“George & Tammy” Costume Designer Mitchell Travers on the Power Couple’s Fashion Forward Approach

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When George Jones and Tammy Wynette sang, the nation listened. The chart-topping talents performed some of the most memorable songs in country music history and their love story rivaled any of their lyrics. Together, they shaped the industry amid the rise of television and against the backdrop of a rapidly changing American landscape. Showtime’s limited series George & Tammy, created by Abe Sylvia, captures the tumult and triumph of their decades in the spotlight.

Costume designer Mitchell Travers threaded the needle between life and legacy as the characters established a show business style and took their work home with them.

“George (Michael Shannon) is sort of going back to his roots and Tammy (Jessica Chastain) is on the rise,” Travers described. “So, you get to really understand that it is a show, and it is a performance from the songs to the clothing to the stage. Everything was designed for audience consumption, but then you get these really great moments of Tammy at a piano in a tank top, and it’s really human and humble and country. There’s something really wonderful about that for me that you get both sides of these very public figures.”

Opposing trajectories tug at the fray between the two from the very beginning of their relationship. Jones was well established in his career when he fastened on to Wynette’s talent, but explosive stardom lay ahead for her. An infusion of domesticity gives the series a raw glimpse into their reality.

“We have so many great instances of him just on the lawnmower, and it’s a great contrast between this man we’ve gotten to meet in rhinestones to a man in an old hunting jacket and a tee shirt on a lawnmower,” Travers noted. “For Tammy, you get to see the reverse where she starts from humble beginnings and just skyrockets to be one of the biggest names, not only in country music, but she had a foray into dance music in the 90s as well. There’s a real creation of a star that you get to experience with Tammy and the unraveling of a star with George in parallel.”

Michael Shannon as George Jones in GEORGE & TAMMY. Photo credit: Dana Hawley/Courtesy of SHOWTIME.
Michael Shannon as George Jones in GEORGE & TAMMY. Photo credit: Dana Hawley/Courtesy of SHOWTIME.

Jones was an early pioneer of the infamous Nudie’s suits that came to define Nashville fashion in his time. The custom western wear played with traditional cowboy silhouettes drenched in glitzy and audacious patterns. The flashy designs were perfect for creating a dreamy aura around the larger-than-life performers who wore them. 

Michael Shannon as George Jones in GEORGE & TAMMY, ìWeíre Gonna Hold Onî. Photo credit: Dana Hawley/Courtesy of SHOWTIME.
Michael Shannon as George Jones in GEORGE & TAMMY, ìWeíre Gonna Hold Onî. Photo credit: Dana Hawley/Courtesy of SHOWTIME.

“George’s style, I can’t believe it’s not more of a touchstone for country artists now because you look back and see some of the things that George was doing in the late 60s and the early 70s, and it was super forward,” Travers noted. “He was doing these incredibly fashionable things at the time.”

The couple played a major role in glamorizing country music as Nashville fanned out from radio to television screens. Delivering an experience that was as vivid in viewers’ living rooms as it was in person required memorable performance attire.

“Nudie famously started adding rhinestones to his suits so that when these performers would come out on stage, everyone felt like they got to see these people live, and there was a genuine star quality to country performance,” Travers described. “That’s where the idea for these Nudie suits comes from was to try to make sure that everybody in the audience got to see them and experience them in real life. I think that the television only brought that feeling closer where you could see the muscles in their neck twitch as they sang. It felt like you were right there with them.”

Michael Shannon is George Jones and Jessica Chastain is Tammy Wynette. Courtesy Showtime Networks.
Michael Shannon is George Jones and Jessica Chastain is Tammy Wynette. Courtesy Showtime Networks.

Wynette’s costumes grew and evolved as her fame increased and fashion trends became bigger and bolder. “With that came bigger collars, bigger jewelry, bigger rhinestones,” Travers said. “Tammy’s sleeves get huge at a certain point in history, or the straps on some of her dresses or bows. In the beginning, they were playing for the back row of the house, but over the course of their careers, I think they started to learn how to play for the camera, which was a really important part of their fame.”

Jessica Chastain as Tammy Wynette in GEORGE & TAMMY, “The Grand Tour”. Photo credit: Dana Hawley/Courtesy of SHOWTIME.
Jessica Chastain as Tammy Wynette in GEORGE & TAMMY, “The Grand Tour”. Photo credit: Dana Hawley/Courtesy of SHOWTIME.

Jones and Wynette not only reached the highest levels of country music but also enjoyed impressive longevity. They navigated major cultural shifts from the 1960s to the 1990s while maintaining a devoted fan base and reaching new listeners. That opened Travers to a huge span of retro looks that appear on the show.

“How much plaid can you put on camera before you’re fatigued? It’s a balance,” Travers laughed. “Taking these individuals and a couple through all these decades was great fun because each decade offers you something to play with. The injection of jewelry and turquoise and silver comes up in the mid-70s, then as you start to make room for the 80s when big business starts to come in and women are working. There’s just so much history that you want to put in the show to help people feel like they’re back there. Or for people who weren’t alive then, you want to give them everything that was happening. All the history, all the trends. But we serve little snapshots of each year. It’s hard not to put everything in and just distill it to its essence in every scene.”

Both romantic and professional partners, Jones and Wynette were legendary solo acts but often appeared together – even after ending their marriage. The pair put detailed consideration into their image. That unity was often expressed through their costuming, which Travers used throughout the series to signal their ever-changing dynamic.

 

“There were times when they would match their costumes perfectly to one another,” Travers said. “I loved to imagine the conversations they had on a tour bus or waiting for a flight where they were planning their outfits together. I really think that one of George’s love languages was matching. I think it was his way of identity and partnership. For me, it was great fun to design these matching ensembles for the two of them when things were really good. And then when things weren’t so good, try to visually pull them apart and create some distance just with the clothes alone.”

Travers’ team built many of the costumes, but several of the pieces were truly vintage. In their search, the costume team even made a historic discovery. One vintage dealer that Travers collaborated with exclusively sources sequined and beaded gowns – attributes that would describe much of Wynette’s attire.

“She and I were working together to source items for the musical performances, and she discovered the exact gown from the ‘Tammy’s Touch’ album released in April 1970,” Travers recalled. “Jessica and I had a marathon first fitting, as she has so many costumes in the series. I, of course, pulled out Tammy’s gown to show her, and she had to try it on. I had a ‘Country Greats’ playlist going in the fitting, and just as we finished zipping up the dress, Stand By Your Man came on shuffle, and we all got goosebumps!” 

After the show wrapped, Travers returned the dress to its rightful heir – Jones and Wynette’s daughter, Georgette Jones. “I’m certainly not going to hold onto that,” he insisted. “It’s not mine to keep, but I just felt like the universe was on our side as we were hunting at all these incredible vintage resources that we found some of this stuff that was as authentic as it gets.”

Travers described the wardrobe he assembled as “a little Tammy Wynette department store.” He and Chastain would wander the aisles gathering inspiration for the character.

“With each layer that we put on, a little more Tammy comes up,” Travers observed. “And every time we try something new, we learn a little bit about what we want this character to be. Obviously, there’s a ton of reference that we can lean on, but it’s really important that you help the actor find their portrayal of it.”

New episodes of George & Tammy are available to stream every Friday on the Showtime app.

For more on George & Tammy, check out this interview with series creator Abe Sylvia:

“George & Tammy” Creator Abe Sylvia on Crafting a Complicated Love Story

Featured image: (L-R): Jessica Chastain as Tammy Wynette and Michael Shannon as George Jones in GEORGE & TAMMY, “The Grand Tour”. Photo credit: Dana Hawley/Courtesy of SHOWTIME.

Why Every Digital Costume in “Avatar: The Way of Water” Really Exists

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Daring adventures, illuminating discoveries, and unbelievable wonders are hallmarks of James Cameron’s blockbuster films. In trademark fashion, Avatar: The Way of Water is a technological feat that developed new filmmaking tools in production. Yet, costume designer Deborah L. Scott (Titanic, Back to the Future, Avatar, E.T.) said that is all secondary to Cameron’s driving force. “Jim doesn’t like sci-fi that much,” she noted. “You can see it even in Aliens. He comes back to what’s plausible. What human things will always be there.”

It’s that human touch that gives the largely CGI film its credibility, which led Scott and her team to create over 2,000 garments – even though a tiny fraction of practical creations are seen on screen. “We actually made, in The Way of Water and further into Avatar 3, we’ve made every single costume,” Scott revealed. “Every costume, every prop, every piece of jewelry. I did all the hair designs, the tattooing—all that. Everything was sort of under the umbrella of the costume department.”

(L-R): Ronal (Kate Winslet), Tonowari (Cliff Curtis), and the Metkayina clan in 20th Century Studios' AVATAR: THE WAY OF WATER. Photo courtesy of 20th Century Studios. © 2022 20th Century Studios. All Rights Reserved.
(L-R): Ronal (Kate Winslet), Tonowari (Cliff Curtis), and the Metkayina clan in 20th Century Studios’ AVATAR: THE WAY OF WATER. Photo courtesy of 20th Century Studios. © 2022 20th Century Studios. All Rights Reserved.
(L-R): Ronal (Kate Winslet), Tonowari (Cliff Curtis), and the Metkayina clan in 20th Century Studios’ AVATAR: THE WAY OF WATER. Photo courtesy of 20th Century Studios. © 2022 20th Century Studios. All Rights Reserved.

Pandora is a moon filled with wonder and mystery. Nowhere on Earth could stand in for the fantastical lunar world, which led to a massive motion-capture undertaking. Artists transformed the actors’ performances into the Na’vi and their costumes were drawn digitally in place of the gray motion capture suits. Scott’s work not only established the look of each character but also helped the actors define their movements for their final performance.

On set of 20th Century Studios' AVATAR 2. Photo by Mark Fellman. © 2021 20th Century Studios. All Rights Reserved.
On set of 20th Century Studios’ AVATAR 2. Photo by Mark Fellman. © 2021 20th Century Studios. All Rights Reserved.
Tuk (Trinity Bliss) in 20th Century Studios' AVATAR: THE WAY OF WATER. Photo courtesy of 20th Century Studios. © 2022 20th Century Studios. All Rights Reserved.
Tuk (Trinity Bliss) in 20th Century Studios’ AVATAR: THE WAY OF WATER. Photo courtesy of 20th Century Studios. © 2022 20th Century Studios. All Rights Reserved.

“You are doing reference costumes for set work because performance capture on set, you can’t occlude the markers on the body,” Scott noted. “It was important to Jim to give the actors a sense of time and place with their character. The costumes we made all to human scale for the purpose of putting them on people when needed. So that when an actor needed to know how it would be to dance around with that piece on, we put the piece on and let them dance around and shot a lot of reference for the digital people.”

Testing became a critical component of developing the film. Although the Na’vi home world is filled with mythical creatures and landscapes, departing too far from reality could prove to be a distraction. That meant grounding the physics of Pandora in familiar science. Fabrics, beads, and other materials needed to move in a believable way.

(L-R): Tsireya (Bailey Bass), Neytiri (Zoe Saldana), Neteyam (Jamie Flatters), Lo’ak (Britain Dalton), and Jake Sully (Sam Worthington) in 20th Century Studios’ AVATAR: THE WAY OF WATER. Photo courtesy of 20th Century Studios. © 2022 20th Century Studios. All Rights Reserved.

“Let’s do a proof of concept and build a costume maybe not as complex or as expensive as the real thing but something we can put in the water. See how it works. See if the fronds flow in the right way,” Scott explained.

That information could be used to program the way the costume functioned in the final scenes. The computers had to be taught how to process each piece. “Their computers don’t understand that costume because they have no reference for it,” Scott observed. “You can’t say, ‘We know in our program how a t-shirt works.’ This is like, ‘What is that?’ So the computer has to be fed – the simulators and the animators have to be fed a certain amount of information. That’s why the samples were even more important.”

 

The costume department’s role was so expansive that it served as inspiration across all areas. Because their work was being produced in a tactile way, other departments could study the fabrics, textures, and designs and be inspired for their own contributions.

“For the most part, my department was the one that created all the samples. So the weaving techniques, the colors, and things like that would inform the production design. Especially Dylan [Cole], who did the Pandoran world. He could come through and say, ‘Oh, this is what you’re up to. Oh, that’s an interesting weaving technique,’” Scott recalled. “That’s not necessarily in their wheelhouse. That’s costuming, and they could extract what we were doing and use us too. It was pretty hand in hand.”

Ronal (Kate Winslet) in 20th Century Studios' AVATAR 2. Photo courtesy of 20th Century Studios. © 2022 20th Century Studios. All Rights Reserved.
Ronal (Kate Winslet) in 20th Century Studios’ AVATAR 2. Photo courtesy of 20th Century Studios. © 2022 20th Century Studios. All Rights Reserved.

Although a massive undertaking, Scott insisted that the comprehensive approach to designing beyond the characters’ clothing felt natural. “Because of the performance capture and because you’re working in this virtual world, ultimately, the door to costume design gets wider, bigger, and we can just jump in and take our place there. When I was designing characters, it was natural to design them head to toe. It was natural to put the hair in so that you’re establishing the way these people look.”

The clans of Pandora have incredible bonds with nature. Their native plants and animals provide the resources to handmake their garments. Scott noted that an even stronger tie was established in The Way of Water to reflect how they might obtain the elements of their attire.

“They draw from their environment so they’re drawing from different materials,” Scott noted. “Where you would use a snake in the forest, you’re going to use a sea snake in the ocean. You use animals. We really incorporated birds this time. We used feathers in the first one, but it was never explained. So Jim kept putting birds in shots. Like yes, especially on the ocean, we have birds. There are water birds. So there’s always a touchstone to reality.”

Tonowari (Cliff Curtis) and the Metkayina clan in 20th Century Studios' AVATAR: THE WAY OF WATER. Photo courtesy of 20th Century Studios. © 2022 20th Century Studios. All Rights Reserved.
Tonowari (Cliff Curtis) and the Metkayina clan in 20th Century Studios’ AVATAR: THE WAY OF WATER. Photo courtesy of 20th Century Studios. © 2022 20th Century Studios. All Rights Reserved.

Every detail was researched to be as authentic as possible. Being a warm weather climate, Scott and Cameron focused on the crafting techniques of the indigenous cultures of Oceania as a guide. They then tested various elements of the costumes to be sure that they would be durable and useful as intended.

“I had an incredible team, mostly at Wētā workshop in New Zealand. These are people who really still value handicrafts. They were just constantly making samples. ‘How about this kind of knot? How about this braid? How about this color? How about this material?’ So we had all this research time to develop samples,” Scott said. “At the same time, sculpting things, carving things. ‘Is this shell too soft to carve? Is this shell going to break if you carve it?’”

Some of the film’s more futuristic pieces also tapped into the latest technology. Items like face masks could be modeled in a computer, then built, molded, and cast. Scott noted that 3D printing was “a wonderful tool, but we relied on our hands.” In the end, techniques like weaving, embroidering, beading, and braiding that Scott has mastered throughout her career proved to be the most valuable.

A scene from "Avatar: Way of Water." Courtesy 20th Century Studios.
Tonowari (Cliff Curtis) and the Metkayina clan in 20th Century Studios’ AVATAR: THE WAY OF WATER. Photo courtesy of 20th Century Studios. © 2022 20th Century Studios. All Rights Reserved.

“As a costume designer, there was new technology being developed as we were doing it in real-time,” she noted. “I’m not used to working on a computer. We’re kind of hands-on people. So, that was different. What was absolutely the same is just trying to design costumes for characters. That’s pretty much it. Across the board, that’s always the same. These characters just happen to live on a moon.”

 

Avatar: The Way of Water is playing in theaters nationwide now.

For more on Avatar: The Way of Water, check out these stories:

How “Avatar: The Way of Water” Visual Effects Wizards Conjured Underwater Magic

“Avatar: The Way of Water” Poised to Make Huge Splash This Weekend

James Cameron Says “Avatar 4” Script “Goes Nuts”

Featured image: (L-R): Neytiri (Zoe Saldana) and Jake Sully (Sam Worthington) in 20th Century Studios’ AVATAR: THE WAY OF WATER. Photo courtesy of 20th Century Studios. © 2022 20th Century Studios. All Rights Reserved.

Best of 2022: “Black Panther: Wakanda Forever” Hair Department Head Camille Friend on The Sequel’s Stunning Looks

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Both 2018’s Black Panther and this year’s Wakanda Forever have hugely impacted popular culture, not least by expanding the acceptance and expression of Afro-Futurism in everything from fashion and hairstyles to architecture. Both production designer Hannah Beachler and costume designer Ruth E. Carter won Oscars for their work on the first film and are in the running for a return to the podium with Wakanda Forever. 

For Black Panther, hair department head Camille Friend found ways to incorporate elements of African tribal culture and expanded those influences in Wakanda Forever. She used the same trial and error and inventive thinking required to create looks that could be worn over the entire production or in challenging environments, like those underwater sequences in Talokan. How could the Mayan-inspired Talokani hairstyles look consistent when the cast members wearing them were submerged in water for over 12 hours? 

In a chat with The Credits, Friend takes us through the problem-solving required to get those gorgeous looks in Wakanda Forever. She also considers the lasting effects her designs have had on pop culture and how she is helping Hollywood become more inclusive as the founder of Hair Scholars, which mentors and educates professional hair stylists about working in film and TV. 

 

The hair design in Wakanda Forever was partly based on research into Senegalese warriors, the Zulu tribe, and the Maasai people. What are some of the direct results of that research that viewers can see expressed as part of the specific characters or specific scenes in the film?

The Jabari are definitely inspired by Senegalese warriors. Even from the first one, you know, with Winston Duke, we really talked a lot about how the Jabari were going to look, everything from the angles of the cuts to the lines in the head, even the white paint. All of that really comes from Senegalese warriors. Then you have the Himba tribe, where you have the beautiful clay look on the tribal elders. I remember on the first one, Ryan said he really wanted to do a clay wig. I thought it would be easy. It was not so easy. 

Angela Bassett as Ramonda in Marvel Studios' BLACK PANTHER: WAKANDA FOREVER. Photo by Annette Brown. © 2022 MARVEL.
Winston Duke as M’Baku in Marvel Studios’ BLACK PANTHER: WAKANDA FOREVER. Photo by Eli Adé. © 2022 MARVEL.

Problem-solving time? 

Yes! We had weeks of trial and error. After a while, I just had to pray to God for the answer, and actually, the answer was going to Home Depot. We ended up making a clay wig from different substances that would hold up and last during filming. This time, we got the clay wig down. We could do a clay wig in two days, whereas it used to take us a week. So we have evolved. It’s all basically plaster of Paris. I’ll tell you the steps. We basically take a braid wig, and then we put the plaster on top of it, and we smooth it with gloves and a little water. We let that dry, and then we go in and paint it. That’s what stays and lasts forever. We’ve got it down to a science. I’m very happy about that one.

(L-R): Dorothy Steel as Merchant Tribe Elder, Florence Kasumba as Ayo, Angela Bassett as Ramonda, Danai Gurira as Okoye in Marvel Studios’ Black Panther: Wakanda Forever. Photo courtesy of Marvel Studios. © 2022 MARVEL.

Were there any elements pulled from history for the scenes of mourning and memorial for T’Challa?

Definitely, I’ll tell you that backstory. The reason why Shuri and Ramonda’s hair ended up short is Ryan knew that in West African culture, when somebody is in mourning, they cut all their hair off. When we go into the story, it’s the year after T’Challa’s death, so how would their hair look a year later? That’s where my design began for those characters in Wakanda Forever.  

Angela Bassett as Ramonda in Marvel Studios' BLACK PANTHER: WAKANDA FOREVER. Photo by Annette Brown. © 2022 MARVEL.
Angela Bassett as Ramonda in Marvel Studios’ BLACK PANTHER: WAKANDA FOREVER. Photo by Annette Brown. © 2022 MARVEL.

