A new trailer for director Jennifer Kaytin Robinson’s I Know What You Did Last Summer has arrived nearly thirty years after the original film first jolted audiences back in October of 1997. That film, written by Scream scribe Kevin Williamson and based on Lois Duncan’s 1973 novel of the same name, followed four teens who, after a night of partying, accidentally hit a man with their car and, instead of calling for help, dump his body and swear an oath to never speak of their crime. A year later, they get an ominous note (can you guess what it said?), and find out firsthand how Karma has a way of paying you back. Thus, the killing spree began, as a stalker systematically worked to slash his way through the teens’ lives.
The new trailer sets up this conceit, but now in the era of social media and smartphones. Five friends who, once again, caused a deadly car accident and tried to cover it up, believe that their pact of secrecy will keep them safe. The trailer opens at a wedding, and our friends appear to be living their best lives. When it’s time to open gifts, the bride-to-be opens a note—guess what’s written on it! So, as it was all those years ago, their past returns in killer fashion. One by one, they’re stalked by a lunatic with a hook, and their only chance for survival is to make contact with two survivors of the Southport Massacre of 1997. Enter Jennifer Love Hewitt as Julie James and Freddie Prinze Jr. as Ray Bronson, who have some hard-won wisdom to share from their dance with the devil. So, Julie and Ray teach the new kids on the block that they won’t survive their tormentor by running and hiding. No, the only way to make it through alive is to become the hunters themselves.
Joining Hewitt and Prinze Jr. in I Know What You Did Last Summer are Madelyn Cline, Chase Sui Wonders, Jonah Hauer-King, Tyriq Withers, Sarah Pidgeon, Billy Campbell, Gabbriette Bechtel, and Austin Nichols.
Check out the trailer below. I Know What You Did Last Summer slashes its way into theaters on July 18.
For more upcoming films from Sony Pictures, check out these stories:
In the first part of our conversation with supervising stunt coordinator Stephen Dunlevy, we covered the delicate balance involved with establishing the first theatrical John Wick spinoff, From the World of John Wick:Ballerina, from an action choreography perspective. Ana de Armas’ titular ballerina, Eve Macarro, unleashes a deluge of ultra-violent a**-kicking as she tracks down her father’s killer, crossing paths with the Baba Yaga himself (John Wick, played by Keanu Reeves) more than once.
How was the training and choreography design?
The wonderful thing about working with 87Eleven and Lionsgate, and the fact that I was part of John Wick 2 and 3 and stunt coordinated for John Wick: Chapter 4, is that we all understand the time it takes to develop these. Ana was very committed to the process of learning martial arts because you essentially need to do what Keanu did—he gave us all his time and we trained him in multiple martial arts. You essentially commit to becoming a martial artist. On the first day, I sat down with her and was like, ‘Hey, you just got to trust us through this process. We’ll ease you into it, but trust the process.’ From day one, she was so committed to honoring this character and the franchise, which was fantastic. During training, we looked at her ability and designed the fights based on her development. She trained for about six months, plus rehearsals on top of that. Once she got the base level, we started teaching the choreography.
How did the grenade-fu in Prague come about?
One of the highlights was the grenade sequence at the gun shop in Prague, where she meets Frank [the armorer played by Abraham Popoola], when the assassins attack. She escapes through that maze of rooms and finds these grenades. Now she’s in close confinement but has to fight with grenades. A lot of that sequence was done as a “oner,” when she’s fighting, comes around the corner, throws the grenade, then fights a guy, goes into a different room, fights and puts a grenade in his mouth, closes the door, and uses the door as a shield. We had to come up with ways of shielding her from the concussive sound. The team did a great job capturing what it would be like, in a fantasy aspect, to use grenades. We also have the dueling flamethrowers instead of handguns.
Is the flamethrower sequence an homage to the dragon’s breath shotgun in John Wick: Chapter 4?
There’s an element of that. We’re always looking for interesting weapons to add to the Wick series. The flamethrowers came up because, what you don’t see is flamethrowers on some of the vehicles in that village that they use to clear the snow. And also use it as a tactical weapon. So how do you have a dueling gun fight with flamethrowers? What’s the opposite of fire? Water.
Ana de Armas as Eve in Ballerina. Photo Credit: Murray Close
I love that vertical dome effect when Eve wields the fire extinguisher against the baddie’s flamethrower. Was that done with practical action?
Yes, that’s all real, the fire hitting the water and all those guys being set on fire, that’s all practical. We did a lot of research and testing on how much pressure and gallons of water per minute were needed, depending on how much fire you’ve got.Lionsgate, 87Eleven, and Len really wanted to do this as practically as possible. So, they gave us the time to do it right. We brought fire trucks out and I experimented, stood there and did it myself so no one else would get burnt. I experimented with different flow rates using water and with various cone sizes. You see in the movie when she adjusts the nozzle straight, but it can also flare out. As it pushes water, it also pushes the air with it. So, as the flame hits, it recirculates and pushes the flame back. Sound was added in post, but the flame and water hitting effects were created practically.
Ana de Armas as Eve in Ballerina. Photo Credit: Murray Close
That’s incredible! And it looks amazing. One of the coolest scenes was when Eve straps a grenade onto a bad guy’s neck, chokes him with it, and drags him across a table, then flips the table over to barricade herself against the explosion. How did that sequence come about?
That wasn’t in the original script. It came from the idea of how you would carry grenades and still be able to use your hands [to fight]? We could use a grenade bandolier! And then it’s like ‘What can we do with this bandolier?’ The boys and I were working on it. I went to a meeting, came back, and they’re like, check this out. So that’s how it got incorporated into that explosion. Then the special effects team came back and suggested going even bigger.
Let’s talk stunt doubles!
Our core doubling team for Ana did an amazing job, like Cara Marie Chooljian and Erika Keck. Keanu says it best—he does action but he doesn’t do stunts. So, there’s a definitive line—Ana did as much fighting as we could physically allow her to do. But there’s always a time where a double comes in to protect our actor.
What about your core choreography team?
Jackson [Spidell], Caleb [Spillyards], and Jeremy [Marinas] all did an amazing job, and Kyle Gardiner. It’s always about the best idea wins, no one person’s say is definitive. It’s this amazing collaborative process, and the team worked tirelessly night and day to get this done.
What were some of your personal favorite sequences?
The flamethrower sequence really stands out. We brought in Jayson Dumenigo with Action Factory, who just won an Academy’s Scientific and Engineering Award this year for developing his fire gel. He’s one of our stunt coordinators and fire consultants. Kyle, a friend of mine from Australia, is another amazing stunt coordinator who worked on this. When you’re doing things on that scale and doing close to 200 burns in eight days, you need the best and the brightest. So, all of that fire, all those people being lit on fire, was done practically. With these movies, they’re so big with so much action going on. So we always bring in the best—the best fighters, the best car team, whatever element we’re doing, we try to bring in the best because it allows us to take it up a notch.
From the World of John Wick:Ballerina is playing in theaters nationwide.
Featured image: Ana de Armas as Eve and Robert Masser as Dex in Ballerina. Photo Credit: Murray Close
The late, great Leslie Nielsen’s Frank Drebin was one of the great cinematic fools of late 80s cinema. The Naked Gun: From the Files of the Police Squad! premiered on December 2, 1988, and Nielsen’s deadpan delivery on absolutely lunatic lines, along with the film’s visual wit and fearlessly silly skits, made it an instant classic, spawning two successful sequels and cementing Nielsen’s status as a comedy god. The original franchise was written by Jerry Zucker, David Zucker, and Jim Abrahams, and was based on their television series Police Squad! Although the series was short-lived (6 episodes), Nielsen proved pitch-perfect as the hapless yet oddly effective detective.
Now, 31 years after Neilsen’s final turn as Drebin in Naked Gun 33 1/3: The Final Insult, Liam Neeson is here as Frank Drebin Jr. in The Naked Gun, a reboot of sorts, but of course with an asterisk—Neeson’s Drebin Jr. is Frank Drebin’s son, and he’s taking over his father’s role in the Police Squad. It’ll be a fresh start for audiences too young to have enjoyed Nielsen’s run (along with the original franchise’s excellent ensemble), with a fresh cast and storyline. The reboot comes from director Akiva Schaffer, a longtime Saturday Night Live writer and director of the deliriously funny Andy Samberg-led Pop Star: Never Stop Never Stopping. Schaffer directs from a script he co-wrote with Dan Gregor and Doug Mand, the trio behind Disney+’s Chip ‘n Dale: Rescue Rangers. Seth McFarlane is on board as a producer.
Pamela Anderson joins Neeson as Beth, a mysterious woman with a job for Drebin, a role potentially similar to Priscilla Presley’s Jane Spencer from the original films. The official trailer confirms that the new Naked Gun isn’t afraid to get as deeply, delightfully silly as the original. Just one example is when Drebin Jr. tells Beth to “take a seat,” and she does just that, dragging a seat out of his office and down a hall.
Casting Neeson as Drebin makes plenty of sense—the actor has made a late-ish career turn depicting ruthlessly efficient types, from Bryan Mills in the Taken franchise to Jimmy “The Gravedigger” Conlan in Run All Night. He’s also done solid work in more comedic turns, like playing John “Hannibal” Smith in the reboot of The A-Team. He’ll be deploying that particular set of comedy skills to play the catastrophe-prone detective Drebin.
Neeson and Anderson are joined by Paul Walter Hauser, Kevin Durand, Danny Huston, Liza Koshy, Cody Runnels, and CCH Pounder.
Check out the trailer below. The Naked Gun is booked in theaters on August 1.
For more films and series from Paramount and Paramount+, check out these stories:
Netflix unveiled the final Squid Game trailer last Friday, unleashing one last look at creator Hwang Dong-hyuk‘s world-beating series. The trailer opens with a look back on the life of Gi-Hun (Lee Jung-jae), or player 456, and the happpiness he did have between gambling debts and the perpetual struggle to make ends meet, a happiness that’s been all but erased by the sadistic creators of the Games he’s been laboring in for years.
