It’s old news by now that Tom Cruise is a man who likes to do his own stunts, which includes a lot of the flying he has done in movies like Top Gun: Maverick and his many installments in the Mission: Impossible franchise. For Mission: Impossible – Fallout, Cruise famously piloted a helicopter in the climatic final scene in his chopper-to-chopper battle against Henry Cavill’s August Walker. Stunt coordinator Wade Eastwood told us that Cruised trained on the helicopter for a year to get it right. The scene was ludicrous and it’s wild to think that it was really Cruise doing all those death-defying maneuvers in his chopper, but it really shouldn’t be all that surprising by now.
So the news from Varietythat Cruise has been using a chopper to get from the Italian port city of Bari to a U.S. aircraft carrier off the Italian coast (speculation is that it’s the U.S.S. George H.W. Bush) to film scenes for the final installment in his long Mission: Impossible career – Dead Reckoning Part Two is par for the course. Cruise, writer/director Christopher McQuarrie and the cast and crew have been filming the epic two-part conclusion to the franchise back-to-back, and you know they’re going to lay it all on the line, again to deliver a finale worthy of one of the most breathless action franchise in cinematic history.
Variety confirms from the head of the Apulia Film Commission, Antonio Parente, that the U.S. aircraft carrier is “somewhere between Italy and Croatia.”
“We are proud that [the] Apulia [region] has been chosen as the operational base for this rather complex shoot,” Parente told Variety. He added that the Apulia Film Commission liaised with Paramount Italia but only provided help with airport logistics for the Mission: Impossible shoot.
The first half of the two-part conclusion, Dead Reckoning Part One, was shot in Italy, in both Venice and Rome. The locations for the second part have been kept largely under wraps.
Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One is due in theaters on July 14, 2023, while Part Two is slated for a June 28, 2024 release.
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After three seasons and 48 Emmy nominations, Succession‘s 4th and final seasonis nearly upon us. Creator Jesse Armstrong recently announced that his delicious deep dive into the serial infighting among one family of American billionaire berserks, the Roys, is coming to an end, and HBO has just released a decidedly high-octane official trailer to remind viewers why Succession has been one of the most consistently satisfying shows on TV.
Here we have Logan Roy (the exquisitely cast Brian Cox) at what appears full strength. Gone, it seems, is his King Lear-like doddering from previous seasons, where physical ailments and the occasional mental lapse made the lion appear weak enough for rivals and members of his own family to pounce. The trailer reveals an energized and hungry Logan Roy, ready to tear his family apart (if need be) to maintain control, rousing his employees with a speech befitting a general on the eve of war. And war really is the only analogy that seems to fit Logan’s approach to business—you either serve beneath him or you are the enemy. As the sale of the company Logan built, Waystar Royco, to Lukas Matsson (Alexander Skarsgård)’s tech company GoJo gets closer, the family Roy is circling each other for one final, climatic battle royale to see who ends up on top. These people only know one way to communicate; a perpetual power struggle.
The trailer teases the new alliances (always shaky in the Roy’s world) and battle lines being drawn. Tom (Matthew Macfayden) has aligned with Logan after turning on his own wife, Shiv (Sarah Snook), at the end of season three to sidle up to the man he believes can’t lose. Kendall (Jeremy Strong) and his siblings Shiv and Roman (Kieran Culkin) are a united front as they try to take down their father and stop the sale to GoJo. They’re going to need to figure out a way to get one step ahead of Logan, a challenge they’ve not yet successfully met. The trailer also gives us a sneak peek at one of Logan’s most timeless maneuvers; he tries to lure Roman back to his side by swearing he “needs” his youngest son. Knowing Roman, he’ll likely take the bait.
Caught up in the blast radius of the Roy family war are series regulars Gerri (J. Smith Cameron ), Greg (Nicholas Braun), Stewy (Arian Moayed), Lady Caroline Collingwood (Harriet Walter ), Ewan Roy (James Cromwell), Rava Roy (Natalie Gold) and more. Season four will welcome new cast members, including Eili Harboe, Annabeth Gish, Adam Godley, and Jóhannes Haukur Jóhannesson.
Check out the official trailer for Succession season 4 below. All good things and greedy billionaires must, eventually, come to an end.
Before we try to unpack an intriguing clue that Hugh Jackman revealed to the French newspaper Le Parisien about his upcoming return as Wolverine in Deadpool 3, let’s quickly assess what we do know about the film.
Jackman returns as Wolverine in Deadpool 3 despite dying a hero’s death in James Mangold’s terrific Logan via some narrative trickery. Or really, it doesn’t even have to be all that tricky considering Logan is set in 2029 and Deadpool 3 is presumably set before then. Yet Jackson himself has hinted that his be-clawed mutant’s return is due to Marvel’s use of the multiverse and its ability to superimpose two, three, or a million universes on top of each other. As Jackson said to Sirius XM, Wolvy’s return is possible because of “this device they have in the Marvel world of moving around timelines. Now we can go back because, you know, it’s science. So I don’t have to screw with the Logan timeline, which was important to me. And I think probably to the fans too.”
We also know that Jackson’s Wolverine and Ryan Reynolds’s Merc with the Mouth will face off against a villain played by The Crown‘s Emma Corrin, which is an exciting bit of casting. We also know that director Shawn Levy and longtime Deadpool screenwriters Rhett Reese and Paul Wernick have promised that Deadpool 3 will be as hardcore as ever, even though the famously R-rated franchise is now housed within the vast Marvel Cinematic Universe, which itself lives in the even vaster Disney realm. Marvel Studios president Kevin Feige confirmed the hardcore-ness of Deadpool 3 when he revealed the film would, indeed, be rated R.
Now, onto that nugget that Jackman revealed to Le Parisien about his return as Wolverine:
“Yes, it will even be a double role. Ryan and I have been friends for twenty years; we have a lot of fun together. We’re shooting this summer. That’s why I’m so happy to be in Paris right now and to be able to enjoy French gastronomy. Because very soon, I will have to go on a strict diet to remake Wolverine’s body: steamed chicken and broccoli!”
A double role, you say? This makes us wonder if we might be getting two versions of Wolverine here. Considering that Jackman has already teased the multiverse, one can be forgiven for speculating that screenwriters Reese and Wernick might not have swung for the fences after learning Jackman was willing to return and ginning up the most gonzo storyline for Wolverine ever. Consider that Logan introduced a purely evil version of Wolverine with X-24, a clone of our hero who was, nominally, under the control of Dr. Zander Rice in that film. A “double role” could, of course, mean a ton of different things, and not necessarily that Jackman will be literally pulling double duty as two Wolverines he did in Logan, but it’s intriguing to imagine multiple Wolverines giving the Merc with the Mouth more than even he can handle.
Deadpool 3 is currently slated for November 8, 2024.
All Quiet on the Western Front, Erich Maria Remarque’s 1929 novel that lays bare the harsh brutality of war through the eyes of a naive youth fighting in the German trenches during WWI, is considered a literary classic. So Frank Kruse admits some hesitation when director Edward Berger told him he was doing a modern retelling. That disappeared after Kruse read the script. Though the challenge would be daunting, he wanted to be the film’s sound designer and supervising sound editor.
Kruse’s instincts proved correct. Hailed as one of the best films of 2022, All Quiet on the Western Front recently won seven BATFAs, including Best Film and Best Director. Kruse, along with Lars Ginzel, Viktor Prášil, and Markus Stemler, was honored for Best Sound. The sound team (with the addition of Stefan Korte) is vying for an Oscar in the same category. In total, the film has received nine Academy Award nominations, including Best Picture.
During a Zoom interview, Kruse detailed the important role the sound played in heightening the horrors of the battlefield and the emotional toll war takes on those who fight it.
What was the strategy for the sound design?
I love to support the production sound mixer on projects by recording wild tracks — vehicles, crowds, whatever sound is on set. This is really hard to recreate in post-production. This was at the height of COVID. They were shooting in the Czech Republic. The borders would be closed. Travel wouldn’t be easy. I worked as a production mixer myself for 10-plus years. I know the focus during a shoot is capturing dialogue. There’s rarely time for sound. I made a list ofitems that would be impossible to source later. Then I went through the script with Viktor,the production sound mixer, and flagged all this stuff. Luckily,Edward is a huge fan of recording wild tracks. He was up for directing the wild tracks himself, having the extras run and scream, do takes of them dying, rollingin the mud. That was a godsend.
Behind the scenes on “All Quiet On the Western Front.” Courtesy Reiner Bajo/Netflix.
Approximately how much sound was captured during the actual filming?
I think it was eight-plus hours of wild tracks. Unheard of for a film of this scale. Viktor had two, sometimes three mics mounted on the main characters. One mic would be leveled all the way up to capture the breathing and the close-up exhaustion. Another mic was gained way down for screams so they wouldn’t distort. The mics locked up, giving the sounds this documentary feel. That became a base layer for the entire design work. But we didn’t want to go overboard — you know, the cliche of spooky drones and designy ambiances — stuff like that. We tried to find metaphorical naturalistic sounds for the emotional moments.
How did you research WWI sounds?
World War One is tricky. I tried to find actual recordings from that time. Wax cylinders had been invented, so it was possible to record sound. At Britain’s Imperial War Museum, I found reconstructions using a technology called sound ranging. But they were done later with modern sounds.
So I dug deeper and found an article quoting letters written at the front to relatives back home. They described the horror of the sound very graphically. That became a big source of inspiration. We realized that it wouldn’t make sense to create sounds that were technically correct. We decided to tackle the soundtrack from an emotional side. The story is told so much through Paul Bäumer (Felix Kammerer), the main character. It was about incorporating a subjective soundscape that connected the audience as the camera ran next to him.
The way it was shot really helped. Most of the onscreen effects were done in-camera. The first cut was full of bullet impact explosions, dirt explosions, etc. We used all the gunshot explosions from the production recordings.
What did you layer in?
I call them shell shock moments. When Heinrich (Jakob Schmidt) gets killed hiding behind the tree stump in the first battle, this extreme panic grips him. The background battle sounds get muffled and go away. Only the main sound element is left. We did that sound by scraping and dragging microphones through dirt. We wanted a certain sound for his panic, as if his body is being pushed through the soil — the sound you hear when your ears are literally covered in sand or dirt.
There’s a similar moment in the tank attack when Paul sees his friend Albert (Aaron Hilmer) being burned by the flamethrowers. Everything goes away. His voice stays close and untreated — almost like it’s in this quiet bubble. The sound creates this moment of peace while horrific things are happening. We always try to go against what you see in a subtle but organic way. Personally, I think it is less interesting when all the departments do the same thing at the same moment. It leaves very little space for an audience tofind their own emotion for that scene.
How did Voker Bertelmann’s score impact your design
He came on board a little later than we did. I did a layout of an early sequence where the uniforms are recycled. We see them taken off dead soldiers and refurbished for the next batch of 18-year-olds getting ready to die.
It’s a metaphoric symbol for the industry behind this war. Edward wanted a sound for that. You hear the sewing machines low and pounding like steel mills. That morphs into the real sound of the sewing machines with close-ups of the needles. Eventually, it turns into what sounds like an endless burst of machine gun fire.
I sent that layout to Voker. He introduced another rhythm over that sequence using a harmonium. I found the sound I had made was clashing. So I changed the pitch and tuned it to his music. We tried to find moments when the music did a better job and where the effects were more efficient in telling the story. We never wanted to do the same thing at the same time as the music.
What sounds were the most challenging?
The battle scenes were a huge challenge. There was just so much going on. The tank sound was challenging. We designed it as an emotional element rather than as a technology. These thanks were strategically useless. They barely moved two or three kilometers an hour. They were meant for psychological warfare — to tell the enemy, “You can shoot at us, but the bullets won’t harm us.” We had a wooden toy car. In a weird, funny coincidence, we found when we ran it across a metal ventilation shaft; the wheels resonated in this howling, groaning way — almost like a whale. It became the main element for the tanks. Viktor had wired the tanks with multiple microphones. The original recordings had a rhythmic cadence coming from the metal tracks. We layered them in. It’s always these happy accidents and experimentation in the foley studio.
Behind the scenes on “All Quiet On the Western Front.” Courtesy Reiner Bajo/Netflix.
Any favorite scenes that you worked on or particular sound moments you’re proud of?
