for your scenes like in terms of the historical context versus what the film required in those moments?
Well, the interaction between Oppenheimer and Borden, or Borden and [chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission] Lewis Strauss (Robert Downey Jr.) are moments that are pulled from real history, and a lot of it has documentation to support it. And so, it just didn’t really change the way that I would’ve normally taken inspiration for the character. Now, as far as the journey of the entire film through the eyes and the heart and the spirit of Oppenheimer, when I was reading the script, I did get a sense of tone and world-building that I was able to bring into the way I try to bring forward into life. That’s the stuff that’s pretty impossible to verbalize or put in words. It’s the magic stuff.
L to R: Robert Downey Jr is Lewis Strauss and Cillian Murphy is J. Robert Oppenheimer in OPPENHEIMER, written, produced, and directed by Christopher Nolan.
In your research, how did you interpret Borden’s actions against Oppenheimer?
Everything that I could find out about him was useful, from his history in the military to the journey that he had with the Atomic Energy Commission and his devotion to complicated ideas. It’s fascinating that he ended up being so hard line in his mission to get to the bottom of what he felt were potential compromises that Oppenheimer had made to our national security.
He was a complicated figure, like pretty much everyone in this story.
Borden was not one of these out-of-the-gate, warmongering guys. He had some complex ideas. And yet, once he got convinced of the notion that Oppenheimer had, in some way, the potential to threaten our national security, he became driven in a way that is something all of us can fall prey to.
Do you see parallels between Borden’s stance and our current moment?
I think we live in a time where fear prevails. There’s a seduction in falling completely into a sense of absolutism, and that’s what Borden did, in my opinion. But again, I just had intentions and simple actions to follow to play a character that made complete sense. If you thought that there was somebody that might potentially be a threat to something you love, then you would do everything within your power to get to the bottom of it.
Cillian Murphy is J. Robert Oppenheimer in OPPENHEIMER, written, produced, and directed by Christopher Nolan.
Back to what it felt like to film your scenes, can you explain a bit more about that terror you felt?
I was terrified because I feel a sense of great honor. It’s humbling that filmmakers who I respect so much and who have shaped cinema in our time would hire me once, let alone twice. In Denis Villeneuve’s case, three times. So when something like this happens, and I have an opportunity to go back into this space with these people, there’s a comfort that comes in the fact that I trust them deeply because we now have a history together, and they’ve always steered me.
L to R: Cillian Murphy (as J. Robert Oppenheimer) and writer, director, and producer Christopher Nolan on the set of OPPENHEIMER.
Did the nerves ever abate?
The nervousness, it’s all on me. It’s my feeling so grateful for the fact that they want me to come to play with them again, and I have to make sure I rise to the challenge of what they need. There’s a part of me that just doesn’t wanna let them down. I have to overcome those feelings because they’re useless when you’re trying to make art or tell stories. But it’s hard sometimes. I definitely feel that I put pressure on myself, and I just have to try and breathe through that and trust that they know exactly what they need from me, and they’ll tell me if I’m not giving it to them.
Featured image: SAN DIEGO, CALIFORNIA – JULY 22: David Dastmalchian visits the #IMDboat At San Diego Comic-Con 2022: Day Two on The IMDb Yacht on July 22, 2022 in San Diego, California. (Photo by Vivien Killilea/Getty Images for IMDb)
An iconic piece of Americana and the philosophical-minded father of the atom bomb have got to be the two most unlikely partners in cinematic history of all time, but here we are—and it’s glorious. Greta Gerwig’s Barbie and Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer—now collectively known as Barbenheimer—joined together to bring in the fourth-largest weekend at the box office in movie history.
Gerwig made history with the largest opening weekend for a female director ever, as Barbie pulled in a year’s best $155 million, and Nolan’s Oppenheimer made a very impressive $80.5 million. What makes the Barbenheimer feat even more delightful is how much of an outlier it is for two very different, very original films to fuel such a massive weekend. The top three collective weekend hauls ahead of Barbenheimer were all led by massive franchises, either debuts or sequels—Avengers: Endgame turned an April weekend in 2019 into the all-time top-grosser at $402 million collectively, the premiere of Avengers: Infinity War in April the previous year led to $314 million collectively, and Star Wars: The Force Awakens generated a $313 million collective weekend in December 2015.
Barbie‘s weekend was truly staggering as the film did extremely well both domestically and overseas. It launched itself into its premiere weekend on a pink tide of critical raves, that insanely clever marketing campaign, and the superbright wattage of its cast, led by Margot Robbie and Ryan Gosling. Among the records Barbie broke are the biggest opening for Robbie and Gosling, the biggest three-day opening for a movie based on a toy (besting Transformers: Dark of the Moon‘s $115.9 million), and the biggest opening weekend for a Warner Bros. movie that wasn’t a DC Studios film or a sequel. Simply put, wow.