Gi-Hun’s getting a pep talk of sorts from player 149 (Kang Ae-shim), who tells him not to blame himself for everything that’s happened. “No matter how you look at it,” she says, “life is just unfair.” Truer words have never been spoken. As she speaks, we see the colossal robot Cheol-su (replacing the killer robot from season 1, Young-hee) mowing players down. “Bad people do bad things, but they blame others and go on to live in peace,” she continues. “Good people, on the other hand, beat themselves up about the smallest things.”
The trailer reveals snippets of some of the games we’ll be seeing in the final season, as Gi-Hun risks his life to put a stop to the entire sick enterprise. He’s got one true believer—player 149—who tells Gi-Hun that she still believes he came back to the games to “save us all.” That was undoubtedly his mission when he gave up most of his winnings from the games to fund his attempt to expose the creator and end the games. Now, at long last, we’ll see how Gi-Hun manages his long-awaited face-to-face meeting with Front Man. Seasons 2 and 3 were filmed consecutively, in a Herculean, 200-day shoot. Now, the global phenomenon will come to a close when the third and final season streams on June 27.
Steeped in the lore and rituals of the John Wick universe, director Len Wiseman’s From the World of John Wick: Ballerinais a bold attempt at expanding the franchise that put practical action back in the spotlight after the OG John Wick came out in 2014. Taking place somewhere between the third and fourth Wick films, this cortisol-triggering revenge thriller follows Eve Macarro (Ana de Armas), a younger member of the Ruska Roma, where John himself (Keanu Reeves, reprising his iconic role) was trained years before he became the much-revered Baba Yaga. As she embarks on her first contract killing mission, she encounters the cult that killed her father 12 years ago. Hellbent on revenge, her quest soon leads to the Chancellor (Gabriel Byrne), who leads a rival assassin tribe hiding in the Alpine village of Hallstatt.
Continuing in the neon-drenched ass-kicking tradition of John Wick action, there is no shortage of gun-fu, savage triangle chokes and roundhouse kicks, grenade-fu, and all manner of carnage. A veteran of the last three Wick films, supervising stunt coordinator Stephen Dunlevy rejoins the Wick family with franchise co-creator Chad Stahelski serving as producer (with his action design company, 87Eleven) and stunt coordinator Jackson Spidell, who doubled for Keanu Reeves in the first three Wick films.
We spoke to Dunlevy about helping turn Armas’s seething newcomer to the world of Wick into a one-woman wrecking ball.
Newcomer Eve Macarro fits into the labyrinthine world of the Ruska Roma and the John Wick realm very well. Charting through the four John Wick films (so far), where does her story fall in the timeline?
Ballerina was in development while John Wick: Chapter 4 was shooting. So, we didn’t want to give away any spoilers. They decided that between John Wick 3and 4 is the best place. Having John Wick in Ballerina gives it that level of authenticity – he’s passing the torch to Eve. And having Keanu in this film gives it that cherry on top.
The opening sequence scars Eve forever—her father dies protecting her from the Chancellor’s men.
We found a really cool location in Hungary where they were staying, a former palace. When the guys attacking them emerge from the water, which was shot in Croatia, it was tough dealing with the tides. I love that sequence because we’re building her backstory. Our fight coordinator, Jeremy Marinas, did a really good job of establishing a throughline of the fights to see Eve’s development and where she comes from. Trying to save her father that day is the foundation of who she is. So, we needed that fight to resonate through the series. Being the first fight in the film, we also wanted it to be a fun nod to the John Wick films, so we go from crossbows to handguns to hatchets.
Eve’s first official mission at the club feels like a nod to the Red Circle fight in the first John Wick, right?
Yeah, a little bit.
Ana de Armas as Eve in Ballerina. Photo Credit: Courtesy of Lionsgate
Being aspinoff in such a beloved franchise that has set so many benchmarks in action cinema is especially tough. How do you manage the delicate balance between paying homage to it and trying to top it with fresh ideas?
As soon as that coin came out in the first John Wick, you’ve created this amazing world that we’ve barely scratched the surface of. There are so many stories to tell that we don’t have to trip over ourselves trying to top the previous films. With Eve, we get to expand on what we saw in a fraction of the Wick films. The ballerina training at the Ruska Roma gives her the physical agility and mental toughness. She falls down and keeps getting back up until she gets it right. We see where John Wick comes from and develop this new character. Eve has to work it out on her own and build her own skills. People who train in the same gym come up with different styles and different ways to do things because they work better for them. Because of what Ana brings to it and what we developed as we were training with her, we discovered new things. Part of it is found weapons in the Wick world, whether it’s a pencil, a grenade, or ice skates, there are so many things she can fight with.
Ana de Armas as Eve in Ballerina Photo Credit: Larry D. Horricks
The ice skates were cool! And she also uses a hammer at one point.
It was! When she fights in the kitchen, there were pots and pans and axes. It’s everything.
[Spoiler] When Eve fights John in Hallstatt, it is an important moment for the franchise because he passes the baton to her. There are crucial character elements as well—he lets her live at least three times by my count.
Absolutely. And you notice he doesn’t pull his gun in the beginning. When she draws her gun, he just goes for his [bulletproof] vest to block the bullets. Every time he lets her up, she keeps attacking him. We went through different iterations of who was winning until we found the best balance between both worlds. Of all the fights, that was probably the hardest, trying to find that sweet spot. Jackson, [fight coordinator] Caleb [Spillyards], and our team worked relentlessly on trying to find that balance.
Ana de Armas as Eve and Keanu Reeves as John Wick in Ballerina. Photo Credit: Courtesy of Lionsgate
Since John Wick is the legendary hitman who is virtually unstoppable, how do you balance his level of prowess against a first-timer like Eve?
You have this delicate balance since we couldn’t have Eve beating up John. There was no world where the younger, inexperienced assassin was suddenly going to beat John up. So, we came up with the idea for him to give her the opportunity [to live], but you see her stubbornness and her relentless need to avenge her father’s death. We’ve all seen how good John is. Eve is young and raw; she runs on aggression and this need for revenge, whereas John’s style is more practiced and controlled.
Eve’s fighting style has to stay true to the world of John Wick, not only because the Ruska Roma also trains her, but to keep diehard Wick fans happy. How is her fighting style different from John’s, and what does it reveal about her character?
John Wick is six feet, 180 pounds, and a male who’s physically stronger. Eve is 5’7” and a lot lighter. You can have different fighters training in the same gym and the same style, but they’re all going to lean towards different aspects. What Eve takes away from the training and her abilities is going to be different from John’s. Since she is younger and raw, we wanted to showcase the development of her abilities. As a smaller, lighter person, she’s going to have to move faster and differently; she has to be a little smarter in terms of her environment. What keeps her alive is her ability to read a situation and quickly adapt. There are elements that overlap, but Eve’s style is definitely a little different.
Check out part two to find out how Dunlevy helped film the dueling flamethrower sequence practically and how the epic grenade-fu came about.
From the World of John Wick:Ballerina is playing in theaters nationwide.
Featured image: Ana de Armas as Eve and Robert Masser as Dex in Ballerina. Photo Credit: Murray Close
While HBO continues to patiently plot out the contours of its expanding world of Westeros—A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms is slated for a 2026—House of the Dragonremains the only series to make it to air since Game of Thrones concluded in 2019. And in its two seasons, Ryan Condal’s Targaryen-focused series has achieved something remarkable: it has managed to carve out a distinct narrative path and emerge from the shadows of its predecessor with an identity and an aesthetic all its own.
This is not to say House of the Dragon skimps on the bloody battles, dragon fire, or deadly palace intrigue that millions of people tuned into Game of Thrones to watch. With the series focused on the scheming, dreaming, fatally ambitious Targaryen brood, you could argue there’s been more of a focus on familial feudalism than even the Lannisters provided. Yet the aperture on House of the Dragon feels tighter. While we’re still whisked across the Seven Kingdoms as the warring factions within House Targaryen scrabble and scrum for the Iron Throne, the series feels statelier, if no less deadly.
On one side you have The Blacks, led by Queen Rhaenyra Targaryen (Emma D’Arcy), who claims the Iron Throne as the rightful heir named by her father, King Viserys I (Paddy Considine), and aided by the seething Prince Daemon (Matt Smith), who only just recently truly bent the knee to his queen at the end of season 2. On the other side are the Greens, nominally led by Aegon II Targaryen (Tom Glynn-Carney), aided by his mother, Queen Alicent Hightower (Olivia Cooke), Ser Cristian Cole (Fabien Frankel), and Prince Aemond (Ewan Mitchell), the true leader of the Greens by the end of season 2 after he barbecued his brother via dragon.
As Emmy voting opens and fans eagerly await House of the Dragon‘s third season in 2026, we had a chance to talk to cinematographer Vanja Cernjul, who helped deliver some of the most technically ambitious sequences in the show’s history. Cernjul reveals the innovative techniques and creative problem-solving behind the camera, from BOSU balls to simulate dragon-riding authenticity to coordinating 16 stunt performers on fire simultaneously, exemplifying the artistry and technical precision that has made House of the Dragon a worthy successor to Game of Thrones.
Vanja Cernjul on the set of “House of the Dragon.” Courtesy HBO.
I’d love to hear what it’s like to film these epic set pieces from a technical standpoint. How many cameras do you have to capture hundreds of extras and horses? How long does a given sequence take with so many moving parts?
One of the largest sequences was the “smallfolk” riot in episode 206, which became our major focus during pre-production. The scene depicts Queen Alicent caught off guard by unrest in King’s Landing. With 150 extras, 30 horses, and only two days to shoot in the medieval Spanish town of Cáceres, the scale and stunt work required careful planning. We storyboarded the whole scene first, then worked on the best shooting order. We wanted a seamless flow, so we shot consecutively and in story order when possible. However, we also had to optimize time with all the extras and consider lighting conditions throughout the day. We had four camera crews and a drone crew, maximizing shots from every setup, as orchestrating so many people and soldiers on horses for every take required considerable time.