I must say, some of my favorite scenes are the quiet ones. I love the moment at the end of the film when Kat (Albrecht Schuch) is in the forest. He looks up into the sky and the (leafless) trees. We added the wind blowing through the trees, shaking the leaves even though there aren’t any. It was going against the visuals to create a dream — past the war, at home with his wife. It’s so peaceful. I really like the contrast.
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When Sara Dosa won Best Film Documentary Director from the Directors Guild on February 18 for Fire of Love, it was no doubt an acknowledgment of the daunting task Dosa faced in shaping nearly 200 hours of 16 mm archival footage shot by her subjects, without sound, into her mesmerizing film. Fire of Love is also nominated for this year’s Best Documentary Oscar.
Fire of Love, a National Geographic film on Disney+, is about Katia and Maurice Kraftt, chemist and geologist, respectively, and their passion for science and each other. The couple, who both hailed from Alsace in France, chased volcanos around the world for two decades after they married in 1970, getting close enough to capture extraordinary footage of erupting, bubbling volcanos sending rocks and boiling lava shooting into the atmosphere.
Katia and Maurice Krafft are seated for an interview in their home in Alsace, France. (Credit: INA)
Despite being recognized as the world’s foremost volcano experts, Dosa says few people outside France and the scientific community know of the Kraftts. She hopes the success of Fire of Love changes that.
“They are not well known but it’s a timeless story…they seem out of a myth but they are real and for us it was so extraordinary to [create] a film about these humans who worked with this utter clarity of purpose,” says Dosa.
FIRE OF LOVE Director, Sara Dosa. (Credit: Erik Tanner/Contour by Getty Images)
The Kraftts’ vast 16mm archive and Katia’s trove of photographs are housed in a facility in Nancy, France, called Image’Est. The research was challenging because after the Kraftts died in 1991, Maurice’s older brother Bertrand managed the archive, and it moved around over the years before landing at Image’Est, says Dosa. “Image’Est loves the images and took care of it and stayed in touch with Bertrand. He was happy with us and is part of the journey,” she says.
Katia and Maurice Krafft, in blue winter jackets, gaze upon a volcano in the distance as smoke, steam and ash swirl behind them. (Credit: Image’Est)
Due to pandemic, Dosa could not travel to France until October of 2021.
“By then, we were far into editing. They would scan and send [material] over the internet 20 hours at a time and we’d hungrily watch all of it.”
Besides the Kraffts’ films and photos, the Fire of Love team all had to cull though 50 hours of their radio interviews and televisions appearances on variety and talk shows as the couple became celebrities in France, a rarity for scientists at the time with the possible exception of oceanographer Jacques Cousteau.
Besides their haunting film footage, one of the key decisions Dosa made early on was to trust the Kraffts’ own words. The story unfolds through their letters, poetry and journal entries narrated by actress and filmmaker Miranda July.
“At the beginning, we didn’t want narration at all. We hoped the archive would speak for itself but we quickly realized the challenges with the footage and if we wanted to tell the love story, which felt like their true legacy, we needed a narrative vehicle to tell that love story,” says Dosa. “We were inspired by the tropes of French New Wave, which already existed in Katia and Maurice’s own work. We decided to embrace that subjective, playful narrator that people associate with the French New Wave as part of our style.”
Katia smiles while putting on her giant metal helmet while on Mt Etna in 1972. (Credit: Image’Est)
Once they decided on a narrator, the team knew they wanted a woman’s voice to counter the prevalence of male narrators in nature documentaries, says Dosa. But they assumed it would be a French woman until producer Greg Boustead suggested July. “We were excited because she possesses what we call a deadpan, curious voice,” says Dosa. “It reminded us of the narration in Godard’s Masculine Feminine. A deadpan narrator can make space for the images and story. She was perfect on a lot of levels. She took the writing we did and elevated it. Working with her was a total dream.”
Another key decision was to reveal early on in the film that the Kraffts died doing what they loved. We learn at the start of the film that they died while filming the eruption of Mount Unzen in Japan in 1991, an event that killed 43 people.
“We did not want it to feel like a third act payoff,” says Dosa. “It was important to be sensitive to them and not let their deaths feel sensationalized or a plot twist. We also didn’t want the question of when or how they died to take up narrative space and be distracting. So we took that question out and dwelled in how they lived because that’s what it was about — how to live a meaningful life in the pursuit of a dangerous love.”
Katia Krafft wearing aluminized suit standing near lava burst at Krafla Volcano, Iceland. (Credit: Image’Est)
Dosa and her team were also keen to focus on the nature of time and the difference between time on the human scale—the duration of a single life—and time on a geologic scale.
“We were also thinking carefully about the theme of time in the film, the fleeting nature of human life set against the immortality of a volcano,” Dosa says. “That pulls into focus these existential questions of the meaning, life and love that make it all the more full of longing. Even though they died, death is not end for them. They are bound up in this endless cycle of creation and destruction. So we start with death and then connect it back to the beginning.”
The DGA award may boost Fire of Love’s Oscar chances despite hefty competition from critical favorite All the Beauty and the Bloodshed and BAFTA winner Navalny. Dosa says the precursor awards have fostered “camaraderie rather than competition” among the nominees. She hopes the awards spotlight “will help people all over world know the story of Katia and Maurice Krafft.”
“They would be ticked by all of this,” she says. “Our deep hope is that people can be inspired by their love for the earth, and maybe people will develop their own relationship with it. That’s the goal for me.”
Featured image: Katia Krafft wearing aluminized suit standing near lava burst at Krafla Volcano, Iceland. (Credit: Image’Est)
Filmmaker Darren Aronofsky often pursues the road less taken in movies like The Wrestler, Black Swan and Requiem for a Dream. He’s done it again in The Whale, which stars Oscar-nominated Brendan Fraser as Charlie, a 600-pound English teacher who conducts classes over Zoom with his screen image hidden so students can’t see his true size. The entire film (now available on demand on Prime Video, Apple TV and elsewhere) takes place inside Charlie’s apartment, where he argues with his caretaker (Oscar-nominated Hong Chau) and tries to reconcile with his estranged daughter (Stranger Things star Sadie Sink) while suffering from a heart condition. Fraser’s transformation into an enormous man makes for riveting spectacle, but, the actor insists, “This not a film about an obese man. It’s about a man in search of redemption and the breathless [suspense] that comes with whether or not he will achieve it.”
Fraser starred in his first blockbuster The Mummy in 1999. Since then, he’s made dozens of comedies, biopics, action pictures and dramas, including Gods and Monsters opposite Ian McKellen. But until last month, Fraser had never been nominated for an Oscar. His children woke him with the news, armed with ice cream, cake and balloons. Fraser says. “To share that moment with my kids, it’s among the top five happiest days of my life.”
Fraser, who lives in upstate New York with his family, spoke by phone during a recent visit to Los Angeles, detailing the nuances of his Whale hero and offering some hard-earned advice for young actors.
You imbue Charlie with so much heart and soul. How did you go about understanding the psyche of this troubled man?
On one hand, he’s the victim of having fallen in love with the wrong person so there’s the fallout from that cataclysmic event. And then knowing that a child got lost in the mix, whether it’s because of a court action, his former wife’s drinking, maybe his economic status — we don’t really know the reason, but what it means is that his little girl got compromised. When we meet Charlie, he’s dealing with the ramifications of this life he’s lived, the regrets, the failures. He has possibly five days left [to live] so he makes this Hail Mary to reach out to his daughter and apologize. I just had intense empathy for this character, and somehow the love I have for my own kids — that fueled me.
Sadie Sink in “The Whale.” Courtesy A24.
You shot The Whaleduring Covid. How did the pandemic impact the vibe of this film?
We were frightened, living under existential threat: Will there be a tomorrow? I’m not trying to be dramatic, but it wasn’t lost on all of us that this could be the last time we ever get to make a movie! But it was important to get up off of the couch, like Charlie must do, and go back to work. The pandemic made us all realize how much we cared about what we were doing.
Brendan Fraser on the set of “The Whale.” Photo by Niko Tavernise. Courtesy A24.
The prosthetics in this movie are sensationally seamless. Had you ever done extensive prosthetics before The Whale?
In Bedazzled, directed by Harold Ramis, I played a guy who goes through five different incarnations in this Faustian bargain he makes with the devil, Elizabeth Hurley. There were a lot of transformative prosthetics, but it was the traditional process: you get a life cast done, they put goop on your face, straw through your nose, a mold is made, it’s compounded into sculpting for an appliance — nose, cheek, whatever — and then applied to your face. There are seams, but the audience buys into it because there’s a suspension of disbelief.
The Whale sets a new standard in photo-realistic prosthetics, with Adrien Morot earning an Oscar nomination in the makeup and hairstyling category. How did you get fitted for the “Charlie” fat suit?
I couldn’t sit for a mold because of the virus so the producer had this iPad and did a digital scan of my body in my driveway in freezing January. From that body scan, data was sent to Arden Morot in Montreal. He imported the data to create a virtual Charlie body, with absolute dominion over the placement of pores, skin anomalies, everything. He imported textures so [the body] became like a giant texture map. From that data, molds were 3-D printed, appliances were made to fit my face perfectly, and you never see the construction line.
Adrien Morot sculpting Charlie’s body. Courtesy Adrien Morot/A24.Adrien Morot painting resin over the 3D printed sculpture of Charlie’s facial appliance. Courtesy Adrien Morot/A24.Adrien Morot adds a bit of glue to Charlie facial appliance while Annemarie Bradley-Sherron styles his hair. Courtesy Adrien Morot/A24.
From the outside in, “Charlie” represents a marvel of technology, but you had to animate his physicality from the inside out. What kind of research did you do in preparation?
I watched documentary and reality television footage with the volume turned down because I wanted to study bodies and their centers of gravity. I wanted to understand the mobility issues and disabilities and challenges faced by those who live in larger bodies. I also took inspiration from the great creatures of nature. Watching a great white [whale] crest and break the water and come down? To my eye, it’s reminiscent of the silhouette we see [at the end of the movie] when Charlie takes to his feet.
Movies rarely feature characters like Charlie in the lead role. Was it important for you to shine a light on the ways society as a whole views people who are heavy?
Yes! I worked with an advocacy group called the Obesity Action Coalition. Their mission statement is to end the bias that we as a society uphold as an accepted norm. The Coalition wants to make corrections wherein we don’t refer to people who live with obesity with the prevalent terminology. It’s not fair and we can do better. It’s the Coalition’s belief, and I concur, that this character Charlie can save lives by changing someone’s heart.
Audiences have responded deeply to your performance, famously giving you a six-minute standing ovation after The Whale screened at Cannes. What do you make of that?
When Charlie chooses to get up on his feet under his own power, which he could not do before, and goes to the light? I think that’s why audiences are having this collective – I don’t know if you call it catharsis or what — but there’s this undeniable emotional response from people in the audience taking part in this ritual that is cinema, sitting in a dark room with strangers, hopefully, checking their biases at the door.
Brendan Fraser. Courtesy of A24
Darren Aronofsky is such a distinctive filmmaker, always bringing a very specific vision to his projects. Who are some of the other directors you’d like to work with?
I’d like to work with Martin Scorsese again. Here’s the drill when you work with a masterful filmmaker like him: Everybody’s at the top of their game, all departments, and they’re all standing by like sentries. I’m serious! I gladly waited for a month to be called in for five or six days on Killers of the Flower Moon. There were a couple of scenes that Martin decides he wants to put in: “Call Brendan, can he get here now?” “Yes, I can!” I jump in the car and go. We’re all duty-bound to give Martin Scorsese what he needs to make the piece the best that it can be because we’re in service of something higher than our own interests. That’s the way I felt.
You’ve been acting professionally since you were about 22 years old. Back in 1992, when your first big movie Encino Man came out, did you ever picture yourself being nominated for a Best Actor Academy Award?
Are you kidding me?! No. Way. If I had allowed myself the fantasy, it would have been the category I’ve always admired: supporting actor. I’ve always wanted to be the bass player who backs somebody up and is really good at it. That’s how I felt when I worked with Ian McKellen [in Gods and Monsters]. He’s the lead guitarist.
In your field, career longevity can be a rare thing, yet you’re still going strong after three decades in show business. What advice do you have for actors who are in it for the long haul?