How did you design the underwater sequences in Talokan? That had to be a challenge.

I’m going to say I have a whole different respect for water. In a lot of movies, you shoot them dry for wet. The hair is really dry, but we’re putting a little spritz on them. In Wakanda Forever, it was a whole different ballgame. When you have people thoroughly submerged in water for 12 hours a day, how will you make this happen? Plus, we could not put any product in the hair because hair product in water makes it cloudy. So how are we going to make this hair stay with no product in it? We had to figure it out, and again, it was through a lot of trial and error. What glues work? What glues don’t? We ended up using a lot of silicone glue because they hold up under water and they’re more of a flexible glue. We took spirit gum, broke it down with alcohol, and made it really thin. Then we made it into a hairspray that we would spray on all the pieces and let them dry. We figured out how to get it thin enough so that it wouldn’t change the color of the hair. Then we sprayed all the pieces with the glue hairspray that we’d made, and that’s how all the hair would stay up while in the water for 12 hours a day.

Tenoch Huerta as Namor in Marvel Studios' Black Panther: Wakanda Forever. Photo courtesy of Marvel Studios. © 2022 MARVEL.
Tenoch Huerta as Namor in Marvel Studios’ Black Panther: Wakanda Forever. Photo courtesy of Marvel Studios. © 2022 MARVEL.

Can you talk about how both Black Panther and Wakanda Forever have had an influence in the real world in terms of access and expansion of hair products and designs for Black hair?

After the first one, a writer friend called and told us we made Black hair beautiful. After Black Panther, there have been so many more movies that have showcased natural hair. I’m so proud that we could have an impact in starting that movement. I have people who hit me up on Instagram and tell me, “My daughter was so happy to see somebody that looks like her onscreen.”  They saw somebody whose hair texture was the same. Also, 3C or 4A, B, or C textures were very hard to find on the first one. We had to make it. We had to perm it. It was a lot of work that we had to do. On this one, every manufacturer has that now. I think culturally, that’s what’s changed. Even with products, I was doing some research recently and found over 40 Black-owned, female-owned haircare companies. That’s a beautiful thing to have that many in the marketplace. 

Angela Bassett as Ramonda in Marvel Studios' BLACK PANTHER: WAKANDA FOREVER. Photo by Annette Brown. © 2022 MARVEL.
(L-R): Danai Gurira as Okoye and Letitia Wright as Shuri in Marvel Studios’ BLACK PANTHER: WAKANDA FOREVER. Photo by Eli Adé. © 2022 MARVEL.

It’s the whole spectrum of natural hair, both on the screen and off, being celebrated. 

I think there’s a huge difference. And we have things like the C.R.O.W.N. Act, which has legalized wearing your hair naturally. You can wear your hair in any style that you want and still be in the workplace. It doesn’t matter if you’re a lawyer, doctor, or a short-order cook; you have the right to wear your hair naturally, how it grows out of your head. The younger generation will grow up with that, without any shame about their hair. It just gives us such better body positivity and gives us so much more of a beautiful image and confirmation that Black hair is beautiful.

And to further push the needle forward in Hollywood, you founded Hair Scholars, which has its own website and is having a big impact on inclusivity in the business.

It’s one of my greatest passions. I’m a firm believer in equity and inclusion. I used to work for Warner Brothers, and that’s what I did for them. It’s about education. Education is freeing for people. What I love to teach is how to be in the business, how to treat it as a business, how to make your deals, and how to be a department head because that’s definitely what people are looking for, is equity in the business. This is how you put on a wig. This is how you do textured hair. So all those things, together, will make a better community. At this point, a lot of producers call me on movies that I don’t even do, and I help people crew up because I know the people in LA, New York, London, and Atlanta; I know all the people and what their skill sets are. I’m perfectly happy to do that. Whether you’re white, Black, Native American, Asian, or Filipino, there’s absolutely no excuse why a performer sits in the chair and you, as a professional hair artist, makeup artist, or barber, cannot do their hair. That is unacceptable in 2022 and 2023 and going forward. Every performer has a right to walk into the trailer and sit down in the chair and be taken care of and feel beautiful.

 

Black Panther: Wakanda Forever is currently in theaters nationwide. 

 

 For more on Black Panther: Wakanda Forever, check out these stories:

How “Black Panther: Wakanda Forever” Cinematographer Autumn Durald Arkapaw Used Light & Shadows

“Black Panther: Wakanda Forever” Production Designer Hannah Beachler Reveals Her Guide to Talokan

Let’s Discuss That “Black Panther: Wakanda Forever” Mid-Credits Scene

 

Featured image: Letitia Wright as Shuri in Marvel Studios’ BLACK PANTHER: WAKANDA FOREVER. Photo by Annette Brown. © 2022 MARVEL.

Best of 2022: How The “Babylon” Sound Team Built a Sonic Bacchanal

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It’s that time of year—we look back on a few of our favorite interviews from 2022 in our annual year-end list.

The opening sequence to Damien Chazelle’s Babylon (in theaters today) hits you like one of the many lines of powder its characters will ingest. It’s eye-opening, choreographed chaos, leaving you with an intensely euphoric feeling – quite fitting for a story that revisits Hollywood’s infancy of the 1920s and ‘30s when La La Land was a sandbox of drugs, sex, and all night partying. 

It’s here we meet Manny Torres (Diego Calva), a low-level “yes man” with aspirations to make it in the biz, putting together the finishing touches on an elephant-sized bash for the who’s who, including silent movie star Jack Conrad (Brad Pitt) and Nellie LaRoy (Margot Robbie), a party-crasher looking to make a name for herself on the silver screen. Bedlam arrives at nightfall when tux-clad half-naked men, topless women, and hundreds of drunkards and coke fiends descend on the mansion of studio boss Don Wallach (Jeff Garlin), drinking and snorting anything and everything until sunrise. The mash-up has serious FOMO vibes and is glued together by the music from a live orchestra playing in the ballroom. That orchestra is led by trumpeter Sidney Palmer (Jovan Adepo), and galvanizing the moment is a tantalizing dance by Nellie, which catches the eye of a producer who needs to replace an actress who happened to die of a drug overdose in a nearby room. It’s her chance at stardom.

Margot Robbie plays Nellie LaRoy in Babylon from Paramount Pictures.

Beautifully shot on anamorphic 35mm push-processed film by cinematographer Linus Sandgren (La La Land, First Man) and exquisitely alluring production design from Florencia Martin (Licorice Pizza), the visual tapestry of Babylon invites you into the world with open arms, though it’s the sonic creativity that subliminally keeps you moving to the beat of Chazelle’s narrative drum.

“His films are very motivated by music,” says production sound mixer Steven Morrow (La La Land). “There’s a lot of discussion in preproduction about certain music hits and cues as well as the feel he [Chazelle] wants. We work heavily with the music department to make sure Damien has all the tools he needs.” Composer Justin Hurwitz returns for his fourth film with the director, and his up-tempo score helps drive the opulent soundscape.

“Damien wanted the sound to be visceral and real, to be a little larger than life,” says the multi-hyphenated supervising sound editor Ai-Ling Lee (La La Land, First Man), who collaborated alongside the likes of supervising sound editor Mildred Iatrou (La La Land, First Man) and re-recording mixer Andy Nelson (La La Land). “Because there’s a lot of action in the frame, he wanted the sound to be as immersive, in a sense, as much as the visuals.”

In filming the epic party, production sound fitted each actor with a wireless transmitter and lavalier to record their dialog. Boom operator Craig Dollinger placed an additional microphone overhead when viable, though the set walls of the Wallach location were lined with mirrors, limiting opportunities. The bigger hurdle for sound though was finding a solution to the music from the orchestra, so it didn’t trample on the dialog throughout the scene. Morrow decided to give each band member an earwig that the music would be played through, allowing them to mimic playing their instruments. The problem: there were dozens of dancers who also needed to hear the music, plus Robbie’s character. Sound utility Bryan Mendoza organized a system to give each one of them their own earwig to hear the songs and dance to the lavish choreography created by Mandy Moore (La La Land).

For Robbie’s dance number, Morrow devised another solution. “Mandy and Margot came up with the song Firestarter [by Prodigy] that she’s dancing to. Everyone else is dancing to what you hear on screen, but Margot had a separate earwig and transmitter so she could hear that specific song,” Morrow notes. “It may not look like it, but that party scene became a technical challenge where we had 42 earwigs going out on two different channels.”

Margot Robbie plays Nellie LaRoy in Babylon from Paramount Pictures.

Lee admits the opening party sequence is heavily driven by music. For sonic clarity, post had to craft a visceral sound effects track that heightened the scene without overwhelming the audience. “Andy Nelson started the mix by setting what’s the loudest he can play the music for the sound effects, like the party crowd, fights, elephant, etc. I made sure not to play them too loud and be specific when we play them, rather than a bed of sounds. This way, if a small sound doesn’t overpower the music, that helps create an illusion that the music is always big, except for certain moments like the crowd cheers taking over the music on the last half of Nellie’s dance sequence,” explains Lee.

Jovan Adepo plays Sidney Palmer in Babylon from Paramount Pictures.

The mantra for production sound throughout filming was to find creative ways to protect the dialogue and not let the music play over entire sequences. Another such instance was a massive battlefield scene that has multiple storylines taking place at once, including Nellie’s first day on set, where she’s asked to repeatedly shed a tear and Jack Conrad climbing a hill to kiss a princess at sunset.

Lukas Haas plays George Munn, Brad Pitt plays Jack Conrad and Spike Jonze plays Otto Von Strassberger in Babylon from Paramount Pictures.
Lukas Haas plays George Munn, Brad Pitt plays Jack Conrad and Spike Jonze plays Otto Von Strassberger in Babylon from Paramount Pictures.

Supervising location manager Chris Baugh found an empty field in Simi Valley where Martin designed a number of open-air sets to represent Kinsocope studio owned by Wallach. “Kinoscope is what you’d call a Poverty Row studio,” Martin says in the production notes, “so we wanted to show how ramshackle and seat-of-your-pants the approach in those days could be. It’s really these pockets of fantasy sprouting out of the desert, where only months or weeks before nothing existed.” Every individual movie set, every painted backdrop – all were created from scratch.”

The colossal sequence had over 700 extras fighting, explosions, horse stunts, and a full orchestra. “On a traditional movie, you would blast the music and the orchestra would play along as the battle takes place. We thought since we had a large earwig count already, why not just give everyone in the orchestra an earwig, including the conductor [cameo by composer Justin Hurwitz]. This way, they can play along to the silent music, and then good sound effects of the battle and everything that’s going on could be recorded.”

Director of Photography Linus Sandgren and Olivia Hamilton as Ruth Adler on the set of Babylon from Paramount Pictures.
Director of Photography Linus Sandgren and Olivia Hamilton as Ruth Adler on the set of Babylon from Paramount Pictures.

Lee sent two sound effects recordists to capture the aural palette during the multi-day shoot. “They were able to set up a bunch of mics around the set to record a wider perspective of the extras yelling, attacking, and the different prop sounds,” mentions Lee. “We thought it might be kind of cool to capture the sound of 1,000 extras with props weapons and hear what it sounds like.” Morrow adds, “It may seem odd to say [to Chazelle] we don’t want to play this orchestra out loud, but in the end, it helps the authenticity of the scene. It lent all that extra sound that would be very difficult to recreate where you have all these extras on the field running at each other.”

In post, the team further pushed the battle sequence, finding moments to aurally heighten the drama of the unfolding storylines. “Justin’s score is driving a lot of the scene forward,” says Lee. “For sound to play it up, we would hit the cut to play in rhythm and pitch to his score.” Mixing in Dolby Atmos created more of an immersive soundscape where they pulled sound effects from the center speaker placing them in different perspectives for viewers to hear and feel.

Morrow admits none of it would be possible without the collaborative nature of Chazelle. “Damien really cares about every aspect of a movie, and you can tell that in the small details. He has storyboards he sends out to everybody to understand what his goals are for the shoot, but he’s collaborative in the sense that he’s not locked into a specific vision. It’s a very rewarding experience working on his movies.”

 

For more films and series from Paramount and Paramount+, check out these stories:

The First “Scream IV” Trailer Finds Ghostface in New York City

“Transformers: Rise of the Beasts” Trailer Reveals the Maximals, Predacons, & Terrorcons

“Babylon” Official Trailer Finds Brad Pitt & Margot Robbie Living the High Life

Featured image: Margot Robbie plays Nellie LaRoy in Babylon from Paramount Pictures.

 

Best of 2022: “The Woman King” Director Gina Prince-Bythewood on Her Singular, Sweeping Historical Epic

Posted on by babrams

It’s that time of year—we look back on a few of our favorite interviews from 2022 in our annual year-end list.

When director Gina Prince-Bythewood’s most recent film, The Old Guard, premiered on Netflix in July of 2020, the critically acclaimed action drama became one of the top 10 original launches in the platform’s history. Prince-Bythewood is following that with one of the most anticipated films of 2022, the historical epic The Woman King, the story of the Agojie, an elite all-female warrior unit charged with protecting the African Kingdom of Dahomey in the 1800s. Inspired by true events, The Woman King stars Viola Davis, who also executive produced the project and had a significant impact on getting the film made. 

The Woman King follows Davis as General Nanisca, who is preparing a new group of young recruits and readying them for battle under the direction of King Ghezo (John Boyega). She is aided by fierce fighter and Agojie lieutenant Izogie (Lashana Lynch) and Nanisca’s second-in-command Amenza (Sheila Atim), who presides over rituals of initiation and preparation for battle. Recruits are made up of those rejected by their family, such as Nawi (Thuso Mbedu), and captives who choose to join the sisterhood of warriors, like Ode (Adrienne Warren). 

(First row L-R) Lashana Lynch, Viola Davis,Shelia Atim (Second row L-R ) Sisipho Mbopa , Lone Motsomi ,Chioma Umeala
(First row L-R) Lashana Lynch, Viola Davis, Shelia Atim. (Second row L-R ) Sisipho Mbopa , Lone Motsomi ,Chioma Umeala

There have been no previous films like The Woman King. The release of an action film starring a nearly all Black and female cast, and led by Davis, an actor over 50, is a rarity indeed, but if the advanced buzz and its 98% Rotten Tomatoes rating is any indication, it may offer proof that audiences want what The Woman King has to offer. 

The Credits spoke to Gina Prince-Bythewood about the casting and filming of a project that further shows her as a director talented at integrating action with character development and storytelling.  

 

The performances in The Woman King are so compelling. Casting is one of your superpowers. Viola was already attached to the film when you signed on, and she’s spectacular. Can you take us through the casting of Lashana, and in what ways she surprised you with her performance? 

Absolutely. When I read the script, I knew immediately that I wanted Lashana Lynch in the film. I had seen the speech she gave at Essence Black Women in Hollywood, and that was also at the time when the trailers for No Time To Die had started coming out, and she just looked so badass. I believed her in those trailers, and of course, she was in Captain Marvel, but it was what she said about the type of films she wanted to do and the type of work she wanted to put in the world. I was just so inspired and felt like I wanted to work with her. Then we met, and it was such an immediate connection. What we wanted to do with the character of Izogie is so specific, and I love the character on the page, but Lashana inspired me to give her more, not only in dialogue, humor, story, and backstory but also in action. She was one that Danny [Hernandez] and I, our fight and stunt coordinator, could trust implicitly. We knew if we designed it, she could do it. 

Lashana Lynch in “The Woman King.” Courtesy Sony Pictures.

Viola was 56 when production began, and a starring role for a Black woman in film, especially one over 50, is exceedingly rare, but she does some of her best work in The Woman King. Can you talk about some of the aspects of your collaboration with her and how the character was built and delivered through the production?

I am so grateful to her. Viola, along with [producers] Julius Tennon and Cathy Schulman, fought so hard for this film, and part of it was fighting for her to have an opportunity to play a character like this, which she’s never been offered. Nothing has ever been written like this. She’s a genius and deserves all the choices, and the reality of our industry is that you don’t get them as a Black artist, so she created her own. It was really beautiful to build her character Nanisca with the back story that Viola created. That’s a movie in itself. She goes deep into character so that she knows who she is on a molecular level. A lot of our interaction after that was building a relationship between her and Thuso. That was me having them train together to connect, to get to know each other, to rely on each other, and to push each other. And it was getting her comfortable being able to do her own fighting and stunts. 

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Viola Davis and Thuso Mbedu star in The Woman King.

Fighting in the way that was required as Nanisca had to be new to her. 

She had some fear in terms of doing that. She hadn’t done anything like that before. She wanted to know and trust that we would make her look good, and we did. We weren’t going to put her in our box. We were going to let her build her box and build our action and fighting around it. What is Viola really good at? Well, she is hella strong, so let’s put that into Nanisca and her style of fighting. It’s going to be different than Thuso, who is small in stature, but uses speed, or Lashana as Izogie, who’s just feral and will decimate you. That was the fun part of the specificity, me being an athlete, having kickboxed for a couple of years, being able to impart that into Viola and that character and let her know what it feels like when you’re about to fight and what it feels like to be in a fight. On the acting side, she’s brilliant. It was certainly in the fighting and stunts that I was able, I think, to provide the most direction.

Viola Davis and director Gina Prince-Bythewood on the set of The Woman King.
Viola Davis and director Gina Prince-Bythewood on the set of The Woman King.

The battle dance is incredibly complicated. What was involved in the training and the filming of it? 

It was very funny to tell the actors, “Hey, on top of everything else you’re doing, we have a couple of dances that you have to learn.” And then they watched the choreography, and you’d see their eyes glaze over like, “Oh my God, we’re gonna do that?” But we had incredible choreographers. I told them, “They are not dancers. They all have rhythm and the passion to learn, but you are teaching them really intricate, choreographed sequences and some of them involve singing in another language at the same time.” It was a lot. I went to as many rehearsals as I could because it’s inspiring to watch the progression and to see them getting better and better. I told them on set when it came time, they’d been rehearsing in private. The choreography is only half of it. What really makes the battle dance is the aggression that you bring. All these moves like neck slashing and stabbing, that’s what they really did. And so I told them,  “To bring that, you have to start on volume 10.” I remember the first time on the day we shot it, the entire crew was watching to see what it looked like. They went through the dance and went at, I would say, 80 percent, and the entire crew erupted into applause because it was so beautiful and powerful. 

 

There’s a sense of joy and ownership among those involved in this movie. The experience must have been very positive. 

So many of us knew what we were doing was special because it was different and we hadn’t seen it before. When you have collaborators like I had on this, all of whom were women and people of color, all my HODs, everyone brought such a level of passion to be able to tell the story, and everybody was empowered. They had a voice in rooms where they weren’t the only ones for the first time, amongst their own, and feeling valued. That brings out even more in people, and it was such an inspiring environment.  When you believe, when it’s more than a job, you just get really great work out of people.

The Woman King is in theaters now.

For more on The Woman King, check out these stories: 

“The Woman King” DP Polly Morgan on Lensing Viola Davis in Gina Prince-Bythewood’s Thrilling Epic

Viola Davis Reigns Supreme in “The Woman King” Trailer

 

 

Featured image: Viola Davis stars in THE WOMAN KING. Courtesy Sony Pictures.

Best of 2022:”Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio” Animation Supervisor Brian Leif Hansen Packs Puppets With Emotion

Posted on by babrams

It’s that time of year—we look back on a few of our favorite interviews from 2022 in our annual year-end list.

Inside a nondescript warehouse on the outskirts of Portland, a little boy made of wood galvanized efforts by stop motion filmmakers for three years before emerging now to wow moviegoers in Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio. This dark stop-motion iteration of Carlo Collodi’s 1882 tale, in theaters and streaming on Netflix, takes place in 1930’s Italy, adding Mussolini and forest witches to the story’s signature evil doers: circus master Volpe (voiced by Christoph Waltz) and the monster whale.