For episodes 6 and 7, you shot footage in a medieval town in Spain—can you describe filming on location? What were the benefits and challenges?
The town’s medieval architecture posed challenges in maneuvering all the needed equipment. Alicent and Helaena had to flee down steep stone stairs, cross a crowded square, and leap into a carriage—all while being chased by a furious mob. Initial attempts to lead the actors downstairs using a handheld Libra rig proved unworkable—the two grips couldn’t move down fast enough safely. Luckily, we managed to bring a large telescopic crane into the square, which allowed us to track the actors’ descent close enough to maintain subjectivity. To maintain Alicent’s point of view and continuity, a remotely operated camera was hidden inside the carriage, ready to pick up action as soon as the actors entered. Exterior shots showed them sprinting to safety; once inside, the interior camera captured the continuation in the moving carriage.
Episode 6 includes a very emotional scene between Rhaenyra and Mysaria. Can you talk about how you framed their connection?
That scene was a great example of how some of the most powerful moments emerge organically. Many scenes on this show must be meticulously pre-planned months in advance, but this one unfolded completely differently. Director Andrij Parekh really gave the actors time and space to explore. He’s great at creating an environment where something unexpected can happen. The kiss between Rhaenyra and Mysaria was not scripted. When we started, the initial blocking looked nothing like what the scene ultimately became. We began with a wide shot, but as the actors worked through emotional beats, the scene evolved over several hours. We kept rolling the entire time, capturing that evolution as it happened.
Emma D’Arcy, Sonoya Mizuno. Photograph by Theo Whiteman/HBO
Speaking of connections, Aemond [Ewan Mitchell] attempted to showcase his strength at small council meetings, including booting his mother from the council. What’s your method for filming these scenes?
Episode 6 director Andrij Parekh brought his experience shooting powerful rooms from Succession and had great instincts for developing camera behavior that gives you a seat at the table. It’s a fly-on-the-wall approach where the camera subtly becomes a character, reacting to tension in the room. In the Greens’ Small Council meeting, we used that idea to track Aemond as he prowled around the table. We wanted the camera to feel observational, but Aemond still had to be the gravitational center, so we granted him the power to move the camera. Two cameras followed him constantly, circling the table on a “dance floor,” but then they’d react to whoever Aemond was addressing. That reactive, fluid movement created a different energy—more spontaneous, almost documentary-like—which stood in interesting contrast to House of the Dragon’s more deliberate, designed style.
Ewan Mitchell. Photograph by Ollie Upton/HBO
Can you talk about deploying technologies like the BOSU ball and the Volume to give us new vantages of dragon riding?
Perfecting dragon-riding scenes really pushed us to experiment. Our goal was to make those scenes feel more subjective, as if the camera operator was sitting on the dragon next to the rider. Dragon riding is typically shot with the actor on a mechanical rig called a “buck,” which simulates the dragon’s movements. The buck is custom-built and pre-programmed to move in sync with the dragon’s flight path based on VFX previsualization. We shot these sequences inside a Volume, surrounded by large LED screens creating a near-360-degree animated sky. These weren’t used as background plates but as dynamic lighting sources.
One big challenge was making camera movement feel handheld and reactive, even though we couldn’t physically put a camera operator on the buck. We needed the camera to respond as if held on a shoulder, bouncing with every lurch. We used the Libra console, mounted onto handheld-style moose bars, and carried it on the operator’s shoulder to enable the remote head to react to ‘handheld’ operation from the ground.
But I quickly realized the operator on the ground was too stable. It didn’t feel real. That’s when I had an idea: I asked for a BOSU ball—a half-sphere balance trainer—from a nearby gym and asked the operator to stand on it while operating the console. That added just enough instability to make the handheld movement feel authentic, as if the operator were actually being jostled around mid-air on a dragon’s back.
The sequence at Dragonmont was thrilling—a first for the Game of Thrones universe, showing regular folks trying to connect with dragons. How’d you film that to make the action legible and terror so palpable?
Director Loni Peristere wanted the sequence to unfold as an “oner”—a long, continuous take that kept us tightly aligned with Hugh, creating a subjective, first-person experience of the Dragonmont hellscape. Everything was designed around that central shot. We wanted it to feel immediate and subjective, with a handheld camera aesthetic pulling the audience into chaos. But during rehearsals, we realized that keeping up with Kieran on foot across uneven terrain made the footage too shaky. Our key grip rigged a cable-cam system across the stage length. We employed a hybrid approach—part handheld, part cable cam—yielding the ideal balance: movement felt visceral, yet the image remained coherent.
Kieran Bew as Hugh. Photograph by Ollie Upton/HBO
The new ARRI Alexa 35 sensor really helped—incredible dynamic range, especially in highlights, so we could retain detail in flames without overexposing. The physical set was just a fraction of what the space was meant to be. Only the stone plinth was real—the rest was blue screen. To help navigate this vast digital space, the VFX team provided iPads with the Cyclops app as a viewfinder, showing us how the virtual world was interacting with reality in real-time.
And then there were the stunts—some of the most intense I’ve ever seen. At one point, we had 16 stunt performers lit on fire for a single shot. Even though these were some of the best stunt professionals in the world, seeing it happen right in front of you was terrifying.
I loved the moment between Ulf and Silverwing—we’ve rarely seen a dragon in that vulnerable position. Can you discuss framing that sequence?
That moment was a tonal shift from Dragonmont’s chaos, and we approached it differently in lighting and camera language. The sequence was shot on the same stage, redressed overnight to create a separate, quieter corner of the dragon cavern. We relit it using three Tungsten 20K Fresnel units positioned to simulate beams of direct sunlight breaking through cracks in the rock ceiling. The only other light source was the flickering torch Ulf carried.
Finally, I’d love to hear about filming the scene between Lord Oscar, Daemon, and the lords of the Riverlands, where Oscar proves tougher than he appears.
The scene was pivotal for Daemon, filled with intense dialogue and shifting power dynamics. We designed camera movement to reflect the flow of power within the scene. As influence over the Riverlands lords shifted between Daemon and Lord Oscar, their power to move the camera would subtly shift as well, echoing the underlying tension and power play. We kept Steadicam use to a minimum in this episode, but for this particular sequence, it was the right tool to move the camera with the actors.
Matt Smith and Archie Barnes. Photograph by Ollie Upton/HBO
Featured image: Emma D’Arcy. Photograph by Theo Whiteman/HBO
The final trailer for James Gunn’s Supermanis here, arriving a month ahead of the film’s July 11 premiere and boasting fresh footage as we prepare for the official feature film launch of Gunn and Peter Safran’s newly invigorated (and unified) DC Studios. The final trailer opens with buildings pancaking atop each other until one man—can you guess his name?—flies in and manages to hold them up.
Gunn has been explicit that his vision for Superman (David Corenswet) was to build his film around a superhero who is deeply, unabashedly decent, no matter how badly he’s baited or misunderstood.
“Being a child, I loved the purity of Superman,” Gunn said in a previous behind-the-scenes look, which gave us a glimpse of Christopher Reeve as the Man of Steel from Richard Donner’s excellent 1978 film Superman. “That was a time when I was starting to understand what movies were.”
“James didn’t know that Superman was in his future. He wasn’t sure that was the one that he should be doing,” said his DC Studios partner, Peter Safran. “And then he called me one day and said, ‘I have a way in. I know what I want to talk about.”
This final trailer offers a glimpse of Superman through the lens of Lex Luthor (Nicholas Hoult), a character who is decidedly not good and can’t stand the attention that Superman is receiving. So, what’s a sociopath with endless resources to do when someone else is getting all the love? Seek and destroy, of course, so Lex promises to annihilate everything that Superman holds dear, including Lois Lane (Rachel Brosnahan) and his adoptive mother and father, Jonathan and Martha Kent (played by Pruitt Taylor Vince and Neva Howell). “I’ll kill them, too,” Lex says with a shrug and a grimace.
The fresh footage includes a mid-flight brawl that’s a real jaw dropper—Superman knocks the teeth out of one of Lex’s henchmen, aided by his best friend, Krypto the Superdog. We also get a standoff between the Green Lantern Guy Gardner (Nathan Fillion), who gets into Superman’s face and says, “Make a move, big blue,” before the two men brawl. We also get a shot of Mr. Terrific (Ed Gathegi), utilizing his super-intelligence and his can-do spirit to try to help the Man of Steel. At one point, he shouts at Superman, who lying prone in chunks of concrete after a tough fight, “Quit messing around!”.
The ensemble is a big one, as Gunn has populated Metropolis with classic Superman characters and metahumans rarely seen on the big screen, including Skyler Gisondo (Jimmy Olsen), Wendell Pierce (Perry White), Sara Sampaio (Eve Teschmacher), Terence Rosemore (Otis), Anthony Carrigan (Metamorpho), Isabela Merced (Hawkgirl), and María Gabriela de Faría (The Engineer).
“This character’s noble, and he’s beautiful,” Gunn said in that previous behind-the-scenes look. And now, he’s almost ready to make his grand re-entrance.
Check out the final trailer below. Superman soars into theaters on July 11.
Featured image: Caption: DAVID CORENSWET as Superman in Warner Bros. Pictures’ “SUPERMAN,” a Warner Bros. Pictures release.
And not in the way that middle schoolers doodle in their notebooks about dreamy-eyed crushes, or in the way that newlyweds share song lyrics on Instagram. Celine Song has made it her career to analyze the very foundation of love.
Her latest film, Materialists (in theaters June 13), explores the complexities of navigating love in a society that increasingly values material wealth over all else. It follows the tale of Lucy (Dakota Johnson), a matchmaker torn between her heart and her mind in deciding what love really means to her. Billed as a romcom, Materialists is more of a psychological analysis of what it means to love and be loved, as well as an almost eerily accurate commentary on the state of modern dating.