Have courage. Acting is about wanting and wanting and wanting again. There’s always going to be something in the way. An obstacle. And the actor’s job is to get around the obstacle and achieve the objective. And how you do that all comes down to tactics, really. Whether it’s a film, a play, or just the business itself, you need to want and want and want again. And to do that, you need courage. And to have courage is to acknowledge that something is scary. You can’t have courage until you acknowledge that. Thirty years ago, as a young actor myself, I would have done well to have somebody telling me to have courage. It’s something I learned by not achieving the goal, by being stopped by the obstacle. Living in this city is an obstacle: You’ve got to take Fountain because if you take Sunset, you’re going to get stuck in traffic. Finding an agent? That’s an obstacle. Staying in the game, staying relevant? That’s an obstacle. So that’s my epistle for the day. A hero is not just some guy running around in a helmet with a sword and a round shield. It’s a guy like Charlie. He’s a hero.
When it comes to makeup effects, Adrien Morot ranks among the very best. From fierce alligators (Crawl), to mutant superheroes (X Men films X-Men: Days of Future Past, X-Men: Apocalypse, and Dark Phoenix), to this year’s favorite film doll (M3GAN), Morot has proven time and again he’s a prosthetic wizard. But even he wondered if he had met his match when director Darren Aronofsky offered him The Whale.
“Terrified,” answers Morot with a smile during a recent Zoom interview when asked about his initial reaction. “It’s the kind of project that anybody with a head on their shoulders should run away from…the challenge is so immense.”
Based on the stage play by Samuel D. Hunter (who also wrote the screenplay), The Whale stars Brendan Fraser as Charlie, a morbidly obese online English teacher attempting to reconnect with his estranged teenage daughter (Sadie Sink) as he self-destructs by overeating.
Fraser needed to look hundreds of pounds heavier. After reading the script, Morot knew it wouldn’t be easy. Overweight makeups are typical to comedy (The Nutty Professor, Shallow Hal) or sci-fi (Thinner). Each permits a suspension of belief. The Whale didn’t allow for that.
“It’s a chamber piece with a small cast. Nobody’s wearing prosthetics other than the main character. He’s almost in every single scene,” explains Morot. “He’s going to fill up the screen. Any sort of flaw will be immediately noticeable. It’s a prosthetic artist’s nightmare.”
Brendan Fraser. Courtesy of A24
Having worked with Aronofsky in the past, including Mother! and Noah, Morot just couldn’t say no. He would create a makeup unlike any he had done before.
But that was only part of the challenge.
The pandemic was rearing its ugly head. Aronofsky thought The Whale, with its small cast and one location, would be the perfect COVID bubble project. Anticipating a shutdown lasting weeks, not months, the director wanted to act quickly. He scheduled five weeks of prep. Knowing something this complicated usually takes longer, that deadline concerned Morot.
Morot watched the stage production. It created Charlie’s look with padding and wardrobe cheats. This didn’t feel right. “They were using all sorts of tricks to help them out,” Morot observes. “The character is wearing long sleeves, a high collar, those kinds of things. It hides the padding.”
Brendan Fraser. Courtesy of A24.jpg
Consulting on the film, the Obesity Action Coalition, a non-profit that advocates for overweight individuals, confirmed Morot’s suspicions. Overweight people commonly wear minimal, loose clothing. “For practical reasons, a lot of skin is exposed,” he explains. “There’s no hiding it like they did in the play. It’s not true to reality.”
Charlie would require prosthetic arms, legs, chest, neck and oversized cheeks. And then there was the shower scene where he’d be totally nude. That added cascading ripples of fat hanging around his midsection. More time was needed to get it right. “If the makeup is a distraction because its show-offy or it’s bad, your movie doesn’t work,” Morot remembers telling Aronofsky.
Aronofksy agreed and expanded preproduction to 12 weeks.
Nina Anton finishes cleaning a 3D printed sculpture of Charlie’s arm prosthetic. Courtesy Adrien Morot/A24.
Unfortunately, that didn’t solve another problem. Normally, an actor comes to Morot’s workshop to do a full body cast. This generates molds used to manufacture body parts. But COVID restrictions prevented Fraser from traveling. It was time to push the envelope.
“We’ve been tinkering with 3D printing for a few years — doing internal tests at the shop,” continues Morot. “Makeup effects use 3D printing quite a bit, but it’s mainly robot stuff like M3GAN. The nature of successful prosthetics is doing a seamless transition with the skin. The accuracy of and consistency of 3D technology is not made for that.”
Morot decided to take 3D makeup to the next level. He contacted a colleague with a 3D scanner, asked him to mount it to an iPad and get it to one of the film’s producers. The producer went to Fraser’s house and, at a socially-distanced length, scanned the actor’s body.
“He sent me the data. I was able to clean it up and have a workable model to start the sculptures from,” adds Morot. “And it worked.”
Adrien Morot painting resin over the 3D printed sculpture of Charlie’s facial appliance. Courtesy Adrien Morot/A24.
Morot’s design featured two headpieces — one that fitted to the front of Fraser’s face and stretched down to his breast. The other covered his skull and neck. Arm pieces extended to Fraser’s shoulders. Each leg was covered by two pieces. A multi-layered midsection gave Charlie his bulging stomach. Most of the time it was covered by an oversized t-shirt, except for the shower shots.
The first application took seven hours.
Adrien Morot adds a bit of glue to Charlie facial appliance while Annemarie Bradley-Sherron styles his hair. Courtesy Adrien Morot/A24.
“No kidding,” says Morot. “But that’s a lot of tinkering because it’s so heavy. It’s finding the right height so that once it’s glued, it drags to where it’s supposed to land. That takes a little back and forth. Then finding the right palette of color that not only matches Brendan’s skin tone, but also the color palette the DP is using.”
Morot ultimately cut application time to under three hours.
As prosthetics can only be used once, new body parts were needed for each day of shooting. Morot credits Kathy Tse for painstakingly hand punching the hairs that covered Charlie’s arms and legs and gave his face its stubble. She logged a lot of workshop hours to ensure every hair was in place.
Morot FX Studio co-owner Kathy Tse punches in hair one by one into Charlie’s arm prosthetic. Courtesy Adrien Morot/A24.
The shower scene initiated a crucial change. Because of its lightweight and its resemblance to skin, foam latex is the prosthetic material of choice. But if it gets wet, it acts like a sponge. So Morot switched to silicone. It delivers a similar look, but is much heavier.
“It was like over 200 pounds. So we engineered a sort of parachute harness that would spread the entire weight over his body,” said Morot. He thought Fraser would balk at carrying all that weight, but the actor gladly bore the load. “He told me that it helped him find the character. Maybe he was just trying to be nice.”
Aronofsky had one final curve. He wanted a shot of Charlie rising from a sitting position. Prosthetics don’t work this way. Sitting pieces are shaped differently from standing pieces. A movement like this had never been done before.
“I was like, ‘Yeah, but you’re gonna do a cut…clever editing. Come on buddy, you’ve got to help me out,’” remembers Morot. “And he’s like, ‘No. I want to see it.’”
Morot and Tse spent hours strategizing without a solution. Then Aronosky got an idea. Could the prosthetics be modeled after a Russian doll, where the smaller versions fit inside the larger ones?
“I thought, ‘That’s pretty clever actually,’” remembers Morot. “We ended up gutting the entire thing. Each piece, depending on where it was located, would fit into the one under it or above it,” explains Morot. “After we did those modifications, the pieces collapsed and puddled on the side in a natural shape. When he got up, it would all deploy. Sometimes, I would have to run in and re-jam something. But for most of it, it ended up working. For sure, I’m gonna use it in the future.”
Brendan Fraser as Charlie in THE WHALE. Courtesy Adrien Morot/A24.
The effort has been appreciated. Fraser received an Oscar nomination for his portrayal. Morot, along with makeup department head Judy Chin and hair department head Annemarie Bradley-Sherron, were nominated for Best Achievement in Makeup and Hairstyling.
“There are so many technological breakthroughs in this movie,” says Morot. “I have to admit, the first day we were on the set, I realized this had never been done before. This is a turning point in movie history and it’s nice to be part of that.”
For more on The Whale, check out our interview with Oscar-nominee Brendan Fraser and the film’s screenwriter Samuel D. Hunter.
Featured image: Adrien Morot adds a bit of glue to Charlie facial appliance while Annemarie Bradley-Sherron styles his hair. Courtesy Adrien Morot/A24.
Cocaine Bear began snorting up viral eyeballs last fall, boosted by a madcap trailer that racked up 18 million views. Now boasting a $28 million opening weekend, second only to M3GAN as 2023’s biggest non-franchise hit, it’s based on the true story of a black bear who discovered a duffel bag of cocaine in the Georgia woods. Directed by Elizabeth Banks, Cocaine Bear features human stars Keri Russell, Alden Ehrenreich and Isiah Whitlock Jr., but the main attraction, nicknamed “Cokey,” owes its CGI existence to the New Zealand-based Wētā FX team led by visual effects supervisor Robin Hollander.
Joined by some 150 artisans, Hollander spent two years perfecting a computer-generated bear that has now entered the pantheon of weirdly irresistible comedy horror creatures. Hollander, who previously worked on the Planet of the Apes trilogy and Avatar, remembers attending a sneak preview screening in November. “People in the audience were losing their minds! It’s not going to change the world, but this is something I think people need right now. Ultimately, that’s what movies are: an escape into shiny green pastures — only our pasture is laced with cocaine and blood!”
In Los Angeles recently for Cocaine Bear‘s Hollywood premiere, Hollander checked in with The Credits to talk about hair count, sun bears and the magic of a well-made “stuffy.”
What were the steps involved in building the star of Cocaine Bear in all her detailed splendor?
In all her gory glory? It started with the first call we got from Elizabeth Banks. One of her mandates was that if this bear isn’t photoreal, the whole thing falls apart. She was very clear that the bear is not stylized, it’s not a cartoon, it can’t look like bad taxidermy every time she comes on stage.
But there’s a lot of trial and error before you get to “photoreal,” right?
Yes. We spent two years and nine days working on this. Liz had some experience with CGI on Charlie’s Angels but this is her first time, I think, building a creature. We showed her examples from other movies where the final result looks amazing, but we needed her to understand: it’s a long road to get there, with many iterations. As we were chipping away and making the nuances of Cokey come alive, we would show Liz stuff that looked a little rough, like a doodle on a napkin, and if she didn’t like it, then we’d pull the plug and not waste time. It was very efficient.
What steps were involved in building Cokey?
We built a model standing on all fours in the “rest pose” — no animation, no expression. Once we had that base model, our creatures department put in joints and restraints, which is called the puppet. Then the animation department goes into the puppet and animates each limb. Our facial model department works with the lip puller and the nose wrinkler and the eyes squasher, all sorts of stuff like that. In order to get the performance our animation supervisor needed, there was a lot of back and forth. The puppet is also used by the creatures department to do all the simulations controlling how the fat under the fur bounces and contracts and expands in order to make the fur shake and jiggle. All of that is fed into the puppet.
Cokey’s face looks so convincing, even in close-ups. How did you achieve that level of detail?
We had the bear looking incredible in shots that were middle ground or background. As post [production] progressed and we got closer up to Cokey in the third act, we took another look at her face. She looked too bristle-y, almost like a brush, so we decided to up the fur count from about half a million to about four million, from her snout to her ears. Instead of one strand, you now have eight. We we were able to make each strand finer and taper them off, which results in smoother, more organic-looking hair.
Courtesy of Wētā FX.Courtesy of Wētā FX.Courtesy of Wētā FX.
You worked previously on three Planet of the Apes sequels that used motion capture of human actors, who were then digitally enhanced to look like apes. Did you consider performance capture for Cocaine Bear?
The Apes trilogy lent itself to motion capture because you can transfer somewhat easily from people to apes. You can’t do that with a black bear anatomically just because the gaze and the walk cycle are so different. We decided early on that it’s not worth the hassle of doing performance capture. Instead, we had an amazing artist named Allan Henry on set.
Allan Henry acted out the bear’s behavior?
Yeah. He could stare at the actor and smile and make grunting noises. We also had Wētā Workshop build this amazing life-size bear — we called it a stuffy — which gave us a really good reference for how fur reacts under different lighting conditions and helped the DP frame shots. Most importantly, the stuffy gave our actors the opportunity to get psyched out by the bear. There was a sweet moment on set where I remember seeing Isiah Whitlock off to the side looking at the stuffy, sort of peering into his eyes, almost like two actors getting acquainted and having a chat between scenes.
Keri Russell as Sari in Cocaine Bear, directed by Elizabeth Banks. Courtesy Universal Pictures.
You’re based in New Zealand. How did you coordinate the CGI work with Elizabeth Banks?