Puppets were fabricated in Manchester, England, and Guadalajara, Mexico, then shipped to Portland, where 41 animators teamed with grips, gaffers, lighting designers, camera operators, and scenic artists to create the fairy tale world inhabited by Pinocchio (voiced by English 10-year-old Gregory Mann) and his father Geppetto (David Bradley). Pinocchio co-director Mark Gustafson enlisted veteran Danish stop motion artist Brian Leif Hansen to serve as the show’s animation supervisor. “We averaged 3.8 seconds of animation output per week,” says Hansen, who abandoned his early ambitions to become a chef and instead moved to England, where he helped animate Tim Burton’s Corpse Bride. Hansen later served under Gustafson on Wes Anderson’s Fantastic Mr. Fox stop-motion feature, followed by Laika-produced Missing Link and Kubo and the Two Strings.

Speaking from Manhattan, where he helped install the Museum of Modern Art’s “Guillermo del Toro: Crafting Pinocchio” exhibition, Hansen drilled into the painstaking process of bringing 12-inch tall heroes and villains to life.

 

Stop-motion animators move Pinocchio characters in tiny increments to build a scene. What kind of blueprint do the animators refer to as a guide?

The animators rely heavily on these [animatic] storyboards, and the voice actors have already been directed, so there’s a voice track to let them know what’s going on. The animator is like an actor. A director relies on the animator to give life to the character and to give a performance, and most times, they get it right.

This film packs such an emotional wallop. Part of that must come from the way voice actors inspire animators to synch the puppet’s movement to feelings expressed through their vocal performances.

Yeah. Emotions are a very important thing. [As an animator] You’ve got these headphones on, and you’re moving these puppets around; if you listen carefully to the voice recordings, you can hear breath and hear the actor shifting around. So you listen very carefully to the voice, and then you stuff all of that into your puppet in a way that lifts it up, enlarges it to become almost a caricature. You don’t just do it plainly. It’s crucial to have a good sound to work with when you’re creating a performance.

You worked as a hands-on animator yourself for about 15 years, and now, with Pinocchio, you’ve graduated to animation supervisor. How did that happen?

Mark Gustafson needed a wingman, somebody who’s done this many times before, to make sure he could deliver this high level of animation. That wingman being me. It turned out we work really well together.

What’s the division of labor?

Mark basically takes care of the emotion and the story, and I take care of all the technical things that need to be working so the animator could do his or her best performance. Also, I’m sort of a cheerleader, keeping up the spirit of this jolly ambiance within the animation department. Animators are artists, so they’re sometimes nervous about their work. And you need to make sure they focus on the right things rather than things that nobody’s going to see.

Guillermo del Toro's Pinocchio - (L-R) Gepetto (voiced by David Bradley) and Pinocchio (voiced by Gregory Mann). Cr: Netflix © 2022
Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio – (L-R) Gepetto (voiced by David Bradley) and Pinocchio (voiced by Gregory Mann). Cr: Netflix © 2022

The puppets in Pinocchio are moved by hand 12 or 24 times per second of screen time. How do the animators make that happen?

There’s enough tension [in the gears beneath the silicone surface] to hold a pose. You go in and move the core of the body, arms, legs, then your head, then your eyes and eyelids. Then you step away from the frame and they take a picture. Then you go back in and move everything again. What’s crazy about this process, called straight ahead, is that you don’t have key poses drawn on paper to show where you’re going. The animator’s moving into unknown territory, so you have to have everything planned out in your head before your start. Otherwise, it’s going to go south really quickly. For example, if you come in too high or too low with the puppet’s heel, it’ll look like he’s got a limp. Walking a human is really difficult because the human eye easily recognizes if it’s not perfect. Dogs are easier.

 

In this digital age, it’s refreshing to realize that the human hand, not an algorithm, dictates exactly how high the eyebrow goes or where the finger will point.

Exactly.

Stop motion is so labor-intensive! Just to get the timeline straight, when did you start, and when did you finish?

I started in January 2019. There was only one animator at the beginning. Two weeks later, another couple started, then a third one started. We ramped up to a maximum capacity of 41 animators on 60 sets. We shot the first frame in August 2019 and the last frame this August. We were rushing big time, and everything was being shot at the same time. We had like 30 Pinocchio’s, 18 Geppetto’s, seven Volpes. If there were only one Pinocchio, it would have taken ten years to shoot the movie. [laughing]

Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio – (Pictured) Pinocchio (voiced by Gregory Mann). Cr: Netflix © 2022

Different crews for different sets?

Yeah. The Director of Photography, Frank Passingham, had four lighting and camera teams, each with ten or twelve sets. One crew did most of the church sequences. We had two and a half churches. Other people worked primarily on Geppetto’s workshop, which was actually three workshops split down the middle so we could shoot from both directions at the same time.

Guillermo del Toro's Pinocchio - (Pictured) Pinocchio (voiced by Gregory Mann). Cr: Netflix © 2022
Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio – (Pictured) Pinocchio (voiced by Gregory Mann). Cr: Netflix © 2022

Count Volpe, the greedy carnival boss voiced by Christoph Waltz, has a huge physical and performance presence. What was it like bringing him to life?

In Guillermo’s terminology, Volpe is a ten. He’s very purposefully the most caricatured being. And he has a Jekyll and Hyde personality: He’s either this showman with the happy face and big arms [waving around], or he’s this narrow-focused meanie. Also, the Volpe puppet was very big, so his joints need to be tight, which made them difficult to move. Most of the time, Count Volpe had to be attached to a rig because he was too heavy to stand by himself.

Guillermo del Toro's Pinocchio - (L-R) Pinocchio (voiced by Gregory Mann) and Count Volpe (voiced by Christoph Waltz). Cr: Netflix © 2022
Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio – (L-R) Pinocchio (voiced by Gregory Mann) and Count Volpe (voiced by Christoph Waltz). Cr: Netflix © 2022

Looking back at your immersion for more than three and a half years in the Pinocchio bubble, which sequence stands out as your favorite?

There are so many well-animated shots that I don’t really have a favorite. But the interaction between Geppetto and Pinocchio in the church is beautiful, the argument in the woods between them is genius, Geppetto waking up drunk and discovering Pinocchio for the first time is great, and the songs are funny and cool . . I could go on. But it’s not like there was one big mountain we climbed and everybody cheered when it was over. This was more like hedge jumps in the Olympics.

 

Hurdles?

In Denmark, we call them hedges but yeah, in Pinocchio, there was constant problem-solving that had to happen on the spot, but they weren’t impossible to solve because the problems came a little bit at a time. You had a whole team of collaborators, so you could just pick away at it, slowly.

You’re making progress, three or four seconds a week.

Yes, because if you had to think about the whole movie all at once, you’d just sit in the corner, shaking and crying. Here, we just had to carry on with these little bits that needed to be made, and then after you make all the little bits, you have a big thing.

For more on Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio, check out these stories:

Bringing Stop-Motion Puppets to Life through Sound in “Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio”

“Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio” Early Reactions: A Stop-Motion Masterpiece

Guillermo del Toro on Why He Set “Pinocchio” in a World of Fascism

Featured image: Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio – (Pictured) Pinocchio (voiced by Gregory Mann). Cr: Netflix © 2022

Best of 2022: “Nope” Cinematographer Hoyte van Hoytema on Capturing the Epic Scope of Jordan Peele’s Latest

Posted on by babrams

It’s that time of year—we look back on a few of our favorite interviews from 2022 in our annual year-end list.

Cinematographer Hoyte van Hoytema failed to get into two Dutch film schools, so he worked in a soap factory, played in a band, and survived unemployment as a self-described “slacker” before finding his creative footing at a renowned cinema academy in Lodz, Poland. Since then, he’s made up for lost time through collaborations with A-list auteurs, including David O. Russell (The Fighter), Sam Mendes (Spectre), and Spike Jonez (Her). Working with Christoper Nolan on Interstellar, Dunkirk, and Tenet, van Hoytema embraced the director’s passion for big-screen stories enabled by IMAX cameras, and now, he’s teamed with Jordan Peele to shoot the writer/director’s contemporary western-meets-extraterrestrial thriller Nope (opening Friday, July 22).

Hoyte van Hoytema and Jordan Peele on the set of "Nope." Glen Wilson/Universal Pictures
Hoyte van Hoytema and Jordan Peele on the set of “Nope.” Glen Wilson/Universal Pictures

Speaking for undisclosed reasons from an enormous warehouse in London, van Hoytema talked about capturing the night sky, creating a sense of spectacle, and taking cues from movies that inspired Nope‘s sumptuous visuals.

Over the past ten years, you’ve demonstrated excellent taste in directors, which continues now in your first collaboration with Jordan Peele on Nope. How did you guys get together?

Jordan and I talked about previous projects, but circumstances never timed out. When Jordan came up with Nope, the stars aligned and we started talking. I had a hunch it could be a cool collaboration.

Nope deals in part with the very nature of spectacle, and given your previous IMAX projects with Chris Nolan, you would seem to be well-suited for crafting work on an epic scale. What was Jordan’s creative brief regarding Nope?

Creative briefs are never brief. When you talk to an interesting director, it’s never something where they go, “I want this and I want that.” It’s more of an ongoing conversation. But from the beginning, it was evident that Jordan wanted to expand, to make his canvas bigger, to challenge himself, to understand what spectacle is, to shoot on the big formats for the big screen. He wanted to find the best possible way to shoot this story in an uncompromising way. He never said, “Oh I want to work with you because you shoot with the biggest cameras out there,” but he liked the fact that I’d worked on 65 millimeter.

Hoyte van Hoytema and Jordan Peele on the set of "Nope." Glen Wilson/Universal Pictures
Hoyte van Hoytema and Jordan Peele on the set of “Nope.” Glen Wilson/Universal Pictures

Biggest cameras out there being IMAX. Roughly how much of the movie is shot in that format?

It’s a lot. Thirty to forty percent. If you see the movie in an IMAX theater, those sequences suck you into the film in a very visceral way. 

Nope feels in some ways like a western, with the wide open spaces, the big sky, the horses. To inform that look, did you and Jordan reference Hollywood westerns?

We referenced many films. Of course, we had to watch Lawrence of Arabia. Jordan projected the early King Kong movie for me in black and white We also watched the beautiful uncompromising films from the seventies and eighties. Spielberg’s Jaws and Close Encounters were huge inspirations in the way they presented original stories on a big screen so that they became events and spectacles in that way. We watched Heaven’s Gate because of the horses and the dust! We’d just throw references at each other and explored how you may unconsciously harvest certain things from movies you love. Funnily enough for us, it always came back to spectacle.

(from left) OJ Haywood (Daniel Kaluuya) and Emerald Haywood (Keke Palmer) in Nope, written, produced and directed by Jordan Peele.
(from left) OJ Haywood (Daniel Kaluuya) and Emerald Haywood (Keke Palmer) in Nope, written, produced and directed by Jordan Peele.

You filmed Nope in the southern California desert east of Los Angeles, outside of Santa Clarita?

Just past Santa Clarita, in Agua Dulce.

Daniel Kaluuya as OJ Haywood in Nope, written, produced and directed by Jordan Peele.
Daniel Kaluuya as OJ Haywood in Nope, written, produced and directed by Jordan Peele.

And that landscape plays an important role in this movie. How did you use your cameras to bring out the power of nature?

The best example I can give you is the night shots. On one of our first [location] scouts, Jordan and I stepped out of the car at night, turned the lights out, and walked into the middle of this valley. There was a tiny red blinking light blinking on a telephone tower in the distance but otherwise, no light. So your pupils start dilating. Suddenly you start seeing details in the hills around you, the stars in the sky — you experience the expanse of nature. We loved that feeling, which also becomes a very scary feeling in the context of the film. We both thought it was very special but also impossible to film because if you light an area at night with conventional lighting, everything around it will be dead. I started obsessing over how to capture the darkness of the night but somehow see through it. We developed a new technology that went through a lot of evolutions, but in the end, we figured out technically how to do it. The result is the look of our night, which I like to believe is unique. And that all came from wanting to re-create the experience Jordan and I had on that first scout.

Nope, written, produced and directed by Jordan Peele.
Nope, written, produced and directed by Jordan Peele.

In addition to being DP, you generally serve as your own camera operator, and on Nope, you carried this shoulder-mounted IMAX camera, which looks pretty heavy. Was it difficult to handle?

I’m not stronger than any other DP. The myths around this camera are much bigger and heavier than the camera is, and it’s really quite doable. In fact, my incredible B camera operator Kristen Correll did a whole week of operating, and I saw her flying an IMAX camera on her shoulder. I live by the philosophy that as cinematographers, it’s not our job to make things convenient; it’s our job make the difficult and the inconvenient doable so that we can achieve shots that are extra special. 

Hoyte van Hoytema on the set of “Nope.” Glen Wilson/Universal Pictures

Changing subjects for a moment to your Oscar-nominated work on Dunkirk, there’s a remarkable sequence of British soldiers running along the beach as bombs drop around them, with you and your camera out of frame following right behind. The shot really pulls in the viewer.

It has to do with making the audience feel like they’re participating, and that automatically forces you, as the cinematographer, to be there physically. In the end, the most visceral cinema is very much about intimacy, about being in the middle of things. For me, it’s important to get in there, get closer, go further, be it and live it. Very often, that means allowing yourself to work more with your gut rather than just analyzing things in an intellectual way. But I also love moments that allow for contemplating and mood and distance.

With Nope and your other films, it seems that you move through different types of shots to create a visual dynamic?

Yes. You want a film to be immersive, but there are times when you want to take a breath – and then you get hooked by the next sequence and sucked in again. It’s similar to classical music, where a 20-minute sonata goes through all these different peaks and valleys, moments of sorrow, moments of resolve, less gas on the pedal, then you’re being pushed again. That dynamic is so important in filmmaking, going from being outside, observing, to being sucked in and becoming part of things, then being pushed out again so you can take a breath.

What techniques did you use in Nope to capture that contrast between epic wide shots and individual characters?

I worked with Panavision’s Dan Sasaki, an incredible engineer slash artist who can make whatever you need optically out of metal and glass. He designed custom lenses both for the Panavision and for the IMAX that tweak the focus so the camera can get physically closer to the faces of our actors. I want you to experience that space the same way you experience a landscape, and that’s always sort of been my obsession. Ultimately, I think faces are the most interesting things in film. I’m not so much interested in the expanse of nature if I don’t have the beautiful face to counteract it. 

(from left) OJ Haywood (Daniel Kaluuya), Emerald Haywood (Keke Palmer) and Angel Torres (Brandon Perea) in Nope, written, produced and directed by Jordan Peele.
(from left) OJ Haywood (Daniel Kaluuya), Emerald Haywood (Keke Palmer) and Angel Torres (Brandon Perea) in Nope, written, produced and directed by Jordan Peele.

For more on Nope, check out these stories:

First “Nope” Reactions Say Jordan Peele’s Latest Stunner is Out of This World

New Video Details How Jordan Peele’s “Nope” was Shot With IMAX Cameras

Daniel Kaluuya & Keke Palmer Highlight New “Nope” Trailer & Inside Look

Featured image: Daniel Kaluuya as OJ Haywood in Nope, written, produced and directed by Jordan Peele.

 

Best of 2022: “Succession” Director Mark Mylod on Season 3 & TV’s Most Irresistibly Twisted Family

Posted on by babrams

It’s that time of year—we look back on a few of our favorite interviews from 2022 in our annual year-end list.

Succession director Mark Mylod knows his way around family drama. Mylod’s been with the series since the first season, directing the second episode (the pilot was helmed by co-creator Adam McKay), and is now the most tenured Succession director of them all, with 12 episodes to his credit. He’s also something of an expert when it comes to palace intrigue, considering he’s a Game of Thrones alum, yet he admits that Succession‘s highly-anticipated and ultimately critically acclaimed third season presented some unique challenges.

One of those challenges was that season three would payoff the long-simmering internecine battle between the scheming Roy family that’s been boiling since the pilot. In the season two finale, the oft hapless Kendall Roy (Jeremy Strong) announced to the entire world at a press conference that his father, the fearsome if wounded Logan (Brian Cox) wasn’t just an inept leader of Waystar Royco, he was a criminal. Thus, two seasons and 20 episodes worth of moves and counter-moves, backstabbing and sniping had now officially given away to a father-versus-son blood feud, and Mylod was responsible for four episodes in the third season, including the crucial premiere set mere minutes after season two’s finale.

We spoke to Mylod about the challenges, and joys, of helming creator Jesse Armstrong’s brilliantly baroque family drama, how he approaches working with an ensemble cast, and why authenticity is the key to Succession‘s success.

How did you approach directing the first episode for season 3, which picks up right after season 2’s explosive finale? 

The thought process was somewhat driven by fear of failure on my part. We’d made a choice that it was going to pick up ten or fifteen minutes after the end of season two’s storyline, and that really dictated the approach. Because it was apparent to me the challenge was to match the intensity and kick straight away into high gear. The beginning of season two was much less intense, it picked up with more of a slow burn. In season three, we wanted to parachute the audience right back into the level of intensity with the press conference of season two.

At long last, the Roys were finally at war with each other, with family members being forced to choose a side, Logan or Kendall. What were some of the challenges of filming this battle we’ve been waiting for?

My part, in particular, while also trying to shoot in the middle of the pandemic, was to match that intensity. In the writer’s room, we decided the season really was going to be about civil war, and we wanted to ramp this up. This had been the undertone in the first two seasons and now it was outright conflict. So it was a ramping up of scale, which in production terms was tricky to achieve. We were very limited in terms of the number of people we could have on set at that time. As the season progressed, we structured it so that we could scale up in the hope that Covid would drop to the point where we could get more people in the shots. The last two episodes were set in Italy, but we weren’t remotely sure we would be able to shoot in there, so we were running two models, one with production in Italy, and another with production in North America. 

Brian Cox, Kieran Culkin, Alexander Skarsgård. Photograph by Graeme Hunter/HBO
Brian Cox, Kieran Culkin, Alexander Skarsgård. Photograph by Graeme Hunter/HBO
Jeremy Strong. Photograph by Graeme Hunter/HBO

How were you going to play those Italy scenes in North America?

It was quite sad because we couldn’t decide where that would be. Maybe up in Maine, then we thought about going to Rhode Island, but Gilded Age was cranking into production for HBO and we felt we’d be stealing their locations, so we went away from that. We thought about going to Martha’s Vineyard, and then south to Florida, but it all felt like such a stretch for where their mother would get married. Everything kept pushing back to Chianti, Italy.

 

You’re working with such a talented ensemble cast that we could really just go through the list one by one, but I’d like to start with what it’s like to work with Brian Cox.

Brian Cox’s presence is extraordinary, and as intimidating as he is, when there’s a big scene to shoot, he’ll come to set as nervous as a kitten because he’s so keyed up and wants to get it right. 

One of the show’s strengths is the way these actors all seem to thrive as warring siblings, spouses, or in-laws. How do you harness their varied styles and skills?

With this ensemble, a huge part of my job is to facilitate each of those actors who have their own ways of working, and a lot of our scenes are big ensemble scenes. That’s what I get paid for, to set up an atmosphere where they can all thrive and work. It can be tricky, as they do have disparate ways of working. Whatever allowances we make for each other, hopefully, the results speak for themselves. Whatever comes out, the truth is when we’re on set we’re all working towards the same goal.

Jeremy Strong, Kieran Culkin, and Brian Cox. Photograph by Graeme Hunter/HBO
Jeremy Strong, Kieran Culkin, and Brian Cox. Photograph by Graeme Hunter/HBO

You really got to lean into your ensemble chops with the final two episodes of the season, where we’re charging towards the endgame with either Logan or Kendall coming out on top. 