Dakota Johnson in “Materialists.” Photo credit: Atsushi Nishijima/A24
“We have a material record of things, because the film is ‘Materialists,’” Song says. “But the thing that we don’t have a record of is the feeling that passed between people.”
In the opening sequence, Song’s message is clear: love predates humanity. But humanity has lost sight of what it means to be in love. Working as a matchmaker briefly in her early career, Song always knew she wanted to write about her experience.
“I remember leaving that job feeling like, ‘Oh, I want to write something about this,’” Song says. “I think that when it comes to the filmmaking of it, I think that it always has to feel true to me and in the way that I experience [life].”
As a matchmaker, Lucy is very practical. Similarly to Song’s own experience, Lucy spends her days asking people what they want out of their love life and hearing monetary values in response. Lucy is constantly bombarded with clients looking for someone “tall,” or “rich,” or in a certain tax bracket, who dress a certain way, and act however they deem acceptable. They all request a perfectly curated human who meets their standard, but also is deeply in love with them.
“You actually cannot fall in love with the height, weight, salary,” Song says. “As Lucy says, love has to be on the table.”
Throughout the film, Lucy goes on her own journey of self-discovery, realizing that even as a self-proclaimed expert on love, she still has no idea how to understand her own heart. Torn between the perfectly distinguished “unicorn” Harry (Pedro Pascal) and the emotionally mature but financially inadequate John (Chris Evans), Lucy struggles with heeding her own advice.
Dakota Johnson and Pedro Pascal in “Materialists.” Photo credit: Atsushi Nishijima/A24
“To me, it’s so much about the distinction between dating, which is a game, and something that you can try, right?” Song explains. “You can go on dates, you can be on Tinder, you can do whatever you want, you can try. And then there’s love, which is something that you can’t try, and that’s what’s hard about it. But then, when it happens to you, it’s the easiest thing in the world.”
You’ll have to see the film to find out how Lucy chooses in her quest for happiness and love. Song did have this to say, however, about finding love, in the movies and life;
“The one thing that you should feel entitled to from the person who loves you is that they love you,” Song explains. “Love is the only thing that you’re entitled to.”
Song also says her decision on the film’s ending was rooted in wanting to create a film for the modern woman.
Dakota Johnson and Chris Evans in “Materialists.” Photo credit: Atsushi Nishijima/A24
“I think this is something that I think so many of us modern women understand,” she says. “All day I have to show up and have to be the smart girl, right? I’m a director, I’m a boss, like, you know, I have to walk around, I have to make decisions, and I’m in control of everything. I try to control everything… So what an amazing thing that there is one thing in a person’s life, in my life, that makes me feel so stupid, right? And makes me feel like a fool.”
Song’s films are characterized by soft, romantic lighting and camera angles so gentle, it almost feels like a caress. When creating a film about romance, she wants the viewer to “momentarily” forget their own reality.
“You almost want it to feel like it’s just being observed, and you’re being observed intimately, so much so that the audience forgets, not the whole time, but even even momentarily, that they’re watching a thing that is not real,” she says. “So the visual language is always going to be about that — you want to feel completely effortless, because love is effortless,” Song says. “So in that way, I wanted to make a movie that feels as effortless as love.”
Materialists is in theaters on June 13.
Watch our full video interview here:
Featured image: L-r: Writer/director Celine Song, Dakota Johnson, and Chris Evans on the set of “Materialists.” Photo credit: Atsushi Nishijima/A24
We’ve known for a while that James Gunn’s Superman would be set in a world where David Corenswet’s Man of Steel wasn’t the only person on Earth with superpowers. Gunn has been teasing—and then the casting announcements and later trailers revealed—that his reboot would open with Superman in a world filled with metahumans and monsters of all sorts. While Nicholas Hoult’s Lex Luthor remains a relatively super-powerless human bound by the laws of physics (those are about the only laws he feels bound by), there are plenty of characters in Superman who have gifts and abilities (or in the case of Anthony Carrigan’s Metamorpho, perhaps “curses” would also apply) that, if not quite rivaling Superman, certainly will make his life a lot more interesting. These include Edi Gathegi’s Mister Terrific, Isabela Merced’s Hawkgirl, Nathan Fillion’s Guy Gardner, and yes, Krypto the Superdog. Add in Superman’s Kryptonian robot helpers, too, to be fair.
We’ve got a few fresh peeks at these folks in images provided by Warner Bros. Hoult’s Lex Luthor is once again Superman’s main nemesis, and he’s got his own hero shot, as it were, in an image below. We’ve also got a new look at Fillion’s Guy Gardner, a member of the Green Lantern forces with that unbeatable haircut (Fillion is a longtime collaborator of Gunn’s)—the Lanterns are getting their own HBO series, no less, and Guy will be the one to welcome them into the newly unified DC Universe. In the same shot is Merced’s Hawkgirl, a flying, butt-kicking tactical genius and one of DC’s first superheroines, a character created by writer Gardner Fox and artist Dennis Neville and who first appeared in Flash Comics # 1in 1940 and eventually was rebooted, so to speak, by writer David S. Goyer and artist Stephen Sadowski as Kendra Saunders in “JSA: Secret Files and Origins #1” in August of 1999. And then there’s Gathegi’s Mr. Terrific, aka Michael Holt, the second character to take up the mantle of Mr. Terrific, whose skills, among many, including super intelligence—in the comics, he had 14 Ph. D.s.
The new images also include a showdown between Superman and Lex Luthor, as well as a shot from inside the Fortress of Solitude with Superman scolding his ever-mischievous best friend, Krypto the Superdog, and his robot caretaker, Kelex, a Kryptonian butler. A behind-the-scenes shot shows Gunn, Hoult, and Corenswet on set.
Another thing we know about Superman’s plot is that when the story begins, Clark and Lois Lane (Rachel Brosnahan) are already a thing. As Brosnahan teased, the film starts with Clark and Lois already romantically tangled. We also know from the trailers that Superman’s can-do, whole-hearted goodness isn’t viewed as such by some of the most powerful people on the planet. This includes the Secretary of Defense of the United States, who is officially looking into Superman’s actions.
Superman’s decency has been a central point of interest for Gunn since he started talking about his vision for the character. This is a writer/director who made his name centering weirdos and wildcards from The Guardians of the Galaxy to The Suicide Squad, but in taking on the story of Superman, he’s made it plain he wanted to focus on a superhero was deeply good, and who believed in the goodness in others, even if he’s labeled a threat, an alien.
Check out the new images below. Superman soars into theaters on July 11.
Caption: (From L-R) NATHAN FILLION as Guy Gardner, ISABELA MERCED as Hawkgirl and EDI GATHEGI as Mr. Terrific in DC Studios’ and Warner Bros. Pictures’ “SUPERMAN,” a Warner Bros. Pictures release. Photo Credit: Courtesy of Warner Bros. PicturesCaption: DAVID CORENSWET as Superman in Warner Bros. Pictures’ “SUPERMAN,” a Warner Bros. Pictures release.Caption: NICHOLAS HOULT as Lex Luthor in DC Studios’ and Warner Bros. Pictures’ “SUPERMAN,” a Warner Bros. Pictures release. Photo Credit: Jessica MiglioCaption: DAVID CORENSWET as Superman in DC Studios’ and Warner Bros. Pictures’ “SUPERMAN,” a Warner Bros. Pictures release. Photo Credit: Jessica Miglio.Caption: (L to r) NICHOLAS HOULT as Lex Luthor, DAVID CORENSWET as Superman and Director JAMES GUNN in Warner Bros. Pictures’ “SUPERMAN,” a Warner Bros. Pictures release. Photo Credit: Jessica MiglioCaption: (L to r) NICHOLAS HOULT as Lex Luthor and DAVID CORENSWET as Superman in Warner Bros. Pictures’ “SUPERMAN,” a Warner Bros. Pictures release. Photo Credit: Jessica Miglio
Featured image: Caption: DAVID CORENSWET as Superman in DC Studios’ and Warner Bros. Pictures’ “SUPERMAN,” a Warner Bros. Pictures release. Photo Credit: Jessica Miglio.
Ana de Armas had some practice acting like a bad ass in 2021 when she appeared briefly as a CIA agent doing field work in Cuba in James Bond’s No Time to Die. But in the John Wick spin-off Ballerina, now in theaters, she takes the fighting to a whole other level as Eve, an orphaned dancer determined to avenge the death of her father no matter how many men, nearly every one them of a trained killer and twice her size, she has to beat up along the way.
To help prepare de Armas for the staged mayhem, producers enlisted stunt specialist Jackson Spidell of the 28Seven Action Design company, co-founded by Ballerina executive producer Chad Stahelski. A Michigan native, Spidell doubled for Keanu Reeves in the first John Wick, winning Taurus World Stunt Awards for that movie and for Captain America: Civil War. Deadpool 2, Avengers: Endgame, and other Marvel movies followed. On Ballerina, Spidell mainly served a supervisory role, but he did step into the fray himself a couple of times. “When they T-bone Ana’s car, I’m the guy who gets the ax to the face,” Spidell says wryly, “It got a good reaction at the advance screening.”
Speaking from his home in Los Angeles, Spidell talks about stamina, cat-and-mouse combat, and de Armas’s ability to flip in and out of warrior mode during the demanding Ballerina training sessions.
Eve head butts, she punches, she kicks, she stabs, she smacks opponents with pots and pans. Walk us through the process of turning Ana de Armas into this fierce Ruska Roma assassin.
Ana hit the ground running because she had dipped her toe into action before in No Time to Die, which is where I think she caught the eye of the Ballerina producers. Early on, we had conversations about how she perceived the character and what she wanted to pursue performance-wise.
Ana de Armas as Eve in Ballerina. Photo Credit: Larry D. Horricks
So Ana had some input, but you’re still operating within the framework of the four previous John Wick movies, right?