We’d do virtual review sessions every week and send hi-res files that they could cut into the AVID. It was nice to have direct input from the filmmaker because, usually, you’re dealing with a client-side supervisor. That makes sense on a big show with multiple vendors. But for this one, it was refreshing to get a message from Liz’s husband, Max Handelman, when he’d forward me an Instagram post of a bear doing something funny. We’d flesh it out and say, “Here’s what we did with that link you sent over.” It was more like sending messages to a friend.
As you mentioned earlier, Elizabeth Banks needed a photoreal hero bear. What were some of the real-world references that inspired Cokey’s behavior?
We showed Liz footage of sun bears because they just looked naturally coked up.
Sun bears?
Sun bears. If you go on YouTube and look them up, you’ll see what I mean. Their eyes roll around in their heads, and the tongue lolls out. They’re incredibly ferocious and make really weird facial shapes if they want to get into a coconut or a bag of food or something. When we saw the footage, we said, “Surely this is what a bear would look like on coke.”
(from left) Stache (Aaron Holliday) and Daveed (O’Shea Jackson, Jr.) in Cocaine Bear, directed by Elizabeth Banks. Courtesy Universal Pictures.
Anything else?
The Revenant, of course, gets referenced a lot when you talk about bears in movies so we wanted to build on that. The thing is, the back knees [of The Revenant bear] felt quite bent and we found that when Cokey had bent back knees, she just looked like a fat dog, limping. So we gave Cokey peg legs, basically, having seen footage of black bears taking long steps with straight legs where it almost looked like they were dragging them.
Does Cokey sometimes stretch the limits of what a bear could physically accomplish in real life?
Well, the ambulance chase — people say that would never happen, but black bears run up to 35 miles an hour. The ambulance isn’t going that fast on a winding road, so in our minds, a normal black bear could keep up; plus, she’s on coke, so let’s take it to the nines.
And then Cokey makes that incredibly long slo-mo jump?
Obviously, the jump is not going to happen quite like that, although black bears are very good at jumping. We saw tons of footage of bears jumping between trees or jumping onto someone’s deck.
What about that wild sequence where Cokey’s on her back pushing herself across the ground?
There’s ample footage of bears rolling around scratching their backs on the ground, although not quite as seductive as Cokey’s doing it. That was Liz’s idea, wanting to show that Cokey was enamored with Eddie. The bear’s high on coke and likes this man in the blue jacket. At one point in time, it was more sexual, with Cokey fully dry-humping him. We were like, “Yeah, let’s not do that; it takes us out of the movie too much.”
You spent a lot of time and energy bringing this movie bear to life. Looking back on Cocaine Bear, what are you most proud of?
For me, the proudest achievement is the team that we put together back home at Wētā FX and the fact that we built this great relationship with Liz. Also, our producer Lily Lawrence was fantastic at managing the process. And having worked now on something really hilarious, we just hope Liz makes a franchise out of it and churns out more coke bear movies!
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Willem Dafoe is a national treasure, which makes his latest film Inside such a perfect vehicle for him. Dafoe plays an art thief poetically named Nemo who takes on a job filching treasures from a high-tech New York penthouse that goes disastrously wrong. In a new featurette released by Focus Features, art curator Leonardo Bigazzi walks us through the exquisite art collection depicted in the film, and explains how each work of art speaks directly to Nemo’s increasingly dire circumstances.
Yet this isn’t just a high-concept art thief caper film like, say, The Thomas Crown Affair. No, Inside owes at least part of its DNA to thrillers like David Fincher’s 2002 film Panic Room, which found Jodie Foster having to lock herself and her daughter inside the family’s titular safe space while three men intent on stealing a fortune prowl through her house. In Inside, as the title suggests, Nemo gets trapped inside the penthouse after triggering an alarm that turns the place into a super-heated fishbowl. Used to ingeniously figuring out ways to quietly separate rich people from their priceless works of art, now Nemo’s life will depend on whether or not he can find a way to steal himself out of this deathtrap. The art contained in the penthouse might be his salvation—or his ruin.
The art on display is a mixture of paintings, sculptures, and new media, Bigazzi explains. In fact, Bigazzi curated the art depicted in Inside as he might have done for an exhibit in a museum, with each piece picked specifically to heighten Nemo’s growing desperation as the heat ticks higher towards certain death, and the art itself seems to a part of the torment. Each piece, Bigazzi explains, speaks to Nemo, urging him to take certain actions at certain moments as he tries to devise a way out of the penthouse before he loses his mind and his life. The art itself becomes his guide, and making art, even though Nemo is a thief, not an artist, becomes key to his survival.
Inside comes from director Vasilis Katsoupis, from a script by Ben Hopkins, and the conceit is such that the film is essentially a one-man show. Inside will let us see how Nemo puzzles his way out of his dire situation. Or not. The trailer indicates that our high-end art thief will start to lose his mind while trapped inside this sweltering, multi-million-dollar cage, yet this new featurette suggests that maybe, just maybe, the art thief will become an escape artist and find a way to survive. How Nemo attempts to escape, what lengths he’ll go to get free, and how badly it will get before the end credits roll are all part of the excitement. Getting to see Dafoe use his considerable gifts in feverish genre film is worth the price of admission alone.
Check out the trailer below. Inside arrives in theaters on March 17, 2023.
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Featured image: Willem Dafoe stars as Nemo in director Vasilis Katsoupis’ INSIDE, a Focus Features release. Credit: Wolfgang Ennenbach / Focus Features
Christophe Beck is one of the most prominent composers in the Marvel sandbox. He not only scored all three Ant-Man films but co-composed Hawkeye and, to great acclaim, WandaVision. After eight years of collaborating with the Marvel team, Beck is well-versed in the MCU’s sonic landscape.
The composer’s first collaboration with director Peyton Reed was years before he composed themes for Ant-Man’s miniaturized adventures. The two first worked together on Bring It On, the quintessential cheerleader film. Even though their stories have grown in scope, most notably in Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania, the duo stay in good touch with their comedy and electronic roots for their latest Marvel adventure.
When you worked on the first Ant-Man, you tried some crazy electronic experiments that didn’t work for the movie. Did you return to any of those early ideas for the quantum realm?
It’s interesting you asked that. I have a real passion for electronic music and modular synthesizers, which is a specific kind of instrument that invites experimentation and is particularly good at making incredibly strange noises. Peyton and I got really excited about getting all insect-y with the modular synth, and we created a suite of demos that was glitchy and experimental and skittery, and it was really, really cool.
It got to a certain point when we realized it was not working with the tone of the movie, which was more of a lighthearted heist/caper vibe. In fact, at one point, Kevin Feige heard some of that stuff and he said something like, “Ah, it sounds cool, but I’m worried people are going to think their speakers are broken when they listen to it.” Peyton and I thought he might be right about that.
We ended up putting that aside and going back to a classic heist feel, picking up on the iconic heist sound of the sixties and seventies. Now, when Peyton called me before Quantumania, he was like, “Hey, I’m excited. We’re going to be exploring this entirely fantastical, strange, and magical universe. Can we pull out some of those little sounds?” I did go back and listen, but it still didn’t feel quite right. There’s something very angular and just too strange about those sounds.
We wanted to make sure the Quantum Realm, particularly when we’re first introduced to it, was a place that inspired awe and that was a place that was beautiful and exotic and not just weird, weird, weird. There’s enough weirdness in the characters that are down there that we don’t need to lean into that so hard with the music. The music could focus more on the emotional quality of what it’s like to be there and less on literally mirroring what we’re seeing. So yeah, it’s interesting you bring that up because that did come up in some early conversations with Peyton.
That was eight years ago. Would you say what a Marvel movie sounds like has changed much since then?
I don’t think so. I think what’s amazing about how Marvel handles their movies, and I think Quantumania is the 31st film in the franchise, is they’re so good at giving each film a unique identity. The first couple Ant-Man movies were heist movies. Captain America: Winter Soldier was more of a political thriller. You end up with these movies that explore different classic genres, and that gives composers a chance to imbue their scores with a bit of a unique identity.
Yet the films all still cohere into a larger narrative.
It’s Marvel. There needs to be a fundamental throughline, not only in the stories that they tell. It’s something else that Kevin and Marvel are incredibly good at, giving each film its own identity while also having a place in the larger story that they’re telling, some more than others, but they all fit in. That has to be reflected musically as well.
Kevin is a big fan of movie music and knows his movie music history and iconography. These are superheroes, so there has to be an element of that classic boldness. Of course, big themes are always welcome when you’re trying to evoke that classic superhero feel. I think he was right; even with moving away from strange, weird electronic noises to a classic heist feel, there still needs to be thematic continuity and bold themes, and that’s what we have in Ant-Man. One of the things that have been consistent in all three Ant-Man movies is his theme, something that I’ve taken great joy in revisiting and exploring and developing and finding new ways to say it musically.
In the first movie, Scott is a thief. Now, he’s saving universes. How’d that huge personality change affect his theme?
I think all you need to do is listen to that first theme, which has a sneaky feel to it. It introduces the idea of getting big and getting small, and you hear that musically as the piece develops as well. It goes from really loud to really soft and sneaky, back to really loud. Skip forward to Quantumania, the variation of the Ant-Man theme in Quantumania, which you hear first; it’s the first track on the album. It’s also the main end credits piece in the movie. Now, it’s high energy; it’s bolder. The orchestra is taking a much bolder approach to state the theme, and there’s a real drive and power to it that reflects the maturity of the character and Scott Lang coming into his own as a hero.
How about for Ant-Man and the Wasp? As a duo and the central romance in the series, did their theme develop?
Yeah, that’s something else we talked about too. Quantumania is the first of the Ant-Man movies where you get a feel for the romantic love between Ant-Man and the Wasp. It culminates at the end when they have a scene where that feeling is at the forefront. Again, we went to the Ant-Man theme, but this time it was played slowly on cellos with flowing strings around it, and I tried to evoke the heart in the theme as well. One of the things I try to do is make sure that [the themes] are versatile, that they can be developed and varied to evoke the full range of emotions that a story might call for. Sometimes it is a challenge to make it work, but it felt natural in Quantumania to find not only the sort of more mature, bold, super-heroic version of that theme but also the more gentle, more bittersweet, and romantic version of that theme.
The first movies were, as you said, heist movies. Here, there are far more moving pieces, characters, different cultures, and a whole new world. How’d the leap in scope provide more challenges?
Besides everything you just said, the sheer amount of music was off the charts for this one. I think the first couple of movies might have had a little over an hour of score in each one. This one we’re talking about is a little over two hours. The music starts and basically never ends until the end of the movie. Sometimes it’s like I’m driving a cruise ship. I’ve got this behemoth under me, there’s all this chaos going on underneath, and I just have to focus on what’s in front of me on that particular day. Working on a film of this size and complexity is a new challenge, for sure.
And a film that’s kicking off Marvel’s Phase 5, no less.
This film has an important role to play in the overarching story, so I took direction from Kevin Feige and Peyton to let me know what is important, what to highlight, what to not worry about so much, and especially in early days when very little of the visual effects are completed, and so much is left to the imagination as I’m working on it.
There is a lot of buildup to Kang the Conqueror in the movie. How’d you want to build up to his reveal, to make him present in the Quantum realm before he even appears?
A lot of what my decisions ended up being, the decisions I ended up making, shifted as I saw more and more footage of Jonathan Majors as Kang. Jonathan is an incredible actor, and he brings so much intensity to the role. One of the things I learned as a composer early in my career is when an actor comes on screen and is killing it, stay out of the way and let the actor do their thing. My job becomes less about merely mirroring what’s already on the screen and amplifying what’s on screen. Opportunities become available for me to add different layers. If Jonathan is bringing so much to his portrayal of Kang, that leaves me free to think about what else is going on in the scene, more subtext and keeping things simple, and letting his performance carry the day.
At first, my themes for Kang, I got excited. I wrote this theme for a big Marvel villain, and it was big and complex, and I went through a process of simplifying and simplifying until his performance could really speak. Also, the first time we see Kang in this movie, he’s not at his full power. He’s confused. He doesn’t know where he is. He’s exiled. He’s trapped and lonely, and so when we first hear Kang’s theme, it’s a little bit more melancholy than later on when it blooms into his full malevolent power.
When he goes full-on villain at the end, do you still want to keep those notes of melancholy? Or do you want a blasting sound of villainy?