Meanwhile, Nolan’s Oppenheimer had a wonderful opening weekend, too. A three-hour, R-rated biopic about J. Robert Oppenheimer doesn’t sound like the stuff of box office gold, but such is the interest that Nolan’s work always generates that it was precisely that. Led by a phenomenal performance by Cillian Murphy in the title role, Oppenheimer is now Nolan’s third biggest domestic debut, which is saying a lot considering it lands behind only The Dark Knight Rises ($160.9 million) and The Dark Knight ($158.4 million). Oppenheimer is also the third-biggest opening for a biographical film in North America, only behind American Sniper ($89.3 million) and The Passion of the Christ ($83.8 million).
Box office aside, both Barbie and Oppenheimer come from two of our most talented filmmakers, and their critical reviews and CinemaScores reflect that. Both are enjoying crucial grade A CinemaScores, with Barbie at 90 percent and Oppenheimer at 93 percent. When talented filmmakers tackle films they’re passionate about it, history can be made.
For more on Barbie and Oppenheimer, check out these stories:
Featured image: L-r: Caption: MARGOT ROBBIE as Barbie in Warner Bros. Pictures’ “BARBIE,” a Warner Bros. Pictures release. Photo Credit: Courtesy Warner Bros. Pictures; “Oppenheimer” movie poster. Courtesy Universal Pictures.
Spoilers below; approach with extreme caution if you haven’t seen the film yet.
Robert Oppenheimer (Cillian Murphy) stares wide-eyed into the pond spread out in front of him; his last conversation with Albert Einstein (Tom Conti) on the potential catalytic effects of the atomic bomb has rendered him speechless. The music swells as the screen fades to black — the final scene of Christopher Nolan’s highly-anticipated Oppenheimer.
L to R: Tom Conti is Albert Einstein and Cillian Murphy is J. Robert Oppenheimer in OPPENHEIMER, written, produced, and directed by Christopher Nolan.
A “singularly dramatic moment in history” — That’s how Nolan describes the motivation behind his desire in telling the story of Robert Oppenheimer.
“This moment in which Oppenheimer [and] the key scientists in the Manhattan Project realized they could not completely eliminate the possibility of the chain reaction from the first atomic detonation, that first test that would destroy the world,” Nolan says.
It was that specific moment in history, Oppenheimer’s reckoning with the possible world-ending consequences of his actions, that guided Nolan’s storytelling.
OPPENHEIMER, written and directed by Christopher Nolan
“His story is one of the most dramatic ever encounters, full of all kinds of twists, and suspense, things that you couldn’t possibly deal with in any kind of fictional context,” he explains. “So I really got hooked on the idea of trying to bring the audience into his experience…what he went through, make his decisions with him…try and arrive at a telling of his story that would invite understanding rather than judgment.”
Moral ambiguity is a theme Nolan frequently explores in his films, and Oppenheimer tackles that tenfold. But Nolan says he’s not here to tell us whether or not Robert Oppenheimer was a good person but rather to walk the audience through his decision-making.
L to R: Robert Downey Jr is Lewis Strauss and Cillian Murphy is J. Robert Oppenheimer in OPPENHEIMER, written, produced, and directed by Christopher Nolan.
“Humans, individual flaws, and the tension between his aspirations and his brilliant intellect telling him what he should be doing, and his inability to live up to those things, or his blindness to where some of these things might take him,” Nolan explains of his creative process. “That’s what creates interesting tension in the story.”
When stripped raw, Oppenheimer, at its core, is a story with an age-old message: If you play with fire, you’re going to get burned. And it tells us as much in the opening shot: billowing flames, hundreds of feet high, encompass the entirety of the screen, the words of the great story of Prometheus overlaying the fire.
“We haven’t made a documentary; we’ve made a dramatic interpretation of his life,” Nolan says. “You’re looking at a character who was very careful. But everything he said about the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki—it was very precise, never apologized. He never acknowledged any guilt as relating to his part and what had happened. And yet, all of his actions from 1945 onwards are the actions of somebody truly suffering under an immense weight of shame and guilt.”
L to R: Florence Pugh is Jean Tatlock and Cillian Murphy is J. Robert Oppenheimer in OPPENHEIMER, written, produced, and directed by Christopher Nolan.
After Hiroshima and the death of Jean Tatlock (Florence Pugh), there’s a scene in the film where Oppenheimer is slumped against the trunk of a tree, spiraling into an all-consuming panic. Kitty Oppenheimer (Emily Blunt) shakes her husband and says, “You don’t get to sin and then play the victim.”
OPPENHEIMER, written and directed by Christopher Nolan
Nolan doesn’t confirm his personal feelings on Oppenheimer’s morality, and when asked if this scene is meant as an interpretation of Kitty’s feelings in that part of her life or an interpretation of the audience’s feelings toward the character, he says it’s all of the above.
“There are times when the writing wants to synchronize with or guide the audience’s particular expectations or interpretations,” he explains. “But I think what’s most successful is when it synchronizes sort of seamlessly with the feelings and emotions of the character in the moment.”
L to R: Emily Blunt (as Kitty Oppenheimer) with writer, director, and producer Christopher Nolan and Cillian Murphy (as J. Robert Oppenheimer) on the set of OPPENHEIMER.