Yeah. Having lived in the Wick universe for more than a decade now, we know the vocabulary and the style points we wanted to hit, but what we didn’t want was for people to watch Ballerina and go “That’s a female John Wick.” We wanted Ana to be her own character. And that meant giving her a different style.
How so?
Keanu’s been doing this kind of fight for a thousand years, and he’s experienced every kind of situation, whereas Eve is new to this world, so she’s going to falter. We wanted to play her character as someone who’s sort of learning everything on the go, who doesn’t have the experience that John Wick has, who has a vulnerability.
And the fight choreography plays into all that?
It’s like if you had a little sister, and she tried to fight me and four of my friends, how is she going to beat us? By cheating. By using your environment. “I’m not going to kick you in the knee, I’m going to grab this chair over here.” It’s like, “I’m small, you’re big,” so we really wanted to play it as a cat and mouse [situation] where Eve is just this really smart mouse.
You trained Ana at the 87eleven stunt company here in Los Angeles?
We trained at 87eleven for two months, then went to Prague and continued training. We had a blast working with Ana because she has a fire in her eyes. If she does a move and says, “How was that?” we might say, “It could be better.” Then she’ll be like “Okay, watch this.” Ana had bumps and bruises all the time, and she wore them like a badge of honor. And it’s funny because she could be so intense during the fight scenes, but as soon as you say “Cut,” she’ll be laughing and light. Ana is one of those actors who’s able to turn it on and off.
Ana de Armas as Eve in Ballerina. Photo Credit: Murray Close
What would a typical training day look like?
Four or five hours a day, we’d go through the choreography or learn new judo techniques, practice reactions, and teach her to fall safely so she wouldn’t sprain a wrist or crack an elbow.
These fights look grueling but also very precise. How did you get Ana up to speed?
When we rehearse these fights, we break them down into parts. “Here’s the first section.” Rehearse that four or five times. “Okay, second section,” same thing. Then the third section, four or five times. Then we circle back. “Okay, here’s the first half.” And they’re like “What”!? Then the second half. By this time, they’re more or less broken. [slumping]. Then you say, “Now we’re gonna do the whole thing top to bottom.” That endurance is important because these are intricate fights. Halfway through filming, something might go wrong or someone forgets something, and you have to get right up and start from the beginning again. Over and over.
And the John Wick franchise is famous for its long takes.
That’s why you need to have stamina. Not only body stamina, but mental stamina, because once your body gets tired, the first thing that goes is your memory. It’s like dipping the same tea bag over and over in the water. After a while, nothing comes out, if that makes sense.
What specific fighting styles did you focus on?
We worked a lot with judo and Jiu-Jitsu, which have always been strongly shown in the Wick universe, along with traditional wrestling styles. We did a lot of gun training as well. Ana needed to get in close to people and use her elbows, so we used something called the CAR system.
What does CAR stand for?
Central Axis Relock. We trained Ana in the specialized gun system for the “Ice Bar” fight, which involved using rubber bullets.
There’s some swordplay in Ballerina as well, right?
We did work a little bit of that with Ana, but since the whole building was on fire during the sword-fighting scene, we decided, “This one’s going to be her double.” Cara Chooljian learned sword work for this movie and killed it. That’s actually one of my favorite scenes in the film, where “Eve” just goes ham on people with a sword.
You’ve doubled in the past for Keanu Reeves. Did that happen in Ballerina?
It did! Once we learned that Keanu was going to be in the movie with an expanded cameo when he fights with Eve, I put the [John Wick] suit back on. So yeah, I got to fight Ana and Cara, which was a lot of fun.
Ana de Armas as Eve and Keanu Reeves as John Wick in Ballerina. Photo Credit: Courtesy of Lionsgate
Before you started wearing the John Wick suit back in 2015, you made some DIY “Sampler” videos where you did backflips and fight moves. It’s very impressive.
Thank you.
How did you develop those stunt skills?
I grew up in a sports-oriented family, so I learned acrobatics in my backyard and did gymnastics at open gyms. Then I competed in martial arts across the United States and overseas. There was a generation above me who had moved into the stunt industry, so I migrated west. Through the open gyms in L.A., I met people who did stunts, and they’d mention upcoming projects, wondering, “Who’s a similar make and model to this actor who can do x, y, and z.?” One day, I got a random phone call from 87eleven asking if I wanted to audition as a double for Justin Chatwin in Dragonball Evolution. The rest is history.
From the World of John Wick: Ballerina is in theaters now.
Featured image: Ana de Armas as Eve in Ballerina. Photo Credit: Larry D. Horricks
The setting is Eddington, New Mexico. The month and year are May 2020. It was, as you surely recall, a deeply bizarre, horrifically upsetting time as the world as we knew it was in the process of a forced reckoning with mortality, morality, America’s long history of racism, and what at times felt like, at least here in the United States, a nationwide crackup. So it’s the perfect set-up for a filmmaker like Ari Aster, who already has three deeply unsettling and very singular films to his name— his hardcore horror freakout Hereditary(2018), his sun-baked Scandinavian nightmare Midsommar (2019), and his trippy, trauma-drama Beau is Afraid (2023). Now, Aster has set his sights on our early pandemic-era civic strife, where regular citizens struggled against each other and themselves in a suddenly shrunken world of social distancing, masking, shutdowns, and the politicians and internet trolls who turned these realities and necessities into incendiary devices meant to burn down any sense of shared sacrifice or common decency two or more citizens of the same country might feel for each other.
Aster is one of our most fearless filmmakers, content to make viewers squirm in his pursuit of creating wholly original films. Once again, he’s tapped Joaquin Phoenix after working with him in Beau is Afraid to play Joe Cross, the Eddington city sheriff, the one guy in town who refuses to wear a mask, even though he’s also an asthmatic. Joe is one of the folks who simply don’t believe in all the stats about COVID transmission, nor does he think lockdowns make any sense at all.
Joe’s antagonist is Pedro Pascal’s mayor, Ted Garcia, who he challenges in the next election. Their enmity for each other isn’t just about their divergent politics (Ted believes in science and wearing masks and the like), but a deep, personal wound that Joe still nurses from their past.
Early in the film, the George Floyd murder occurs, and the repercussions of Floyd’s murder are felt in Eddington, as a small movement of anti-racist youth starts making trouble in town. Aster is trying to pinpoint the moment America began to crack apart, when anger and resentment, be it over COVID protocols, America’s historic racism, encroaching tech-supremacy, and the conspiracy theories that crept across the country captured larger and larger swaths of the country, to the point where some of the most powerful people in America were parroting insane talking points and neighbors distruted neighbors. Dread, anger, and paranoia are all rich themes for a filmmaker like Aster to explore, made all the more terrifying by coming from a history so recent that we’re still living through it.
The trailer gives you just a taste of this deep slice of how Aster sees what happened to America, perhaps what’s still happening to America, in the wake of a pandemic that upended the entire world and a call for social justice, which has as many proponents as it does detractors. With incredible performers and a filmmaker unafraid to hold a mirror, cracked as it might be, up to the United States, Eddington might not be the feel-good movie of the summer, but it’s still absolutely a must-see.
Check out the trailer here. Eddington arrives in theaters on July 18.
Featured image: L-r: Joaquin Phoenix and Pedro Pascal in “Eddington.” Courtesy A24
The adaptation, which lands in movie theaters on Friday, June 13, 2025, largely mirrors the storyline of the 2010 original. At the heart of the film is the friendship between a young Viking called Hiccup, played by The Black Phone‘s Mason Thames, and Toothless, a Night Fury dragon, who becomes the key to both dragons and humans forging a new future together on the isle of Berk. Original voice cast member Gerard Butler returns as Hiccup’s father, Stoik, the Viking leader.
Here, DeBlois explains why the original films’ composer John Powell was key to the film’s success, how Roger Deakins recommended cinematographer Bill Pope for the project, and why the Game of Thrones crew played a vital role in bringing Berk to life.
What was your initial reaction when they came to you with this idea?
Peter Cramer, the president of production at Universal, approached me and said they were kicking the tires on this idea of How to Train Your Dragon as a live-action film. I’ve been fairly vocal in saying I’m not a big fan of this trend because it diminishes the accomplishment of the animated movies and the hard work that went into them. It often feels like a wasted opportunity to create something new. I also thought that if someone’s going to do it, I don’t want to see someone else’s version of it. I’m very protective of the characters, the world, and the story, so if they were going to do it, I wanted to be the steward.
Hiccup (Mason Thames) and Hideous Zippleback in Universal Pictures’ live-action How to Train Your Dragon, written and directed by Dean DeBlois.
Does the fact that you recognize the risks make you the perfect guy for the job?
It certainly puts my convictions to the test. I thought that if we approach it through the lens of live action, it offers opportunities to go a little more mature, develop the mythology, and explore richer and deeper character relationships. Also, there are the bells and whistles of live-action as an immersive experience, so we can go into the action scenes knowing we can be more visceral.
(from left) Writer-Director Dean DeBlois (left), Gabriel Howell (center) and Nico Parker (right) on the set of Universal Pictures’ live-action How to Train Your Dragon.
What was the cornerstone you needed to have in place for everything else to work?
Our original composer, John Powell. I thought that if he were in, I would have great confidence going forward. He was the first phone call I made, and I just said, “Talk me out of this if you think it’s a bad idea, but I think there could be great promise in all of this.” He came at it from the same angle. He thought fans of our movie have grown up and this is part of their childhood, so naturally they’re going to be quite guarded about it, but if we could deliver something with love, integrity, and respect, but also bring something new to it, it will not only be a nostalgic hug from the past, but it’ll extend the story to all sorts of people who might not have seen the film, including perhaps their kids.
What were the different challenges for you with directing live-action rather than animation?