Because season three was about that war, the great dramatic opportunity in episodes eight and nine was to bring them all together, force them into the same space, and let sparks fly. As soon as we got that setup, Jesse [Armstrong] wrote two brilliant episodes, so by that point, we know where the whole season is heading. So through the final two episodes, eight and nine, we’re calibrating the ride of those actors. We tried to play it throughout the season that there was a sense of Kendall being on the rise, particularly at the beginning of the season, then hitting those challenges as the Teflon-coated Logan refuses to be knocked down. Whether it’s Logan wielding his power with the DOJ or something else, he always finds a way to win. As Tom says to Kendall, “I’ve never seen Logan get f*cked.” By the time we get to episode eight, Kendall’s just had this terrible dawning truth that he can never win, he can never beat his father, that’s his fate, he can never escape that gilded cage or his place in the hierarchy. So the tragedy for Kendall is that terrible realization that he will never win. 

 

There was a sense in the beginning that Logan could actually lose, as he began the season looking more than a little vulnerable, too.

Logan’s arc through the season was that we start him at his lowest point in episodes one and two when he’s forced to head off to Sarajevo, then he gradually uses all the grit and experience and power he has to come out as the winner. There’s a Shakespearean inevitability about that, even with the ups and downs, that eventually, Logan will find a way to be the last person standing.

What kind of conversations do you have with Jesse Armstrong about stuff like that, the Shakespearean elements to the series, the patriarchial battles, the specter of aging and losing your power, the toying with your children about who will inherit the throne…

We rarely talk in terms of attempting to compare Succession with Shakespeare because that would be sad [laughs], but, what we do talk about is the dynamics of power, the dynamics of family, and the authenticity of what we’re doing. We’re one step removed from reality because we’re not writing about Rupert Murdock or Summer Redstone, but we’re drawing from that type. So every choice, performance, and location is a reflection of the reality of dynamics of power in modern America and modern capitalistic society.

Much has been made about how Jesse’s British, and that remove has given him more clarity on the subject of America’s capitalistic cruelties than an American might be able to bring to bear. Do you agree with that? 

I don’t think it’s the case that we see this clearly because we’re British. The old Churchill thing about how we’re two countries separated by a common language, but in fact, America and England are so similar, and Jesse has a lifelong passionate interest in American culture and politics, he’s incredibly well informed. It’s more a question of his passion for the subject matter. We’re very aware of our limitations as foreigners—I’ve lived in New York for 12-years, but I don’t know the heartbeat of the city as a proper New Yorker, so we put in a lot of work into research, we talk to consultants, we go over every word that an English person would use but not an American, what someone wears, and we speak to the right people and put the work into the end game, which is authenticity. So ultimately I don’t agree that our being British gave us special clarity. Perhaps Ang Lee was perfect for Sense and Sensibility because he was looking at the culture from the outside in, but for us, it’s just about doing the work to be as authentic as possible.

Succession was renewed for a fourth season by HBO.

For more on Warner Bros., HBO, and HBO Max, check out these stories:

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Featured image: Matthew Macfayden, Sarah Snook, Brian Cox, Kieran Culkin. Photograph by Macall B. Polay/HBO.

Best of 2022: “Black Panther: Wakanda Forever” Production Designer Hannah Beachler Reveals Her Guide to Talokan

Posted on by babrams

It’s that time of year—we look back on a few of our favorite interviews from 2022 in our annual year-end list.

When Chadwick Boseman died unexpectedly after leading the cast as the title character in 2018’s Black Panther, it shocked and saddened the world. There was, understandably, some doubt as to whether a sequel could succeed without him. What director and co-screenwriter Ryan Coogler did with Wakanda Forever, however, honored the actor’s legacy while balancing the excitement of a Marvel superhero-driven adventure with a story centered on resilience in the face of loss. 

The burden of carrying on without T’Challa fell largely to the women of Wakanda. Wakanda Forever finds Queen Remonda (Angela Bassett), Shuri (Letitia Wright), Nakia (Lupita Nyong’o), Okoye (Danai Gurira), and the Dora Milaje trying to keep Wakanda safe from global threat after King T’Challa (Boseman)’s death. Namor, the superhuman ruler of Talokan, a secret underwater civilization whose citizens have their own special powers, sees a threat to the existence of his own world in Wakanda’s newfound openness to the “surface world” that came about at the end of the first film. Wakanda and Talokan must band together; otherwise, Namor will take matters into his own hands and put everyone on Earth, including Wakanda, at risk. 

Early in the production for Wakanda Forever, Oscar-winning production designer Hannah Beachler wrote a 400-page guide to the fictional world of Talokan for herself, Coogler, and all their collaborators on the film. She shared a few elements of that guide in conversation with The Credits and spoke about an important way in which her adoptive city of New Orleans offered inspiration for the new film. 

Production Designer Hannah Beachler behind the scenes of Marvel Studios' BLACK PANTHER WAKANDA FOREVER. Photo by Eli Adé. © 2022 MARVEL.
Production Designer Hannah Beachler behind the scenes of Marvel Studios’ BLACK PANTHER WAKANDA FOREVER. Photo by Eli Adé. © 2022 MARVEL.

The world of Talokan took two years to develop. There’s a whole mythology, history, and culture built for the civilization, which is in part inspired by the Mayan world. What are a few examples of what you included in your 400-page guide that helped to create the undersea kingdom?

As far as the hard research goes, one of the things I really wanted to understand was the path they traveled through the ocean. I needed to know where they started, migrated to, and why? When they went into the ocean, what was the path they traveled to get to where they are? Where were they? So we got a map, we got some satellite shots of the Yucatan, of the gulf, and all the way out to the Atlantic, a big overhead shot. We started to trace, really beaming into where we thought that they could be. We were looking at shipping routes between 1750 and the turn of the century, which would have taken them almost into the Atlantic. We needed to understand that.

Tenoch Huerta Mejía as Namor in Marvel Studios’ BLACK PANTHER: WAKANDA FOREVER. Photo by Annette Brown. © 2022 MARVEL.

So figuring out how long they took to get where they wound up and their path determines their culture.

Right. Every spot, how long were they there? What was their architecture like when they were at that point? What were they using when they were in shallower waters in the Gulf? They were in the world of Grand Cayman. What were the materials that they were using just to sustain life? What were they eating? Were they fishing? How were they building? How did they have lighting? The Puerto Rican trench a thousand miles off of the Puerto Rican coast is where they ended up. James Cameron shot The Abyss as the Puerto Rican trench, even though no one’s ever been down in it. It’s 26,000 feet deep, and Talokan is at 12,000 in the abyssal layer. That’s all in there.  

Tenoch Huerta as Namor in Marvel Studios' Black Panther: Wakanda Forever. Photo courtesy of Marvel Studios. © 2022 MARVEL.
Tenoch Huerta as Namor in Marvel Studios’ Black Panther: Wakanda Forever. Photo courtesy of Marvel Studios. © 2022 MARVEL.

No wonder it’s 400 pages.

There was also the growth rate of their population. I did a lot of studies on different population growth rates, so I could understand that in 1792, they went into the ocean with this many people, and in over 500 years, how had their population grown? I looked at different rates around the world between the 1900s and present day, to understand how people move and grow. There are different speeds of development around the world. Then I did a breakdown of 300 years of the evolution of architecture from the time they went into the time they landed in the Puerto Rican trench, so we could understand the different eras. They are 500 years separated from Maya by the time they were in the Puerto Rican trench, so what did that look like? How do they have color, have lighting, how do they travel underwater? How do they heat? They would be in very cold circumstances. We started studying hydrothermal vents. How might they harness that power over 300 years, because they’re utilizing them to heat and move people through the city and to power the hydro-currents as well, that take them through the city at high speeds? There was all of that and more in the guide.

Tenoch Huerta as Namor in Marvel Studios’ Black Panther: Wakanda Forever. Photo courtesy of Marvel Studios. © 2022 MARVEL.

You collaborated and worked very intentionally with cinematographer Autumn Durald Arkapaw and costume designer Ruth E. Carter, especially on the color palettes and how the look of Wakanda can help project the story forward. Can you give specific details on that?

I think it was a really important partnership. For Ruth and I, we’d sit down and talk about colorways. For Wakanda, we had a grip on what those color stories were going to be. It was more about how we were going to expand on that in fresh and new ways. Then what did Autumn see for it, her and Ryan? What’s the tone of the film? Because we’re dealing with grief and mourning, and there are some parts of that that wanted to be a little more contrasted in the lighting, so then how did the sets need to change? Even the sets we saw in the last movie changed a bit, so that was a huge conversation. When we’re in Shuri’s lab, you can tell that it’s a little bit different than the punchiness of the first one. 

(L-R): Danai Gurira as Okoye, Angela Bassett as Queen Ramonda, and Letitia Wright as Shuri in Marvel Studios’ BLACK PANTHER: WAKANDA FOREVER. Photo by Eli Adé. © 2022 MARVEL.

Can you talk about the sacred grove? Those scenes are so gorgeous and moving.

When we were moving to the sacred grove, which is the traditional communal area, I came to Autumn and told her I wanted it to be punchy green. I wanted it to feel like an old and sacred place, and have the trees and ground covered in moss, and be this punchy green around them. We just came from Shuri’s lab, and we were in this very dark place, and then we’re coming into this letting-the-grief-in place, with them in white. That’s renewing for people. We punched the color down on the green a little bit but turned the color up on the white. When we get to North Triangle in the procession, you can see the color elevate in the buildings and in the world around you, which goes back to what we remember of Wakanda. People are singing and dancing in the procession, very much like a second line. Me being from New Orleans, it’s very much in that manner of a jazz funeral, where grief is also about the celebration of life. We didn’t want it to have the fog of grief but the hope of moving forward through the grief. And that’s why that seems a little punchier, in the way that it’s shot and the colors that we use in the buildings.

A scene from Marvel Studios' Black Panther: Wakanda Forever. Photo courtesy of Marvel Studios. © 2022 MARVEL.
A scene from Marvel Studios’ Black Panther: Wakanda Forever. Photo courtesy of Marvel Studios. © 2022 MARVEL.

In New Orleans, grief is so much a part of life, and celebration is always part of honoring the dead. 

I grew up in rural Ohio, but I’ve been in New Orleans for 20 years, so I feel like I am a local at this point. I believe when I moved to New Orleans, I found home. A lot of what the first Black Panther was about was Killmonger searching for home. It was Shuri and T’Challa asking who they are, and what home means, and if it should be exposed to the world. I think even from the first one; it was very much a part of the experiences of my life. 

So jazz funerals in New Orleans were an inspiration? 

When we first started talking about a procession, the first thing I said to Ryan was a jazz funeral. I had shown him some video of what that looked like, so he could see the grief that you do still experience in a jazz funeral, with the brass band playing. What that is, in the diaspora, in the Caribbean communities, and in many countries in the African communities, specifically West African communities, and of course, a lot of African Americans that were trafficked here came from West Africa, they brought those same traditions with them. It’s clear that that’s where the second line, and jazz funeral, and that way of grief came from. We worked with experts of West Africa on the many different cultures and how they grieve, as well, and we wanted to connect the people of the diaspora in that way.

 

Wakanda Forever is now playing in theaters across the country. 

 

 

For more on Black Panther: Wakanda Forever, check out these stories:

How “Black Panther: Wakanda Forever” Cinematographer Autumn Durald Arkapaw Used Light & Shadows

Let’s Discuss That “Black Panther: Wakanda Forever” Mid-Credits Scene

“Black Panther: Wakanda Forever” Makes Box Office History

Featured image: Behind the scenes of Marvel Studios’ BLACK PANTHER: WAKANDA FOREVER. Photo by Annette Brown. © 2022 MARVEL.

Best of 2022: “Stranger Things 4” Music Editor Lena Glikson on Cutting Kate Bush’s “Running Up That Hill”

Posted on by babrams

It’s that time of year—we look back on a few of our favorite interviews from 2022 in our annual year-end list.

From the get-go, Netflix hit Stranger Things has excelled in the art and craft of needle drops. Encompassing eighties classics from David Bowie’s “Heroes” in Season One to “Everlasting Love” in Season Three, song choices curated by three-time Emmy-nominated music supervisor Nora Felder have consistently amplified the characters’ emotions to uncanny effect. 

But nothing in Stranger Things’ previous hit list prepared audiences for this summer’s zeitgeist-smashing anthem “Running Up That Hill.” Recorded in 1985 by British singer-songwriter-producer Kate Bush, the track drives Episode Four’s heart-rending montage featuring Max (Sadie Sink) as she fends off the monster Vecna. Viewers were swept away by the psychodrama and propelled “Running Up That Hill” to the top of the charts 38 years after its release. A video of the sequence posted on YouTube has generated more than ten million views and counting.

Like many viewers of Stranger Things, the series’ music editor Lena Glikson had never heard “Running Up That Hill” until she was tasked with synching the song to the picture. She explains, “I didn’t grow up in America so certain songs in the show that were internationally famous I definitely recognized, but some of the songs, like “Running Up That Hill,” were completely new to me.” 

A Russian native, Glikson played piano and sang from an early age, moved to the U.S. to study film composing at Berklee College of Music, then found her way to Los Angeles, where she worked her way up to become a music editor on Joker and A Star Is Born before joining the Stranger Things team for Season Four. Speaking from her Los Angeles home, Glikson talked about cutting “Running Up That Hill,” making the move from Russia to Hollywood, and working with the Duffer Brothers to “massage” Kyle Dixon and Michael Stein’s Emmy-winning synth scores. 

Vintage pop songs are embedded in Stranger Things’ DNA but “Running Up That Hill” introduced Kate Bush to a whole new audience, including yourself. What was your reaction when you first heard the song?

I loved it. Just the fact that “Running Up That Hill” is so unique, we had to make sure that it plays beautifully so there were many many revisions I did just to make it fit the picture. [Producer] Shawn Levy, who actually picked the song, and the Duffer Brothers and the picture editor Dean Zimmerman—they all had to agree on the way it should sound within the episode, so there was a long process in getting to that point.

STRANGER THINGS. (L to R) Maya Hawke as Robin Buckley, Gaten Matarazzo as Dustin Henderson, Joe Keery as Steve Harrington, and Sadie Sink as Max Mayfield in STRANGER THINGS. Cr. Courtesy of Netflix © 2022
STRANGER THINGS. (L to R) Maya Hawke as Robin Buckley, Gaten Mazzo as Dustin Henderson, Joe Keery as Steve Harrington, and Sadie Sink as Max Mayfield in STRANGER THINGS. Cr. Courtesy of Netflix © 2022

What did that process entail?

My job was to massage the edits and so all the cuts match the picture 100 percent. For me, it was also about creating the build toward the end, because it’s not only the song—there are additional orchestral stems composed by Rob Simonsen and recorded by the London Contemporary Orchestra. Dean created a little mock-up and then building in additional tracks from these different stems, and different orchestral instruments, became a big part of my job. Especially during the [flashback] montage with Eleven and Max, it was very emotional for me because I really love those characters. 

 

At the end of the sequence, this quiet piano solo reprises the song’s melody as the sun sets. Was it exciting to edit that shift in dynamics?

One of the arrangements already contained those piano notes, which sound so gentle, so delicate. They have a lot to do with who Max is and bring us back to the essence of her character in a way. Especially in this scene, the dread, the pain, and then the fact that she got saved — I was so worried about Max not coming back to life, it’s an amazing moment to hear how this quiet piano brings such a tumultuous scene to a close.

STRANGER THINGS. Sadie Sink as Max Mayfield in STRANGER THINGS. Cr. Courtesy of Netflix © 2022
STRANGER THINGS. Sadie Sink as Max Mayfield in STRANGER THINGS. Cr. Courtesy of Netflix © 2022

Besides working on “Running Up That Hill” and songs like “Psycho Killer,” Journey’s “Separate Ways” and The Cramps’ “I Was a Teenage Werewolf,” you also edited scores by Emmy-winning composers Kyle Dixon and Michael Stein. What was that like?

Working with Kyle and Mike was very interesting because they don’t come from the film world; they come from a band. That gives them a certain kind of flexibility about trying different things.  I interacted with them quite a lot because I was kind of the bridge between the Duffer Brothers and the composers, to make sure Kyle and Mike knew exactly what they wanted. I’d translate the brothers’ notes into musical language, technical stuff like “Let’s use sixteenth notes here instead of quarter notes.” 

Those pulsating sequencers create such a spooky vibe.

In terms of tone, it’s pretty dark, for sure. And even though we all know Stranger Things for having lots of synth music, I also cut some nice classical pieces. For instance in Episode Six when everyone’s playing at Suzie’s house, we have Violin Concerto in D Major by Korngold playing on top of that scene. I loved cutting that to make sure it lines up with all the little changes. I also cut a long piece by Philip Glass when Nancy’s walking through Victor Creel’s s house.

That’s a thoughtful tip of the hat, given that Glass pioneered the style of sequencer-based music that Kyle and Michael specialize in for the show.

Yeah.

Long before Stranger Things came along, you studied piano and voice from the age of six in your hometown of Voronezh, Russia. Then you got into Berklee College of Music, one of the best music schools in the United States. How did that happen? 

I wanted to become a jazz singer and I also acted in musicals. I figured the best place to embrace this culture was the United States. 

Musical theater! What was your favorite role?

I was part of a company that did original music by this incredibly talented composer from Kyiv and a director from St. Petersburg. My favorite role was playing the godmother in our vampire remake of Cinderella called Halloween Story. It was pretty dark. 

Evil characters are so fun to play.

Oh yeah. And what I do now on the post-production side as a music editor—part of why I’m able to do movies like A Star is Born is that I have that background as a vocalist. I know how your face looks when you sing a certain sound and what the vocal position is, so doing lip-synch for musicals is my huge specialty.

How did you transition from Berklee to Hollywood? 

After graduation, I came to Los Angeles, sent out sixty or seventy applications, and got a wonderful internship with music editor Nick South who’s worked a lot with composer Rolfe Kent on romcoms like Freaky Friday and Illegally Blond. Nick taught me all the key command shortcuts and talked about the diplomatic parts of our job, like, literally, how to write an email. After a couple of months, he offered me a position as an assistant in his studio, which I did for a year and a half. 

And now you can add Stranger Things to your resume. What’s the key lesson you’ve learned along the way about what it takes to be a good music editor?

It’s a hard skill to develop because you only learn by practicing, cutting, temping, tracking, and assembling things to fit the scene better. You have to serve the picture. Sometimes there are tiny things you do to make the cut work, like a tiny bit of time-stretching so the downbeat happens exactly on the cut. It’s a very kind of OCD type of work to make sure everything’s perfect. And of course, you’re talking to the director or showrunners so you understand the emotional content of the scene. It’s always about empathy.

For more on Stranger Things, check out these stories:

“Stranger Things 4” Makes History & Crosses Billion-Hour Viewing Mark

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Featured image: STRANGER THINGS. Sadie Sink as Max Mayfield in STRANGER THINGS. Cr. Courtesy of Netflix © 2022

Best of 2022: Bill Hader on Bringing Up “Barry”

Posted on by babrams

It’s that time of year—we look back on a few of our favorite interviews from 2022 in our annual year-end list.

For eight seasons, Bill Hader gained a legion of fans with the hilarious characters he brought to life on Saturday Night Live. Since then, his popularity has only grown with his Emmy-winning portrayal of the manic hitman/aspiring actor in the HBO series Barry. But to hear Hader tell it, performing wasn’t his initial goal. For as long as he can remember, he wanted to direct.

“Since I was fairly young…I would say 10 or 11 was when I first started to notice the ‘directed-by’ name,” Hader says during a recent Zoom interview. “I remember John McTiernan —  realizing, ‘Oh, the guy who did Die Hard, did Predator. This director’s name is on the movies I like.’ These types of things.”

Likening it to being in a band and hearing punk music for the first time, Harder’s perspective changed completely. “‘Oh, that’s effective.’ And ‘I think I know how they did that,’” he continues. “And then trying to do it myself.” 

Bill Hader directing Sarah Goldberg in "Barry" season 3. Courtesy HBO.
Bill Hader directing Sarah Goldberg in “Barry” season 3. Courtesy HBO.