Oppenheimer is immensely detailed — an attribute characteristic of Nolan’s filmmaking style, along with intricately woven storylines. No apple goes unnoticed, no close-up without intent. In Oppenheimer, it’s the hanging of bed sheets on the clothesline to dry that become one of the most profound metaphors in the film and serves as an almost unspoken language between Robert and Kitty.
L to R: Cillian Murphy is J. Robert Oppenheimer and Emily Blunt is Kitty Oppenheimer in OPPENHEIMER, written, produced, and directed by Christopher Nolan.
“I came across this fact in the book, this notion that because [Robert] couldn’t talk directly to anybody about the success or failure of the test, they came up with this code relating to change in his life,” Nolan explains. [Oppenheimer was based on the Pulitzer Prize-winning biography “American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer” by Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin.] “The sheets make up a bit. And I wanted to bring it together in a visual sense. For me, Kitty Oppenheimer is one of the most interesting characters in the film—one of the most interesting characters of Oppenheimer’s real-life story—their relationship was complex. So I love the idea of a coded message between them that only they can understand.”
Kitty Oppenheimer was a brilliant scientist in her own right, and Nolan says that during her time at Los Alamos (the creation town of the atomic bomb), she was “given very little to do,” so the sheets also symbolize her domestic experience.
“It was very frustrating [for her] and caused a lot of problems,” he says. “So, for me, it was the coming together of all of those different things.”
L to R: Emily Blunt is Kitty Oppenheimer and Cillian Murphy is J. Robert Oppenheimer in OPPENHEIMER, written, produced, and directed by Christopher Nolan.
During his 32-year marriage to Kitty, Robert Oppenheimer had a long history of affairs, a fact not left out of Nolan’s retelling. One of Oppenheimer’s most famous lines in history is when he quoted part of the Hindu scripture Bhagavad Gita: “Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds,” after witnessing the first detonation of the atomic bomb. In Nolan’s version, that line comes during a sex scene with Jean Tatlock (Florence Pugh).
“I wanted to destabilize the context in which that quote normally appears,” he says. “Oppenheimer was very controlling of his image in his public statements. He was extremely self-conscious, very, very aware of the theatricality of his persona, and used that to further a lot of causes he espoused, the things he was worried about. And I wanted to present this in a new way that would cut through that.”
Like many of Nolan’s films, Oppenheimer shuffles between past and present — between the creation of the atomic bomb and the two security hearings beginning in 1954 about Oppenheimer’s affiliation with the Communist party. Beyond the use of black-and-white scenes to depict the timeline of the hearing, Nolan says the color shifts serve another purpose.
“You’re looking for a subtle way, a clearer way of shifting between the intensely subjective storytelling in the cover sequences,” Nolan explains. “And then the more objective view very often provided by Robert Downey Jr., as his character, Lewis Strauss.”
L to R: Robert Downey Jr is Lewis Strauss and Cillian Murphy is J. Robert Oppenheimer in OPPENHEIMER, written, produced, and directed by Christopher Nolan.
It turns out that following your fear can result in you making history.
Co-writer/director Greta Gerwig told one of her Barbie stars, Dua Lipa, that the idea of creating a feature film out of the iconic Matell doll terrified her. “It was something that was exciting because it was terrifying,” she said on Dua Lipa’s podcast At Your Service. “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, after Gerwig did it, Barbie‘s astonishing $155 million opening weekend has become the largest premiere weekend ever for a female director.
Barbie launched Gerwig past Captain Marvel co-director Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck, which opened in 2019 with $153. Gerwig now also holds the title for sole female director over Patty Jenkins, who had that title with her $103 opening for 2017’s Wonder Woman.
Barbie was the weekend’s highest-grossing film, but we’re guessing by now you know it was part of a two-film bonanza, along with Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer, which lead to a momentous weekend at the box office. The “Barbenheimer” phenomenon helped notch the fourth-biggest weekend of all time at the domestic box office, with Oppenheimer hauling in a very impressive $80.5 million. What makes the Barbenheimer feat even more intriguing—and delightful—is that the top three weekends at the box office were all led by massive franchises, either debuts or sequels—Avengers: Endgame helped turn an April weekend in 2019 into the all-time top-grosser at $402 million collectively, Avengers: Infinity War fueled an April weekend the previous year to $314 million collectively, and Star Wars: The Force Awakens generated a $313 million collective weekend in December 2015.
Barbie isn’t just the biggest opening weekend for a female director ever; in fact, it also now has the biggest opening weekend of the year, vaulting over The Super Mario Bros., which opened to $146 million.
Barbie became a phenomenon for several reasons—the allure of a top-flight director and star-studded cast (led by Margot Robbie and Ryan Gosling) taking on an iconic piece of Americana, a genius marketing campaign, and a stellar reception from critics and crowds. All of that, and a filmmaker taking on a project that scared her, has led to a historic weekend at the box office.
Featured image: Caption: (L-r) RYAN GOSLING, MARGOT ROBBIE and Director/Writer GRETA GERWIG on the set of Warner Bros. Pictures’ “BARBIE,” a Warner Bros. Pictures release. Photo Credit: Jaap Buitendijk