Much of it is similar, but there is the added intensity of principal photography. You spend a lot of time prepping, designing, and building models of sets, as well as figuring out the choreography. Early on, you try to answer as many questions as possible so that when you arrive on the day and have X number of shots to get done, you’re not thinking about logistics and can focus solely on performance. That was the biggest education, as I thought we had rehearsed and planned for a very specific scene in every case. However, once you have the actors in there and go through the blocking, ideas start popping up. As you work the scene together, a cadence develops, certain lines are no longer needed, and a new line is required; it’s all about the pauses, silences, and mannerisms. Thanks to Bill Pope, our cinematographer, I found myself very focused on the truth of the performances and doing my best to ignore the 300 people standing around, adjusting lights and moving grip equipment. I was very focused on getting that truthful interaction because it was going to make or break the movie.
Bill Pope is one of the best. Does his involvement give the film more gravitas?
Absolutely. The second phone call I made was to Roger Deakins because we had worked with him on all three animated movies. Having just come off Blade Runner 2049, he said, “I don’t want to do any big effects movies for a while, but I know just the guy to introduce you to,” and he made the call to Bill Pope. Bill jokes that he did what everyone does when Roger Deakins calls, and that is, he did what he told me to do. Roger recommended Bill because he knew how strong a storyteller he is. Aside from just having a great eye and great ideas for light and composition, Bill is primarily focused on the truth that comes through with the actors. He has a strong, intuitive respect for stories, and that always comes first.
(from left) Night Fury dragon, Toothless, and Hiccup (Mason Thames) in Universal Pictures’ live-action How to Train Your Dragon, written and directed by Dean DeBlois.
You shot this in Belfast, Northern Ireland, and there’s a lot of location work. How much did that real-world influence what you were doing?
We did a location scout in the very beginning. We gathered our producers, Bill Pope, and our visual effects supervisor, Christian Manz. We piled into helicopters to fly around the coasts and canyons of Iceland, the Faroe Islands, and the Isle of Skye, cherry-picking our favorite locations, sea stacks, and coastlines. That was instrumental in establishing the scope of the movie, as everything is grand, larger than life, and sculpted in such an ethereal way that it gave us a sense of the breadth of what the movie could be. When we started designing our locations and figuring out which parts of those three places to incorporate into the world of Berk, it came with a certain exotic yet grounded quality. That became a defining factor in shaping the world as we know it. We were circling that part of the map and saying, “Berk is somewhere in here.” The island of Berk is a real island in the Faroe Islands called Tindhólmur. It’s smaller, but we scaled it up for our purposes. It’s the same proportions, though.
Those areas have incredible local talent who have worked on epic productions from Game of Thrones to Star Wars.
We basically employed the Game of Thrones team. They’re skilled, incredibly passionate, and always go above and beyond whatever task is assigned to them. I found myself walking into the sets, marveling at the extra details we hadn’t even talked about. They put them in because they care so much about what they’re doing. The builders, sculptors, and craftspeople create a whole other level of grounded reality with whimsy and character. I was blown away. There was a sense of respect among all the disciplines and a great deal of appreciation.
Stoick (Gerard Butler) in Universal Pictures’ live-action How to Train Your Dragon, written and directed by Dean DeBlois.
The costume design is incredible. In that part of the world, you have access to local talent, as well as teams in London who understand both the theatrical and the transition to the cinematic. Did you utilize that as well?
Our costume designer, Lindsay Pugh, pulled from all of the available costumers in Belfast and beyond. Several individuals had traveled from London and other parts of the UK to work on the film. It was a huge department. I don’t know the number of pieces they made, but everything was done with incredible skill and attention to detail. It all feels well-worn and manages to capture the silhouettes of each of our characters in a way that pays homage to the animated movie without copying it.
(from left) Astrid (Nico Parker), Ruffnut (Bronwyn James), Gobber (Nick Frost), Fishlegs (Julian Dennison) and Snotlout (Gabriel Howell) in Universal Pictures’ live-action How to Train Your Dragon, written and directed by Dean DeBlois.
Berk is now one of the worlds at Universal Epic Universe in Orlando, Florida. Did you ever imagine this IP evolving in this way?
It’s very surreal to me. I had no idea it would travel this far into the zeitgeist. To become a theme park is such a rare privilege. I remember working on Mulan for Disney, and at the time, we would joke amongst ourselves that the measure of success was whether you got a Disney on Ice show. When Mulan was getting a Disney on Ice show, we thought, “Oh, we made it.” That has changed. Now, if you have a theme park world based on your film, you’ve really managed to penetrate pop culture.
“How to Train Your Dragon.” Courtesy Universal Pictures.
How to Train Your Dragon soars into theaters on June 13.
Featured image: (from left) Hiccup (Mason Thames) and Night Fury dragon, Toothless, in Universal Pictures’ live-action How to Train Your Dragon, written and directed by Dean DeBlois.
HBO’s Harry Potterseries is coming into focus. Following the casting news of the core three—Dominic McLaughlin as Harry Potter, Arabella Stanton as Hermione Granger, and Alastair Scout as Ron Weasley—nine new cast members have just been revealed.
The new cast includes the Malfoys and Dursleys, crucial characters in the Potterverse. The first season of the HBO series will cover the events in Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone. The new cast members are, from left to right in the photo below, Katherine Parkinson as Molly Weasley, Lox Pratt as Draco Malfoy, Johnny Flynn as Lucius Malfoy, Leo Earley as Seamus Finnigan, Alessia Leoni as Parvati Patil, Sienna Moosah as Lavender Brown, Bel Powley as Petunia Dursley, Daniel Rigby as Vernon Dursley and Bertie Carvel as Cornelius Fudge. The search has been led by casting directors Lucy Bevan and Emily Brockmann. The series comes from showrunner and executive producer Francesca Gardiner, withMark Mylod on board as a director of multiple episodes and an executive producer.
The newly announced cast members join McLaughlin, Stanton, Scout, as well as John Lithgow (Conclave) as Albus Dumbledore, Janet McTeer (Ozark) as Transfiguration Professor Minerva McGonagall, Paapa Essiedu (Black Mirror) as Severus Snape, Nick Frost (Shaun of the Dead) as the beloved Rubeus Hagrid, Luke Thallon as Defense Against the Dark Arts Professor Quirinus Quirrel, and Paul Whitehouse (Harry & Paul) as Argus Filch.
HBO’s plans for their Potter series are hugely ambitious—seven seasons to cover J.K. Rowling’s seven novels.
“The series will be a faithful adaptation of the beloved Harry Potter book series by author and executive producer J.K. Rowling and will feature an exciting and talented cast to lead a new generation of fandom, full of the fantastic detail and much-loved characters Harry Potter fans have adored for over 25 years,” HBO said in a statement. “Exploring every corner of the wizarding world, each season will bring Harry Potter and its incredible adventures to new and existing audiences and will stream exclusively on Max where it’s available globally, including upcoming markets such as Turkey, the U.K., Germany and Italy, among others. The original, classic and cherished films will remain at the core of the franchise and available to watch around the world.”
The series is set to begin filming this summer and is expected to premiere on HBO in 2026.
The news broke at the end of last week that rising star Mia Goth is joining Ryan Gosling in Star Wars: Starfighter. Goth’s current dance card is loaded with major movies—she’ll next be seen in Guillermo del Toro’s Frankenstein, playing Victor Frankenstein’s (Oscar Isaac) fiané, Elisabeth,and after that, she’ll appear in Christopher Nolan’s The Odysseyin an undisclosed role—so why not add a role as the villain in arguably the most iconic film franchise of them all?
Goth joins Gosling in his Star Wars debut, too, with the film slated for production this fall and a release date scheduled for May 28, 2027. When the world learned that Gosling’s Star Wars: Starfighterwas a reality at the Star Wars Celebration in Tokyo, the actor said that the script, from Jonathan Tropper, “is filled with so much heart and adventure, and there just really is not a more perfect filmmaker for this particular story than Shawn.” Goth becomes the first major addition to the cast to join Gosling.
The script is currently being kept sealed in carbonite, but the barest sketch has been revealed; Gosling plays a character who is trying to protect a young person from evil pursuers, and Goth is set to play one of those pursuers. Star Wars: Starfighter is not connected to the Skywalker Saga, which began with George Lucas’s 1977 galaxy-creating Star Wars IV: A New Hope, and carried on through 8 more films. Starfighter is set roughly five years after the events of J.J. Abrams’ 2019 Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker, the film that, for a time, anyway, ended the Skywalker Saga. (The Saga will presumably continue when Daisy Ridley’s upcoming new Star Wars film gets released.)
Goth became a beloved figure in the horror world after starring in Ti West’s trilogy—X, Pearl, and MaXXXine—playing several characters. Her star is certainly on the rise, and now will shine in a galaxy far, far away.
Featured image: LOS ANGELES, CALIFORNIA – FEBRUARY 06: (EDITORS NOTE: Image has been shot in black and white. Color version not available.) Mia Goth attends Vanity Fair and Lancôme Toast Women in Hollywood on February 06, 2020 in Los Angeles, California. (Photo by Matt Winkelmeyer/Getty Images for Vanity Fair)
When wefirst see Eve (Ana De Arma) fight in director Len Wiseman’s From The World of John Wick: Ballerina, you can tell she has yet to hit her peak. She, nonetheless, can irrefutably kick my ass and yours too, but it’s like watching a bear cub trying to climb a tree – it will eventually reach the top but there’s plenty of flopping and flailing on the way up. You see, Eve is fresh out of definitely-gonna-murder-you training and is just a shadow to the certain set of skills Baba Yaga (Keanu Reeves) has paraded in theJohn Wick movie franchise. She needs real-world reps and gets them during an initial mission to collect a high-profile target (Sooyoung Choi) at a nightclub. It’s here where a group of well-groomed bad guys allows her to punch, kick, and stab her way into the ass kicking business – struggles and all. But even after months of seasoning, shown on screen via a violently delicious montage, the fight choreography doesn’t overtly become a one-sided cape-wearing clash, but rather, it’s grounded in the character’s physical presence. Instead of miraculously overpowering anyone standing in her way, she turns to the objects around her, whether that’s nunchakus, knives, kitchenware, or ice skates, for the upper hand. It’s a lesson she’s learned from a former trainer who told her to “fight like a girl,” meaning: strategy over strength.