For Hader, that meant commandeering his dad’s video camera and making Evil Dead-inspired horror shorts featuring his sisters. Though they fueled his filmmaking ambitions, they’re destined to remain in Hader’s past. “Oh, no, no…no one will ever see these,” he says with a laugh when asked about their whereabouts.

Hader’s career start took several turns. The Oklahoma native relocated to Los Angeles in 1999 with an eye toward writing and directing. Initially, he found work as a PA, honing his scripting skills during off-hours. But after several years with little traction, Hader changed course. A friend, who was a member of The Second City Hollywood, encouraged Hader to perform. He joined the troupe in 2003 and comically blossomed onstage. One night, Megan Mullally caught him in action and steered Hader to his SNL gig.

It made Hader a star, earning him Emmy nominations in 2012 and 2013 for Outstanding Supporting Actor in a Comedy Series. Simultaneously, he wrote and contributed voices for South Park, winning an Emmy in 2009 when the series was named Outstanding Animated Program. He acted on the big screen in such features as Adventureland (2009), The Skeleton Twins (2014), Trainwreck (2015), and IT: Chapter Two (2019).

Photo Credit: Brooke Palmer
L-r) BILL HADER as Richie Tozier, JESSICA CHASTAIN as Beverly Marsh, JAMES MCAVOY as Bill Denbrough, JAMES RANSONE as Eddie Kaspbrak, ISAIAH MUSTAFA as Mike Hanlon, and JAY RYAN as Ben Hascomb in New Line Cinema’s horror thriller “IT CHAPTER TWO,” a Warner Bros. Pictures release.

But Hader never lost sight of his directing ambitions. So when talks turned serious about greenlighting Barry, he seized on the opportunity. The move even caught series cocreator, Alec Berg, off guard.

“I was in a meeting with Alec Berg and the people from HBO and just said, ‘I’d really like to direct this,’” Hader remembers. “And he kind of looked at me, ‘You would? We haven’t talked about this.’ I was like, ‘No man, I think I could do it.’ So yeah, it was what I’ve always wanted to do.”

Hader directed Barry’s March 2018 premiere episode and was hooked. Now in its third season, he has directed nine more.

“I love it,” explains Hader. “I mean it’s exhausting, but it’s a lot of fun.”

Bill Hader directing Elsie Fisher in "Barry" season 3. Courtesy Merick Morton/ HBO.
Bill Hader directing Elsie Fisher in “Barry” season 3. Courtesy Merick Morton/ HBO.

Not surprisingly, Hader has excelled as a director. Barry’s debut episode earned him an Emmy nomination. He won a DGA award for the second season episode Ronny/Lily. Hader admits that finding his directing style has been an evolving process.

 

“I was incredibly prepared to an insane degree when I directed the pilot,” says Hader. Every shot was figured out. Every cut was figured out. And as time has gone on, I think I’ve gotten a little bit more confident. Every single piece of it doesn’t need to be that thought out. I don’t actually need all these shots. This one shot can make it work.”

Hader finds his acting experience has helped to make him a better director. He often uses lessons learned to make shoots run smoother. He avoids doing too many takes, believing they wear down a cast and crew. He strives to keep the days short for the same reason. If a scene needs to be shot at night, he schedules it over two nights. An all-nighter, in Hader’s words, “Just makes people insane.”  

Henry Winkler and Bill Hader in "Barry" season 3. Photograph by Merrick Morton/HBO
Henry Winkler and Bill Hader in “Barry” season 3. Photograph by Merrick Morton/HBO

“Keep it simple and try to encourage people,” Hader explains. “So much of it is giving people the confidence to go for it. As an actor, you don’t want to look like an idiot. You have to be brave to put yourself out there in a way that might look silly. I can see people relax after a take when I tell them, ‘We got it. Let’s try this or that. This is the time to have fun.’”

When asked to name some of his favorite filmmakers, Martin Scorsese and Akira Kurosawa readily come to mind. Hader adds that regular viewers of Barry can easily see the influence the Coen brothers have had on his directing.

However, don’t be surprised if you get a Sergio Leone feeling when watching forgiving jeff, the Hader-directed first episode of Season 3. Reminiscent of a scene from Leone’s Spaghetti Westerns, it opens with Barry standing on a desolate Southern California cliffside framed by a giant dead oak tree. 

Bill Hader in "forgiving feff." Photograph by Merrick Morton/HBO
Bill Hader in the episode “forgiving feff.” Photograph by Merrick Morton/HBO

Barry and another man are watching the Jeff of the title dig his own grave. Turns out, Jeff has slept with the other man’s wife and the cuckold husband has contracted Barry, via social media, to kill Jeff. The husband makes a macabre request. He wants Barry to slice off Jeff’s eyelids so he has to watch Barry pull the trigger. Barry goes to his car to find a pair of clippers. But when he returns, the husband has had a change of heart. Jeff has apologized and the husband is ready to forgive him. Barry doesn’t take the news well. As the sunrise peeks over Barry’s shoulder, he turns his smothering rage on both men.

“So we shot that at dawn. It had to be shot in about 30 minutes because it was all natural light” Hader details. “We set up when it was dark and the sun was coming up. When we were on my close-up, we wanted the sun to start peeking out behind this hill. The minute it did, I could see Carl Herse, the DP, getting excited. I was doing the take and he was like, ‘It’s happening! It’s happening!’ We were running. We were gunning. And it worked out perfectly.”

It’s moments such as these that make Hader glad he made the move to directing.  

“I really do like being on set with the crew,” continues Hader. “I just love the energy — especially when things are going well. It’s a long process, long days, and it takes people away from their families. It can be arduous, so you want to make sure you’re doing something that is worthwhile and hopefully having fun.”

Hader also enjoys that directing keeps him involved throughout the entire process. To him, it’s hard to beat being on a mixing stage and seeing the final results. “The mix is the last moment.  You actually get to sit there and say, ‘It’s finished. I’m looking at it. Wow,’” says Hader. “It’s like, ‘Okay, I sat down with an idea. Now here we are. We got it.’”

Hader has written a script — a dark comedy – and hopes that one day it will serve as his feature directing debut. But as Barry heads towards its Season 3 finale on June 12, it appears that those plans are on hold. HBO recently announced that it’s picking up Barry for a fourth season and Hader will direct all eight episodes of it.

“I mean Barry’s my whole life,” says Hader. “I would love to make a feature, so whenever that happens…we’ll see.”

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Featured image: Bill Hader in “Barry” season 3. Photograph by Merrick Morton/HBO

 

 

Best of 2022: “House of the Dragon” Co-Creator & Co-Showrunner Ryan Condal on Season One & Beyond

Posted on by babrams

It’s that time of year—we look back on a few of our favorite interviews from 2022 in our annual year-end list.

The first season of House of the Dragon has come to a close as an unqualified success. The premiere saw the largest single-day viewership for a series debut in HBO’s history and continued to land consistently in the top five titles streamed across all platforms through its last episode. The show was renewed before the second episode of the series even aired. 

House of the Dragon is a prequel to Game of Thrones—created by George R.R. Martin, Miguel Sapochnik, and Ryan Condal—and like Game of Thrones, is based on the “A Song of Ice and Fire” novels by Martin. Set nearly 200 years before the events of Game of Thrones, it follows the beginning of the end of House Targaryen. 

At its center is the conflict between members of House Targaryen, not least who will become the ruler after King Viserys (Paddy Considine) dies. Viserys steadfastly commits to placing his daughter, Princess Rheanyra, on the Iron Throne, but members of his inner circle and his young wife Alicent, who bears the king a son, have other ideas. 

The Credits spoke to executive producer and co-showrunner Ryan Condal about power and patriarchy, and he shares his thoughts on season one and his hopes for season two. As a longtime collector and lover of movie props, Condal also discusses some of the great designs and props created for the series.

Ryan Condal and Matt Smith on the set of House of the Dragon. Photo courtesy of HBO.
Ryan Condal and Matt Smith on the set of House of the Dragon. Photo courtesy of HBO.

In House of the Dragon, the dragons are that world’s version of nuclear weapons. There are 17 of them, right?

I mean, at the very peak, if you count everybody, yes, but right now, in our world, there are probably 12, let’s say. Some of those are counted as hatchlings that become young dragons. 

They’ll be more in Season 2?

We’ll definitely introduce more of them as we go along. I think that’s part of the fun of doing the show. They are characters, and in Season two, they’re needed for their most famous purpose, which is to decimate and cause death and destruction. Design-wise, we really do go through quite a process with them. In Season one, the dragons were designed over the course of a year, where we did a lot of early concepting on basic things like how our dragons are different from what you saw in the original series, and honoring what they did with Drogon, Rhaegal, and Viserion, then figuring out in a time when there were many more dragons, was there just one breed? We came up with these three different genotypes of them, where they’re all the same species, but they just have different breeds that have different shapes, colors, and sizes. We worked with these two designers, who are really great because they’re working with similar software, so they would actually just switch off the design. They would pull the dragon up to a certain point and then switch, and the other one would take over because both had a different way into it. Now that we’re working on Season two, they’re back at it because we need more dragons!

"House of the Dragon." Photograph by Courtesy HBO
“House of the Dragon.” Photograph by Courtesy HBO

That kind of collaboration leads to much more creativity. 

Exactly. I saw it as kind of similar to my writing process that I go through with Sara Hess, my writing partner on the show. We write a draft of the script, and then she takes the scenes that I don’t like to write and makes them better. She sends me a battle scene and says to ‘make it exciting.’ 

As a collector of movie props and art, you’re especially sensitive to the quality and workmanship of the sets and props used in the show. How did your experience as a collector and fan of film artisans impact your choices? 

There was nothing more exciting for me than going into those workshops where physical things were being built for the show, whether it was sets or down to a dragon’s egg. I love the artistry that goes into the making of these things. We really had aces across the board on Season one. One in particular that I worked closely with was Peter Johnsson, who designed and then constructed the two ancestral Targaryen Valyrian steel swords, Blackfyre and Dark Sister. He is a real swordsmith who actually makes his living making swords in the old way. He makes re-creations for museums, and he actually studies finds of real medieval swords and deconstructs them to figure out what you do because usually they’re pulled out of a river, and all the leather and wood are gone or rusted away, so he figures out what it might have looked like when it was made new. They’re two of my favorite things that were built for the show. 

Paddy Considine, Milly Alcock. Photograph by Ollie Upton / HBO

It’s great fans can look for that. So many props on the show have intricate detail. 

I also had a lot of fun with the big props that they made for this show, like the Iron Throne, and the Driftwood chair, the sea snake’s chair, and King Viserys’s big model of old Valyria, which is like this giant Lego build. Seeing something built on that scale, it’s almost like a mini set, you know, seeing it being built and how they, how they can conceive of it, building it in sections, and watching the throne get built, from concept to day by day, going in there and watching them actually make and cast swords, and burn them and melt them in their own prop builder way, that was a lot of fun. 

Paddy Considine and Emily Carey. Photograph by Ollie Upton / HBO
Paddy Considine in “House of the Dragon.” Photograph by Ollie Upton / HBO

What conversations were there about allowing both a more diverse cast and anchor storylines, and as the first season is coming to an end, how do you think those decisions have been received and accepted? 

What we wanted to do was tell the story and not let identity politics get in the way of it one way or the other. It’s a period show, and to try to tell a story about race in this particular setting would feel anachronistic and out of the time. Not that it’s undiscussed, but it’s covered and discussed in different ways. This is a world based on what your last name is and what your bloodline is. Are you true born, or are you bastard born? In this time period, there are things these people would not even have terms for, like the ideas of misogyny or feminism. Great genre storytelling holds up a mirror to us in our modern lives but does it in a way where issues and topics are cleverly disguised within the world that we’re exploring. I would say that we’re not doing anything that’s not a part of the story as George wrote it. We’re not taking something that he wrote and making it about something else. The very first story that he ever published in the Targaryen history was called “The Princess and the Queen,” about two women in a power struggle in a patriarchy, and from that come a lot of these different storylines and the things that Alicent and Rhaenyra both struggle with. 

Olivia Cooke, Emma D’Arcy. Photograph by Ollie Upton/HBO.

Clare Kilner directed the penultimate episode, her 3rd for the show. “The Green Council” was helmed by a female filmmaker and also written by Sara Hess. There are lots of power dynamics at play between the women of the show, specifically in this episode. What did they bring to it in terms of undermining ‘Team Patriarchy’? 

I adore both Claire and Sara. Sara is my right hand on the show, and I wouldn’t be able to survive without her. That’s entirely her episode, and Clare directed the hell out of it, so that’s one that I’m able to kind of sit back and just enjoy without looking at with all of my personal writer insecurities being brushed onto it. For me, the scene that really stands out that is very symbolic of the larger story we told this season is between Rhaenys and Alicent, where Alicent confronts her, and Rhaenys asks her if she’s ever imagined herself on the throne. It tells a story about what it’s like to be a woman of extreme power living in the world of the patriarchy, because these are both women who have their heads right up against that glass ceiling. It shows the shifting dynamic from where we started, where the men would rather put it all to the torch rather than see a woman on the Iron Throne, and here we are in episode nine, actually seeing the torch being lit. It’s a great scene written by a woman, directed by a woman, and has two women in the scene not talking about men. It would pass the Bechdel Test with flying colors.

Eve Best and Olivia Cooke. Photograph by Ollie Upton / HBO

Looking back on the first season, in what ways has the finished show changed or surpassed what you imagined when you first envisioned it?

This show is really within degrees of what I wanted and hoped it would be. You always have a picture of something in your mind’s eye as a writer, and I think we achieved that in a big, big way in season one. In many ways, I can’t believe that it’s done and out there. After four years of us working on this with George, to be here is really incredible. It’s the thing I set out to make, and now we get to do it again on season two, and we get to learn from the things that we didn’t quite nail down or didn’t quite do right, and the things we think we could do better or make bigger, now we get to do it all over again and have a second shot at it. 

 

House of the Dragon is currently streaming on HBO Max. 

For more on House of the Dragon, check out these stories:

Featured image: Photograph by Courtesy HBO

 

Best of 2022: “Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery” Writer/Director Rian Johnson Unpeels His Whodunit

Posted on by babrams

It’s that time of year—we look back on a few of our favorite interviews from 2022 in our annual year-end list.

When released in 2019, Rian Johnson’s star-studded, deliciously delightful who-done-it Knives Out was met with universal acclaim and became a smash hit. In it, star Daniel Craig shed all remnants of his Bond persona to play the quirky Southern genius detective Benoit Blanc in a performance so winning and a film so enjoyable even a character’s sweater became a sensation. (Granted, that character, the spoiled viper Ranson Drysdale, was played by Chris Evans). The stage, therefore, was immediately set for Johnson’s second installment, Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery. The new release, another darling with critics, has the envious holiday release dates of November 23rd in theaters and December 23rd on Netflix. 

Much like its predecessor, Glass Onion features a stellar ensemble cast. Craig’s Benoit Blanc is invited for a lavish weekend to a private island off the Greek coast by billionaire Miles Bron (Edward Norton).  Blanc is the odd man out in a yearly gathering of friends that includes Connecticut governor Claire Debella (Kathryn Hahn), right-wing social media star Duke (Dave Bautista), scientist and futurist Lionel Toussaint (Leslie Odom Jr), fashionista and former supermodel Birdie Jay (Kate Hudson), and Bron’s estranged former business partner And Brand (Janelle Monáe). Each character has their secrets, and when one of them is murdered, it is down to Blanc to find the killer and separate the truth from lies while keeping himself alive. 

The Credits spoke to writer/director Rian Johnson about the newest film in his Benoit Blanc series, which is inspired by the best Agatha Christie mysteries and their classic 70s and 80s cinematic interpretations. He talks about his collaboration with Daniel Craig, his love of whodunits, and how he drew from his brushes with the crazy world of billionaires and celebrities to make Glass Onion equally funny and up-to-the-minute.

Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery (2022). (L - R) Writer/Director Rian Johnson, and Daniel Craig. Cr. John Wilson/Netflix © 2022.
Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery (2022). (L – R) Writer/Director Rian Johnson, and Daniel Craig. Cr. John Wilson/Netflix © 2022.

How has Daniel Craig acted as your muse to collaborate in creating a 21st-century detective like Agatha Christie’s Hercule Poirot? 

The interesting thing is I had grown up with Poirot so much in my head that when I sat down to create this character, Benoit Blanc, I messed myself up a little bit because I started going down the wrong path. I started thinking in terms of like the great detectives like Poirot or Miss Marple or Nero Wolf; I started thinking in terms of quirks. I started thinking in terms of the superficiality of what I knew about them, so I started trying to build a version of Benoit Blanc, like, what’s his thing? Does he have two different colored eyes? It was awful. So I just had to clear the deck and say no quirks. I’m gonna give him a slight southern accent because he’s in the Northeast for the first movie, so that will make him a little fish out of the water. I decided to write him very straight, and then I’d find an actor. I didn’t know who it would be, or who I’d collaborate with. 

Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery (2022). Daniel Craig as Detective Benoit Blanc. Cr. Courtesy of Netflix © 2022.
Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery (2022). Daniel Craig as Detective Benoit Blanc. Cr. Courtesy of Netflix © 2022.

Enter Daniel Craig.

Daniel really found, literally, Benoit Blanc’s voice, but also, one thing that I love that he has in common with Poirot is that he loves hearing himself talk in that slightly pompous, self-elevated, but endearing way. That, and the other thing that was important to me to capture was I always loved the moments where Poirot connects on an emotional level. There’s always a moment where he has an aside, like a heart-to-heart with one of the characters, or sees the good in someone, or even the good trying to get out from under the evil, and tries to have a sincere appeal. That heart at the center of it was something that I’ve tried in both of these movies to have Blanc always have. Whereas there’s so much cynicism in the motives for murder and money and everything, centering these movies around an emotional core where Blanc sees the good in somebody and is engaging with that is something that felt important.

GLASS ONION: A KNIVES OUT MYSTERY (2022) Daniel Craig as Detective Benoit Blanc and Janelle Monáe as Andi. Cr: John Wilson/NETFLIX
GLASS ONION: A KNIVES OUT MYSTERY (2022) Daniel Craig as Detective Benoit Blanc and Janelle Monáe as Andi. Cr: John Wilson/NETFLIX

Specifically, in the Hercule Poirot novels, there is always a political element to the way that he approaches his work, where it’s about the haves and have-nots, and his heart-to-hearts tend to be about people feeling a loss, feeling like they’re been left behind. That’s certainly present in your Benoit Blanc films. 

Yeah, I mean, even down to Christie’s decision to make Poirot Belgian, to make him a foreigner, and what that meant in British society at that moment, and how that meant he was seen and regarded. That was the other big ingredient for me and the motivation for making these. For such a long time, whenever you saw a whodunit, it was a period piece set in England because it was usually a Christie adaptation, but Christie wasn’t writing period pieces; she was writing to her time and to her place. The notion of doing the genre well and doing it in America, right now, and not in a message-y type way, but not being afraid to engage with the culture right now at this moment, that, to me, was a big motivating factor for what was exciting about doing this.

GLASS ONION: A KNIVES OUT MYSTERY. Courtesy Netflix.
GLASS ONION: A KNIVES OUT MYSTERY. Courtesy Netflix.

You started out just a normal person going to film school but have become a noted filmmaker making some pretty huge movies. You’ve probably had some experiences in the rarified air where some of the characters in Glass Onion live. How much of what you’ve seen, with celebrities or perhaps a completely over-the-top billionaire, wound up in the movie? 

That’s a phenomenally perceptive question because it’s exactly the case, and it’s something that I don’t really talk about because I’m not sure how to, but just having had exposure to this other world, and feeling the way that Blanc feels when he shows up on the island of this movie, feeling completely lost, thinking, “This is a planet that operates under rules that I just don’t understand,” it’s very strange. A lot of the details of that went, in a subliminal way, into the experience of this movie. It just also felt like there was so much comedy to be mined from that. It’s also crazy because you get exposed to some of this stuff, and you realize what’s in the movie is not really that inflated; it’s probably even tamped down a little bit compared to some of the stuff that’s out there. It was fun working with Edward Norton on it, too, because he’s in the tech investor world and has been very successful, so he also knows a lot of, like, the inside baseball of this stuff. We had a lot of fun riffing and coming up with little details we could put in there and stuff to lampoon. Also, so much that we touch upon in the movie is happening everywhere around us. The big thing that was on my mind was just big blatant lies, and big blatant lies being forwarded by complicity based on self-interest, that’s also still in the air. 

Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery (2022). (L-R) Edward Norton as Miles, Madelyn Cline as Whiskey, and Daniel Craig as Detective Benoit Blanc. Cr. John Wilson/Netflix © 2022.
Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery (2022). (L-R) Edward Norton as Miles, Madelyn Cline as Whiskey, and Daniel Craig as Detective Benoit Blanc. Cr. John Wilson/Netflix © 2022.

And somehow, Glass Onion is still very funny. 

It’s like nuclear war and Dr. Strangelove.  There’s no other way to come at it than to hopefully point out how horrible it is by laughing at it. 

Some of the funniest moments were those clearly inspired by James Bond. From the score, cinematography, and then, in specific, Daniel Craig’s bathing costume. What kinds of discussions were there around those?  

I loved the idea, and I actually I can’t take credit for this; a friend of mine, Michael Lerman, pitched me this joke even before I started writing the movie that Blanc never takes his shirt off. He’s the kid at the pool party who wears his shirts into the pool. That cracks me up, and so I went with that. Then Daniel worked with Jenny Eagan, our costume designer, and it was Daniel who went down this route of thinking, in terms of Blanc’s role in this movie, that he’s affecting a sort of Jacques Tati’s Monsieur Hulot-type vibe, so he’s got the hat, he’s even got his physical characteristics. There’s a lot of Tati that he’s bringing to it, and it’s Tati by way of Cary Grant by way of James Bond. Even with the setting, I think in the script when I was describing Miles Bron’s lair, I wrote, “It’s kind of like a Bond lair,” then I put in parentheses, “Sorry, Daniel.” 

GLASS ONION: A KNIVES OUT MYSTERY (2022) Edward Norton as Miles and Daniel Craig as Detective Benoit Blanc. Cr: Courtesy NETFLIX
GLASS ONION: A KNIVES OUT MYSTERY (2022) Edward Norton as Miles and Daniel Craig as Detective Benoit Blanc. Cr: Courtesy NETFLIX

Can you talk about the production design by Rick Heinrichs? Where was the film shot? What was the inspiration for the interior, and who made the art in the art gallery? 

The exteriors were all Greece. The interiors, and all the sets, including the big room with all the art, were built on a stage in Belgrade. I worked with Rick on The Last Jedi, and he’s done a bunch of work with Tim Burton. He’s incredible at communicating nuanced character through very large palettes, through big scale, and that’s what we needed for this movie. With the artwork, Rick is very knowledgeable in terms of the art world. I’m not, actually, so I was very much relying on Rick. It’s a combination of actual reproductions of classics. There’s a Rothko, and a Hockney, although the Rothko is upside down because I feel like Miles would hang it the wrong way, then also, there are some original pieces that are kind of pastiches of different styles of art by all local Belgrade artists. 

GLASS ONION: A KNIVES OUT MYSTERY (2022) Jessica Henwick as Peg, Daniel Craig as Detective Benoit Blanc and Janelle Monáe as Andi. Cr: John Wilson/NETFLIX
GLASS ONION: A KNIVES OUT MYSTERY (2022) Jessica Henwick as Peg, Daniel Craig as Detective Benoit Blanc and Janelle Monáe as Andi. Cr: John Wilson/NETFLIX

Those are all very narcissistic.

Exactly. Down to the big painting of Edward that looks like it’s out of Fight Club. I just cracked up when they showed that to me. 

GLASS ONION: A KNIVES OUT MYSTERY (2022) Kate Hudson as Birdie, Leslie Odom Jr. as Lionel and Kathryn Hahn as Claire. Cr: Courtesy NETFLIX
GLASS ONION: A KNIVES OUT MYSTERY (2022) Kate Hudson as Birdie, Leslie Odom Jr. as Lionel and Kathryn Hahn as Claire. Cr: Courtesy NETFLIX

Lots of writers forget to write strong female characters, especially those that are women of color, but they’re a main feature in this film series. 

When you have actors like Janelle Monáe and Kathryn Hahn and Kate Hudson and Madelyn Cline and Jessica Henwick, when you’re writing, knowing that you’re going to have people like that coming up to bat, the amount that you can build into it knowing that they’re going to amplify it and take it up to another level, it’s pretty joyous. It’s pretty cool to see. So in that way, it’s an entirely selfish thing to work with fantastic actors like that, who I know are gonna take whatever I write and just make it better.

Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery releases in theaters on November 23rd and streams on Netflix on December 23rd. 

Featured image: Daniel Craig in “Glass Onion: A Knives Out Story.” JOHN WILSON/NETFLIX © 2022

 

Best of 2022: How the “Top Gun: Maverick” Sound Team Ingeniously Captured Raw Emotion Mid-Flight

Posted on by babrams

It’s that time of year—we look back on a few of our favorite interviews from 2022 in our annual year-end list.

Mark Weingarten is no stranger to navigating the challenges of a production sound mixer. Over his accomplished career, Weingarten’s mixed on Christopher Nolan’s WWII epic Dunkirk, traveled to another dimension in Interstellar, captured the spirit of Katniss Everdeen in The Hunger Games, and tracked the drama behind The Social Network and The Curious Case of Benjamin Button. In director Joseph Kosinski’s world-beating Top Gun: Maverick, the hurdle was finding a way to usably record the actors’ dialogue inside fighter jet cockpits pulling up to 7Gs.

The journey for Weingarten began with a heavy dose of research and preparation. Since Kosinski sought to have all the inflight dialogue recorded, whether it was plane to plane communications, plane to ground, or an actor saying something to themselves, like when Tom Cruise whispers one of Maverick’s iconic lines, “Talk to me Goose,” the sound mixer needed a solution for every possibility. On top of that, production would be using the working flight masks worn by pilots which, at times, would be covering the actor’s faces while needed oxygen flowed through them.

Credit: Scott Garfield. © 2019 Paramount Pictures Corporation.
Tom Cruise plays Capt. Pete “Maverick” Mitchell in Top Gun: Maverick from Paramount Pictures, Skydance and Jerry Bruckheimer Films. Credit: Scott Garfield. © 2019 Paramount Pictures Corporation.

“Initially in prep I thought about running a microphone into their masks but decided against it because the masks are fully functional, providing oxygen as well as enabling critical communications,” says Weingarten. “I didn’t want to do anything that could possibly interfere with any of that. I knew there already was a microphone built into the mask, I thought if there was a way I could tap into that existing microphone, I might be able to record the inflight dialogue, then listen to it during dailies and hear if the quality of the audio would be acceptable to use in the final film. I thought we should also put another lavalier microphone on their survival vests, which is their outermost garment, in case there were dialogue scenes among the actors with their masks hanging open.”

GREG TARZAN DAVIS PLAYS "COYOTE" IN TOP GUN: MAVERICK FROM PARAMOUNT PICTURES, SKYDANCE AND JERRY BRUCKHEIMER FILMS.
GREG TARZAN DAVIS PLAYS “COYOTE” IN TOP GUN: MAVERICK FROM PARAMOUNT PICTURES, SKYDANCE AND JERRY BRUCKHEIMER FILMS.

During an early tech scout, Weingarten pieced together some of the puzzle. “I was able to connect with the Navy’s internal plane communications department, which oversees all the internal communications in the planes, and they showed me all the places where I could possibly tap in to record the dialogue. The only problem was that every option was no good for one reason or another,” he says.

Diving into the matter further, the sound mixer learned that there is a connection on the inside of the survival vest that could allow him to record the dialogue. Weingarten touched base with the Navy’s Aircrew Survival Equipmentment (PR) department, which oversees the survival vests and oxygen masks. After the visit, he was able to confirm his idea of tapping into the vest to record the microphone audio from the mask.

The camera setup inside the F/A-18F cockpit was elaborate. Cinematographer Claudio Miranda (with the help of 1st AC Dan Ming and key grip Trevor Fulks, who sadly passed away from stage four metastatic esophageal cancer before the film’s theatrical release) configured six Sony Venice cameras, four looking back at the actor and two looking forward. Miranda opted to use the Sony Rialto Camera Extension System, which allows the sensor and lens to be separated from the camera body, for one of the cameras looking back at the actor and two looking forward over the pilot’s shoulder. Everything was wired so the actor could flip a single switch to start recording all six cameras along with the sound recorder. This was done for two different fighter jets in addition to the coverage captured jet to jet or helicopter to jet.

For sound, Weingarten originally recorded directly from the microphone from the pilot’s mask using a special adapter that he had custom-made, which connected the cable from the survival vest into a Lectrosonics SM wireless transmitter. The audio would then be transmitted to a Lectrosonics 411 receiver which was connected to a Sound Devices 744T recorder and mounted inside the cockpit. Similar to the camera setup, the audio could be triggered to start or stop recording via the remote. The sound team also placed a secondary wireless lavalier and Lectrosonics SM transmitter on the actors for dialogue without their masks.

“The first time we got to try out the setup was with Tom’s [Cruise] initial flight while he was acting. Everything through the mask microphone and the secondary lavalier sounded great,” says Weingarten. “But when we were watching dailies, Tom noticed something in the frame, just over his shoulder. It turned out to be the Sound Devices 744T and the 411 receivers. We had to figure out another solution.”

Back at the drawing board, Weingarten found a way to simplify the setup even further. “I ended up buying several Lectrosonics PDR recorders, which can record audio directly from a microphone source and sync timecode. They are about the same size as the Lectrosonics SM transmitters and could fit inside the survival vests. It meant we no longer needed the Lectrosonics 411 receivers or the Sound Devices recorder.”

The streamlined setup did however have one hiccup. The actors would no longer be able to trigger the start/stop recording through the remote setup which Cruise (who also served as producer) asked for specifically. Instead, the PDR recorders would start recording just before the actors put on their survival vests and would remain recording from takeoff until landing. “My boom operator Tom Caton and I talked directly to Cruise about the change and he could not have been cooler. Tom was incredibly nice and said it was a great solution,” says Weingarten.

With the new setup, the Lectrosonics PDR was connected directly into the microphone inside the mask via the survival vest where both picture and sound were synced via timecode. A second PDR and lavalier were initially used to record the “mask off” audio but during production, Weingarten found the audio from the mask microphone “was great even for the scenes when the masks were open.”

“Over time we scrapped the second lavalier and went down to one microphone,” says Weingarten. “The main reason is this thing the Navy calls Foreign Object Damage (FOD). It concerns any objects that can come loose during flights and potentially cause a crash. It’s a big concern, so the more minimal we went the better. In the end, all the inflight dialogue was recorded from the connections in the vest, and there wasn’t one line looped.”

Weingarten replicated the solution for each flight, of which there were hundreds, to capture the epic aerial sequences in the film. The audio was recorded onto a 16GB microSD card that slid into each PDR. “Before each flight, we would place a PDR inside the actor’s survival vest, start recording, and then retrieve it at the end of the day. The nice thing about the PDRs is you can split a mono input and reduce one channel of audio down -20dB, so if the audio starts to over modulate on one channel, the second channel will be fine.”

Looking back, the sound mixer recalls it was “one of the nicest, most collaborative movies” he’s been on. “Joe is one of the nicest director’s I have ever met. He’s super kind, respectful, smart, and well prepared. He really made it a delightful experience. Plus, everyone on the cast and crew was very helpful. We all had to navigate working with the Navy and their rules and everyone was there to help each other out.”

For more on Top Gun: Maverick, check out these stories:

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Going to Flight School With “Top Gun: Maverick” Stars Glen Powell & Greg Tarzan Davis

Featured image: Tom Cruise plays Capt. Pete “Maverick” Mitchell in Top Gun: Maverick from Paramount Pictures, Skydance and Jerry Bruckheimer Films.

Best of 2022: “The Batman” Cinematographer Greig Fraser on Finding Light in the Darkness

Posted on by babrams

It’s that time of year—we look back on a few of our favorite interviews from 2022 in our annual year-end list.

At a gripping three hours, The Batman isn’t so much an endurance test as it is a lengthy visual puzzle, one that takes place primarily after hours. Director Matt Reeves’s take on Batman (Robert Pattinson) may be the franchise’s most disaffected nocturnal not-so-superhero yet. Working, brooding, and convening with Alfred (Andy Serkis) from dusk ’til dawn, this Bruce Wayne is consumed by trying to undo a complex web of official corruption hidden by Gotham City’s entrenched crop of violent mafiosos.

Batman’s also working against the Riddler (Paul Dano), an incel type serial killer who, thinking himself more clever than his ploys would otherwise suggest, has deluded himself into believing he is simultaneously working with Batman to bring Gotham into the light while dragging Bruce Wayne’s late parents into the city’s eternal muck. But Batman works alone and besides, if ever he were to be tempted to take on an associate, it would be Selina (Zoë Kravitz), an employee at the Iceberg Lounge (which manages to be a credible techno club, mafioso-run den of iniquity, and crooked bureaucrat hangout zone in one.) Selina, a devoted Catwoman to both her feline and human friends, is working on what Gotham really needs: seeking clarity and vengeance for her missing colleague Annika, just one of many women harmed by Gotham’s politician-criminal partnership from hell. 

Among the film’s many plaudits is the fact that you can actually see it: despite everyone’s favorite masked vigilante’s predilection for darkness, we can always tell where Batman is and what he’s doing. The Batman’s moody and effective low-light cinematography comes courtesy of Greig Fraser, of Dune, Rogue One, and Zero Dark Thirty. We had the chance to sit down with Fraser and talk about the 1970s films that influenced today’s Batman, where and how he scrupulously plugged in flashes of light, and the process behind orchestrating seamless action sequences.

Caption: (L-r) ZOË KRAVITZ as Selina Kyle and ROBERT PATTINSON as Batman and in Warner Bros. Pictures’ action adventure “THE BATMAN,” a Warner Bros. Pictures release. Photo Credit: Jonathan Olley/™ & © DC Comics
Caption: (L-r) ZOË KRAVITZ as Selina Kyle and ROBERT PATTINSON as Batman and in Warner Bros. Pictures’ action adventure “THE BATMAN,” a Warner Bros. Pictures release. Photo Credit: Jonathan Olley/™ & © DC Comics

You and Matt Reeves have worked together before. How did you get started on The Batman and develop a language for its distinct aesthetic?

I’ve known Matt for a long time now. We stayed very close after we finished Let Me In. We’re two peas in a pod when it comes to our visual language and our aesthetics. Even before Matt’s first meeting, we started talking. As a DP, it doesn’t always happen like that. You’re not always at the beginning of the journey. Often it’s that the director’s been through the meetings, they’ve got the job, they then have to look for a DP. Or, if it’s a director you’ve worked with in the past, they normally don’t engage with the DP until they’ve got the job. So to be engaged before the job was got was fantastic because it just meant that from that day, we were constantly riffing action sequences, set pieces, and coming up with what this Gotham should look and feel like. 

Caption: (L-r) ROBERT PATTINSON and director MATT REEVES and on the set in Warner Bros. Pictures’ action adventure “THE BATMAN,” a Warner Bros. Pictures release. Photo Credit: Jonathan Olley/™ & © DC Comics
Caption: (L-r) ROBERT PATTINSON and director MATT REEVES and on the set in Warner Bros. Pictures’ action adventure “THE BATMAN,” a Warner Bros. Pictures release. Photo Credit: Jonathan Olley/™ & © DC Comics

What were some of the references you looked at together?

I can’t specify directly that there was this shot by this photographer. But there are a number of photographers that do some work in that dark environment, and there are a number of films. We’re both very big fans of noir 70s cinema — you know, Chinatown, All the Presidents Men, Heat, The Godfather. Obviously, some of those are set in downtown, some of them are not. We looked at a number of photographers — not necessarily name photographers, some hobbyists doing shots of urban landscapes. I can’t name who they were. If I was scrolling Instagram or researching urban landscapes, I might have come across something that had just the right amount of rain, just the right amount of mist, just that kind of feel that felt cinematic and didn’t feel like it was contrived or controlled. 

Caption: ROBERT PATTINSON as Batman in Warner Bros. Pictures’ action adventure “THE BATMAN,” a Warner Bros. Pictures release. Photo Credit: Jonathan Olley/™ & © DC Comics
Caption: ROBERT PATTINSON as Batman in Warner Bros. Pictures’ action adventure “THE BATMAN,” a Warner Bros. Pictures release. Photo Credit: Jonathan Olley/™ & © DC Comics

We have to talk about how on earth you did your job given that Batman is nocturnal to the extreme this time around.

You’re right, that was a talking point early on. Because the Batman is a dark guy, isn’t he? He comes out late at night. So one would assume he’s not walking around often in the morning, in the cold light of day. We were all very careful. We knew this could potentially be so dark it becomes unwatchable. So part of the job that I had, along with Matt, we went, ‘all right, it’s got to be bright enough that we can see but not dark enough that we lose the mood.’ So that was the biggest challenge that we had. We tried to walk that tight rope, where every scene we did had pockets of bright light. The diner scene, for example — a diner is what you would call bright. In our movie, it’s bright but not garishly bright. But Batman doesn’t ever come into the diner. Batman stays outside in the shadows, in the darkness. So that’s how we staged a scene like that, knowing that if Batman walked into that diner, that might not really be his character, that he wants to stay in the background. Whenever we were thinking about staging scenes, we had to think about what Batman was going to be seen in. For example, inside the Iceberg Lounge, we had to make sure it was suitably down in tone that he would not feel out of place in that environment. 

Caption: COLIN FARRELL as Oswald Cobblepot/the Penguin in Warner Bros. Pictures’ action adventure “THE BATMAN,” a Warner Bros. Pictures release. Photo Credit: Jonathan Olley/™ & © DC Comics
Caption: COLIN FARRELL as Oswald Cobblepot/the Penguin in Warner Bros. Pictures’ action adventure “THE BATMAN,” a Warner Bros. Pictures release. Photo Credit: Jonathan Olley/™ & © DC Comics
Caption: JOHN TURTURRO as Carmine Falcone in Warner Bros. Pictures’ action adventure “THE BATMAN,” a Warner Bros. Pictures release. Photo Credit: Jonathan Olley/™ & © DC Comics
Caption: JOHN TURTURRO as Carmine Falcone in Warner Bros. Pictures’ action adventure “THE BATMAN,” a Warner Bros. Pictures release. Photo Credit: Jonathan Olley/™ & © DC Comics

In addition, the club seemed to be going for real nightlife bona fides.

We set up a real club, effectively. In London there’s a place called Printworks, which, funny enough, I’d been there a few times when it was an event venue. We worked with an events company and our gaffer to light it. We wanted to make a really interesting lighting environment that we could control. As Batman comes down the stairs the lights flash brightly, and again, that goes back to making sure the whole thing wasn’t one tone of darkness. At the bottom of the stairs, as he lands or receives the first hit, we deliberately flashed the blinders in the back so that the whole place lights up. In that scene, even though it was dark up to that point, you get these flashes of brightness, so hopefully, your eyes don’t become exhausted by watching too much darkness. 

That said, the action sequences don’t feel overly jumpy or flashy. We particularly liked the moment Selina confronts Carmine Falcone.

One of the things that we tried to make sure we did was that we didn’t cut too many times. Matt’s very economical when it comes to the shots he wants to get. He knows the shots he needs. He doesn’t shoot coverage for the sake of shooting coverage. He knows what her close-up is. He knows the shot where she’s going to fire the gun. We shoot coverage before and after that moment, obviously, but he knows that’s the moment he’s there to get. He’s very efficient when it comes to shot structure, and it means that we can work really hard at getting that shot right: getting the timing right, getting the flash right, getting the sync right. It’s quite fun doing those scenes because it involves a lot of timing and performance beats.