That hearkens back to what we were talking about earlier with the Ant-Mantheme. Kang’s theme, just like the Ant-Man theme, depending on how I treat it and depending on what other phrasings and chords and harmony are underneath it, can shift from something more melancholy to something more malevolent. One of the things I noticed is when there’s an actual chord progression underneath a melody, that brings a little bit more emotionality to it, a little more heart, and a little more musical direction.
Eagle-eared listeners to the movie score will notice as the film progresses I rely less on chord progressions and more on static harmony, which gives a more driving, more ambitious, more insistent feeling to Kang’s theme. Of course, the instruments that his theme plays on as well have a lot to do with it. We have a processed solo violin. It doesn’t sound that much like a violin, just enough to make it feel a little bit familiar in the early scenes with Kang. As it progresses, I bring in the rest of the orchestra, and by the end, we’ve got all 80 musicians blasting away.
Before the film reveals MODOK’s identity, the track “The Hunter” is hilarious because it plays this ridiculous character deadly straight and serious. Was that a lesson from your days of scoring comedies?
Absolutely. I think a lot of comedy scoring is taking a character’s inner emotional landscape and amplifying it and putting it on steroids. A lot of comedy scoring, effective comedy scoring, is not making funny music to help the audience laugh, but to get inside characters’ heads and exaggerate it, and that’s what brings the permission to laugh in the audience. We did that a lot in the score, especially once MODOK’s face is revealed, and we see him for the ridiculous character that he is. The track you mentioned, “The Hunter,” occurs at a point in the movie when we haven’t seen his face yet, and we wanted to sell the idea that MODOK is this unstoppable killing force and feared by all, a terror-inspiring presence in this world, and that’s why we really went for it in that track.
How’d you want to strike the balance of familiar and otherworldly within the Quantum Realm?
You know, we’ve had glimpses of the Quantum Realm in the previous two movies, not enough to warrant diving in and giving the Quantum Realm its own sonic universe. This was the first opportunity. As I mentioned, Peyton and I had early conversations about wanting to make sure that the Quantum Realm had a unique sound to it, and we both love electronic music, so I pulled out my synths for it. We went through a pass of the score early on where we watched the first four reels in a run one day and we were like, whoa, this score feels very dark and intense, and I think we need to find the fun again. We need to give the Quantum Realm a proper theme in the classic tradition of movie themes to make it feel a little bit less angular and a little bit less weird. We wanted to make sure that we grounded it a little bit so that audiences could appreciate the beauty and the wonder and the exoticism of this heretofore unexplored universe.
From what I’ve read, you are a huge Depeche Mode fan. How much influence would you say they have on you when you compose electronic music for a movie like Quantumania?
By this point, their music, their melody writing, and the phrasing of their melodies is so baked into my DNA I don’t even notice it anymore. I went to a show at the Hollywood Bowl that they played about eight or nine years ago, and it was the first time I’d really had an opportunity to revisit their music. First of all, I loved the show, but also I felt I needed to take a bit of a cold shower after because it was just like, oh, that, that’s where I get that. Oh, that too. The way they turn the phrase here and the way that note matches up against that chord, it’s like, oh, that comes from this song. It was surprising and kind of wonderful to me that I was able to connect those dots and see how big of an influence they are.
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You can’t always get what you want, but sometimes…you know the rest. Set to the deathless Rolling Stones tune, the first official trailer for Ted Lasso season three deliver us a peek at what’s next for AFC Richmond. It also sets up, without a lick of dialogue until the very end, the budding rivalry between coach Lasso (Jason Sudeikis) and his former assistant Nate (Nick Mohammed), who defected from AFC Richmond to go coach West Ham United for the loathsome Rupert (Anthony Head). Nate’s swiftly changing persona from lovable soccer savant into the series villains was one of season two’s surprises. Having being promoted to the Premiere League at the end of season two, AFC Richmond will now be playing against the top dogs, but one imagines it’ll be the battle with West Ham that’ll serve as the new season’s main event.
Season 3 consists of 12 episodes and will track Coach Lasso and the squad as they take on the burden of playing the very best, as well as explore the personal triumphs and agonies of the lovable team’s core group, from Lasso on down through the roster. Luckily, AFC Richmond has some new help on the coaching front, with former star Roy Kent (Brett Goldstein) now stepping into the role of assistant coach alongside the always dependable Coach Beard (Brenand Hunt).
Season three will also find Keeley (Juno Temple) charting a new course as the head of the her own PR company and AFC Richmond owner Rebecca (Hannah Waddingham)’s longstanding feud with her ex-husband, Rupert, and one imagines a deeper exploration of the private pain Coach Lasso has buried under all his good cheer and which was revealed in season two.
Returning cast members include Jeremy Swift, Phil Dunster, Toheeb Jimoh, Cristo Fernandez, Kola Bokinni, Billy Harris, and James Lance.
Check out the season 3 trailer below. Ted Lasso returns to Apple TV on March 15.
Filled with plot twists, double-crosses and characters who never seem to be who they are, Sharper is designed to keep you guessing right to the end. But one thing is for certain; with a razor-sharp cast that includes Julianne Moore, Briana Middleton, Sebastian Stan, Justice Smith and John Lithgow, the Apple TV+ original film delivers its many satisfactions with a cast more than equal to the job.
“It’s so fun,” says Middleton during a recent interview. “The experience was so amazing. It’s a testament to Ben Caron, our director. He set the tone. He kept coming back to, ‘It’s play! It’s exploration! It’s fun!’”
Middleton plays Sandra, a pivotal character who sets the conniving in motion when she walks into a bookstore owned by Tom (Smith). By the time she has made her purchase, he is smitten. A relationship soon evolves. Or does it? As the plot unwinds, we follow Sandra into her past life as Sandy and her involvement with Max (Stan). He, in turn, leads us to Madeline (Moore), who is set to become the new wife of New York billionaire Richard (Lithgow). Things only get twistier from here, as Richard’s health fails and a power struggle for his money unfolds among Madeline, Tom—who turns out to be Richard’s estranged son—Max, who we are led to believe is Madeline’s son, and Sandra, who,well…you will need to watch and see.
And that’s exactly the point of the screenplay by Brian Gatewood and Alessandro Tanaka—it’s a film as sharp and glittering as a diamond. And it’s what lured Middleton, who made her film debut in the George Clooney-directed drama The Tender Bar, to sign on.
“I fell in love with Sandra pretty instantly,” Middleton continues. “It’s a very non-traditional script in the way that it’s told – this non-linear, chapter-like story. And then once we get to the end of the film, seeing her arc, her growth — it just cemented it for me. Oh my God… to not only get to play such a multi-faceted role, but such an amazing person.”
Middleton got into a conning frame of mind by watching a string of caper films, citing the Will Smith/Margot Robbie crime comedy Focus as a particular favorite. But she credits Caron with the spark that fueled Sharper’sintrigue. Before filming began, he encouraged the cast to read “The Confidence Game: Why We Fall for It… Every Time,” a 2016 book by Maria Konnikova. It was a game changer for the actress.
“It dives into the psychology of these games and why they work. That opened my eyes to not only how much human psychology, but also how much of our humanity is tied into these confidence games. That was a huge thing,” Middleton explains. “We want to believe that the world is a safe place and people are good. I think that’s something that really felt true about Sandy for me. It gave me little nuggets of wisdom to go back to, little fun things to hold on to and make choices around.”
The cast was also given the opportunity to dig a little deeper into their multi-layered characters with two weeks of rehearsal. “God bless Ben for that,” says Middleton. “Getting into the psychology like we would any character. It was an amazing way to discover things in dialogue and in the relationships before we actually started filming.”
To put his vision for Sharper in focus, Caron took the cast and crew on a field trip to MoMA for a big screen showing of the Jane Fonda/Donald Sutherland 1971 film Klute. Middleton thinks it helped set a tone as they prepared to begin shooting. “We all watched it together,” she says. “It was an aesthetic inspiration in the way [Klute] shoots New York because of the way that our film involves New York. We shot on 35 millimeter. It was lit so gorgeously. Charlotte Bruus Christensen, our DP… stellar! It planted the seed for my love for New York because Sharper is a love letter to the city.”
Sebastian Stan and Briana Middleton in “Sharper,” now streaming on Apple TV+.
Middleton admits that she struggled to relate to some aspects of Sandra. Unlike her character, Middleton has never been homeless, in trouble with the law or struggled with substance abuse. This is where she drew upon her acting lessons. But when it came to the heart of Sandra, Middleton found the two had a lot in common. “I have a lot of hope for people and I try to see the best in them. Seeing the good and the potential in others is a reflection of how we see ourselves,” she says. “So I think the biggest thing I discovered from reading the book and then going back to the script was that link between the two of us. That was a central piece of her to me.”
As she got more into Sandra’s skin, Middleton discovered areas of the character that weren’t as apparent at the onset. “When I was thinking about the story and her growth, she felt like this bamboo in the wind, kind of flowing back and forth, doing whatever,” says the actress. “But when I actually embodied her, she had way more strength, way more opinions and way more agency than I gave her credit for.”
Justice Smith and Briana Middleton in “Sharper,” now streaming on Apple TV+.
Middleton may not have as many films under her belt as the rest of the cast, but the rising star used this to her advantage by tapping into their experience to up her game. “I do believe that when you have a great scene partner that, you have to work a lot less,” she explains. “I didn’t get to work with John, unfortunately. But Julie, Sebastian, and Justice were all amazing examples of that. Because this film has just so many layers, you can get overwhelmed. ‘What should I play right now? Should I lean more into this for the audience? Should I do a little split in the middle?’ We talked a lot about just prioritizing presence over preparation or perfection. And that’s such an easy thing to do when you have amazing actors like the four of them.”
For example, Middleton cites one of her favorite scenes in Sharper, where Sandra and Tom get to know each other during an afternoon of strolling through Queens. “It’s kind of a montage,” she explains. “It’s near the billboard scene in that first chapter. Ben just trusted us so much to play and to improv and trust that we knew these characters. We got to explore different things and I felt we both walked away knowing more about our characters and about that relationship after that night. That was a real fruitful experience.”
Briana Middleton and Justice Smith in “Sharper,” now streaming on Apple TV+.
But there’s another scene that Middleton might just remember most from Sharper. That would be the confrontation that takes place between Sandra and Madeline as the con builds to its climax. “This is going to sound awful,” says Middleton. “But, when else are you gonna tell Julianna Moore, this amazing woman and actor, to suck your d**k? Like, when else are you gonna say those things? Wow! That was so fun. I think we both had fun with that.”
Sharper is streaming now on Apple TV.
For more stories on Apple TV series and films, check these out:
Everything Everywhere All At Oncelived up to its title last night, grabbing just about everything in sight at the SAG Awards and all at once. In a record-setting night at the SAG Awards, the indie juggernaut took home all of the movie category awards (save for the non-televised stunt ensemble). Not for nothing, on Saturday night, Everything Everywhere All At Once grabbed the Best Picture Award at the Producers Guild, completing a weekend sweep that sets it up as the movie to beat at the Academy Awards, with final voting beginning this Thursday and the ceremony coming in just two weeks. The SAG and Producers Guild Awards are both seen as fairly strong predictors for the Oscars.
Everything Everywhere All At Oncetook home the Best Actress for Michelle Yeoh (besting award season frontrunner Tár‘s Cate Blanchett), Best Supporting Actress for Jamie Lee Curtis (upsetting Black Panther‘s Angela Bassett), Best Ensemble, and Best Supporting Actor (Ke Huy Quan, becoming the first Asian actor to win a SAG Award as an individual rather than as part of an ensemble).
The multidimensional family drama from directors the Daniels (Kwan and Scheinert) heads into the Oscars homestretch with a head of steam after this weekend’s dominance and last weekend’s wins at the DGA Awards, where it took home five awards, including Best Picture, Best Director, and Best Screenplay. It would seem like Everything Everywhere All At Once is a lock to win the Original Screenplay award at next weekend’s WGA Awards and to notch yet more wins at the Independent Spirit Awards.
How well is Everything Everywhere All At Once set up for its Oscars run? Should the film take home the top prize at the WGA Awards, it would have swept the DGA, SAG, and WGA trifecta, and no film that has done so has ever lost the Best Picture Oscar.
If you’re looking for a reason why EEAAO could still come up short at the Oscars, it would be All Quiet on the Western Front‘s win at the BAFTA Awards. Netflix’s sweeping WWI epic took home seven wards, boxing out Everything Everywhere All At Once, which won only one, Film Editing. The BAFTA Awards are also key for reading the Oscar tea leaves, making the big wins by All Quiet on the Western Front the sole compelling argument that Oscars night might not end with the final envelope for Best Picture containing the four words Everything Everywhere All At Once.