Sonically treating Eve’s opportunistic fighting style was the post sound team at Formosa Group that included supervising sound editors Luke Gibleon, Mark Stoeckinger, and Casey Genton, the latter also serving as rerecording mixer alongside Andy Koyama, with music editing by Ben Zales. “Early on, Eve is a novice. She’s a little weaker, sloppier, and nervous to an extent. As she gains experience, she gets powerful, precise, confident, and graceful,” says Gibleon. “We design and mix the sound to reflect that growth, making sounds more powerful, violent, and sometimes more showy fun as she uses unique objects to fight with.”
Ballerina joins the growing John Wick saga and takes place during the events ofJohn Wick: Chapter 3 — Parabellum, unfolding as anorigin story that sees Eve bent on revenge over those who wrongedher family – the plight of which had production filming across parts of Prague, Budapest, and Austria for several pulse-pounding scenes. Dance club brawls, hotel shootouts, John Wick standoffs, and a flame war fiesta where Eve trades in bullets for a flamethrower, turning baddies into BBQ. Sound navigated each with visceral intent, enlivening the aural tapestry of the story, characters, and underlying themes.
Below, the team shares how they approached the soundscape behind one explosive scene, in which Eve improvises her way out of a gun shop full of goons wielding knives, guns, and grenades.
What goes into balancing real-world sounds with the sonic elements of the Wick world?
Luke Gibleon: We always try to find elements from whatever region you’re at, while at the same time, when you’re in the Wick world, we try to find elements that feel otherworldly and exist outside of our present time and space. We put in a lot of interesting tones and other sounds that are more meant to make you feel something than hear something, so it’s a little bit of a balance of both.
Mark Stoeckinger: Also to speak for Jason Freeman, who edited all the dialogue, he helped and paid attention a lot to casting people who spoke Czech or German or another language to really give this diverse tapestry to different locations, or to give them a sound that you know your ear might not pick up specifically in what it is but you can tell it’s different.
What’s cool about the sequence is how Eve does most of her murdering with grenades. Was there an overall direction to the approach?
Casey Genton: The direction from Len was that he really wanted each one of those grenades to feel like it was shaking the earth. He wanted to feel the impact, the resonance of those explosions from behind doors, or right in your face. And it really comes through in the music, which drives the narrative…there’s this rhythm to it when you’re handing it off to the effects.
Luke Gibleon: Len also brought the idea of misdirection. And in this scene, that misdirection moment happens when we are brought into the shop, and we’re meant to feel like, okay, we’re gonna get this cool gun moment like we’ve gotten in other movies. And then boom, we take you right out of it with this attack by these bad guys.
Did you treat the grenade explosions with any interesting design elements?
Luke Gibleon: It’s really a mix of all kinds of layers. We want each grenade to sound a little different, and it all depends on where that grenade explodes and what the environment is around the grenade. We’re ensuring it makes us feel like we’re in that environment.
Casey Genton: A favorite moment is when Eve slams a guy behind a metal door, and then she blows a hole through the wall. Nick Interlandi, our sound effects editor, added one of these crazy bullet ricochets just before the explosion. It’s those fun little elements that sort of catches your ear and creates a different feeling.
So, did you navigate each explosion differently then?
Casey Genton: It was really important for us to build moments that were loud and significant, but then also have sort of throwaway grenade moments that were equally important and great but didn’t need to be quite as big as the other ones.
Luke Gibleon: One example is where we go into a tinnitus moment with Eve. We asked, How do we come out of it and it actually lends itself to a lot of dynamics. It’s not just one big constant wall of sound.
Casey Genton: Len was all about trying to find a cool way to introduce the effect of the grenades in such close proximity. Luke made this really great tinnitus-ish sound that wasn’t quite the same sound you always hear every single time you’re in that headspace. We were able to make our own version for her concussed state.
Another standout moment is when Eve flips over a table to barricade herself just before several grenades kill some henchmen. I loved how the soundscape dips, allowing the audience to immerse themselves in the impact. Was that always the intention?
Ben Zales: Our composer Joel J. Richard said when Eve goes into the room with the table and she starts searching for stuff, the moment lends itself for the music to come down to a lull before this really big table flip and big explosion. It was quite a dance between the music and sound effects.
Speaking of music, sequences like these are fueled by stunts, camera, and the unexpected, but also by music. How did you finesse the latter into the soundscape?
Ben Zales: For us, it’s whatever the moment needs. Whatever tells the story best. Dialogue is usually king, and in an action movie like this, sound effects are probably right up there with it. But there are definite moments where the music does shine. We try to find the best way to tell the story and give it the best impact for each scene and each moment.
Casey Genton: We have a lot of experience with Chad [Stahelski], and he comes from an action background, and the action part is related to the sound effects, but then the emotion and the fun and the energy are all about the music. Chad never wants to subjugate that by not having the music appropriately played in the scene, but he doesn’t want everybody to be fighting for the same sonic space, so he expects all of us to work together to find the best solution to that.
Mark Stoeckinger: When it comes to the music, it can be big and energetic, but doesn’t have to be a sonic hog. We always want to find a way to make the space so that everything that’s appropriate can play at the same time without everything competing.
From the World of John Wick: Ballerina is in theaters now.
Featured image: Ana de Armas as Eve in Ballerina. Photo Credit: Larry D. Horricks
It’s been well documented—on this site, no less—the extent to which Tom Cruise has put his body on the line for his Mission: Impossible franchise. Thirty years after we watched Cruise break into the CIA’s Black Vault in director Brian De Palma’s Mission: Impossible, we now have a portion of our cinematic memory bank filled with nothing but Cruise’s stunt work. We have seen him scale the 2,700-foot Burj Khalifa in 2011’s Mission: Impossible — Ghost Protocol and held our breath as we watched him hanging off the side of an Airbus A400m in 2015’s Rogue Nation. In 2018’s Fallout, he became the first actor to perform a HALO (High Altitude Low Open) jump on film, and later, in the same film, watched his mastery of helicopter piloting. For 2023’s Dead Reckoning, Cruise revved a motorcycle off Norway’s Helsetkopen mountain and turned it into a parachute jump. All of these stunts have required a Herculean amount of planning, preparation, and technical mastery. They’ve also required a ton of Chutzpah.
Now, in his apparent last performance as Ethan Hunt in The Final Reckoning, Cruise notched himself a Guinness World Record for doing 16 burning parachute jumps while filming the insane plane sequence as his Ethan Hunt battles Esai Morales’ Gabriel mid-air in a pair of propeller planes. The stunt was, by definition, highly technical and inherently dangerous, requiring Cruise to make sure the parachute didn’t twist while it was burning, or it could have fried him to a crisp.
Cruise and his stunt coordinator, Wade Eastwood, utilized a “snorri rig” for the stunt, a body-mounted camera that allows viewers to experience a dynamic, first-person point of view of Ethan after he’s leapt from a plane, so that we’re locked in freefall with him in a burning parachute as the world spins around him and the ground rushes up to meet him.
“The action evolves with the story — I’m not trying to invent action just to invent the next big stunt. It’s got to be emotionally engaging through action and fit the character,” Eastwood told us when we interviewed him for the last installment. It speaks to the character-driven action choreography that is at the heart of the franchise. Even though each new installment manages to top the last in terms of breathtaking stunt choreography, the reason the films will stand the test of time is that the stunts serve the story. In this instance, it earned Cruise a Guinness World Record as well.
Check out Cruise’s lunatic stunt here:
Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning is in theaters now.
For more on Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning, check out these stories:
The first trailer for Fargo creator Noah Hawley’s Alien: Earth has landed, and with it, we finally get a sense of the massive scope and scale of Hawley’s ambitions for his adaptation. Once again, Hawley’s attempting to take a beloved film (or in this case, film franchise) and graft the essential components of its DNA into a deeply satisfying small screen experience, trading in adapting the Coen Brothers’ offbeat and singular sensibility for the grand, gruesome sci-fi horror franchise that Ridley Scott’s Alien kick-started in 1979.
After a brief, chilling opening set-piece that includes one of the franchise stalwart aliens, the face-hugger, we’re set down on Neverland Research Island, which is, as the title makes plain, based on Earth. The year is 2120, and a research team is about to break new ground where they’re preparing to “help” an ailing young girl become the first person to transition from a human body to a synthetic one. What could go wrong?
We move on to Prodigy City, where a spaceship crash-lands containing something invaluable. As we’ve learned over the course of the Alien franchise, you really don’t want to go snooping around abandoned ships, but a team led by Wendy, by that little girl from Neverland Research Island, now grown (and played by Sydney Chandler), braves the unknown to check out the ship. Again, what could go wrong?
Sydney Chandler is Wendy in “Alien: Earth.”
The ship has all the markings of an Alien nightmare waiting to unfold. Splattered blood, cracked and shattered cages, the works. The ship was carrying five different life forms, we learn, “from the darkest corners of the universe.”
What. Could. Go. Wrong?
These five life forms are on the loose, and Alien: Earth will track what happens when Wendy and her team of “hybrids” try to uncover where they are and who’s responsible. The Earth they live on is controlled by five corporations, including Weyland-Yutani, the owners of the ship that spilled its monstrous life forms onto the blue planet. A few of these monsters we’ve met before—the iconic Xenomorph and the face-huggers, of course—but we also get a glimpse of a jellyfish-like creature and, as some folks are speculating, the possibility that Alien: Earth will include a predator. It wouldn’t be the first time the franchises have crossed paths.
Joining Chandler in the cast are a great ensemble, including Timothy Olyphant as Kirsh, Alex Lawther as Hermit, Samuel Blenkin as Boy Kavalier, Babou Ceesay as Morrow, Adrian Edmondson as Atom Eins, and Essie Davis as Dame Sylvia.
Check out the trailer below. Alien: Earth arrives on FX Networks and Hulu on August 12.