Caption: ZOË KRAVITZ as Selina Kyle in Warner Bros. Pictures’ action adventure “THE BATMAN,” a Warner Bros. Pictures release. Photo Credit: Warner Bros. Pictures/™ & © DC Comics
Caption: ZOË KRAVITZ as Selina Kyle in Warner Bros. Pictures’ action adventure “THE BATMAN,” a Warner Bros. Pictures release. Photo Credit: Warner Bros. Pictures/™ & © DC Comics

The big car chase scene also seemed like it required intense planning.

The car chase was a pretty interesting process. Matt’s very involved with every frame of this film and the car chase was one of those. We luckily had a couple of units going at once at that time. So my second unit DP, Danny Vilar, took the reins on that. He did all the preliminary testing, mounting to motorbikes, mounting to cars, crash tests, and we took a bit of a different approach where, as you saw, we strapped cameras to the motor vehicles. It may seem easy to do but it was actually quite hard to get the angles we wanted. It took a lot of R&D, it took a lot of takes, and we bought ourselves some older Arri Alexas to use as crash cameras. It meant that we were able to bring cameras closer to the point of destruction, knowing that if we did break them, it would be a write-off anyway. We had lenses rehoused by a company called Iron Glass, and they made these smaller lenses that were a bit more nimble and could be easily mounted to these cars. Danny Vilar and Iron Glass and our grip, Guy Micheletti, put that together.

 

You stay aware of the characters in those moments — they don’t get lost in a blur of action.

Everything has a purpose in this film. Every shot, every pan, every motion, there’s very much a reason to exist and there’s no filler, in the sense that there are no shots that you could do without. This is very much a well-orchestrated machine. The way I see it, it’s like a Rolex watch. If you take the back off a Rolex watch, every single piece in that Rolex watch has a really important purpose. That’s the same with this film. It’s a very complicated machine that has lots of cogs, lots of turning wheels, lots of minuscule movement, and all of it is essential to each other. If you take out one of those cogs in that Rolex, for example, the whole thing doesn’t work. It’s the same with us. And I think with our movie, what was great was refining every single one of those cogs to help make the final piece come to life. 

This film feels like a real departure from other Batman movies. What were some aspects you wanted to keep or leave behind?

Batman’s an iconic character. Most of the world knows what that symbol is. So from my perspective, we are batting with heavyweights of the industry. Some of those Batman films are some of the best films made, historically. What was honest about this was we didn’t tackle it and look at any other Batman film and go, okay, he does that, so we’ll do this, or we’ll be the same as what they do. We did not do that. We looked at other films to look at what we wanted to do. It just so happens instead of Marlon Brando onscreen we’ve got Robert Pattinson or the Penguin in all his glory. We didn’t look at the previous Batman films to reference, and that wasn’t out of disrespect for them. It was probably more out of respect for them that we didn’t feel set in those worlds. We didn’t want to make a part four. That wasn’t even a conversation. There was no ego involved, which is the thing that I love about Matt. It’s not about being better. Although I will say this: there wouldn’t have been a pressure to be better than any of the other Batman films, but if we do get a chance to do something else, of course there’s going to be a big pressure on ourselves to further explore this world, which is really rich. I think we touched upon some things in this film we can grow upon. Regardless of whether I’m involved in it or not, that’s something I’m really interested in seeing.

For more on The Batman, check out these stories:

“The Batman” Prepared to Join “Spider-Man: No Way Home” With an Epic Opening

How “The Batman” Writer/Director Matt Reeves Embraced Fear

The Best Batman Of Them All? “The Batman” vs “The Dark Knight”

“The Batman” Early Reactions: A Gripping, Glorious Street-Level Detective Story

Featured image: Caption: ROBERT PATTINSON as Batman in Warner Bros. Pictures’ action adventure “THE BATMAN,” a Warner Bros. Pictures release. Photo Credit: Courtesy of Warner Bros. Pictures/ ™ & © DC Comics

Best of 2022: “Winning Time” Writer Rodney Barnes on Scripting HBO’s Fast-Breaking Lakers Series

Posted on by babrams

It’s that time of year—we look back on a few of our favorite interviews from 2022 in our annual year-end list.

It’s pretty much a slam dunk that Winning Time: The Rise of the Lakers Dynasty will appeal to basketball fans. After all, it tells the story of one of the most pivotal moments in NBA history and features some of the game’s most notable figures — Magic Johnson, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, Jerry West, and Pat Riley. 

But Rodney Barnes, who shares scripting duties with Max Borenstein and Jim Hecht, and serves as an Executive Producer on the 10-episode HBO series that debuted March 6, believes the show offers something for everyone.

“I’m old enough to have seen a lot of sports-themed movies and TV shows. And more often than not, the players are relegated to a one-dimensional idea,” says Barnes during a recent Zoom conversation. “That’s the funny one. That’s the bad one. That’s the surly one. And the narrative is about the coach, the owner, or a particular player. Here, we got an opportunity to really get into the nuance of the human part of being a professional athlete.”

Rodney Barnes
Rodney Barnes

Based on Jeff Pearlman’s 2014 book “Showtime: Magic, Kareem, Riley, and the Los Angeles Lakers Dynasty of the 1980s,” Winning Time opens in the summer of 1979 during a period of upheaval for the Los Angeles Lakers. Dr. Jerry Buss (John C. Reilly), a flashy real estate mogul, is looking to shake up professional basketball by buying the team. He wants to make the game more exciting by making it more entertaining. One way he hopes to do that is by drafting Earvin Johnson (Quincy Isaiah), a Michigan State all-star whose moves on the court earned him the nickname “Magic.” Current coach Jerry West (Jason Clarke) is against the idea. He believes Johnson is too stocky to play point guard, Johnson’s position in college. Veteran center Kareem Abdul-Jabbar (Solomon Hughes) is also skeptical, reluctant to change his style of play for Johnson. And then there’s Norm Nixon (DeVaughn Nixon — Nixon’s real-life son), the team’s current point guard. He’s worried Johnson will take his job. Lurking in the background is Pat Riley (Adrien Brody), a former player so anxious to get back in the game, he’s willing to kowtow to Chick Hearn (Spencer Garrett) in hopes of landing a broadcast job as a color analyst. 

L-r: John C. Reilly, Quincy Isaiah, Jason Clarke. Photograph by Warrick Page/HBO
L-r: John C. Reilly, Quincy Isaiah, Jason Clarke. Photograph by Warrick Page/HBO

Barnes was brought onto Winning Time by Borenstein, his longtime writing partner, who serves as the series showrunner. A lifelong basketball fan, Barnes quickly said yes. ”Loving basketball the way that I do, having lived in the period where the show begins and, remembering it fondly, it checked a lot of boxes that made me want to be a part of it,” adds Barnes.

Calling Pearlman’s book “a foundation,” Barnes read anything and everything he could find about the Lakers — books, newspaper articles, magazine profiles. He scoured YouTube for clips of the players. Though he thought he was familiar with the story, Barnes quickly learned how much he didn’t know — a world of complex characters, warts and all. 

John C. Reilly, Quincy Isaiah, Kirk Bovill. Photograph by Warrick Page/HBO
John C. Reilly, Quincy Isaiah, Kirk Bovill. Photograph by Warrick Page/HBO

Buss is a fast-talking wheeler-dealer, building his dream on a financial house of cards that is threatening to collapse at any minute. But he’s relentless in realizing a vision that could elevate pro basketball to new heights of popularity — and, more importantly, deliver him a championship team. 

A hotshot hoopster, Johnson’s ego is as big as his talent. But going from collegiate superstar to lowly NBA rookie takes some getting used to and he struggles to inject his brand of basketball into the Lakers. One of his main roadblocks is Abdul-Jabbar. As introverted as Johnson is outgoing, the 7’2” center grapples with trying to balance professional fame with his Muslim faith. He’s haunted by the feeling that he should be doing something more important than putting a ball in a basket.

Solomon Hughes, Sarah Ramos. Photograph by Warrick Page/HBO
Solomon Hughes, Sarah Ramos. Photograph by Warrick Page/HBO

Full of disenchantment, West is furious that he can’t channel his achievements on the court into coaching. Riley is a lost soul, searching for his place in a game that, at this point, considers him an afterthought.

Also in the mix are Jeanie Buss (Hadley Robinson), the boss’ daughter who, though just a lowly intern, is determined to help her dad transform the fan experience; Jack McKinney (Tracy Letts), an analytics-obsessed coach Buss reluctantly brings in to lead the Lakers; Claire Rothman (Gaby Hoffmann)), the club’s event coordinator tasked with figuring out how to elevate a night of basketball into a party; and Earvin Johnson Sr. (Rob Morgan), Magic’s sage father who guides his son on the path to realizing his full potential. 

The roster was rich with potential. The challenge was keeping it real. “Any time you have facts as your boundaries, humanizing those facts in such a way so they support one another to create a moving narrative is never easy,” explains Barnes. “You’re already confined by reality. You can’t just go anywhere like in fiction.”

 

At the same time, the writers were careful not to do a disservice to some of basketball’s biggest stars. “We’re fans of these guys. We appreciate what they accomplished,” continues Barnes. “You’re trying to make this a love letter —  a show of appreciation more so than anything else. So it’s a delicate balance of storytelling, while still being true to the times and respectful at all times.”

Barnes explains that he started by creating an outline together with Borenstein and Hecht. After each writer individually drafted his designated segments, Barnes and Borenstein would reunite and revise until they arrived at a shooting script. Each had his own story specialties.  

“I dealt with the players, their lives, their ongoing narrative,” explains Barnes. “It’s like anything. Once you get to know these characters, start to live with them, you become attached to the rhythm of the dialogue, the way they communicate.”

Quincy Isaiah, Solomon Hughes. Photograph by Warrick Page/HBO
Quincy Isaiah, Solomon Hughes. Photograph by Warrick Page/HBO

YouTube came in handy to get the speech patterns just right. “We were able to go back and see interviews —  Magic Johnson on Soul Train —  just a lot of different things to get an idea beyond words,” he adds. “Going from the flatness that comes from books and articles to getting to hear the cadence of how a human being talks.”

And who was the most fun to write? Without hesitation, Barnes names Johnson and Abdul-Jabbar. “Those two guys stick out for me because they’re so different,” he explains. “One is introspective —  sort of an introvert. The other is outgoing. So it’s two different ways to create dialogue. I just enjoyed it and I love both those guys.”

Barnes also takes pride in how Winning Time offers both a sports and cultural perspective of the era. At the time, the ABA was merging into the NBA. The series shows how this radically impacted the style of play. “A lot of what we see in modern basketball today started with the Lakers in the showtime offense,” he observes.

And then there is the societal impact. Before 1979, owners ruled and players kept their opinions to themselves. There were exceptions – Bill Russell, Spencer Haywood, Abdul-Jabbar — but, by and large, pros avoided discussing race and cultural issues. Citing today’s players’ strong support of the Black Lives Matter movement and their outrage when George Floyd was killed, Barnes believes Winning Time shows the seeds being planted. “Jerry Buss narrowed that boundary through a personal relationship with the players,” he says. “That was the beginning— the bridge to players being able to have a voice en masse and the way the NBA operates today.”  

Winning Time airs on Sunday nights on HBO and HBO Max at 9pm.

 

For more on Warner Bros., HBO, and HBO Max, check out these stories:

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“The Batman” Soars to Epic Opening Weekend

The Batman” Prepared to Join “Spider-Man: No Way Home” With an Epic Opening

Featured image: L-r: Quincy Isaiah, Solomon Hughes. Photograph by Warrick Page/HBO

 

Best of 2022: “Everything Everywhere All At Once” Actress Stephanie Hsu on Landing the Role of a Lifetime

Posted on by babrams

It’s that time of year—we look back on a few of our favorite interviews from 2022 in our annual year-end list.

It’s very difficult to describe Everything Everywhere All At Once, the new genre-busting indie from writer/directors Dan Kwan and Daniel Scheinert, collectively known as Daniels. It’s a multiverse sci-fi brain twister, an action movie with Hong Kong-style fighting, and a moving family drama about a mother and daughter. It’s about existential dread, love lost and found, and, of course, the importance of paying your taxes correctly and on time. Michelle Yeoh is at her career-best as matriarch Evelyn Wang, an Asian-American woman embroiled in an adventure across the multiverse trying to save humanity from supervillain Jobu Tupaki, who, it turns out, is an alternate version of her daughter Joy. 

Stephanie Hsu, known for her work on Broadway and as Mei in The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, brings depth and flamboyance to Joy and Jobu Tupaki. Rounding out the cast are veteran performer James Hong as Evelyn’s father, Ke Huy Quan, beloved for his roles as Data in The Goonies and Short Round in Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, as Evelyn’s husband, and Jamie Lee Curtis as IRS agent Dierdre Beaubeirdra. 

It must have taken an incredible amount of focus, stamina, and collaboration for the cast and crew of Everything Everywhere All At Once to bring it to the screen. The Credits chatted with Stephanie Hsu about working with Daniels, and how the power of love and optimism plays an important part in this film destined to be a cult classic. 

The movie has both authenticity and craziness, and it couldn’t exist without an incredible level of collaboration. You did daily warmups, and there were weekly awards for members of the crew. Can you talk a little bit more about how collaboration aided in the authenticity of this film? 

The communal experience is very important to the Daniels, and a non-hierarchical way of working is really important. That’s why the PAs are listed in the credits first. It just makes everybody feel seen and cherished. Making films is crazy. It always gets stressful. Time is always running out, money is going out the window, but if you have a team or a film family that cares about one another and knows that they are valued, they will work harder. They will show up, and take care of one another when things get tough. It’s so funny because this was my first feature, and I feel so lucky because that is so much of what I want for the world of filmmaking and art-making in general—this kindness and collaboration. That’s just not how it is usually, it’s really rarely like that, and people feel very bad about themselves, feel very stressed, feel very left behind. So I think that the reason why this movie is reaching audiences the way that it is, other than the fact that personally, I think it’s brilliant, imaginative, and heartfelt, it’s also because of the story and the value systems of the film—kindness, love, cherishing one another—are actually how we made the film. There’s integrity there, and for some reason, that transference is happening, and audiences are feeling that. We all felt safe bringing anything and everything to the table, whatever our ideas were, and all of us wanted to give our all because we really believed in the project and in each other. 

(L-R) Stephanie Hsu, Michelle Yeoh, Ke Huy Quan. Photo Credit:Allyson Riggs
(L-R) Stephanie Hsu, Michelle Yeoh, Ke Huy Quan. Photo Credit: Allyson Riggs

What kinds of warmups did you do? 

We did something called a hug tackle, and I remember I led an exercise called the mind meld, where you would say a word, any word, with a partner at the same time, and keep going, to try to get to the same word. That warmup is just fun because you have to surrender. You cannot possibly know what the other person is going to say, but you’re listening and thinking at the same time. All the warmups were great, because it’s a chance for all of us to cross departments, and have really focused time with each other. 

Everyone in the whole cast and crew took part? 

Oh yeah. All the cast, all of the crew, all of the camera crew, all the PAs, sometimes the chefs and folks at craft services would come, too. 

(L-R) Stephanie Hsu, Ke Huy Quan, Michelle Yeoh, James HongPhotocredit: Allyson Riggs
(L-R) Stephanie Hsu, Ke Huy Quan, Michelle Yeoh, James HongPhotocredit: Allyson Riggs

There are so many aspects of the mother/daughter relationship that are represented both literally and metaphorically in the film. How much did the cast and the Daniels talk about that? 

For me, the mother/daughter relationship, I knew it in my bones. I grew up with an immigrant mother. I was her only child, and it was mostly just me and her growing up. There’s just a way that strong women can love you so much and truly fail at showing it every step of the way. It’s not just Asian mothers, it’s not just immigrant mothers, it’s just mothers. And I think mother/daughter relationships are so much more heightened, because of beauty standards and because you want the best for your child, but you don’t realize that that’s actually not in your control whatsoever. But interestingly enough, I don’t think we talked about it that much, because we all just knew it. It was kind of an unspoken starting point for all of us. 

Nihilism is based on the belief that nothing matters. This could easily be our approach to issues like global warming and war, but it gets, in one way, to showing that we’re both the problem and the solution. How did that play into how you approached your role? 

I would say that what we talked about even more than the mother/daughter relationship was this concept of nihilism, and how an agent of chaos might make more chaos if nothing matters and nothing has any significance. I like to say that nihilism saved my life in some ways because it’s a very heavy time. It was a heavy time two years ago, when we were filming, it is a heavier time now. And I feel that myself and so many people, so many of my peers, so desperately want to fix it all. We can just feel so helpless, while also trying to figure out ways to help. Nihilism suggests the possibility that nothing we do matters, and so all we can do is try our very best. There’s no winning here. There’s no finish line. It’s just going to keep going like this, there are going to be more and more generations of suffering, but if we come here and know that we gave it our all, or gave it something, then we’re just making it a little bit better as much as we are able. 

What part of making Everything Everywhere All At Once has been most integrated into you both personally and professionally?

I feel like I snuck in through the backdoor of Hollywood with this movie since this was my first feature. I could have never expected that this would be receiving the praise that it’s receiving, and that beyond praise, that people really get it, and are really moved by it, and inspired by it. That is my dream, to put things out in the world that shift people and move people. I feel that this journey is such an affirmation that it is possible to work with people you love and admire, and who are kind and follow the art, not follow the power. I just feel excited to keep moving in that direction, because it hasn’t proven me wrong at all, you know, and it has only brought me beautiful experiences. 

Everything Everywhere All At Once is in theaters now across the country.  

Featured image: tephanie Hsu. Photo Credit: Allyson Riggs

Best of 2022: MPA Creator Award Recipient Writer/Director Nikyatu Jusu on her Stunning Debut Feature “Nanny”

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It’s that time of year—we look back on a few of our favorite interviews from 2022 in our annual year-end list.

Deploying West African folklore to interrogate the myth of the American dream, writer/director Nikyatu Jusu‘s debut feature Nanny is a remarkably assured genre-melding experience. Nanny also gives viewers something that’s sadly still quite rare—it evocatively places us inside the head, heart, and aching soul of Aisha (Anna Diop), an undocumented Senegalese immigrant trying to navigate the mystifying codes of the United States to create a stable place to bring her son, Lamine (Jahleel Kamara). Jusu’s nimbly executed deployment of supernatural characters to critique the myth of the American dream would be a difficult feat for a veteran writer/director, let alone a young filmmaker making her very first feature. It’s for this reason that Jusu is the Motion Picture Association’s choice for their inaugural MPA Creator Award, which is part of our centennial celebration.

“I’m immensely grateful,” Jusu says. “I know it’s the first year of this award, but I was like what? (Laughs). I’m just drowning in gratitude.” Jusu isn’t just drowning in gratitude, she’s also dealing with the whiplash of the whirlwind execution of her stunning debut. She shot Nanny only last July in 27-days in New York City, powering through an intense post-production in August, submitting the film to the Sundance Film Festival, and then winning Sundance’s top award, the U.S. Grand Jury Prize, all in the span of 6 months. “I’m still a little breathless at everything that’s happening,” Jusu says.

Nikyatu Jusu on the set of "Nanny." Courtesy Nikyatu Jusu.
Nikyatu Jusu on the set of “Nanny.” Photo by Makeda Sandford.

Nanny teases out the pain and fear associated with leaving your home and your loved ones to create a new life abroad, as well as the relentless second-guessing of whether or not you’ve made the right decision. Aisha gets a job as a nanny with a family that initially seems sane, even ideal. There’s the liberal, hard-working mother Amy (Michelle Monaghan), her husband Adam (Morgan Spector), and their daughter Rose (Rose Decker). There’s the elegant Manhattan apartment. Yet it becomes clear that while Aisha is entrusted to take care of Rose and become a nominal part of the family, her life, her interiority, and her hopes and dreams for her own son back in Senegal are expected to be all but nonexistent. She’s a nanny, and her world is supposed to consist of being subservient to Amy, Morgan, and Rose.

“I remember going to class daily while at NYU and seeing these black and brown women pushing mostly white children in strollers in the city,” Jusu says. “It was like a visual manifestation of some of the domestic work my mom had done on and off in the south, growing up in Atlanta. It brought a tangible image to a story that had been percolating in my head about an African woman who’s a caregiver. I went down a rabbit hole of research about domestic workers in the city. I’ve always been curious about that exchange of labor, and what does it mean to inhabit somebody else’s home and raise their children, but still be undervalued. It’s such an important job with such high stakes, you’d think it would be treated with much reverence.”

Jusu began crafting the script over a period of roughly 8 years. “All of these themes were percolating, but I didn’t want to make a straightforward, preachy, pedantic 90-minute PSA,” she says. “I didn’t want to do a straightforward drama, either. I wanted to do something that felt a little more mainstream, a horror or a thriller. Those darker genres have always been intriguing to me. All of the filmmakers I admire—Lynne Ramsay, Boon Jong-Ho, Park Chan-work, Denis Villeneuve—utilize genre to get the audiences to feel empathy towards a character they wouldn’t normally pay attention to.”

Jusu’s crucial insight was incorporating supernatural characters from West African folklore to tease out Aisha’s growing desperation as she works for the increasingly demanding Amy. “Please, make this space yours,” Amy says to her nanny, a moment before handing her a binder full of rules and guidelines. Aisha’s visions—or visitations, depending upon your take—from Anansi the spider, a diminutive trickster whose quick wits help it best bigger rivals, and more terrifyingly, Mami Wata, a water spirit whose motives seem, on first blush, to be murderous, begin to pull at the threads of her sanity. The constant threat of deportment, let alone of never seeing her son again, create and nurture these nightmares.

The melding of genres—horror, psychological thriller, domestic drama—comes naturally to Jusu, who looks to the frequency with which her favorite foreign filmmakers deploy multiple genres to tell a single tale. “The goal was always a slow burn,” she says of the pacing for Nanny. “I had to almost hold my mom hostage to watch Parasite because so many people are conditioned to a barrage of stimuli, but what I loved about Parasite and Bong Joon H’s work, in general, is you get oriented to who these people are and their relationships. If you help me care about these people, I’ll go with you wherever you want to take me by the third act.”

Jusu was also aided by her work in Sundance’s screenwriting and directing labs, where she was paired with filmmakers who understood what she was driving at.

“I had mentors like director Karyn Kusama and screenwriter Michael Arndt, and their feedback was just so smart,” Jusu says. “I’m a voracious note-taker because I know I’m not processing in real-time. I had a color-coded system, I organized it all in Google Drive, and I kept getting the same notes in my early draft…my mythology and supernatural elements weren’t melding with my storyline, so I was challenged to make them cohesive. I dug into what those supernatural elements meant—like grief and depression—and I was able to cement that folklore in Aisha’s character arc. These mentors helped me ask myself what was activating these creatures and how did they impact the way Aisha acted.”

Creating the creatures was a major feat. Without a massive budget to spend on VFX, Jusu had to find ways to get the visions she had in her head, and on the page, onto the screen. That required scaling back some ambitions, but in that process she found that less was often more. She also turned to one of the absolute masters of creature features for inspiration.

“Guillermo del Toro is someone I studied deeply,” she says. “I went down a rabbit hole with his interviews and the way he approaches creature creation. Do I think what we ended up with is 100% translated from what I envisioned? No, but do I think it came out great? Absolutely? For example, I originally had this massive spider taking over the condo, but then I had to creatively pivot around this, and I realized it’s easy to make a large spider shadow if a small spider walks in front of a light source. Little concessions like that are part of the learning process. Then our mermaid figure was the most ambitious and hardest, both with CGI and practical effects, but everyone just came together to pull off these visual elements.”

Rigging the underwater scene for the Mami Wata sequence in "Nanny." Courtesy Nikyatu Jusu
Rigging the underwater scene for the Mami Wata sequence in “Nanny.” Photo by Makeda Sandford.

While Anansi the spider and Mami Wata the water spirit give terrifying life to Aisha’s internal struggles, the relationship between Aisha and her employer Amy is both highly believable and deliciously specific. Jusu says one of the ways she was able to get inside their dynamic was that she could relate to both characters.

“I think this whole girl boss/mom boss is tricky because patriarchy and feminism and the capitalist paradigm are complicated,” she says. “For a lot of women who are high achieving and want the perfect house and life, it’s very hard to balance all that, and something is going to crack. This system we’re all maneuvering in is not quite conducive to raising a family within a community. We’re all in these individual spaces hiding away, hiding our dysfunctions, in our little family. I know so many Amys, women who have this beautiful veneer on the outside but who are falling apart internally. Michelle [Monaghan] gave so much fat and tendon and texture to who Amy was because Amy could have easily been a caricature. All of these characters have pieces of me, from Amy to Aisha to Rose, so it was easy for me to try and write this woman. She and Aisha have a lot in common, actually. Everyone is suffering in different ways, and there’s no ideal to be reached. I just needed the right actors. “

The most important actor was, of course, Anna Diop, and Jusu fought hard to get her in the title role. Diop currently co-stars in Greg Berlanti and Akiva Goldsman’s superhero series Titans, so finding a way to get her to work on an ambitious indie film wasn’t easy, but both writer/director and star were committed to making it work.

“She possessed everything I could have imagined,” Jusu says. “I was worried about casting, this is the type of film that could easily fall apart in casting and execution, but Anna is so graceful and smart, and I think she’s been underutilized in this industry and I’m excited for people to see her depth and ability. She’s also Senagalese-American, she even has this distinct vaccination mark that West Africans have, including my mom and dad have it. And she was so passionate about getting the accent right.”

Jusu’s achievement in Nanny is such that the film and its many thematic, visual, and genre elements feel exquisitely balanced as the story churns towards its climax. Yet she’s happy to concede that she’s still learning a lot about her craft. The fact that she made her feature debut in the midst of a pandemic also added an extra degree of difficulty—and mortal dread—that she’ll hopefully never have to duplicate.

“We filmed this really intricate opening shot,” Jusu says, describing a single, flowing scene without any cuts, where the camera floats down a hallway and turns upside down. Her vision was to marry that opening to an equally intricate ending shot. “We ended up chopping it up and not even using that opening or ending,” she says. “That was something we figured out in the edit. This is what you learn as a feature director—don’t be too married to your style, and remember that the most important thing you have to do is to serve the story.”

Nanny is a riveting story you won’t soon forget, while Nikyatu Jusu’s story is only just beginning.

Featured image: Anna Diop in “Nanny.” Photo by Ian S. Takahashi.

Best of 2022: “The Woman King” DP Polly Morgan on Lensing Viola Davis in Gina Prince-Bythewood’s Thrilling Epic

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It’s that time of year—we look back on a few of our favorite interviews from 2022 in our annual year-end list.

A sweeping historical epic that blends intimacy and adventure is the kind of movie that The Woman King cinematographer Polly Morgan dreamed about making while growing up in West Sussex, England. 

“My earliest memories were Close Encounters and Empire of the Sun. Spielberg captured my imagination like many of my generation,” said Morgan over the phone from the Toronto International Film Festival, where The Woman King had its world premiere. “I knew I wanted to go to Hollywood. I didn’t even know what that meant; I just knew I wanted to go to the place where they make movies.” 

That’s just what Morgan has done. She’s worked nonstop for two decades in television and movies; earned an MFA from the American Film Institute; became the only woman member of both the British Society of Cinematographers (BSC) and the American Society of Cinematographers. Over the past two years, she shot A Quiet Place: Part II,  Where the Crawdads Sing, and now The Woman King, director Gina Prince-Bythewood’s historical epic set in 1823 in the real West African kingdom of Dahomey with Viola Davis as Nanisca, the leader of an army of women warriors called the Agojie, and John Boyega and King Ghezo who allows his own people and those of neighboring countries to be trafficked as slaves.

Viola Davis and John Boyega star in THE WOMAN KING.
Viola Davis and John Boyega star in THE WOMAN KING.

Morgan says although her recent films spam different genres, they share commonalities. “Even though A Quiet Place: Part II is a thriller-horror movie, it’s an intimate story of this family and their relationships with each other and dealing with the loss of their father. The Crawdads movie is really about a young woman abandoned by her family and the resilience she needed to survive. And [The Woman King] is a story of sisterhood and a mother and daughter. I’m drawn to something when I can feel a deep emotional core to a story. I like things to have some depth to them.”

Polly Morgan and Gina Prince Bythewood on the set of THE WOMAN KING
Polly Morgan and Gina Prince Bythewood on the set of THE WOMAN KING

She cites Nope cinematographer Hoyte Van Hoytema as an inspiration.  “When he came on the scene, I was amazed at what a chameleon he was, how he could float between genres and be a storyteller in films like Let The Right One In, The Fighter and Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, and it didn’t matter what types of movies he was doing. He was a storyteller.”

When she and Prince-Bythewood discussed the visual language for The Woman King, the director used the term “intimately epic,” recalled Morgan.  “How can we show this West African nation in a way that’s going to surprise people who think that Africa is just a dry and dusty continent? This country was rich and lush and gorgeous and full of color. It was an incredible environment. Also, how can we show the beauty of these women, their vulnerability, and how to capture the gloriousness that is black skin?

(First row L-R) Lashana Lynch, Viola Davis,Shelia Atim (Second row L-R ) Sisipho Mbopa , Lone Motsomi ,Chioma Umeala
(First row L-R) Lashana Lynch, Viola Davis,Shelia Atim
(Second row L-R )
Sisipho Mbopa , Lone Motsomi ,Chioma Umeala

We wanted [the film] to look gorgeous but authentic and real and not overly commercial and glossy. We wanted to be true to the genre of historical epics like Braveheart and Gladiator — visceral and with textures — but also true to the [time] period.”

Shooting in North and South Africa was difficult for many reasons, Morgan said. “It was challenging logistically with the weather, either rainy and muddy in the North or hot and windy in the South.” Then “a couple of weeks into production, suddenly sixty-five percent of the crew tested positive for Covid. We shut down for a couple of weeks, and some of us were terrified it would never get back up and running. But we did get back and finished in March 2022.”

Viola Davis and Lashana Lynch with young recruits in THE WOMAN KING.
Viola Davis and Lashana Lynch with young recruits in THE WOMAN KING.

Morgan admits she was concerned about shooting “huge sequences outside in the African sun. How was I going to control the light; how was I going to take care of these women and highlight the beauty of their skin and make them look good, especially with such a tight schedule? I had to be clever and lucky. And Gina supported what I needed.” 

Besides epic adventure movies, Morgan studied classical paintings for inspiration. “I looked at artists like Rembrandt and Caravaggio who used firelight, and I looked at how the light plays on the faces and [creates] shadows. I also studied Flemish painters like van Dyck whose images show natural light through a window,” she said. Morgan and Prince-Bythewood wanted to use light to show the contrast of a beautiful place rendered ugly by the slave trade. “We wanted the audience to feel a difference between that environment and the beauty of Dahomey,” Morgan said.

Viola Davis stars in THE WOMAN KING.
Lashana Lynch stars in THE WOMAN KING.
Lashana Lynch stars in THE WOMAN KING.

The creative team, led by production designer Akin McKenzie, did “massive amounts of research,” said Morgan. “Our phenomenal production head Akin McKenzie dug deep to find documents written by European traders who had actually visited the place at that time. They’d come home and write accounts about seeing the Agojie women, about meeting Ghezo, and how Dahomey was a kingdom full of riches like gold. There’s photographic evidence as well, [such as] King Ghezo wearing a top hat and shiny black shoes that had been a gift to him as a trade for human life. We wanted the movie to be authentic, so we soaked up this information. Everything is based on real research.”

Viola Davis and Thuso Mbedu star in THE WOMAN KING
Viola Davis and Thuso Mbedu star in THE WOMAN KING

Throughout the production, Morgan was motivated to combine historical epic with rousing entertainment and “set a relatable story within those moments to educate about what life was like. It’s refreshing these days to have a movie like this in contrast to the superhero movies being made,” she said. “This is a true, authentic environment and an amazing cinematic story, but what makes it memorable and so strong is that we all get to learn a little history that we didn’t know before. It’s a story that needed to be told.”

 

The Woman King hits theaters on theaters September 16.

Featured image: Viola Davis in “The Woman King.” Courtesy Sony Pictures.

 

Best of 2022: Getting Sea Sick With “Triangle of Sadness” Production Designer Josefin Åsberg

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It’s that time of year—we look back on a few of our favorite interviews from 2022 in our annual year-end list.

Satirical black comedy Triangle of Sadness, writer/director Ruben Östlund’s first English-language feature, debuted at the 2022 Cannes Film Festival, where it won the Palme d’Or. The Swedish auteur is known for 2014’s Force Majeure and The Square, which in 2017 also won the Palme d’Or and was nominated for a Best Foreign Language Film Oscar. 

Triangle of Sadness, like Östlund’s previous films, examines classism and the decadence of the famous and the ultra-rich. It is broken into three segments. The first centers on high fashion models Carl (Harris Dickinson) and Yaya (Charlbi Dean), and how their relationship is impacted by Carl’s dimming value as a male model and Yaya’s greater financial success. The second follows Carl and Yaya’s travels on a super yacht helmed by a Marxist captain (Woody Harrelson). The night of the captain’s haute cuisine dinner, a dangerous storm wreaks havoc on the stomachs of the yacht guests and the yacht itself. The third and last segment takes place on a remote island, where survivors from the yacht find themselves in a new class hierarchy, in which the yacht’s domestic manager Abigail (Dolly de Leon), the only one among them who knows how to fish or start a fire, reigns supreme. 

Production designer Josefin Åsberg, Östlund’s longtime collaborator, had a lot to consider in her job of designing the look and feel of the film. Not least was how to realistically present a yacht with environments befitting the elite and ultra-rich. She also had to make the copious amount of vomit and sewage flowing at the crescendo of the yacht scenes as believable as they were gross. Of course, The Credits, just like you, wanted to know all about that.

 

There are three distinct sections to the film. The first one has stark contrasts in parts, which seems to be very intentional. It’s very white, but at one point the characters are splashed with bright paint, so it’s a bit of an introduction and preparing you for the second segment.  

It partly took place in the fashion world. It’s quite limited in the sense that it’s a hotel, a catwalk, and auditions. We wanted to make it visually of a piece with the rest of the film. We didn’t want it to look totally different from the rest. Other than the bright splashes, it’s very discreet, color-wise. It’s very subdued. 

In terms of the yacht in section two, Ruben Östlund is quoted as saying that you had incredible detail in your production design. What considerations did you have, both in terms of how super yachts look and how their opulence relates to the story?

We knew we were looking for a quite classic yacht. I took the measurements for the windows from the actual yacht for the set in the studio, but then I was quite free to design the interiors. We made the dining room with the area outside, the corridors with the cabins with the toilets and bathrooms. We also wanted to control the movement because the bad weather increases during the captain’s dinner, so it was also a lot of fun to plan and think about ideas. We tested different angles on a small gimbal. When does it start to get difficult to walk? When do things start to slide? We build the set two meters up on a hydraulic platform; then, we could control having slight movement in the beginning, and then as the chaos comes closer and closer, we can make it more and more intense.

Dining room set – courtesy Tobias Henriksson.

Let’s talk about the captain’s dinner. How did you decide what kind of foods to use and how that would relate to the seasickness that takes over the diners? 

Regarding the food, we knew it should, at first, not look disgusting. For example, with oysters, if you’re not seasick, they’re great. Then we wanted to add some green syrup or something that looked a little bit odd. If you’re seasick, you’re so sensitive. We also had this huge octopus arm with big suckers.  

That’s when it starts going off the rails.

Yeah. That octopus looks almost like a burnt arm. Octopus is tasty if you’re on land, but when you’re seasick, it’s the worst food you could have. At the same time, we didn’t want to make it too much like a joke. We had a fine dining chef. We discussed with him how food might look in a very high-caliber restaurant. Maybe put some flowers on it so it looks elegant and tasty. Actually, we originally planned for three dishes, but on the morning of the shoot, I met with Ruben, we stayed in the same hotel and had breakfast, and he said it would be fun if we could add five more dishes. 

When things are about to go off the rails in "Triangle of Sadness." Courtesy of Neon.
When things are about to go off the rails in “Triangle of Sadness.” Courtesy of Neon.

Did you have to consider, as a production designer, what food would create the most interesting or artistic vomit? 

You could see the looks whenever the next dish is arriving. They’re presenting them, like, “da da da dah!” taking away the cloche, and the diners can’t stand it. We made a lot of tests of the puke, depending on the character. This is a character that loves red wine, which would make the puke a little bit pink. With another who loves champagne, it’s more frothy. Then maybe we put some pieces of an octopus or some shrimp or something. There were some fun discussions regarding this whole scene. When we made a test, at first, we didn’t have any carpet in the dining room, but then all the furniture came sliding when the rocking was starting to get really bad and crescendo. We decided it would be too much. It’s intense as it is, with the food and the puke. If everyone is also sliding, then it would be too much. I said, “Let’s have a white carpet.” That’s much more painful if someone pukes on a white carpet. We also looked at the different colors for the sh*t when the toilets explode.

When things go off the rails in "Triangle of Sadness." Courtesy of Neon.
When things go off the rails in “Triangle of Sadness.” Courtesy of Neon.

It’s certainly a very particular look, where there can be no question of what is covering the floors of the yacht.

We did a test with a toilet in the studio. At first, they made it a little bit too orange, so it looked a little bit too much like the puke. Then it was a little bit too dark brown, so we had to work on it a while. It also was like whole systems are in collapse, so then it needs to have water mixing in because it’s raw sewage and ocean water. At first, somebody scheduled that scene on the second shooting week. I said, “That’s not possible; of course, an exploding toilet system needs to be the last day of the shoot.” 

The bathroom set in "The Triangle of Sadness." Courtesy Neon.
The bathroom set in “The Triangle of Sadness.” Courtesy Neon.

What’s great about that scene is the metaphor about everything breaking down. It has to be that intense and over the top. 

It was like the end of the human being. Everything is breaking down. At the same time as all the puking and sewage, the captain is repeating, “The ship is going under. The ship is going under.” Everything visually and in the script is combined into a catastrophe. 

The third segment is on an island with the elite as castaways. How did you approach that? 

We found this beach in Greece. It was a nudist beach at the end of a small beach town. We were there after all the tourists had left. We cleaned the beach and added a lot of greenery. W discussed how clean the beach needed to be and how many big tree branches we needed. We wanted to have plastic chairs or things that look like they came on the yacht and floated onto the beach. It’s never clear where they are. Are they in Europe? Are they on a Pacific coast island? We wanted it to be unspecific. We didn’t need to add tropical greenery. It was not a jungle, but we needed to make it feel like it was someplace a luxury yacht would go, like a quite nice island. 

As the production designer on the film, what are you most proud of that viewers might not notice but you know really works? 

I’d say the fact that a lot of the scenes on the yacht are filmed in a studio. The goal is for audiences not to notice and just feel it is part of the story, not set apart. There’s the platform two meters up that allows for the rocking in the storm at sea, all in the studio, and when I tell people, they can’t imagine that. That makes me very proud. 

The yacht set with blue screen. Courtesy Neon.
The yacht set with blue screen. Courtesy Neon.

 

Triangle of Sadness is in select theaters and available for rent or purchase on Vudu and Prime Video.  

 

 

Featured image: L-r: Charlbi Dean and Harris Dickinson in “Triangle of Sadness.” Courtesy Neon.