There were many more SAG Awards given out, of course, in both television and film. Brendan Fraser took home the top acting prize for his work on The Whale, while on the television side, it was a big night for Abbot Elementary and The White Lotus, the latter of which also saw its season two star, Jennifer Coolidge, snagging another award for her performance.
It’s shaping up to be a very interesting awards season, and surprises likely await at the Oscars.
For the full SAG Awards List, see below:
Outstanding Performance by a Male Actor in a Television Movie or Limited Series
Steve Carrell (“The Patient”)
Taron Egerton (“Black Bird”)
Sam Elliott (“1883”)(WINNER)
Paul Walter Hauser (“Black Bird”)
Evan Peters (“Dahmer”)
Outstanding Performance by a Female Actor in a Television Movie or Limited Series
Emily Blunt (“The English”)
Jessica Chastain (“George and Tammy”) (WINNER)
Julia Garner (“Inventing Anna”)
Niecy Nash Betts (“Dahmer”)
Amanda Seyfried (“The Dropout”)
Outstanding Performance by a Male Actor in a Comedy Series
Anthony Carrigan (“Barry”)
Bill Hader (“Barry”)
Steve Martin (“Only Murders in the Building”)
Martin Short (“Only Murders in the Building”)
Jeremy Allen White (“The Bear”)(WINNER)
Outstanding Performance by a Female Actor in a Comedy Series
Christina Applegate (“Dead to Me”)
Rachel Brosnahan (“The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel”)
Quinta Brunson (“Abbott Elementary”)
Jenna Ortega (“Wednesday”)
Jean Smart (“Hacks”) (WINNER)
Outstanding Performance by an Ensemble in a Comedy Series
“Abbott Elementary”(WINNER)
“Barry”
“The Bear”
“Hacks”
“Only Murders in the Building”
Outstanding Performance by a Male Actor in a Drama Series
Jonathan Banks (“Better Call Saul”)
Jason Bateman (“Ozark”)(WINNER)
Jeff Bridges (“The Old Man”)
Bob Odenkirk (“Better Call Saul”)
Adam Scott (“Severance”)
Outstanding Performance by a Female Actor in a Drama Series
Jennifer Coolidge (“The White Lotus”)(WINNER)
Elizabeth Debicki (“The Crown”)
Julia Garner (“Ozark”)
Laura Linney (“Ozark”)
Zendaya (“Euphoria”)
Outstanding Performance by an Ensemble in a Drama Series
“Better Call Saul”
“The Crown”
“Ozark”
“Severance”
“The White Lotus”(WINNER)
Outstanding Performance by a Female Actor in a Supporting Role
Angela Bassett (“Black Panther: Wakanda Forever”)
Hong Chau (“The Whale”)
Kerry Condon (“The Banshees of Inisherin”)
Jamie Lee Curtis (“Everything Everywhere All at Once”)(WINNER)
Stephanie Hsu (“Everything Everywhere All at Once”)
Outstanding Performance by a Male Actor in a Supporting Role
Paul Dano (“The Fabelmans”)
Brendan Gleeson (“The Banshees of Inisherin”)
Barry Keoghan (“The Banshees of Inisherin”)
Ke Huy Quan (“Everything Everywhere All at Once”)(WINNER)
Eddie Redmayne (“The Good Nurse”)
Outstanding Performance by a Female Actor in a Leading Role
Cate Blanchett (Tár”)
Viola Davis (“The Woman King”)
Ana de Armas (“Blonde”)
Danielle Deadwyler (“Till”)
Michelle Yeoh (“Everything Everywhere All at Once”)(WINNER)
Outstanding Performance by a Male Actor in a Leading Role
Austin Butler (“Elvis”)
Colin Farrell (“The Banshees of Inisherin”)
Brendan Fraser (“The Whale”) (WINNER)
Bill Nighy (“Living”)
Adam Sandler (“Hustle”)
Outstanding Performance by a Cast in a Motion Picture
“Babylon”
“The Banshees of Inisherin”
“Everything Everywhere All at Once”(WINNER)
“The Fabelmans”
“Women Talking”
Outstanding Action Performance by a Stunt Ensemble in a Motion Picture
“Avatar: The Way of Water”
“The Batman”
“Black Panther: Wakanda Forever”
“Top Gun: Maverick” (WINNER)
“The Woman King”
Outstanding Action Performance by a Stunt Ensemble in a Television Series
“Andor”
“The Boys”
“House of the Dragon”
“The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power”
“Stranger Things” (WINNER)
Featured image: LOS ANGELES, CALIFORNIA – FEBRUARY 26: (L-R) Jamie Lee Curtis, Jenny Slate, Stephanie Hsu, James Hong, Michelle Yeoh, Ke Huy Quan, Brian Le, and Harry Shum Jr. accept the Outstanding Performance by a Cast in a Motion Picture award for “Everything Everywhere All at Once” onstage during the 29th Annual Screen Actors Guild Awards at Fairmont Century Plaza on February 26, 2023 in Los Angeles, California. (Photo by Kevin Winter/Getty Images)
Harpo Films and OWN: Oprah Winfrey Network has been leading the pack in Hollywood in terms of diversity and inclusion for years. From the very beginning of OWN’s drama series Queen Sugar, creator Ava DuVernay envisioned using all female directors for the series, and both OWN and Harpo Films were 100% behind that. DuVernay’s show proved a hit, and her commitment to hiring diverse female directors resulted in greater success for the 42 helmers that took part. Similarly, after years of holiday movies showing all white protagonists and storylines, Harpo and OWN began releasing Christmas movies featuring stories and characters from communities of color, with other networks and production companies subsequently following suit, expanding representation across platforms, all for the better.
With the recent premiere of the new docu-series The 1619 Project, for which Harpo partnered with Hulu, they are continuing to give voice to subjects and issues centering the Black experience in America. As director of development and production of Harpo Films, Lauren Tuck, whose focus is scripted programming, has been integral to a number of OWN projects. They include Queen Sugar, David Makes Man, and All Rise, as well as their popular slate of holiday movies.
The Credits spoke to Lauren Tuck about all things Harpo and OWN, especially their commitment to centering the Black experience onscreen.
Can you unpack your work for Harpo Films, its connecttion with OWN, and how you work across both?
Harpo is Oprah’s privately funded production company, but we wear two hats. When the network first started, it was really mostly unscripted programming, and then about eight years ago, OWN really wanted to get into the scripted space. OWN didn’t have scripted executives, they only had unscripted executives, so they looked towards us. We, under Harpo Films, were already handling scripted television and feature films on a variety of platforms, so Harpo Films became the functioning scripted division of OWN. In many ways, we are one group, one team under Oprah’s mission to uplift storytellers. So, while we have our own separate projects still, we also have projects for OWN, like the holiday movies and All Rise. We really help to bolster the OWN scripted slate and development slate and made Tuesday nights a successful scripted night, with shows like Greenleaf, Queen Sugar, and David Makes Man.
Who are a few mentors in your career that helped bring you to where you are now?
A great mentor, who is still someone I talk to, consider a friend, and adore, is Paul Weitz. I worked with him at Depth of Field. He was really the person who taught me that I love development. What was so lovely is he was a writer/director, and he would have me read his scripts and I’d be able to give notes. He was very big on collaboration, and if I had a thought or note, he’d want to hear about it. No idea was too small. Even though you’re an assistant, to have a seat at this table, to have a voice, was just so important. I realized working there that I love reading new voices. I love finding those interesting new stories that we haven’t seen before. It was with Paul that I really honed in on development as what I love and what I crave. Then my boss Carla Gardini, here at Harpo, who is like Paul, she always wants to hear my opinion and she has always championed things that I’m excited about. It’s really nice when you have those people in your life. Especially in this crazy industry, it’s lovely to have people you can go to for advice or talk to about navigating things.
You lead development and production on OWN’s annual holiday movies, which reflect more diverse communities. Can you share a bit about that?
It came from our audience, really, people hungry to see themselves in these spaces. We’re so big on research and understanding what our audience wants, and they really just kept saying, “We want to see ourselves in the holiday space.” I love holiday movies too, and it felt like unless it was the best friend who had no arc, you really didn’t see us. So we decided to dip our toes in this space and haven’t looked back since. It’s been, my goodness, about five years now, and it’s been so rewarding, because it’s so essential to have movies and projects with people that look like you. I think people just don’t realize how important images are, and we have holiday movies where it’s families and romance and Black love.
Like A Christmas Fumble.
With A Christmas Fumble, we heard from people that were just so happy that we were celebrating a Black love story. It’s great being able to say yes; we finally have our seat at the table for holiday movies. People took note and now are following suit and featuring more diverse casts, or, I should say, featuring more of America, and it’s been great for us. It’s been just an honor to be able to work on the holiday movies showcasing our communities, because we also celebrate holidays!
On Queen Sugar, Ava had all female filmmakers through the whole series, which was wholeheartedly supported by OWN, and it changed the career trajectories of those filmmakers. How does that continue as a guiding light for projects through Harpo?
I think people are looking at Queen Sugar and realizing, “Why aren’t we following what is clearly a successful model?” We joke now and say that we can’t hire the Queen Sugar directors because they’re all so busy and doing wonderful, fabulous things. People are really taking note, seeing that crews can and should be inclusive. It’s been great to be a pioneer in that way.
And you continue make sure there is inclusivity and diversity above and below the line.
For us it’s important on all the projects that we do. On All Rise, with our great showrunner Denitria Harris-Lawrence and Simone Missick as executive producer, but also the crew, making sure it was inclusive from the top to the bottom. You know, when we do our holiday movies, we look at that, as well, whether it’s cast or below the line, with makeup, hair, all of it. It’s really important to us to have representation across the board.
Especially in films and shows featuring a spectrum of different skin tones, having cinematographers and hair and makeup artists, just to name two departments, that know how to highlight Black skin.
Absolutely. You have to know how to light Black skin. That is a must, finding Black cinematographers. Many of our holiday movies are shot in Canada, but we’re very intentional, so we find talented Black artists there as well. Also, with hair and makeup, that’s important to the Black community. You want your actress to feel confident and comfortable. So yes, the head of the makeup department, the head of the hair department, it’s a priority for us to hire people who are African American. For one of our holiday movies, we were able to hire someone who was an assistant, and she became the head of the department, so that was really rewarding. It makes a difference, and you can see on the screen. You can definitely point it out.
What is an example of a time recently when you were reminded you’re doing exactly what you’re supposed to be doing in your career?
I knew I’m doing what I’m supposed to do when we called this writer, and this was literally her first feature film, to tell her we that we really loved her pitch and were moving forward with her project. It’s a scripted project that we’re doing under the 1619 banner. We just knew we were changing the course of her life, and I was so excited for her. She’s doing what she wants to do, and hopefully the world will see this movie. For me, this is why I got into this business, to help lift up writers and people who are up-and-coming in their career and then seeing them flourish.
Featured image: Lauren Tuck. Photo Courtesy of Harpo Films
The Marvel Cinematic Universe has just nabbed another Oscar-nominee.
Steven Yeun will join the antihero epic Thunderbolts for Marvel Studios, The Hollywood Reporterscoops, in a juicy yet unspecified role. Yeun was nominated for an Oscar for his outstanding work in writer/director Lee Isaac Chung’s Minari, played a key role in Jordan Peele’s sci-fi horror Nope, and will star in Parasite director Bong Joon Ho’s upcoming sci-fi film Mickey 7. He’ll also be seen in the upcoming Netflix/A24 series Beef.
With Thunderbolts, Yeun will be making his first MCU appearance in a film that’s shaping up to be a new kind of Marvel movie. The story is centered not on heroes and villains but antiheroes and villains, with the titular superteam comprised of some of the more morally flexible characters in the MCU canon. They include a former Black Widow in Yelena Belova (Florence Pugh), Winter Soldier (Sebastian Stan), Red Guardian (David Harbour), a former disgraced Captain America in John Walker (Wyatt Russell), Ghost (Hannah John-Kamen), Taskmaster (Olga Kurylenko), and the shady Valentina Allegra de Fontaine (Julia Louis-Dreyfus).