Featured image: “Alien: Earth” key art. Courtesy FX Networks.
At long last, we have the first footage from director Jon M. Chu’s Wicked: For Good, the second part of his two-part adaptation of the juggernaut Broadway musical, which itself was based on Gregory Maguire’s best-selling novel. This is our first glimpse at the sequel after Chu and his stars, Cynthia Erivo, who plays Elphaba, and Ariana Grande, who plays Glinda, took to the stage at the Colosseum Theater at Caesars Palace to unveil the footage at CinemaCon this past April.
The first look at part two doesn’t disappoint, with Elphaba arriving at Glinda’s doorstep to make clear the contours of the world they’re living in—“This is between us,” Elphaba says, “the Wizard and I.” We’re then given a look at Michelle Yeoh’s Madame Morrible, promising that “the Wicked Witch can’t elude us forever,” and guarantees a swift end to Elphaba’s freedom, promising that Prince Fiyero (Jonathan Bailey) and his squadron will track her down.
Wicked: For Good will span the events of the musical’s second act, which tracks Elphaba and Glinda’s friendship facing the ultimate test as they come to terms with their new identities—the Wicked Witch of the West for Elphaba, and Glinda the Good Witch of the North. It also covers Dorothy’s arrival in Oz from Kansas.
The official trailer is bursting with feeling and song, as Elphaba and Glinda begin their epic journey toward becoming the characters we thought we knew in The Wizard of Oz. “You’re the only friend I’ve ever had,” Elphaba says to Glinda toward the end of the thrilling trailer. “And I’ve had so many friends,” Glinda quips, but when the two clasp hands, she says, “but only one that mattered.”
The scripts for both Wicked films come from Winnie Holzman and Dana Fox. Erivo, Grande, Yeoh, and Bailey are joined by Jeff Goldblum as the Wizard of Oz, Ethan Slater as Boq Woodsman, Marissa Bode as Nessarose Thropp, and Bowen Yang as Pfannee.
Wicked was a massive critical and commercial smash, earning 10 Oscar nominations, including for Best Picture, Best Actress for Erivo, Best Supporting Actress for Grande, as well as noms for production design, editing, makeup and hairstyling, costume design, original score, sound, and visual effects. Costume designer Paul Tazewell won his category, becoming the first Black man to win it, and production designer Nathan Crowley won his.
Check out the trailer here. Wicked: For Good flies into theaters on November 21.
Featured image: L to R: Ariana Grande is Glinda and Cynthia Erivo is Elphaba in WICKED FOR GOOD, directed by Jon M. Chu.
A new teaser for director Matt Shakman’s The Fantastic Four: First Steps has arrived, and along with new footage comes the news that tickets are now on sale. The new look situates the importance of family for Marvel’s upcoming reboot, which is fitting considering the Fantastic Four are Marvel’s First Family (they were created by Marvel Comics legends Stan Lee and Jack Kirby on August 8, 1961, ushering in a new level of realism to the comics medium.) We see glimpses of the Silver Sufer (Julia Garner) arriving in New York as the herald to a coming catastrophe that is the world-eating Marvel supervillain Galactus (Ralph Ineson), with the Fantastic Four—Pedro Pascal (Reed Richards/Mister Fantastic), Vanessa Kirby (Sue Storm/The Invisible Woman), Joseph Quinn (Johnny Storm/The Human Torch), and Ebon Moss-Bachrach (Ben Grimm/The Thing)—the only people around who can stop it.
The retro-futuristic look of The Fantastic Four and the earwormy bit of the score we’ve heard in the trailers and teasers speak to the crack team that Shakman has assembled behind the camera to pull off this all-important introduction of one of the most beloved characters in the Marvel canon to the MCU. Composer Michael Giacchino, cinematographer Jess Hall, production designer Kasra Farahani, and set decorator Jille Azis, to name a few, have all contributed to the Jetsons-meets-Mad Men look. Two examples of the practical effects and retro-futurstic look are the robot H.E.R.B.I.E. (Humanoid Experimental Robot B-Type Integrated Electronics), which was an actual animatronic android that zipped around the set on wheels, and the two models of the Four’s Fantasticar that were built, one of which had a real interior for the performers to sit in.
The Earth that the Fantastic Four live on is not our Earth (there are multiple Earths, of course, in the Marvel multiverse), and in this one, the Four are to these particular Earthlings what our most famous astronauts are to us.
“We knew that we’d be on another Earth, so we had a chance to reinvent what the ’60s looked like,” Shakman told Entertainment Weekly. “I was really interested in imagining the Fantastic Four being astronauts. Instead of Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin going to the moon, what if it was Reed, Sue, Johnny, and Ben who were really the first to go into outer space, the first to push those boundaries?”
During the same set visit that EW conducted, production designer Kasra Farahani provided further explanation of the look.
“The lines are beautiful and slick, based on mid-’60s American concept cars that were actually referencing European cars, so they have an elegance,” production designer Kasra Farahani told EW. “And yet there are these undeniably ’50s-looking retrofuture elements like the turbine intakes at the front and back of the car, and the bubble dome. Even a lot of the interface controls inside are very much based on more of a ’50s look.”
At long last, The Fantastic Four are making their Marvel Cinematic Universe debut, something fans have been clamoring for since Disney acquired 21st Century Fox way back in 2019. Check out the new teaser below. The Fantastic Four: First Steps arrives in theaters on July 25.
“I never saw myself as an action [actor]. But I’ve been in this industry a little bit, and I know you have to have an open mind to everything,” says Catalina Moreno, who stars alongside Ana de Armas in the upcoming From the World of John Wick: Ballerina, the fifth film in the popular franchise. Her teenage son, she says, is “obsessed with John Wick, so when I got the script for Ballerina I thought, maybe it was meant to be.”
She brushed up on the John Wick series by watching with her son. “He’s my fan and I love that,” she says. “We watched to see when the Ruska Roma started in the John Wick world since it is a big part of Ballerina. Ana is a ballerina and trained assassin in the traditions of the Ruska Roma. So it’s interesting to discover these little doors that the John Wick world leaves open to explore.”
Ana de Armas as Eve and Keanu Reeves as John Wick in Ballerina. Photo Credit: Courtesy of Lionsgate
Although Moreno is best known for indie dramas, starting with her breakout role in the 2004 sleeper Maria Full of Grace, which earned her a Best Actress Oscar nomination, she is now taking on more genre roles. In 2023, she worked with Hong Kong action master Woo on Silent Night and says she prepared by watching Woo’s Face/Off and The Killer. “I learned to appreciate them,” she says. She’s currently in her fourth season starring in the science fiction horror television series FROM.
Catalina Sandino Moreno and writer/director Joshua Marston on the set of “Maria Full of Grace.” Courtesy Courtesy of Catalina Sandino MorenoCourtesy of Catalina Sandino Moreno
“Action films are following me now,” says Moreno, who’ll next be seen in the crime thriller RIP slated for release in November from Netflix. “I read the script and it was so good; very entertaining and super fast-paced.” She was eager to work with actors Matt Damon, Ben Affleck, and Steven Yeun. “I admire and grew up with them, so I had to do it. I told my grandmother I was in a movie with Ben Affleck. She didn’t know who he was until I said, ‘Jennifer Lopez’s ex-husband.’ Then she knew.”
Moreno is enjoying being at a point in her career when she’s experimenting with different roles.
“When I started, I felt so much pressure because I traveled the world with [Maria Full of Grace] and I saw people’s reactions to the movie. It felt like a big responsibility, especially being Colombian and representing a Colombian film. Now I feel a movie can be just entertaining … I feel like I can play a bit. I’m able to let go of the pressure I put on myself.”
Catalina Sandino Moreno and writer/director Joshua Marston on the set of “Maria Full of Grace.” Courtesy of Catalina Sandino Moreno
She never expected Maria Full of Grace to be such a critical and commercial hit. “I was excited because it was HBO and I had HBO at home,” she says. “I just wanted to watch it in my house; I never expected it would be in film festivals or win anything. I never imagined how impactful it would be in my life.”
Moreno attended a screening last year to celebrate the film’s 20th anniversary. “The theater was packed with people. When the film came out, some questioned how an American filmmaker [Joshua Marston] could tell this Colombian story. But he did it so beautifully because it was from the girl’s point of view about the world of narco trafficking. The way he did it was so touching and current. I saw people who watched it for the first time 20 years later and were still moved by it.”
“I love the movie,” Moreno continues. “I’m still in contact with Joshua; he is a good friend. I believe if I had done a comedy for my first movie, my career would have been complexly different. This one made a dent in my life for sure.”
After the impact of her debut, Moreno was selective about roles because she wasn’t being offered much challenging material.
“They sent me the sexy Latina, the maid, the Colombian drug dealer, the poor immigrant. I love those stories, but when you’re given only those roles in a short period, [I wondered] ‘do I have to do this to survive?’”
She waited two years before making her second feature, Fast Food Nation, and in 2008, starred with Benicio del Toro in Steven Soderbergh’s Che.
“I thought I had to do important films,” she says. “Who cares about superheroes or romance? I pressured myself to make movies that mattered. [For Che] I went to Cuba. I read the book. I love the process of working on important films, but every film has its place. For John Wick fans, Ballerina is important. It’s a continuation of this incredible world.”
Catalina Sandino Moreno as Lena in Ballerina. Photo Credit: Larry D. Horricks
Moreno credits de Armas for inspiring her to make daring career choices. “I told her I admire her so much; what she did with Marilyn was inspiring for me as a Latina. Who would have thought Hollywood would allow a Cuban to play Marilyn Monroe?” says Moreno about de Armas’s acclaimed performance in Blonde (2022). “That opens ground for all of us. I love that about her. Ana showed me you can do any role if you are passionate. It does not matter where you’re from or who you are; you can be fearless.”
Ballernia is in theaters on June 6.
Featured image: Catalina Sandino Moreno as Lena in Ballerina. Photo Credit: Larry D. Horricks