Thunderbolts is sort of like a Marvel version of the DC Studios film The Suicide Squad. In that film, some of the most offbeat and bizarre DC antiheroes teamed up at the behest of the United States government to save the world. In Marvel’s version, as Marvel Studios boss Kevin Feige joked at D23 in 2022 when the film was introduced, the team must be pretty rough around the edges when “beloved Winter Soldier is the most stable among them.” But who’s getting them all together and why? Those questions won’t be answered for some time.
Yeun joins recent newcomer to the cast Ayo Edebiri (a breakout star from Hulu’s The Bear), who recently grabbed another unspecified role in the film. Jack Shreier (Robot & Frank) is directing from a script by Black Widow writer Eric Pearson.
Featured image: Oscar® nominee Steven Yeun arrives on the red carpet of The 93rd Oscars® at Union Station in Los Angeles, CA on Sunday, April 25, 2021.
Grab your stoutest friends and prepare a fellowship for a quest because multiple return trips to Middle-earth are currently being plotted.
Fresh details have emerged that Warner Bros. and New Line have struck a deal with Embracer Group AB, the folks who hold the film rights to the property, which will allow Warner Bros. and New Line to develop new features based on J.R.R. Tolkien’s “The Hobbit” and “Lord of the Rings” books. Considering the abundant wealth of storylines, characters, and mythical history Tolkien packed into those works, there’s no shortage of cinematic opportunities to explore. Warner Bros. Discovery announced the news on an investor call on Thursday.
Embracer Group AB is a Swedish gaming company that acquired the rights to produce Lord of the Rings films, theme park attractions, games, merchandise, and live productions after it bought Middle-earth Enterprises last year from The Saul Zaentz Company.
Peter Jackson’s original Lord of the Rings trilogy was a critical and commercial smash, igniting the passions of a legion of Tolkien’s fans and ushering in a huge swath of newcomers to Middle-earth, earning a combined $2.9 billion at the box office. Jackson’s third and final installment, Return of the King, won an Oscar for Best Picture in 2003. Jackson then delivered his The Hobbit trilogy between 2012 and 2014. Jackson and his Lord of the Rings creative partners Philippa Boyens and Fran Walsh released a joint statement saying they are aware of the news and looking forward to learning more: “Warner Bros. and Embracer have kept us in the loop every step of the way. We look forward to speaking with them further to hear their vision for the franchise moving forward.” Jackson, Boyens, and Walsh did not have any input in Amazon’s Lord of the Rings series.
New Line currently has one Lord of the Rings project already lined up—the animated feature The War of the Rohirrim—which bows in 2024. As for any potential overlap between the new films and the Amazon series, it shouldn’t be an issue. Amazon’s series is focused on an entirely different era within the Lord of the Rings timeline, the Second Age, which takes place thousands of years before the adventures of Bilbo, Frodo, and the Fellowship of the Ring depicted in the films. Warner Bros. and New Line will almost certainly focus on the Third Age, when Tolkien’s most beloved creations lived and went on their adventures, including the wizard Gandalf (so memorably played by Ian McKellan in the films), the heroic Aragron (also memorably played by Viggo Mortensen) and many more.
Warner Bros. film heads Michael De Luca and Pamela Abdy released a statement saying they’re not looking to simply redo what Jackson accomplished but are excited to tap into the vast world Tolkien created for new narrative opportunities: “Twenty years ago, New Line took an unprecedented leap of faith to realize the incredible stories, characters and world of The Lord of the Rings on the big screen. The result was a landmark series of films that have been embraced by generations of fans. But for all the scope and detail lovingly packed into the two trilogies, the vast, complex and dazzling universe dreamed up by J.R.R. Tolkien remains largely unexplored on film. The opportunity to invite fans deeper into the cinematic world of Middle-earth is an honor, and we are excited to partner with Middle-earth Enterprises and Embracer on this adventure.”
For more on Warner Bros., HBO, and HBO Max, check out these stories:
“I’ve noticed an uptick in mushroom articles,” production designer John Paino jokes. So have I, actually, but it might be a case of being suddenly aware of the ubiquity and centrality of fungi to the living world ever since HBO’s The Last of Us premiered. The series, based on the critically acclaimed video game by Naughty Dog, asks us to look afresh at the fungus and fear. It presents a world in which fungi, specifically the Cordyceps genus (it includes some 600 species), has infiltrated the human body and mind, turning formerly healthy people into a variety of zombies nearly as variable as the fungus kingdom itself (there are an estimated 2.2 to 3.8 million species, but nobody knows for sure—only 148,000 have been identified). Co-created by Chernobyl visionary Craig Mazin and Neil Druckmann, the man who dreamed this nightmare into existence for Naughty Dog, The Last of Us is making a very strong case for being one of the best zombie stories of all time and, by a wide margin, the best video game adaptation, ever.
Paino was aware of the game, of course, as were all the creatives who came onboard Mazin and Druckmann’s series, but he didn’t log the necessary hours to really take it on. “It’s so engrossing that you really have to take the time to devote your life to it,” he says. Yet he was a major fan of was the game’s concept art, from which he began developing his ideas on how to create a world in which fungi rule to such an extent that even the most ardent mycologist or truffle pig would rue the day they ever became interested in mushrooms, molds, and all the other living organisms that fall under the fungi umbrella.
“Concept art is fascinating to me, and I remember seeing the concept art for part one of the game and how cinematic it was, with great attention to detail and to light sources,” Paino says. “It looked exactly like the kind of concept art you’d do for a TV show or a film, it was what really what drew me in. It’s just so beautiful.”
Bella Ramsey. Photograph by Liane Hentscher/HBO
The Last of Us is centered on a hardened, resourceful smuggler named Joel (a terrific Pedro Pascal) who, like every other adult who has survived the Cordyceps plague, lives with the memories of those he lost in a constant, exhausting state of alarm. In Joel’s case, he lost his daughter, Sarah (Nico Parker), during the first blush of the plague’s spread, when a soldier was ordered to shoot her for fear she might be infected. Years later, he finds himself tasked with a very unusual smuggling job; get some special cargo out of the Quarantine Zone in Boston and deliver it to a group of people who believe very strongly in the cargo’s importance to fighting the plague. The cargo has a name—Ellie (an equally terrific Bella Ramsey)—and she might hold the key to defeating the plague in her veins. Their journey, fraught and frightening, is the backbone of season one.
This narrative conceit also presented Paino with unusual challenges, as the story dictates that Joel and Ellie are never in the same place twice, tasking him with the responsibility of creating fresh ruins for them to explore and often flee.
“We never repeated anything,” Paino says. “Joel and Ellie are going from A to Z, so everything they’re passing through is new. I think we had 180 locations, and we built somewhere to the north end of 90 sets.”
Anna Torv, Pedro Pascal, Bella Ramsey. Photograph by Liane Hentscher/HBO
As Joel and Ellie move west from the QZ in Boston across the living nightmare of post-plague America, they run afoul of increasingly bizarre and grotesquely beautiful variations of the infected. They also bear witness to the reclamation of manmade structures by nature. In this case, a berserk, murderous nature. Some of Paino’s design choices were inspired by the Cordyceps fungi itself.
“[The sets] are evocative of this new lifeform which very well may take over the planet and which comes from this plant-based plague,” Paino says. Yet co-creator Craig Mazin was clear from the jump that they weren’t making “disaster porn.” “It’s hard because there is this point where the natural world has very much taken over society, the architecture, civilization as a whole. Especially through Ellie’s eyes, having never been outside the QZ, there is a kind of awe with all of that. As adults, Joel and Tess [Anna Torv] are very much aware of how dangerous this world is, so it wouldn’t be a surprise to them, but it’s a surprise to Ellie and the viewer, so we wanted to play with that. We didn’t want to make it too beautiful, but it is beautiful.”
Pedro Pascal, Anna Torv, Bella Ramsey. Photograph by Liane Hentscher/HBO
The beauty and the horror are locked in a deathly embrace in The Last of Us in a way that’s unusual for a show about the living dead. That becomes apparent during the second episode, “Infected,” when Joel, Ellie, and Tess make it out of the QZ and have to pick their way through a museum. It’s here they come across a sub-species of the infected known, un-scientifically but evocatively, as “clickers.” This variation of zombie (in the third stage of their infection according to The Last of Us wiki) enjoy a unique kind of migraine—their skulls have been exploded open by the fungus, which fans out on either side of their head with a gruesome panache that would have made H.R. Giger blush. What’s left of their faces is basically the lower jaw and a row of jagged teeth. They earn their nickname by moving via echolocation (producing a clicking sound) towards their prey.
A “clicker” hears Joel, Ellie, and Tess in episode 2. Photograph by Liane Hentscher/HBO
During the episode, two clickers hone in on our heroes, and what follows is a deliciously terrifying chase through the museum. Paino and his team pored over every little detail to ensure the place looked just right, even though his most brilliant stroke never made it to the screen.
“We had this incredible commemorative Revolutionary War tea set that the fungus was growing through,” he says. “At one point, Joel side glances this tea set, and that was our nod to the line between the civilization and history and how the fungus and infected have grown through it, literally and metaphorically. The infected don’t care; they’re just going to go everywhere.”
Samuel Hoeksema plays a “clicker” in “The Last Of Us.” Photograph by Liane Hentscher/HBO
As for the design of the clickers themselves and the hordes of the ingeniously infected who haunt the series, Paino points to prosthetics designer Barrie Gower. “That’s totally his wheelhouse,” he says. “Our thing was making sure we had some interesting things for the Cordyceps to grow through, like that the museum in Boston. Working with the infected and creature effects, it was about making sure that the creatures either came out of our environments or really popped against them with the colors we chose.”
Paino says that despite the continental sweep of The Last of Us, following Joel and Ellie’s journey for thousands of miles, the series rarely makes use of green screens to fill in backgrounds digitally. “Most of the interiors are built and the locations are dressed,” he says. For the sets and locations, only visuals like two ruined skyscrapers leaning against each other, frozen in mid-collapse by their mutual support, are one hundred percent VFX.
One of the most memorable builds for Paino and his team, and one of the best episodes of television this year (or any other, if you ask me), was for episode three, “Long, Long Time,” which shifted the focus from Joel and Bella’s journey to a skilled if lonely doomsday prepper named Bill (Nick Offerman) and his shock at finding a starving man named Frank (Murray Bartlett) begging, from the bottom of a hole Bill had covered to trap would-be intruders, for a little food. The episode, which spans years, tracks their relationship inside Bill’s compound which, thanks to Frank, becomes a home.
Nick Offerman, Murray Bartlett. Photograph by Liane Hentscher/HBO
“When I read the script, I immediately emailed Craig and said it’s one of the best I’ve ever read,” Paino says. “It’s just haunting and beautiful. And it was so great to have a respite, because it’s a show where you don’t really stop; you don’t get to dig into people’s lives and flesh out their personalities and characters. But in episode three, we were able to, and it was really great from a design and art point of view. It was really wonderful.”
Nick Offerman, Murray Bartlett. Photograph by Liane Hentscher/HBO
Designing Bill and Frank’s house required adding little touches that turned what was a booby-trapped, heavily fortified suburban fortress into a place where two men fell in love and lived their lives in the most darkly romantic setting possible. Frank, an amateur artist, begins populating the walls of the house with his portraits of Bill.
“It was a little difficult to land on how talented Frank was,” Paino says. “It was also important to make sure that we showed his skills degrading, even though it’s never said what exactly his degenerative disease is, whether it’s Parkinson’s or MS, that would certainly effect his ability to paint. And the actors were just so great. Murray Bartlett as Frank, you could see his mind wander as his illness takes hold. He did such a great job of showing his cognitive skill decaying.”
One of the biggest challenges for Paino was doubling Calgary’s architecture, where The Last of Us was filmed, for some of the American locations. “We’re going from the east coast of America to the west coast, and there wasn’t a lot of appropriate architecture in Calgary,” Paino says. “Once we get to the middle of America and the middle of our journey, on the vast plains, Calgary was great for that. But when we were in the cities, that’s where the challenges were.”
Melanie Lynskey in episode 4. Photograph by Liane Hentscher/HBO
Those challenges included imagining what a world that hadn’t had a functioning electrical grid, or any reliable infrastructure, for decades.
“Nothing has worked for 20 years, and nature has claimed things, so finding locations where we were able to give that much desiccation was our biggest challenge,” Paino says. “It’s really hard to break things down like that, actual places where people to go to work in. So making sure we had the time not only had the time do that, but then restore the location, that was hard.”
Whether Joel and Ellie were fighting for their lives in a museum, a laundromat in Kansas City, or a suburban culdesac outside of it, much of what you see in The Last of Us are real places turned into ruins by Paino and his team. For the climatic battle in the suburban culdesac towards the end of episode 5, Paino built the set in a parking lot adjacent to one of their stages. The scene saw Joel, Ellie, and two new (and brief) fellow travelers, Henry (Lamar Johnson) and Sam (Keivonn Woodard), beset by a group of rebel humans led by Melanie Lynskey’s Kathleen, who unleashes her vast amount of firepower in an effort to punish Henry for a past transgression. Things look bleak for our heroes when it’s just human vs human, but this is a world where humans no longer rule. Cue a truck that explodes and falls into a sinkhole, unleashing a horde of infected that includes a “bloater,” a massive zombie in the final stages of infection. (The show’s cultural impact is such that you can even test your knowledge of the various stages of zombification via Elle Magazine, not an outlet you’d usually associate with keen-eyed analysis of the varietals of the living dead.)
A “bloater” emerges in episode 5. Photograph by Courtesy of HBO
“It was one and a half acres in length and at least as wide as an acre,” Paino says. “It had 13 houses on it, including the three story sniper house. After a lot of planning, we picked which house the truck would crash into, then rigged that structure to collapse when the truck ran into it. Flame units and explosive charges went off at the moment of impact. The truck was then moved and the hole was created and made safe for the extras who were made up as the infected to emerge. We added ladders and ramps to facilitate them moving quickly.”
It’s riveting television, designed by Paino down to the very last fungal tendril creeping along the cracked floors and up the walls. It’s a nightmare vision of the planet, all the more heartbreaking for still being so beautiful.
For more on The Last of Us, check out these stories:
The Flash is going to race into theaters for the very first time at CinemaCon 2023 this coming April.
Warner Bros. will be premiering director Andy Muschietti’s film at the annual convention of theater owners in Las Vegas, Varietyreports, fueling the speculation that the studio is very enthusiastic about their upcoming superhero film. DC Studios co-chief James Gunn went on record saying The Flash was one of the best superhero movies he’d ever seen, a big vote of confidence from a man who is re-designing the future of all Warner Bros. superhero storytelling alongside Peter Safran. The Flash was a project Gunn and Safran absorbed rather than spearheaded, so to hear Gunn’s enthusiastic support of the film has further suggested Warner Bros. has a potential big winner on their hands.
The Flash stars Ezra Miller as the speedy superhero Barry Allen, a young man torn to shreds over the death of his mother and determined to do anything within his powers to change her fate. Barry’s powers are rather immense, and his solution is to travel back in time to change past events, but as we’ve learned in just about every time travel film, you can’t change the past without altering the future. In this case, Barry gets trapped in an alternate reality where General Zod (Michael Shannon) is not only still alive, but prepared to annihilate the world. What makes Barry’s problem even more pressing is that in his universe, there are no metahumans (no Superman, Wonder Woman, Aquaman, etcetera), and his only hope lies in luring an older, very retired Batman (Michael Keaton, reprising his role from more than 30 years ago) to help him save the world. Batman is, of course, not a metahuman but rather a very rich, very committed, all-too-human vigilante.
Joining Miller, Keaton, and Shannon are Sasha Calle playing Supergirl, Ben Affleck (as the Batman of his universe), Ron Livingston as Barry’s father, Henry Allen, Kiersey Clemons as Iris West, and Antje Traue as Faora-Ui.
CinemaCon runs from April 24 through 27, and is the place where studios bring some of their buzziest upcoming projects, revealing brand new trailers and sizzle reels, as well as major stars. The event helps get exhibitors enthused about the movies they’ll be splashing across their screens. It’s particularly exciting for the theater owners when a studio unveils an entire film, as Paramount did last year with Top Gun: Maverick, which, in case you hadn’t heard, did quite well at the box office and with critics.
Though Haifaa Al-Mansour is known as the first female filmmaker in Saudi Arabia by virtue of her award-winning 2012 feature Wadjda, she has since become a go-to director inside and outside Hollywood through both features and projects on the small screen. The writer/director’s releases Mary Shelleyand The Perfect Candidate were lauded by critics and audiences, and her artistic contributions to shows like The Good Lord Bird, Archive 81, and Tales of the Walking Dead elevated the already well-regarded projects. Al-Mansour’s commitment to empowering women is evidenced in the subject matter she chooses, especially as writer/director, as well as in the advocacy she is devoted to in her personal life.
Her latest work is on the 5th and 6th episodes of Anne Rice’s Mayfair Witches on AMC, based on Rice’s best-selling trilogy, “Lives of the Mayfair Witches.” The series focuses on neurosurgeon Rowan (Alexandra Daddario), who has discovered she is part of a powerful centuries-old family of witches silently ruling New Orleans. At odds with her is the evil matriarch controlling the family, Carlotta Mayfair (Beth Grant). There’s also an insidious threat posed by demonic entity Lasher (Jack Huston). Helping her win against Lasher is Ciprien Grieve (Tongayi Chirisa), an agent with a secret paranormal society called the Talamasca. Episode 5, “The Thrall,” finds Rowen and a wounded Ciprien trapped at the Mayfair House in a time loop. In Episode 6, “Transference,” Rowen takes part in a Mayfair ritual to transfer Lasher’s connection to another witch in the family.
The Credits chatted with Al-Mansour about that powerful scene of sisterhood in “Transference,” using Groundhog Day as inspiration in “The Thrall,” and more.
By coming in on the 5th and 6th episodes, you got some juicy storylines to sink into, but a lot of the visual language of the show had been set. How did you approach your work to bring your personal aesthetic as a director to bear?
With episodic television, you go to a show that is established, but you have to find your own voice as a director, and for me, the way it comes through is really about shaping the performance with the actors, and trying to find the right camera angles and shots. Within that world and aesthetic that is already established, you find your own angles and find your own lighting. It’s always digging, and talking to the creatives around you, trying to find that thing that speaks to you individually. I always follow the characters, and they lead me into the unfolding visual storytelling. Follow the emotion. Follow the character. That is my approach. That is the glue that brings my own style together with the original construct of how the show is designed.
BTS, Director Haifaa Al Mansour and Alexandra Daddario as Dr. Rowan Fielding – Mayfair Witches _ Season 1, Episode 5 – Photo Credit: Alfonso Bresciani/AMC
Shooting in New Orleans for a story like this, which is so famously based in the city, must offer some major inspiration.
Absolutely! We felt Anne Rice’s legacy around us all the time. We felt her presence, and it was just the perfect place to shoot. New Orleans has this magical and charming quality, and has so much history with jazz and all that. It was especially cool because Alex got married during our show in New Orleans, which really was amazing. To be able to be present as she was celebrated, not only as the star of the show, but to celebrate with her at such a special moment in her life in that magical city made it so special for all of us.
Alexandra Daddario as Dr. Rowan Fielding – Mayfair Witches. Season 1, Episode 6 – Photo Credit: Alfonso Bresciani/AMC
The city is like another character, especially the Mayfair house.
The house where we filmed, especially the exterior—because we divided the scenes between the house used as the Mayfair House and interiors shot at the studio—became a local hit where people go and take pictures with it. There is a pride of bringing a series like this to their town, and people felt a lot of ownership of it. That attitude by the people of New Orleans really helped us with challenges, like how the city can get really hot and muggy in summer when we were shooting, but people were excited, so we were powering through it because of the passion and really loving the project.
BTS, Alexandra Daddario as Dr. Rowan Fielding – Mayfair Witches. Season 1, Episode 5 – Photo Credit: Alfonso Bresciani/AMC
For “The Thrall,” what was your inspiration for how you dug into the episode?
The movie Groundhog Day was a major touchstone, and we referenced it a lot, but there are a lot of differences, too, that made it interesting. There is a progression within our story. Being trapped in time and space is such an amazing concept to play with. And Tengayi did a great job bringing all the subtleties of discovering his wound and having his body decay. For me the most exciting thing is when the bubble bursts, and you see the actors portray their characters becoming themselves after they were trapped in that world.
There are power dynamics at play that you lean into with your shots.
Yes! When Alex and Beth, as Rowan and Carlotta, are in that pivotal scene together, the framing of it is very symmetrical to divide the power, but then when Rowan comes into the frame, it’s about Rowan visually taking over the space and foreshadowing her success. It’s also outside, so it gives her that power of being in the clear, where she can step into the light. The film The Babadook is one I like to reference for framing in terms of isolation and power dynamics. Also, putting people in structures like in this episode shows how trapped they are, where they stand in relationship to themselves, and their inner thoughts. I really try to play within the locations we have, to find those positions where I can tell the inner story visually.
The scene with the women’s circle in “Transference” is so powerful.
That is the most exciting scene ever. We had to do the rig, and bring in the camera, and go around and around, but for me, that scene is about the power of feminism, all the women coming together and giving their power to one person. That is such an amazing symbol of sisterhood, and that we have to travel in a pack. Women are always loners, because that is how we’re raised and how society has programmed us for centuries, but I think there is a power in becoming and cultivating that sisterhood and coming together. So that was one of the most exciting scenes I’ve ever enjoyed shooting. Audiences should see that performance when Alex is calling on Lasher. She was feeding off the people around her, it was her scene and she owned it, but it was also really an amazing collective experience.
Each project gives a director some insight about their own style or something new for their bag of tricks. What did you take with you from Mayfair Witches?
Trust actors. I really love to trust actors, be there for them, and give them the chance and the environment to give me their best. A lot of the choices are made between the two of us, and sometimes it’s important to give them more space, because they’ll give me more. Also, as I said, it was great filming in New Orleans because all of Anne Rice’s books take place there, so it’s the original setting. I enjoyed being in a place where things originally happened. It reminded me a lot of when I shot Wadjda or The Perfect Candidate. When I go to a place that is original and where it happened, there is an integrity to it, and some kind of a charm that gives the shoot something special. I think I’ll strive a little bit more now to be in places that have a soul that serves the story.
Anne Rice’s Mayfair Witches air on Sundays at 9:00pm ET/PC on AMC and are available on Thursdays prior on AMC+.
Featured image: BTS, Alexandra Daddario as Dr. Rowan Fielding and Jack Huston as Lasher – Mayfair Witches – Season 1, Episode 5 – Photo Credit: Alfonso Bresciani/AMC
Production for House of the Dragon season 2 is just beginning, and HBO and HBO Max content CEO Casey Bloys has confirmed with Varietythat viewers can expect to return to Westeros in 2024.
Bloys told Variety that the popular Game of Thrones spinoff series will likely not be eligible for the 2024 Emmy season, and considering that eligibility ends on May 31, 2024, you can pencil in season two for the summer of 2024. When asked whether HBO will be exploring any other Game of Thornes spinoffs alongside House of the Dragon, Bloys said the primary focus is on making sure any series set in the fictional world of Westeros (or anywhere else, for that matter) is narratively tight. Any future Game of Thrones spinoffs will have to pass the rigorous internal process that House of the Dragon went through.
“My philosophy is a good script is number one priority,” Bloys told Variety. “I am not doing it based on wanting to have one a year, two a year. I want to do it based on the scripts that we’re excited about.”
There were a number of potential Game of Thrones spinoffs that HBO was exploring once the flagship series ended in May of 2019, but ultimately, House of the Dragon was the only one to make it to air. The series, co-created by Ryan Condal and George R. R. Martin, with season one shepherded by Condal and Miguel Sapochnik, explores the inner turmoil in House Targaryen some 172 years before the birth of Daenerys Targaryen (memorably played by Emilia Clarke in Game of Thrones). It was a ratings hit, and a slow-burn, evocative look at how arguably the most powerful house in Westeros history ultimately flew their dragons too close to the sun, so to speak.
“Remember to get House of the Dragon following up from Game of Thrones, we developed a lot of shows, shot a pilot, developed a bunch of scripts and we got House of the Dragon,” Bloys said to Variety. “To do that again is going to take the same amount of effort. You have to develop a lot of things, try things. You never know what’s going to work. So we’re currently doing that. I’m not opposed to any number of shows. There’s probably a natural limit to how many fans want, but I’m open to any as long as we feel really good about the scripts and the prospects for a series. It takes a while to get one that hits the mark. I know George [R.R. Martin] feels the same way. You want to do one that everybody’s really proud of and excited about.”
Lots of fans will be excited about the return of House of the Dragon, but we’re betting they wish it would be arriving a little bit sooner.
For more on Warner Bros., HBO, and HBO Max, check out these stories:
