Based on a 2016 short story by Alexander Weinstein, After Yang, directed by South Korean-born American filmmaker Kogonada, explores a new take on sci-fi’s eternal Turing question: Can a robot have a soul? Do androids dream?

“A lot of times when a story deals with this kind of subject matter, it’s about an AI wanting to be human,” the director told Deadline. “But in this case, it’s about a human trying to make sense of the loss and value of a non-human being.”

READ MORE: How ‘After Yang’ Director Kogonada Explored The Hidden Stories Of A Sci-Fi Drama: “I’m Often Curious About The People In The Background” (Deadline)

The film stars Colin Farrell as Jake, the father of an adopted Chinese girl who buys an android named Yang to teach his daughter about Asian culture. But when the android breaks, Jake finds himself considering more than just the cost of repair.

“It’s not a science-fiction film that’s concerned with hovercraft and lasers and space travel,” Farrell says in the film’s production notes. “It’s grounded in a world that should be recognizable to all of us. We talked about it being on the brink of some cataclysmic global climate event, which led a return to a hybrid of urban and rural. It had taken hold within the cities of the world, where people had started growing their own crops on rooftops.”

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Uniquely for a film set decades from now, After Yang takes place mostly in a family’s home: around the kitchen table, in low-lit bedrooms and hallways. This lo-fi aesthetic, reminiscent of Jean-Luc Goddard’s Alphaville (1965) by way of Alex Garland’s Ex Machina is part of what makes the film so appealing.

More than one article on the production’s design has pointed out Kogonada’s use of “geometric shapes, stacked boxes, and asymmetrical lines to add warmth and definition to the family’s open floor plan.” Slashfilm notes.

“He also uses meticulous composition and deliberate blocking to enhance the characters and their journeys; in one deep focus shot that takes place in a dimly lit, backroom chop shop, Jake steps from the farthest reaches of the frame into darkness in the foreground as he tacitly agrees to continue down the path he’s on.”

READ MORE: After Yang Review: Kogonada’s Sci-Fi Sophomore Feature Finds Beauty In The Ordinary (Slashfilm)

Kogonada, who made the equally exquisite 2017 indie Columbus, “loves a wide shot that reveals the architecture of his spaces, allowing characters to creep into the frame almost surreptitiously,” purrs Thrillist. “It’s a style that matches the way Konogada unravels the layers of Yang’s history, opening up doors that Jake and Kyra never knew existed… Like Columbus, After Yang uses minimalism and architectural spaces to craft a detailed, serene, and lush atmosphere that feels immensely warm despite appearing to be cold and distant at first glance.”

READ MORE: ‘After Yang’ Is a Stunning Sci-Fi Fable About Identity and Humanity (Thrillist)

Cinematographer Benjamin Loeb (Mandy, Pieces of a Woman), recalls bonding with the director over their mutual love of medium and wide shots, especially those by the master Japanese filmmaker Yasujiro Ozu.

“We talked a lot about the relationship between emotions, human beings, and space,” he says in the film’s notes. “I’ve been in a lot of situations where a director will say, ‘This is an emotional moment so we need to be close on the face so we can see the eyes,’” Loeb says. “To the contrary, that actually harms the scene in some ways. Body language, emptiness, clutter — that’s really how my conversations with Kogonada sparked.”

Loeb reveals he was a late addition to the film’s production, telling Filmmaker Magazine that in a phone interview with Kogonada “we spoke for hours about everything but the movie. We connected on the topic of emptiness or absence in cinema, as well as space and its relationships to human beings and how it relates to emotions. I think we both just felt like this was a conversation we wanted to keep having, and the next week I was hired.”

READ MORE: “You Have to Become Vulnerable With Your Director Before You Can Go On Set”: DP Benjamin Loeb on After Yang (Filmmaker Magazine)

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After Yang delicately observes the relationship between humanity and technology. In this world, advanced technology, like self-driving vehicles and “techno-sapien” androids robots purchased as live-in babysitters, and nature have been weaved together to create a space where androids and humans can coexist. Here, people aren’t only dependent on technology, but literally consider it to be vital members of a family.

By all accounts Kogonada enjoys an encyclopedic love of movies and has previously crafted short essay-films, many of which can be found in the supplemental features of the Criterion Collection, focusing on directors as varied as Wes Anderson, Terrence Malick, Darren Aronofsky, Hirokazu Kore-eda and Federico Fellini.

In After Yang, he buried some easter eggs for just for cinephiles. Among them: Jake quotes a passage from an obscure 2007 documentary, All in This Tea, directed by Les Blank and Gina Leibrecht, during which Farrell gives a Werner Herzog impression.

“Colin actually has a top-shelf-level impersonation of Herzog that he determined he had to bring down a notch, because someone like Jake wouldn’t have it,” Kogonada reveals. “It’s his half-Herzog.”

A recurring song in the film is “Glide” from 2001 cult Japanese film All About Lily Chou-Chou, while a theme by Oscar-winning composer Ryuichi Sakamoto (The Last Emperor) forms part of the score.

He also tonally references Ozu’s classic Tokyo Story, saying, “One of the many things I love about [the film] is that it’s partly about the devastation of the city after the firebombings of World War II. 100,000 dead. A million homeless. None of this devastation is ever mentioned, nor do we see much of postwar Tokyo. But the film is haunted by a profound sense of loss. It’s a ghost story disguised as a family drama.”

Want more? Watch the creative team and cast behind After Yang in a panel discussion about the making of the film moderated by Variety’s Brent Lang for the Variety Studio Sundance series:

Director Kogonada speaks with USC robotics professor and AI expert Maja Matarić at the 2022 Sloan Film Summit about the reality, fantasy, and speculation within the After Yang:

You can also watch Kogonada discuss the making of his film at the American Film Institute:

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We’re all familiar with Gordon Ramsay’s Hell’s Kitchen, but Boiling Point aims to shine a light on mental health and addiction in the hospitality industry. It does so in a feature length one-take kitchen drama starring Stephen Graham as the harassed chef with a simmering temper.

As a former head chef, director Philip Barantini knows the industry all too well. “I worked in kitchens for 12 years prior to filmmaking and I knew this world was ripe to explore on film,” he told IBC365. “My idea was for the story to be set in a kitchen and for it to be erratic and fast paced with overlapping dialogue. I could picture it all in my head, how the characters should move.”

The budget indie film was also set in the same London eatery where Barantini used to work. The feature arose from a short film on the same topic, also called Boiling Point and starring Graham, which won the filmmakers a British Independent Film Award.

Not all shorts, though, necessarily translate into a 90-minute feature, let alone one that requires the DP to operate with a camera strapped to them for the duration of the production.

“We did that as a proof of concept to see if it was going to work — the last thing we wanted was a gimmick,” Barantini explains. “The idea to do a ‘one-er’ was to create an extra layer of tension and intensity to this world. We didn’t want it to become the spectacle.”

The DP in question is Matthew Lewis, who also lensed the short film. “But, the prep, logistics and practical co-ordination were pretty mind-boggling, and following the action with the camera through multiple rehearsals and actual takes was physically-demanding,” he shared with Cinematography World.

Lewis worked with London camera house Focus24 for several months in advance of the shoot to develop an “Easirig” camera system that would enable agile movement as well as seamless recording of the long take.

“We ran through the camera moves and story beats with our cast for two weeks, and then did two full rehearsals before the actual shoot itself, by which time I knew the camera path off by heart,” says Lewis, who was supported by grip Will Anderson.

A reloader, dressed as a guest, swapped memory cards in the camera, an operation the director describes as “like a Formula One” style pitstop, as he told British Cinematographer.

Those cards were going into a Sony VENICE digital cinema camera, which Lewis liked not only because there were two card ports, but because the company’s Rialto extension system allowed the sensor to live several feet away from the camera, with no loss of image quality, literally taking more weight off his shoulders.

The final camera and body rig combination also included a Zeiss Supreme 29mm lens and remote focus mechanism, a Pancro Mitchell D-strength diffusion filter, two Transvideo Starlite HD monitors pitched at 45 degrees, a Teradek Bolt 3000 XT transmitter, and two 150W batteries — which came in at 10 kilograms, all told. Lewis’ 1st AC, James Woodbridge, pulled focus remotely using a ARRI WCU-4 hand unit.

Cinematography World describes how Jem Balls were used to illuminate the exterior sequences, while the interiors were illuminated using carefully-concealed RGB Quasar tubes, Tungsten Fresnels and existing practicals refitted with LED bulbs by gaffer Max Hodgkinson.

Several areas, including some of the dining tables, were lit from above with dimmable Tungsten softboxes. The lighting on these could be heightened while the surrounding ambient light was lowered to deliver a subtle vignette to the image for key moments. The lighting and power package was provided by Pixipixel.

Photography was scheduled for four consecutive nights with two takes each night at 10:00 PM and 2:00 AM in March 2020. Inevitably, COVID intervened, meaning the production could only shoot for two nights, or four takes.

“It had a remarkable galvanizing effect, and everyone focused their energies towards getting the emotion on-screen,” Lewis said. “We shot four takes, but it was the third that became the final film. I’m glad that we wrapped when we did, as I think I’d have been a wreck after a further four takes.”

READ MORE: British DP Matthew Lewis pulls-off a one-shot wonder for Philip Barantini’s award-winning Boiling Point (Cinematography World)

Lewis told IBC365 that he aimed to create a constant flow between characters so you never feel like the camera is wandering by itself; a criticism that could be levelled at the Oscar-winning single-shot drama Birdman (2014).

“As soon as you notice a camera walking down a corridor trying to find something you get pulled out of the story,” he says. “You’ve got to keep the action busy. It was lassoing to someone and swinging around to someone else — like pinballing between people to distract the audience from the one take. As much as I want people to be raving about it, I’d be really concerned if they were and not talking about the story.”

READ MORE: Behind The Scenes: Boiling Point (IBC365)

An additional trick was to avoid inadvertently winding up in the film himself, especially given the shiny kitchen environment.

It did happen once, he revealed to BritCine: “I do show up in the bathroom,” a women’s bathroom, where a hair dryer caught his reflection, but, he adds, “the VFX guys managed to get rid of me.”

READ MORE: Matthew Lewis / Boiling Point (British Cinematographer)

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You could argue that the moment digital camera sensors started to see as well or better than the human eye was when true naturalistic lighting was born. Lighting was just as important as ever but could now, with impunity, supplement and sculpt what nature was already providing.

A lot has happened to directors Lana and Lilly Wachowski since 1999’s The Matrix. This includes their attitude towards in-camera capture, which they now strive for more of. For Matrix Resurrections, director Lana Wachowski discovered her liking for capturing more of what was in front of her.

Cinematographer Daniele Massaccesi explains how she got there, “I remember the first part of Cloud Atlas was on a ship on the open sea, dealing with a rotating boat and the sun. At first, it felt a little bit like losing control. But then, we loved it, because what you get with the sun, it’s unique,” he said.

“Then, there was more change between Cloud Atlas and the first season of Sense8. It was a big step forward. More was on-set, unplanned, just figuring out what would look good without thinking too much. Going with the flow or a feeling. You sense what you feel is right in that moment, because you can’t always predict. You need to grab whatever is there.”

Cinematographer John Toll, who shot Matrix Resurrection’s US scenes, had heard that Wachowski had credited him with her new appreciation of sunlight. “It means she appreciated my approach to day exterior sequences,” he surmised.

“I had quite a bit of experience photographing films with extended sequences taking place in exterior environments. These were accomplished most successfully by taking advantage of the position of the sun and the time of day when we shot.

“As far as the shooting style of Resurrections, I think everything was a modified extension of this idea. Day or night, interior or exterior, we attempted to provide lighting that supported the story, but was based on the natural ‘feel’ of the environments the characters found themselves in.”

To bring this new appreciation of “capturing what you’re seeing” to such a large and long-awaited franchise completion movie was certainly a challenge. Massaccesi described the finer details of the shoot in an interview for the RED Digital Cinema website.

“We knew we had to cater for significant VFX, but Lana also wanted to shoot as much in-camera as she could,” says Massaccesi. “In addition, she has evolved the way she shoots movies and prefers to use Steadicam a lot of the time to feel more involved in the creation of the story on set. Pausing to reload film reels would just delay the creative efficiency.

READ MORE: Behind the Look: Matrix Resurrections (RED Digital Cinema)

Massaccesi explained to IndieWire how that manifested itself on set. “I quickly realized she was always behind me, her hands on my shoulders, whispering in my ear.

“We began to build this relationship where I could tell just by the movement of her fingers what she wanted me to do. We didn’t even need to talk, and it made it easier to grab those moments, those accidents, because she was right there with me.”

That communication made Massaccesi’s transition from operator to cinematographer relatively smooth (Toll had decided not to travel to Europe with the production due to COVID). “Even when I was operating we always talked about the lighting, because it would affect where we moved with the camera,” he explained, “and she was very, very supportive of me even though we all knew this was going to be a difficult shoot.”

READ MORE: ‘The Matrix Resurrections’: Inside How Lana Wachowski Changed the Franchise’s Visual Approach (IndieWire)

The tonal look of the original The Matrix was green to mimic corporate computer screens of the time, while the real world was given an inhospitable, drab blue tinge.

“This time our look for the Matrix world is more colorful, like a postcard, while the depiction of the real world remains cooler and darker with more contrast,” Massaccesi detailed to IBC365. “In Resurrections, the Matrix has been designed so humans in the real world find the simulacra to be believable. It is therefore photoreal and full of color.”

READ MORE: Behind the Scenes of Lana Wachowski’s The Matrix Resurrections (IBC365)

Speaking to the Motion Picture Association’s The Credits, Massaccesi detailed the camera techniques deployed to capture in-camera imagery for a sequence set in a motorcycle shop featuring two characters moving at different speeds.

“We had a 3D rig, with one camera shooting eight frames a second, one shooting 120 frames,” Massaccesi said about achieving the effect. In the background, everything was “happening at normal speed,” but with each camera trained on a different character, each “had completely different looks,” or at least movement speeds, making it easier to “combine the different cameras” during the VFX stage.

This proved to be such an effective approach that the production was able to complete what had planned as a 112-day shoot in less than 90 days. “We finished in 88 days. Warner Brothers pulled the movie to release earlier,” he said.

READ MORE: “The Matrix Resurrections” Cinematographer Daniele Massaccesi on His Leap of Faith (The Credits)

While VFX supervisor Dan Glass needed to work to find the right place for the CG in this new in-camera shooting regime, it was obviously no less important than in the original film. “I think probably the most daunting component was ensuring that the CG content lived up to the bar that had been elevated by the physical production. The way this film was shot, it’s very rich in detail and almost more documentary in style than the earlier movies.

https://youtu.be/kxvi-bykz7U

“It’s fitting that Lana’s process has evolved to one that really focuses on trying to capture natural light in real world locations. This film looks and feels different from the first films, and for story relevant reasons. It’s part of a continuing story, but one that is intentionally a departure visually and I hope people will find that exciting about it — it is deliberately not trying to be what is most expected.”

Glass was looking for complete integration of the CG in to the way the movie was shot but it had its challenges. “In many instances, we had to cut up or combine filmed layers and frequently paint things out, but a completely natural sense of integration comes from that approach.”

Conversely, the challenge with evolving the heavily CG content was finding ways to design and light those shots so that Lana could participate and guide in a similar manner to her photographic process. For that Glass looked to the latest type of production techniques.

“Some of the new virtual production technologies are very exciting, because they bring the virtual and photographic techniques tangibly closer.”

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For the greatest actor of the 21st century — a title The New York Times has bestowed on Denzel Washington — the chance to continue his Shakespearian journey with Macbeth was met with relish by the 67-year-old, who is now left with only King Lear to play.

But while this was to be no stage play, no excursion to Scotland was planned for a lengthy movie recreation. Instead, a Burbank soundstage was booked and an abstract telling of the treacherous tale was proposed.

InsideHook’s Daniel Egan had it right when he described what director Joel Coen and his team has produced. “With The Tragedy of Macbeth, director Joel Coen and cinematographer Bruno Delbonnel cracked a code that has baffled filmmakers for decades. They capture the immediacy of theater and the intimacy of film, all in a square, black-and-white box. It’s a spiky, fleet-footed version of Shakespeare that communicates directly to viewers.”

READ MORE: How Joel Coen and Bruno Delbonnel Breathed New Life Into “Macbeth,” 400 Years Later (InsideHook)

Cohen would never be a willing participant to a pure theatrical retelling of the story, “I wouldn’t know what to do” he said to his wife’s — Frances McDormand — idea a few years before. She went ahead and did it anyway, although returns here to play Lady Macbeth.

“Theater is abstract to begin with,” Joel Coen explains about choosing an approach to the movie. “When you do something in black and white, it’s instantly abstracted, you’ve already abstracted the image. But you’ve abstracted it in a way that is also immediately intelligible to everybody.

“The ambition for myself and for Bruno,” he told American Cinematographer, “without really knowing how to go about doing it — was to preserve the ‘play’-ness of Macbeth, but still make something that is, moment by moment [and] in every way, designed for a camera. That was the starting point, [but] conceptually we were groping around in the darkness, going: ‘Okay, what does that mean? How do we do it?’

“The last thing we were interested in doing was a realistic adaptation of the play: you know, renting a castle in Scotland and people riding around on the heath, that sort of thing….”

READ MORE: The Tragedy of Macbeth: Palace Intrigue (American Cinematographer)

One of the initial questions was how to put the theatrical form inside a film, as Delbonnel explains to IBC365. “We arrived at the idea of a ‘haiku’; to strip everything down to essentials, taking out all ornaments. Then we started to think about applying that idea to the form, the narrative, the set.

“We tried to reduce spaces to their purest simplicity, just like a haiku. We would ask, ‘What is a room?’ It’s four walls, a door, a window, and nothing else. We sought the simplest forms of a staircase, a corridor, a wall. There is almost no furniture in Macbeth’s castle.

“We also wanted to include some of the artifice of the theater, like painted backdrops in exteriors, and having no ceilings in interiors. We wanted this sobriety to avoid the image competing with Shakespeare’s poetry, to leave room for his text.

“But I didn’t want to be ‘nostalgic’ about old black-and-white movies. Quite the opposite: I was looking for the intensity that a very sharp image gives to close-ups. We used large format because I wanted to get a very sharp 4K image.

“The choice of black and white was a way to help to support the visual language,” concludes Delbonnel, who shot in color on ARRI Alexa LF with Cooke S7 lenses and converted to monochrome in post.

READ MORE: Behind The Scenes: The Tragedy of Macbeth (IBC365)

Delbonnel told Joe McGovern at The Wrap that “a play feels more like a movie when it’s shot in black-and-white,” and that he and Coen were guided in the decisions around contrast by the bard himself.

“Following Shakespeare’s lines motivated the decisions we made and helped us to pick the best moments,” he explained. “The sudden move to more contrast would be more powerful.”

Coen and Delbonnel took tips on contrast from German Expressionism as well as Orson Welles’ 1948 Macbeth and Akira Kurosawa’s 1957 adaptation Throne of Blood.

READ MORE: Why ‘The Tragedy of Macbeth’ Cinematographer Grew Superstitious While Making the Black-and-White Drama (The Wrap)

Variety’s Jazz Tangcay says references also came from the austerity of director Carl Theodor Dreyer, Charles Laughton’s influential 1955 noir The Night of the Hunter. Production designer Stefan Dechant collaborated closely with the cinematographer, who started prepping with Coen almost 18 months before shooting began.

Dechant said he favored texture over color, creating shapes and differentiating the environments made up of simple blocks and structures with Gothic arches. Everything was to be geometric without a lot of embellishment. To enhance the arches, Dechant said he darkened them and painted shadow lines, always turning to Delbonnel for final approval. All ornamentations were removed — there were no carpets, no torches and no flashy chandeliers.

Costume designer Mary Zophres followed Dechant’s idea of clean lines with little embellishment in her designs, choosing textured pieces and fabrics. She kept her palette simple.

“In black and white you can use a multitude of colors to create depth,” she said. “But Coen and Delbonnel felt strongly that it had to work in person. Joel didn’t want magentas and purples. He wanted something calming and soothing and not something that was a distraction on set.”

READ MORE: ‘Tragedy of Macbeth’ Artisans on How They Delivered Joel Coen’s Shadowy Study of Ambition (Variety)

Coen found a staunch ally in Delbonnel, according to IndieWire’s Jim Hemphill, as the cinematographer and director worked to cut down the decorative elements as much as possible.

However, the exteriors, recreated on soundstages on the Warner Brothers lot as painted backdrops, are far more sumptuous.

“We thought that the theatricality of a painted sky was more interesting than trying to create a sky later in post, so we embraced old-fashioned technology,” explained Delbonnel. “If you look at The Grapes of Wrath, there’s a beautiful shot at the beginning where Henry Fonda is walking on a road and you know it’s on stage — everything is fake and it’s absolutely gorgeous.”

In The Tragedy of Macbeth, exteriors also benefit from the decision to shoot in the almost square Academy aspect ratio — particularly stunning when viewed on a vertically oriented IMAX screen. That wasn’t the only reason, as Delbonnel revealed: “We wanted to focus on the rhythm of Shakespeare’s language and the power of the lines, and there is nothing better for close-ups and establishing the presence of the actor on screen than the Academy frame.

“If you think about the same scene in anamorphic, you have a lot of air on both sides, which for us would have been counterproductive. You’d see the sets, when what we really wanted to see was the face filling the frame as much as possible,” Delbonnel added.

Although meticulously storyboarded and shot-listed, in common with other Coen films, Delbonnel said that he was still able to give the actors freedom of movement thanks to the way he lit the sets. “For example, in what we called the oculus room, where Macbeth talks to the murderers and there’s a big shaft of light in the middle, I basically told Denzel Washington he could feel free to go wherever he wanted, because I could see him anywhere,” Delbonnel recalled. “He could play with the light, and sometimes he’d be in silhouette.”

What did limit freedom however, was the arrival of COVID-19 in the middle of production. Ironically, filming on the “cursed play” had to shut down on Friday the 13th in March of 2020. “When we came back four months later to resume shooting, the restrictions were so severe that I couldn’t change anything,” adds Delbonnel. “I had to go with what I had rigged before COVID.”

READ MORE: ‘The Tragedy of Macbeth’ Cinematographer Bruno Delbonnel Turned Shakespeare Into a Visual Haiku (IndieWire)

Deadline’s Matt Grobar says the French cinematographer is really interested in formal ideas and conceptual ideas. “More than light, in some ways,” said Delbonnel. “So, if you have a director saying, ‘How can we think about theatricality and avoid being a play, but still being Shakespeare?’, it’s a conceptual thing I’m ready to think about.”

The DP, currently prepping a film he’ll shoot for Alfonso Cuarón, looked to put his own stamp on the classic story. “We didn’t compete with Kurosawa and Polanski, or Orson Welles. It’s not a competition,” he said.

READ MORE: Bruno Delbonnel On ‘The Tragedy Of Macbeth’s Cinematography (Deadline)

But what of the 400-year-old language itself? Even though this is a slight adaptation of the original words, the rhythm of the iambic pentameter remains. How would Cohen appease the oncoming Shakespearean rebuttals?

During a Q&A for the DGA in New York, moderated by director Noah Baumbach, Coen accepted that some modern audiences might be distracted by some of the archaic remnants. “In one respect it is a foreign language,” he agreed. “But if you just listen to the music of, it you don’t need to understand everything and it is accessible to everyone.

“I think this succeeds to a greater or lesser extent,” he continued. “The text is edited so this is only about maybe 80% of the actual words in the play. What Shakespeare does in lots of scenes is he makes a dramatic point and then he elaborates.”

Coen says it’s this elaboration that sometimes get lost in the language, so he has to some degree stripped it out in his version. “It just moves along and that hopefully gives the play a sort of propulsion that it doesn’t always have on stage,” he added.

READ MORE: ‘Director Joel Coen discusses The Tragedy of Macbeth’ (Directors Guild of America)

His main concern was boiling down the text without reducing its identity. “I wanted to do Shakespeare for people who don’t want to see Shakespeare, or who might even be intimidated by it,” he told The Guardian’s Peter Bradshaw. “But I wanted to preserve the power of the text, because that’s the melody of the thing — and I wanted to figure out how to get the rhythm that goes relentlessly through the whole thing like a murder movie.”

READ MORE: ‘A post-menopausal Macbeth’: Joel Coen on tackling Shakespeare with Frances McDormand (The Guardian)

The Tragedy of Macbeth is the first major motion picture to be directed by one of the Coen brothers without the other’s involvement.

Adam Bentz on ScreenRant reports a source close to the Coen brothers saying that Ethan will no longer be making movies in order to focus on his work as a playwright.

READ MORE: Joel Coen Opens Up About Directing Without Brother Ethan After 35+ Years (ScreenRant)

Coen admitted to Deadline’s Mike Fleming, Jr. that he missed his sibling many times on this production, but added, “doing Shakespeare is probably something that Ethan wouldn’t have been as interested in doing.”

However Coen feels that “the Scottish play” prefigures so many tropes of American popular entertainment, dramatic and literary entertainment, “all things which are very sort of close to my heart and my history in terms of things that I’ve been making over the last 35-40 years with my brother can be found in this play.”

With Denzel Washington at age 66 during production, a notable difference in this adaptation was the ages of the titular character and his infamous spouse, played by Frances McDormand.

Interviewed alongside her husband, McDormand says the choice of Washington as Macbeth “couldn’t have been more perfect.”

“There aren’t many actors, contemporaries of my age, that could handle the character but also who consistently does theater the way Denzel does,” she added.

Coen, “not a Shakespearean scholar in any respect,” admits that Macbeth is usually cast younger, but “it was very much part of the conception from the beginning.”

In fact, he saw age giving the play an interesting dimension. “Fran and I were older at that point, and the way to think about it was in terms of your own life and your own experience.

“Time is all over this play; the obsession with the passage of time, Macbeth’s obsession with the fact that he may be king but his heirs won’t be kings,” he added. “The obsession with the future is very much a part of the play, and when you start to think about all those things which Shakespeare weaves into the play about time, and then you add the dimension of the fact that the couple is not a young couple but an older couple, it takes on different colors.”

McDormand said a certain line in the play “jumped out” in terms of Lady Macbeth being post-menopausal. “The fact that they cannot produce children and that they hadn’t successfully kept a child alive seemed to be a real part of the depth of their sorrow,” she said. “My idea was that Lady Macbeth’s job was to produce an heir. That’s her political job, that would be her job, as queen. And because she can’t get him that, she can help get him the crown. She can at least give him the crown. Also, it’s going to keep her alive.”

Still on the subject of time, the film adapts a short play into a shorter film. As well as revealing the shoot lasted barely over a month, Coen said that he abridged the story not just for concision but also for pace.

“What Shakespeare does a lot is he constructs a scene that has a dramatic point,” he explained. “If you’re making a thriller, you want it to march along at a really terrific pace. To me that was a way of involving more and more people in the story who don’t normally go and see Shakespeare.”

Another difference is the translation of Macbeth’s soliloquies into conversation. Traditionally in movie adaptations the soliloquy is presented as a voice-over.

“I wanted to adapt it into the context of the scene,” Coen explained. “Most of Macbeth’s soliloquies, not all of them, are about information that actually one other character in the play knows about, and it doesn’t matter if it’s shared with that person, and that’s Lady Macbeth. So, some of those soliloquies got wrapped into scenes with Lady Macbeth where he’s actually speaking those things to her.”

READ MORE: Frances McDormand & Joel Coen Answer All Questions On Eve Of New York Film Festival Opener ‘The Tragedy Of Macbeth’ (Deadline)

At 105 minutes, this is a shorter Macbeth movie than most, But NPR’s Justin Chang feels the story of Macbeth’s murderous rise to power is told with “ruthless concentration.”

As well as praising Coen and Delbonnel’s use of monochrome and the Academy Framing, Chang highlights Carter Burwell’s score which “sets an ominous mood, complemented by what sounds like an executioner’s drumbeats.”

Also worth noting is English stage actor Kathryn Hunter, who plays all three witches, as well as the staging Coen uses for the ethereal triumvirate. “Rather than showing us the witches stirring their pot, he positions them up in the rafters like birds, looming over Macbeth, while the floor beneath his feet becomes a bubbling cauldron.”

Brendan Gleeson’s Duncan has “a genuinely kingly air,” Corey Hawkins offers “youthful vitality” in the role of Macduff, while Bertie Carvel brings “the requisite gravity to the role of Banquo.” As for Coen, “there’s no denying he has the right temperament for this doomiest of Shakespeare plays.”

READ MORE: This ‘Macbeth’ adaptation distills Shakespeare’s tragedy to its furious essence (NPR)

Newcomers like Moses Ingram, the Queen’s Gambit star who made her feature debut in The Tragedy of Macbeth as Lady Macduff, said she felt as welcome on the set as its veteran leads — and found Coen to be patient and compassionate.

Ingram told Dave Itzkoff of The New York Times that that sometimes after a take, she would “run to the monitor and be freaked out by what I saw.” Coen counselled her that with experience she would be able to look at the monitor and see what she needed to fix: “This is your first feature, so wait on it, and feel it out and learn.”

At the other end of the acting scale, Denzel Washington said he was “eager for the role, as he’d never worked with either Coen but considered himself a fan of their “dangerous’ films.”

Washington said he appreciated Coen’s directing style, beginning at rehearsals in early 2020, “that there be “no stick-up-the-butt Shakespearean acting” in the film,” but he noted with some humor that the director did concentrate on one aspect of his delivery — namely pronouncing his Rs properly.

READ MORE: How Joel Coen Made ‘The Tragedy of Macbeth’ (New York Times (Paywall)

The Tragedy of Macbeth has had a limited theatrical run, but an Apple and A24 deal gives it a much longer stay on Apple’s streaming service, something Cohen has comes to terms with and is now sanguine about, as he told Ryan Lattanzio at IndieWire.

“As a filmmaker you want your audience to see your film on the best, biggest screen possible. The worst nightmare as a filmmaker is that someone watched your film on an airplane,” Coen said.

“When I first got into the movie business — it’s been almost 40 years ago — the reason I was able to make movies with Ethan [Coen], the reason we were able to have a career is because the studios at that point had an ancillary market that was a backstop for more risky films, which were VHS cassettes or all these home video markets, which is essentially television.

“So the fact that those markets are sort of responsible for my career, I’m not going to bust on them now because they’ve become very successful and are overtaking the market. It’s the reason I’m able to do this stuff,” said Coen.

“I have mixed feelings about [streaming] obviously. You want people to see it on a big screen. But the other part of it is that’s been part of the history of our movies since the very beginning. That’s the best answer I can give you.”

READ MORE: Joel Coen: Streaming Is Reason ‘Risky’ Films Like ‘Tragedy of Macbeth’ Can Still Exist (IndieWire)

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In the movies, the before and afters of an apocalypse usually has the post-event world looking desaturated, burnt out, drained of color. Not so Station Eleven, which flips that convention on its head.

In the 10-episode series that just finished on HBO Max, the apocalypse results from a flu that has no incubation period and causes near-immediate death.

In adapting Emily St. John Mandel’s 2014 novel, writer and showrunner Patrick Somerville (The Leftovers) traced three story worlds: a traveling Shakespearean troupe, a cult of kids led by the prophet Tyler (Daniel Zovatto), and a group of survivors living in an airport.

The series alternates between past and present timelines to show the pivotal hours leading up to the crisis, the immediate aftermath, and those who have adapted to the new circumstances of their world 20 years later.

This could be a set up for a “puzzle-box” of elements that fire up fan communities in shows like I, Robot, Westworld and Yellowjackets, but Station Eleven sidesteps this.

“It isn’t that the post-apocalyptic drama doesn’t supply answers — it does, in increasingly rewarding layers as it unfolds — but rather that the questions that really matter can’t be addressed through plot mechanics,” Lili Loofbourow suggests in her review for Slate.

“We are not interested in how the pandemic started, or who engineered it, or even how exactly it works. We don’t even especially need to know the particulars of the ‘Station Eleven’ graphic novel within the show. What matters far more is the feeling the book creates and what that feeling does.”

That feeling is evoked most strongly in an aesthetic that acts an antidote to the dour color palette and mood of other post-apocalyptic motion picture narratives on television and in film.

“Laced with humor and heartache, it’s perhaps the brightest, most fanciful end-of-the-world drama you’ll ever see,” says Joshua Meyer at Slashfilm.

While Nicole Clark at Polygon insists that the “Beautiful, lush cinematography gives scenes a sense of contemporaneousness — resisting the dour tones that often mark the apocalypse genre.”

The visual (production design + cinematographic) concept was have the present feel like the future, and the future to feel like the past.

READ MORE: Station Eleven found a silver lining in the post-apocalypse (Polygon)

“In many ways, we were trying to invert the post-apocalyptic genre,” Somerville tells Emily VanDerWerff at Vox.

“Hiro Murai [who directs the pilot] always said he wanted to be there when we were talking about year 20 [after the plague that kills most of humanity]. Quiet, big, expansive, beautiful, green. Not destroyed. Just still.”

In postproduction the filmmakers actually deemphasized color in scenes set before the apocalypse.

“Year 20 is very naturally lit with lots of bright sunlight and lots of colorful greens and flora and lots of saturation,” explains DP Christian Sprenger, who set the series look with Murai in the pilot.

“We wanted that world to feel welcoming, and we wanted to push against that concept of Cormac McCarthy’s The Road’s very gross, dirty, almost monochromatic future, that sad apocalypse aesthetic. Where that led us was that year zero, the world we’re currently living in, wanted to feel a little bit more subdued and slightly desaturated.”

He also told VanDerWerff that they deliberately chose locations with artificial lighting: subway stations, a theater, even the streets at night. “Everything has this stark, manmade aesthetic. We intended to let that be what the sci-fi future aesthetic normally feels like. And when you jump forward to the future, that almost feels like 200 years ago.”

Sprenger told Robert Lloyd at the Los Angeles Times that the inspiration for shooting with an ARRI Alexa Mini large format camera was to help tell a story “about a few seemingly insignificant people up against these giant man-made and eventually natural landscapes. This idea led us down the path of putting our small little characters against these large-scale wide frames — feeling the contrast of scale to significance.”

READ MORE: Meet the cinematographer whose ‘controlled naturalism’ is changing the face of TV (Los Angeles Times)

The DP’s work on the premiere episode, “Wheel of Fire,” was nominated for the 2022 Emmy Award for Outstanding Cinematography for a Limited or Anthology Series or Movie.

Sprenger discussed his use of the ARRI Mini LF and MasterBuilt lenses in an interview with IndieWire’s Erik Adams and Chris O’Falt:

“At its core, the story of Station Eleven deals with the common man’s relationship to the structures that modern society has built. In the first episode, our character and audience are constantly encountering incredible scale in the architectural wonders of the city of Chicago. Pairing these unique modern optics with a large format sensor allowed the camera to embody that sense of scale and afforded greater control over sharing it with the audience.”

READ MORE: Emmys 2022: Cinematography Nominees on How They Shot the Year’s Best Shows (IndieWire)

Station Eleven is not the only show to imagine the post-apocalypse in a vivid color palette. Mad Max: Fury Road, for instance, is full of crisp blues and burnt yellows, highlighting its desert setting. I Am Legend and The Walking Dead have been set in worlds where greenery has overtaken what once were human spaces.

“What sets Station Eleven apart is its willingness to push those vibrant colors to an extreme,” VanDerWerff writes at Vox. “Every time the series drops us into a world where humanity is rebuilding, despite the devastation of the Georgia Flu, that world feels almost inviting.”

READ MORE: In Station Eleven, the end of the world is a vibrant, lush green (Vox)

Costume designer Helen Huang picks up the theme: “A large part of this project is about optimism and memory,” she says. “Those two things also spark color, because if you look at our world as it is now, if you took away all the people in it, it’s full of color. It’s full of graphics. It’s a memory of our civilization. It creates this world that’s separate from all the other language of the post-apocalyptic world that’s out there.”

Steve Cosens, who shot four episodes, told Slash Film that his direction from Somerville was to depict a future that wasn’t daunting.

“Even though we’re in this kind of post-apocalyptic, post-pandemic world, he wanted nature to feel that it’s friendly. It’s not like some of these other post-pandemic or post-apocalyptic shows where nature is all burnt out and kind of scary. There would still be some lyricism in the design of the sets or there would be pops of color.”

READ MORE: Station Eleven Cinematographer On Capturing The Post-Apocalyptic World Of The HBO Max Series (Slash Film)

The color approach aside, there’s another ray of hope that Station Eleven radiates — that of basic human connection. Instead of going all Lord of the Flies or selfish rogue as elements of humanity are often portrayed in the aftermath of zombie-geddons like 28 Days Later or A Quiet Place II, Station Eleven eases those psychic blows by saturating its plotlines with “excessive, frankly rococo” connections, writes Loofbourow in Slate.

“The show isn’t following some supernatural principle according to which everyone in its universe is connected. Rather, it makes it seem that the reason we’re hearing this particular set of stories is because they are connected. Station Eleven is obviously and unsubtly interested in art — art as artifice, art as authenticity, and art as a preserver of civilization that stands in opposition to civilization’s less savory aspects.”

READ MORE: What Made Station Eleven So Rewarding (Slate)

Want more? Director and producer Hiro Murai and producer Nate Matteson sit down with Gold Derby’s Rob Licuria for a discussion about building a post-apocalyptic narrative that is “about rebirth, not despair”:

Are you interested in contributing ideas, suggestions or opinions? We’d love to hear from you. Email us here.

Adam McKay, writer and director of Don’t Look Up, was in shock that he’d managed to convince such a star-studded cast to join his new movie and was looking forward to a 2020 shoot with huge anticipation — then the pandemic hit and massive doubts bubbled up about making it at all. “It was probably the strangest six months of my life” he said, “seeing an actual disaster unfolding across the world and seeing beat after beat in the script come true.

“I started wondering ‘Do we need to even make this anymore?’ But I remember turning off the news one night and re-reading the script, and my very first thought was, ‘It’s not crazy enough.’ It actually read a bit dry compared to what was actually happening. So I tweaked everything to be 15 percent crazier than it was before.”

The movie follows astronomy graduate student Kate Dibiasky (Jennifer Lawrence) and her professor Dr. Randall Mindy (Leonardo DiCaprio) following their discovery of a planet-killing asteroid headed directly on a trajectory with Earth. They struggle with an apathetic public and a recalcitrant political class in a story that had to balance a climate change message without becoming hectoring, and humor that would show off the riches of the film’s adlibbing cast.

McKay called on his go-to editor, Hank Corwin, ACE, to set the tone. He challenged Corwin to find that balancing act between humor and pathos, formality and abstraction.

This is the third collaboration between McKay and Corwin, following The Big Short and Vice. The BAFTA-winning editor has worked with Oliver Stone, Terrence Malick and Robert Redford, among other directors.

“We talk a great deal and we do have a shorthand now. He knows that I’ll use non-sequitur moments,” Crowin told Cinemontage. In Don’t Look Up he knew I wanted to use nature and behavior so he’d shoot those moments, not knowing necessarily how I’d use them. Adam knows that I like to think in terms of collage as opposed to montage — especially in this film. I don’t want to make scenes overtly polemical. I don’t want to make scenes overtly political. I think the politics that are really important are the politics of emotion and the politics of will.”

It was obvious that Corwin was taking a very different approach to this project than he did with McKay’s previous two films, both of which were based on actual events and required quite a bit of research. “Usually, the way I look at film is I always try to find the subtext of something,” he said.

“The existential nature of this film was right at the forefront. So, as opposed to doing historical research, what I wanted to do was research into natural history. I wanted to show the juxtaposition of the folly of our characters with the eternal yet very delicate state of nature on this planet. I spent months looking at everything from eagles to hippopotami. I guess you could say, it was actually much more of a spiritual approach.

“Adam kept wanting to balance the tone. We had to have levity. It’s a comedy, but everything must be plausible. He had me constantly pulling back the comedy. I don’t come from a funny world like Adam does. I was so proud of myself that I was making these very funny scenes, which we discovered were upending the movie.

“I had to make the scenarios more serious and somewhat plausible, even if they were funny. Obviously, it’s hard when you have someone like Jonah Hill, who’s cracking wise and upending Meryl Streep. It’s an interesting dynamic.”

READ MORE: Hank Corwin Talks Editing and Collaboration in ‘Don’t Look Up’ (Cinemontage)

Speaking with The Hollywood Reporter, Corwin described the dangers of not managing the tone and allowing it to become too set in one direction. “If you make something too funny, or if one character is too weighty, then maybe half an hour down the line, the film won’t feel truthful,” he said. “You have to go back and ascertain what the tone is, where there’s comedy but also where there’s great poignancy and tragedy.”

READ MORE: ‘Don’t Look Up’ Editor on Why Finding Film’s Tone Was Challenging (The Hollywood Reporter)

In an interview with Filmmaker Magazine, Corwin elaborated further on how he used his collaging technique to anchor the film in nature as a tow to the surrounding narrative.

“Right from the beginning. This was a film about communication, about truth and truthfulness. The thing is, it could spin off, become almost too cynical. I wanted to show what was for me the ultimate truth, the state of nature.

“If you have an ocean pounding on a rock, there’s no interpretation there, it just is. If you have a bee collecting pollen, it is just that. I needed that kind of imagery to work in counterpoint to the absurdity of what was going on in the film. The trick with this film is that there is a narrative thrust. I have to take my shots where I can find them. Fortunately Adam shoots moments for me, these impressionistic moments.

“I just try to put in what moves me. There are flows and rhythms. Sometimes I’ll take shots and just move them two or three shots down in the flow. I’m really tuned in to being overwhelmed by the emotional or the narrative thrust of something. I’ve been accused of being a very aggressive editor, but I love sitting on moments.

“McKay is a guy who will have brilliant performances and these brilliant scenes, but if the overall arc of the film isn’t working correctly, he’ll pull them out. I mean it sounds so simple, but I’ve never worked with a director who’s so willing to kill his babies. He’s made me a much better editor. I get so attached to things. I’m very emotional. He’s tougher than I am.”

READ MORE: “I Find that God is in the Mistakes, I’m Finding Moments Where the Actors Don’t Know the Camera’s on Them”: Hank Corwin on Editing Don’t Look Up (Filmmaker Magazine)

Want more? In an interview with The Independent’s Clarisse Loughrey, writer-director Adam McKay talks about how his film relates to climate change and the lack of action humans take when faced with a calamity (like a giant comet headed on its way toward Earth):

Learn a little about Hank Corwin’s work, from his breakout as a feature film editor with Natural Born Killers to Malick’s 2017 Song to Song. With his expansive portfolio, Corwin continues applying his editing style and advertisement work with Nike, ESPN, the ANDY’s, and much more. But within it all, he doesn’t forget to note his greatest editor and inspiration: his wife Nancy Corwin.

In a critical review of director Adam McKay’s Don’t Look Up, YouTube channel Like Stories of Old challenges the idea of the film as a metaphor for climate change, calling it problematic:

Are you interested in contributing ideas, suggestions or opinions? We’d love to hear from you. Email us here.

By Pedro Almodóvar’s standards, he has had a fruitful couple of years with two movies: The Human Voice, a short film with Tilda Swinton, and a true return to the feature format with Parallel Mothers. His muse Penélope Cruz (this is her seventh film with the auteur) says that Almodóvar is only happy when he’s working, but this new film also has a message for Spain and for its mothers.

“The problem is that I’m not so young.” Almodóvar admits to Vanity Fair that he can’t move around as much, and so he needs to select his projects more carefully — even though he keeps reading over old scripts, as he did with Parallel Mothers (and, before that, other titles like Talk to Her and Julieta). “They need a certain amount of cooking time to come to a boil, until I’m ready to actually go ahead with them,” he says. Almodóvar won’t say what might be next in line.

By digging the script for Parallel Mothers out of a drawer for his new feature, he returned to his signature theme of the maternal and his signature style of colorful, bold, twisty melodrama. These Almodóvarian hallmarks developed out of his own upbringing, where he was surrounded by powerful women he admired and adored.

Parallel Mothers is bookended by epic historical tragedy: the unmarked, mass graves of lead character Janis’s great-grandfather and his family, victims of the brutal Franco regime and representative of larger, ongoing national pain. “When I tried it out [in the script], I found that it really took over every single scene,” Almodóvar says. “It just overwhelmed any other subject matter that came up.”

READ MORE: Pedro Almodóvar and Penélope Cruz Keep Coming Back to Mothers—And Each Other (Vanity Fair)

Speaking to the audience at the closing night of the New York Film Festival, Cruz detailed the gestation of the story for Parallel Mothers.

“The first time he shared with me something about this story, we were here in New York, and doing press for All About My Mother,” she said, according to IndieWire. “He told me a few things about this story that changed, evolved a lot into something else, but that was the root of the story.”

READ MORE: Pedro Almodóvar Pitched ‘Parallel Mothers’ to Penélope Cruz During ‘All About My Mother’ Days (IndieWire)

Parallel Mothers was shot by Almodóvar’s longtime collaborator, cinematographer José Luis Alcaine, on a Sony CineAlta VENICE camera outfitted with Leitz Summicron-C Lenses.

Prior to Parallel Mothers opening the 78th annual Venice Film Festival, Sony released a behind-the-scenes clip showcasing its CineAlta VENICE on set with Almodóvar and his crew:

READ MORE: Almodóvar’s Parallel Mothers, Shot on VENICE, Kicks Off the 78th Annual Venice Film Festival (SonyCine)

Marcela Valdes, in The New York Times Magazine, recounted how she asked Alcaine — who is 82 and has shot almost 200 films, including Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown (1988) and Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down (1989) — how it is that Almodóvar is making the best films of his life at an age when so many artists begin to decline. “We can constantly renew ourselves and give another leap and go even farther,” he said.

“It’s not a question of age, he explained,” Valdes writes, “but of temperament, of being the kind of person who keeps pushing, keeps trying new approaches.”

READ MORE: Pedro Almodóvar Is Still Making Movies That Shock (The New York Times Magazine)

One rather novel approach, which surprised a few cinematographers at the film’s screening at the ENERGACamerimage festival in Poland, was that Alcaine shot some interiors at f/11 and even f/22, in order to get as much in focus as possible.

“When viewers are watching a movie they want to be inside it, be a part of it,” Alcaine told Daniel Egan of The Film Stage. “Filming the way we did in Parallel Mothers, the viewers feel like they are in the set looking at the actors. That’s important for capturing the emotions of the scenes.

Alcaine was able to stop down to narrow apertures for a deeper depth of field by setting the Sony VENICE to 4000 ISO. “We can [also] open the shutter to 360 degrees, which essentially means without a shutter,” he added. “If the actors move too much they will be blurred. We choose the moment where they hardly move at all, so we can set the camera to 8000 ISO, which is really a lot. That’s how we get to f/22.”

The cinematographer feels that compared to the 1940s or 1950s, today’s cinema is “too cold” emotionally. “Half of the screen, maybe two-thirds of the screen, is out-of-focus. The director is driving the viewers on a very specific path,” he explained. “I think it’s better to give a lot of information to the viewers so they can feel they are with the actors, suffering the same emotions.”

READ MORE: Cinematographer José Luis Alcaine on Parallel Mothers and Capturing Pedro Almodóvar’s Emotional Vision (The Film Stage)

Plenty of directors have a distinct, recognizable style, but “Almodóvar conjures a cosmos,” film critic A.O. Scott writes in his review for The New York Times, “a domain of bright colors, piercing music (often by Alberto Iglesias) and swirling melodrama. If you’ve visited in the past, you will be eager to return.”

Almodóvar’s version of Spain is “informed by that country’s aesthetic and literary traditions, a legacy that encompasses the perverse whimsy of Surrealism and the openhearted pathos of flamenco.” But, as Scott notes, this time the director “adds an element that he had previously avoided: the legacy of the Spanish Civil War and the nearly 40 years of dictatorship that followed.”

READ MORE: ‘Parallel Mothers’ Review: Almodóvar’s Brutal, Beautiful World (The New York Times)

The New Yorker fleshes out the narrative: “It’s a brisk and breathless romantic drama, spanning about four years in the life of a successful Madrid commercial photographer named Janis Martínez (Penélope Cruz), in which historical memory sparks the flames of passion.

“The story begins in the winter of 2016, when Janis is commissioned to do a series of portraits of a forensic archeologist named Arturo (Israel Elejalde).

“Janis and Arturo have an affair, and she gets pregnant; a single woman, she has the child on her own. In the maternity ward, she shares a room with a young woman named Ana Manso Ferreras (Milena Smit); they give birth at just about the same time and become fast friends, but after both are discharged along with their newborn daughters, they fall out of touch.

“Later, they meet again, by chance, when Ana works as a waitress at a café near Janis’s apartment, and they become ever more deeply implicated in each other’s lives. (Janis hires Ana as a live-in babysitter, and they develop a sexual relationship.)”

READ MORE: “Parallel Mothers,” Reviewed: A Breathless Romance Sparked by a Fight for Historical Truth (The New Yorker)

Writing in Film Comment, Manu Yáñez Murillo points to the grand coincidence that underpins the film’s dramatic obstacles: “both of their babies are born on the same day, and both children suffer an illness, ‘extrauterine inadaptation’ and ‘cerebral immaturity.’

“Arriving in what might be considered the most restrained and least flamboyant period of Almodóvar’s career — nothing here feels gratuitous — Parallel Mothers unfolds as both a literal and symbolic response to the infants’ diseases; even more so because the film channels, through the healing processes of its (numerous) mothers, that of a whole country tending to the still-open wounds of its Civil War.”

READ MORE: Secrets and Lies (Film Comment)

Almodóvar wraps his melodrama with the weighty anchor of righting some of the wrongs of his country’s civil war of more than 80 years ago. He told the New York Film Festival how the stories entwined. “I wanted to create a link between the protagonist and the past, the darkest side of the Spanish civil war. This comes through her grandmother who raised her as an orphan.

“She told her the story of how her great grandfather was killed and leaves her this legacy. I wanted to talk about the mass graves, the truth about them and the truth that the character is seeking which contradicts her handling of her own truth.”

Spain has the second largest number of “disappeared” people in the world with a guestimate of 140,000 individuals. The director points out that, with a new socialist government now in power in Spain, this means that the state is currently in charge of pushing forward with the excavations; he is hopeful for a resolution. “People, mostly mothers, just want a place where they can place some flowers,” Almodóvar said at the festival.

READ MORE: Pedro Almodóvar, Penélope Cruz, and Milena Smit on Parallel Mothers (Film at Lincoln Center)

TheWrap’s Steve Pond says the director is aware that his own movies played a key role in Spain’s slow cultural transformation after the 1975 death of Franco. “My life had changed a lot with the arrival of democracy, and the lives of the people around me in Madrid had changed. So, I was interested in telling stories about that change,” he said.

A large contributing factor to that cultural impact was the way Almodóvar, working in film from the 1980s onwards, “played with gender and sexuality.”

“I wasn’t doing it in the spirit of being an activist, and I wasn’t so pretentious as to think I was going to change Spain. I was just trying to describe as accurately as I could what was around me.”

READ MORE: Pedro Almodovar and Penelope Cruz on Pain, Friendship and Sexy Mothers (TheWrap)

Almodóvar added historical context and more to Parallel Mothers when the director and cast members Cruz and Smit joined NYFF Director Eugene Hernandez to discuss the film during the Closing Night of the 59th New York Film Festival:

READ MORE: Pedro Almodóvar, Penélope Cruz, and Milena Smit on Parallel Mothers (Film at Lincoln Center)

The two women at the heart of Parallel Mothers could represent the two Almodóvars — of yesteryear, and today, says Simon Hattenstone in The Guardian. “Cruz’s Janis and the younger Ana sum up the debate dominating Spain in a simple, impassioned exchange. Ana tells Janis you have to focus on the present to live a fulfilling life; a furious Janis replies you can only make sense of the present if you understand the past — and to fail to do so is a betrayal of your ancestors.

“Almodóvar is not only aware that time is running out to redress the crimes of Franco; he knows that if he hadn’t addressed the issue now, it might well have become too late for him, too.”

READ MORE: Pedro Almodóvar on Spain’s tragic past: ‘You can’t ask people to forget’ (The Guardian)

Variety thinks that, with Parallel Mothers, he has struck the right balance with his melodrama and the emotions of history. “Pedro Almodóvar has written and directed 23 feature films since 1978; each one carries his unique style, yet he manages to keep surprising audiences. Parallel Mothers may be his best and most accessible; it features his frequent outrage at government oppression and deceit, mixed with great compassion for his characters.”

READ MORE: Brothers Offer New Perspective on ‘Maternity and Family’ With ‘Parallel Mothers’ (Variety)

SlashFilm agrees that there’s hidden depths in Almodóvar’s new movie and an evolution on show here, “Parallel Mothers may at first present like a run-of-the-mill effort from the face of Spanish cinema, but there’s a deceptive amount of variation here.

“It’s both a perfect distillation of his artistic fascinations and marked evolution in the depth of his thematic explorations. Fans will instantly recognize the hallmarks of vintage Almodóvar in Parallel Mothers. The camp! The melodrama! The illicit romance! The color! The set decoration! The irony!

“Yet even the smallest peek behind the curtain reveals the film to be anything but a retreat into safe territory. Almodóvar brings years of accumulated wisdom to approach longtime fixations from a more comprehensive vantage point.

“Almodóvar’s latest film is an unabashedly sincere salute to the strength that carries an entire country. That appreciation for feminine resolve blossoms radiantly outward in the film. It’s a prayer of thanksgiving and condemnation of the circumstances that made such worship necessary in the first place.

“One searing image at the film’s close poignantly harkens back to the iconic imagery from Spain’s past while also collapsing it into Almodóvar’s own distinctive visual look. The moment lands with decades’ worth of gathering force.”

The contrast of Janis denying her inner truth while pursuing her family’s greater truth adds texture through to this last shot, a paean to sisterhood familiar within Almodóvar’s filmography. “The movie is this beautiful homage to the imperfections of all these three different mothers,” Cruz says. “I love that.”

READ MORE: Parallel Mothers Review: Director Pedro Almodóvar Gets Both Familiar And Evolutionary (SlashFilm)

Brotherhood also gets a look-in, albeit on the other side of the camera, as Tim Gray reveals in a Variety interview with the filmmaker’s brother, Agustín Almodóvar.

“I think Parallel Mothers gives an interesting perspective on maternity and family. This is one of the films in which Pedro refers to families based on love, rather than on biology,” said the younger Almodóvar, who has served as Pedro’s producer since the Law of Desire (1987). “I’m very lucky to be there from the beginning, when a script is just an idea.”

The producer plays two roles, supporting his brother during his creative process by doing research, and finding funds to make the film. “I keep those two things very separate because I don’t want economic constraints to affect Pedro’s creative choices,” he said.

READ MORE: Brothers Offer New Perspective on ‘Maternity and Family’ With ‘Parallel Mothers’ (Variety)

Another common thread in many Almodóvar films was editor José Salcedo Palomeque, but as Variety’s Jazz Tangcay notes, when Palomeque passed away in 2017 his chair was taken by Teresa Font, who cut this latest movie.

Emotion was imperative to the storytelling, and thus the editing. “The pacing of the film is a very abstract and personal thing, it is driven by whatever a director’s ideas are about narration and by the genre of the film,” Almodóvar told Tangcay. “The idea is to hold on to a shot until it becomes expressive, at the moment when it ceases to be, is when one must cut.”

To help with that emotion, Font put herself in the actor’s position — in this case Cruz’s shoes. To know where to cut, Font had to “feel how she feels and have that sense of what the emotion tells you.”

READ MORE: Pedro Almodovar on Creating ‘Rapid and Tense’ Storytelling Through Editing in ‘Parallel Mothers’ (Variety)

“Parallel Mothers often finds Almodóvar doing Almodóvar, leaning into all of his tics and obsession for this tale of two women whose lives become forever linked when they meet in a maternity ward,” Ben Croll writes in his review of the film for The Wrap.

“With nearly half his film spent in Janis’ (typically ostentatious) Madrid apartment, Almodóvar plays with theatrical affectations, often allowing the background lights to fall out, isolating the lead actress in a pool of black to punctuate key emotional moments. And naturally, the director’s work with actors Cruz and Smit results in typically stellar performances, especially in scenes where the two leads play off one another, wordlessly conveying currents of guilt, tenderness, jealousy and desire.”

READ MORE: ‘Parallel Mothers’ Film Review: Pedro Almodóvar Both Fulfills and Upends Expectations (The Wrap)

Alongside aesthetically even composition and a bold use of color, one of the hallmarks of Almodóvar’s distinctive style is his penchant for center-frame composition, Meg Shields notes at Film School Rejects.

“Wes Anderson is certainly a noteworthy proponent of the ‘putting things in the middle of the shot’ school. The same is true, of course, for Stanley Kubrick, whose notorious perfectionism often manifests in meticulously crafted shots that skirt naturalism in favor of unnervingly symmetrical visuals.

“But I’ll admit, when it comes to center-framed cinema, the work of Pedro Almodóvar never sprung to mind. As a fan of center frames and of Almodóvar’s work, this is a sin on multiple fronts. Perhaps I was dazzled by the tomato-reds and enthusiastic embrace of kitsch and camp.”

READ MORE: The Center-Framed Cinema of Pedro Almodóvar (Film School Rejects)

A (partially NSFW) video essay from the Little White Lies YouTube channel, directed by Luís Azevedo produced by Adam Woodward, takes viewers on a symmetrical tour through the films of the Spanish filmmaker:

Want more? Watch Little White Lies’ “Hearing Pedro Almodóvar — A Lesson in Sound Design,” which delves into how the Spanish auteur uses sound in his films, from Volver to Pain and Glory:

In a post-screening conversation at AFI Fest 2021 moderated by film critic Alonso Duralde, Almodóvar discusses the genesis of Parallel Mothers, including how long the idea for the film had been in his head just waiting to be shared:

If you want still more from Almodóvar, The Spectator has a list of ten films by this iconic Spanish director that are “worth a watch.”

READ MORE: A film lover’s guide to the best of Almodóvar (The Spectator)

Are you interested in contributing ideas, suggestions or opinions? We’d love to hear from you. Email us here.

Twenty-four years ago, Guillermo del Toro and Danish cinematographer Dan Laustsen, ASC, DFF teamed up for the Oscar-winning director’s first American feature, Mimic. Since then, the two have collaborated on Crimson Peak, The Shape of Water and now noir crime drama Nightmare Alley.

Based on the 1946 novel of the same name, Nightmare Alley takes us to 1940s Buffalo, New York, where grifter Stan Carlisle (Bradley Cooper) finds himself in psychiatrist Dr. Lilith Ritter’s (Cate Blanchett) orbit, planning a big con.

Although first filmed in 1947, del Toro doesn’t consider his version a remake but more an accurate adaptation of William Lindsay Gresham’s pulp fiction — and of Gresham himself.

“The novel certainly presented aspects of psychosexual, mystery, magic, weirdness that were really interesting that were not tackled in the first version for many reasons,” the director explained to Uproxx. “Including the fact that there was censorship. It was done during the code. So they really circumvented a lot of stuff.”

Del Toro “very, very pointedly” says he also use Gresham’s biography as the basis for the script. “If you look at Gresham, you find out that he was a seeker, like The Fool, the Tarot card. And he was looking for truth in Catholicism, and psychoanalysis. He was a folk singer. He was in the Spanish Civil War. He became a communist. He was looking for the truth about himself, gets a lot of money and his life unravels rather fast.”

READ MORE: Guillermo del Toro On Why It Was So Hard To Get ‘Nightmare Alley’ Made (Uproxx)

The director had his pick of projects after 2017’s Oscar-winning monster romance Shape of Water, and indeed is often drawn to gothic horror like Pan’s Labyrinth or Crimson Peak. Here the opportunity to take on the noir genre complete with a glamorously icy femme fatale and characters with fateful pasts proved irresistible.

“It’s very adult, no pyrotechnics, no big action. It’s a very intimate, almost like a character portrait,” del Toro said. “I believe that there is a beautiful place for a new resurgence of noir, because it is the most cinematic, lush, glorious genre. And other than horror, it has been my love all my life, both in the novels and in the filming genre.”

The film’s lavish, stylized look is partly the result of the director and DP’s similar philosophies on lighting, camera movement, and how a movie should look and feel.

“We have the same opinions about deep shadows, one single source lighting, and moving the camera,” Lausten told Film School Rejects. “Don’t be afraid of the darkness.”

They referenced several landscape paintings (including by painters like Vilhelm Hammershoi and Andrew Wyeth) as well as the original concept drawings to pinpoint ideas. After test they scrapped the original idea of shooting in 4:3 aspect ratio in favor of widescreen.

READ MORE: Cinematographer Dan Laustsen Explains the Murky Noir Aesthetic of ‘Nightmare Alley’ (Film School Rejects)

Del Toro tells A.frame, “We wanted to have the characters live in the shadows so Bradley Cooper is often completely immersed in a bucket of shadows and you don’t see his face.”

They also decided to lower the ceilings on certain sets to create classically composed images where “the camera is always roaming like a curious child.”

An early discussion was whether to film it in black and white, as Joel Coen and Bruno Delbonnel have done with their noir-infused version of Macbeth.

“We don’t want to make a black-and-white movie, we want to make a powerful color movie,” the DP told Slashfilm. “I’ve never seen the black and white version. So for me, when I’m working with Guillermo, for example, I’m coming into the project clean. I don’t want to see this is as a remake of something.”

He shot large format on an ARRI Alexa 65 for scale, supplemented by an Alexa mini. “Landscapes have to be wide, wide, wide. The carnival has to be huge. When we did Cate’s office, we made it bigger and bigger.”

For Blanchett’s character Lausten wanted to light her face and nothing else in old-fashioned nineteen-forties style. “We have this single source, a kind of follow spot on her that was moving together with the camera. When she’s in the Copacabana, standing there with a gun, the revolver, the light on her with the shadows on the front head, it’s stuff like that I really like.”

READ MORE: Nightmare Alley Cinematographer Dan Laustsen On Shooting Blood, Smoke & Mirrors (Slashfilm)

Lighting was also used to divide the story worlds of the carnival and Buffalo. “The carnival, for example, should be a much softer light compared to when we’re coming into the Buffalo world, where Lilith looks more like a very powerful diva queen,” Lausten tells A.frame. “All the light on her is very specific. Of course, it’s a little tricky to do that because, if she or the camera is not hitting exactly the marks, it doesn’t work. It’s a very technical but powerful way to work.”

READ MORE: How ‘Nightmare Alley’ Cinematographer Dan Laustsen Paints With Light (A.frame)

By all accounts, del Toro is meticulous in planning from production design to shot design with the director not shooting conventional master, medium, and close-up but with specific shots which he is going to use in the edit.

Production designer Tamara Deverell says del Toro wasn’t “particularly trying to be film noir” but did lean into art deco. “We tried to be historically accurate, but I was also looking at modern versions of art deco,” she told The Hollywood Reporter.

“There’s a hotel in Hong Kong that I use as a direct reference for Grendel’s office — the rich mogul in the movie,” she said. “I looked at a lot of Fritz Lang’s I and a lot of older films through the 30s and 40s had that the deco look to them.”

And while Deverell acknowledges that the film was working mostly in human monster metaphors, she says they did manage to get in a few creepy carnival elements.

“For the human monstrosity, we tried to be very real,” she says. “For a Guillermo del Toro movie, it was not really monster-based, but we did do some of the pickle punks and the geek pit. But really the monster really is the human, ultimately, thematically.”

READ MORE: How the ‘Nightmare Alley’ Team Explored Human Monstrosity With Guillermo del Toro’s Carnival Noir (The Hollywood Reporter)

Want more? Speaking to Fellows at the AFI Conservatory, del Toro discussed the making of Nightmare Alley, including master shots, cinematic influences, and the importance of learning from others:

Or watch the video montage The Colors of Guillermo del Toro, presented by Little White Lies and edited by Luís Azevedo, which showcases the rich hues and monochromes the director uses throughout his films:

In this conversation with Dolby Cinema, Guillermo del Toro calls Nightmare Alley a theater of the mind, describing the clarity and immersiveness of Dolby Vision and how the audio audiences hear in the theater will impact how they experience the film:

Take a peek behind the carnival curtain with Guillermo del Toro and his producing team, cinematographer, production designer, and costume designer. In this video from the “Scene at the Academy” series, the Nightmare Alley filmmakers lift the carnival curtain on the process of creating the unique worlds in the film.

In an interview with Collider, cinematographer Dan Lausten answers questions about how Nightmare Alley was made and how he works with del Toro. During the interview, Lausten shares stories and discusses topics such as what it was like shooting the third act first, how they decided on camera placement, why they opted to use the ARRI Alexa 65, and so much more.

Lausten also discusses the color and lighting choices made not just for the film in general, but specifically for the lighting used on Bradley Cooper. He also covers the prep work that went into the film, and what his reaction was when del Toro told him that some of the best shots wouldn’t make the final cut. Watch the full 40-minute conversation in the video below:

Are you interested in contributing ideas, suggestions or opinions? We’d love to hear from you. Email us here.

The unstoppable talent show genre has gone from the humiliation of wannabes from American Idol and the more kind offering of the turning chair of The Voice to the latest twist of how to inject gentler competition back into the genre — a kind of reincarnation for frustrated and inhibited singers with Fox’s Alter Ego.

Alter Ego features real singers disguised with digital avatars, accomplished with a near to real-time performance capture process. Singers in motion capture suits, witness cameras and microphones are composited together in a live audience studio, which is in the same building as the performance capture volume.

The render is simultaneously broadcast to the TV audience as a kind of hologram, although the judges and live audience are watching the show on various monitors placed on-stage.

Unreal Engine is the rendering powerhouse behind the show, and the company describes Alter Ego as a striking experience. “There are the singers, who are competing to be recognized as professional stars; the famous judges including Grimes, will.i.am, Nick Lachey, and Alanis Morissette; and even the live audience of 200 fans. There’s just one very important difference: every single competitor performing live on Alter Ego’s stage is an avatar.”

Director Sam French admits to having anxiety about relying on such complicated technology for a “shot as live” entertainment show. “I was excited but also nervous,” he said. “I had concerns over feet being on the ground and tracking and mocap. All of those things as you really are bringing two worlds together.”

The show had just 10 weeks to create the 20 avatar characters, each of whom had to be outfitted with four different wardrobe options. Each avatar had their own individual effects, as well as several visual effects tied to all the characters.

Multiple cameras are tracked in the performers’ volume space, which is the same size as the actual stage. Michael Zinman, Lulu AR executive producer and co-executive producer of Alter Ego, detailed the workflow. “All of that data from the motion capture, both the body and the face go to the engines, including the camera tracking and the lighting. From there it gets composited on the stage,” he said.

“The two important features for us from Unreal would be the DMX that gives us the success to actually program a show quickly and efficiently. And then certainly the composting so that you buy into the actual avatar on the stage.

“I didn’t think it was going to be possible to do. Not because you couldn’t have an avatar on stage singing in a motion body capture suit. But how do you do 10 of these performances in a day, keep it on budget, and keep it transparent, as elementary as you can through the network, and through the producers on stage — no different to a show with live-action people.”

https://youtu.be/6YD3k_nh98A

Unreal Engine further explained the technical process. “Every performance on the show would be captured live using 14 cameras, eight of which were fitted with stYpe tracking technology. Avatar data including eye color, height, and special effects, as well as motion-capture data, lighting data, and camera data were then sent to a hub of Unreal Engines behind the main stage.

“The result was a virtual avatar that would always accurately reflect the motion-captured performance behind the scenes. When a contestant cried, the avatar would cry, too. And blush. And run their fingers through their hair. All final performances could then be seen directly through on-set monitors, making it easy for the live audience to engage with the final characters and be immersed in their journey, rather than feeling removed from the story due to the computer-generated imagery.”

Dan Pack, managing director of Silver Spoon Animation, underlined the importance of a rigid control protocol. “The great thing about Unreal Engine versus traditional rendering pipelines is that we can preview incredible changes that would normally take a lot of time in post to render… so we are able to change character hair color, eye color, texture, and control the effects, all through this DMX control panel. We pushed DMX on this show further than it has ever gone before in a real-time setting.”

“In order to pull off a show like Alter Ego, you need Unreal Engine’s DMX capabilities; this is the vocabulary and protocol we all speak and the only way to bring in a network competition show on schedule,” said Zinman. “When lighting directors can program virtual and real studio lights on one console, and the characters can be programmed on another, you run through rehearsals much faster. This is how we were able to do 10 unique performances each day.”

https://youtu.be/ycZv8Ma-H2o

In tandem, Silver Spoon was tapping Unreal Engine’s Live Link capabilities to stream data from more than ten mocap instances into the avatars. With virtually no latency, Unreal Engine is able to render high-quality animation captured from the actors onto the avatars in real time — as it happens. Live Link is also used for facial animation via the dedicated Live Link Face app, which enables facial performances to be captured via an iPhone or iPad and rendered in real time in the engine. Using Live Link removed the need for Alter Ego to write a dedicated plugin for the Vicon data packets, giving the team a free-flowing way to animate their skeletal meshes.

Director Sam French sums up the potential of the tech behind Alter Ego, “Alter Ego is probably the best example of the scale of what you can do. Watching them interact on a very normal TV production schedule was incredible. And I think it just the start of what can be done.”

READ MORE: The rise of the virtual singer: the making of Fox’s Alter Ego (Unreal Engine)

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https://youtu.be/MAchQkRoMIY

Landscapers is a new HBO limited series based on a true crime story originating from England in the 1990s. But the retelling isn’t a linear narrative and asks the viewer to navigate surreal journeys in order to understand the perpetrators and why they did what they did.

NPR sets out the story. “Susan, played by Olivia Colman, is a bright-eyed, optimistic former librarian with a secret habit of paying too much for movie memorabilia — especially posters of the old Gary Cooper westerns she once watched with her grandfather. Christopher is a doting, protective husband, played by David Thewlis, searching for work as an accountant in France, where the couple have moved from their native Britain.

READ MORE: HBO’s ‘Landscapers’ unearths the bizarre love story at the center of a grisly crime (NPR)

“But viewers soon learn they are hiding a deadly secret: The pair moved from England to prevent authorities from discovering they had buried Susan’s mother and father in the backyard of her parents’ home 15 years ago, letting the world continue to believe the older couple was still alive.”

The production is peppered with an almost theatrical toolset as scenes that are being re-told suddenly merge in to one, with classic overhead lighting shining down on sparse sets. Multiple camera formats are used to help underline the difference from fantasy to more straightforward exposition.

Landscapers was shot by Erik Alexander Wilson, BSC in an East London studio during the COVID-19 pandemic, which meant production kept as many sets contained as possible, and simply adjusted lighting rigs and gear as needed to capture the different styles. Director Will Sharpe detailed the production in an interview with Variety.

“Even the scene on the Eurostar was actually shot by bringing a Eurostar carriage to the studio because that just made more sense somehow, practically. We had already been using back-projection and certain analog techniques in the world of the show,” he revealed.

READ MORE: By Playing With Visual Styles, ‘Landscapers,’ Starring Olivia Colman, Peels Back Layers of Truth About Love and Murder (Variety)

Sharpe inherited Landscapers after the American director Alexander Payne dropped out because of a scheduling conflict, as The Guardian discovered during their profile of the actor/writer/director. “The bones of the story could have made for a fairly conventional true-crime procedural: were the Edwardses really responsible for the death of Susan’s parents? How did they hide in plain sight for so long?”

“Sharpe, though, pushed to go deeper; there is a dream-like, fantastical element to his retelling of events. One of the incongruities of the case was that Christopher and Susan Edwards were obsessed with Hollywood memorabilia, spending a six-figure sum on posters, photos and letters; when they finally handed themselves in to the police, their personal effects included handwritten notes from the actor Gérard Depardieu.”

Sharpe talks about a previous show he co-wrote called The Electrical Life of Louis Wain, comparing it to Landscapers. “They’re both projects where the central characters are people who are difficult to understand, or who maybe didn’t quite sit in the world in as straightforward a way as they could have done,” says Sharpe. “I wanted to understand these people. I knew I could never fully achieve that, but I wanted to try as best as possible to get into their headspace.”

READ MORE: ‘I have an outsider’s perspective’: why Will Sharpe is the A-List’s new favourite director (The Guardian)

Color tone plays a large part in the series. It supplements mostly Susan’s moods, separates flashes of classic movies and moves the plot on when it needs to.

Thomas Urbye, senior colorist at The Look, in London, describes the brief he received from cinematographer Erik Alexander for color grading the show. “During our initial conversations Erik was keen to adopt a very specific look for the color grade of Landscapers that was reminiscent of the original three- and two-strip Technicolor formats of the early 20th century.

“He shared some resources with me and Grace (another colorist here), and we were able to recreate these looks for use with the Sony Venice camera by utilizing a number of unusual color processes. These were used as show LUTs during shooting along with a black-and-white LUT, which was helpful for reviews and editorial.

“There were a variety of different cameras used including 16 mm, CCTV streams and miniDV. Some of the digital media was even projected digitally at the end of the edit, and recaptured on 16 mm to then be dropped back into the final grade.

“As ever, it was important that these formats and looks served the story. At times they transition between each other with multiple dissolves, and while complex in post, it has produced a unique piece of work.”

Wilson commented on the process for the final grade. “I had already begun creating my own looks during prep, and was able to show Thomas what we were looking to achieve. Both myself and Will (Will Sharpe the director) were keen that the grade and online could happen simultaneously, due to the nature of the complex blending transitions and multiple camera formats and effects.

“We were able to further control the three-strip and two-strip looks in the final grade; often the three-strip effect would push the reds too far, so we had to refine them as needed. Once the main grading passes were done and it was just VFX outstanding, I was able to travel abroad and review episodes via an iPad Pro using The Look’s Moxion system.

“Here I could make notes, review Will’s comments and reply, and even draw shapes on the screen! From our initial meeting through to final review, I was delighted with the collaboration we had with the team at The Look.”

“Jeymes Samuel — aka the musical act The Bullitts — is the writer-director of the new Western The Harder They Fall, and while he may be new to the feature-directing game, he’s been around for a while.

From his work on his own music, to producing and collaborating with the likes of Jay-Z — who, incidentally, is a producer on the film — Mos Def, Charlotte Gainsbourg and many others, to his piloting of the Jay-Z: Legacy short film, Samuel’s been quite busy.

He also has quite a lot to say about movies. Here’s his thoughtful and entertaining examination of five films that inspired The Harder They Fall.”

Source: A.frame

AT A GLANCE:

Everyone is inspired by something. Whether it’s from a past experience, a role model, or something seen in passing, there’s inspiration all around. For Jeymes Samuel, inspiration struck from films he’s seen in his past when creating his feature film directorial debut, The Harder They Fall.

Starting with the boldness of the film, Il Grande Silenzio, Samuel said this “was one of the first westerns I saw where a man of color was a part of the story but his actual color had nothing to do with it… The first time I saw it I thought, there has got to be a post-credits scene… but there wasn’t. Bold filmmaking at its finest.” To some, Il Grande Silenzio may have just been another western movie. But for Samuel, it was something bigger and left a mark on the work he would soon be creating.

Along the same lines, Samuel believes For A Few Dollars More is a 10 compared to the others in the trilogy because of the pace and the “swagged-out rivalry” between the bounty hunters. Yes, the swag shown between two rivals can absolutely change the entire scene. And for Samuel, that’s why “the ‘showdown’ of the hats when Lee Van Cleef and Clint Eastwood meet is one of my all-time favorite scenes in the history of cinema.”

Samuel calls The Bronze Buckaroo “The Harder They Fall before The Harder They Fall.” Running a brief 58 minutes, The Bronze Buckaroo is much shorter than most feature films but still left a big impact. With his background in music, it’s no surprise that it was the use of music that Samuel loved in this film. “While the movie isn’t a musical, it uses song in such a choreographed, performative way. I used this exact train of song/scene thought with Mary’s entrance in The Harder They Fall.” Your background can greatly impact how you view a song, movie, book, or actor. With every piece of media out there, there are different reactions and experiences someone can experience.

When it comes to Magnolia, Samuel believes the thing that is overlooked the most is the musical poetry of the film. Especially when it comes to the frogs. “I have had so many conversations about this beautiful choice to the point that when I was making THTF and I was working on the saloon scene with the Blue Lady dancing, rather than explain it, I would say, ‘In life, you’re either a frog person, or you ain’t.’ Bravo, Paul Thomas Anderson. Bravo.” Inspiration really can come from anywhere, even from falling frogs.

Last, but certainly not least, She’s Gotta Have It has captured Samuel’s attention since he was a child. Working alongside David Lee, director Spike Lee’s brother, Samuel said “not a day went past where I didn’t ask him something about this movie.” For Samuel, “Watching this movie was the closest I got to being in film school.” And as interesting as it is to reflect on who inspired you, there’s also the thought that maybe you’ve influenced others too. Maybe Samuel’s name is already on someone’s list as a person who inspired them.

Read all of Jeymes Samuel’s thoughts on the five films that inspired The Harder They Fall over at A.frame.

Shortly after Sara Gay Forden’s The House of Gucci: A Sensational Story of Murder, Madness, Glamour and Greed was published in 2001, Scott Free, the production company of director/producer Ridley Scott, optioned the feature film rights.

Scott explained his interest, “It was a fascinating family history. The Gucci dynasty was almost Italian royalty within the fashion industry and its destruction came from inside the family and spread. How could that not be interesting?”

He is well known for repeat casting, with Russell Crowe appearing in five of Scott’s films, and Michael Fassbender in four. But it was a singer that caught his eye for the role of the intimidating Patrizia Reggiani Gucci, who marries into the family.

“I became curious about Lady Gaga, particularly after I saw A Star Is Born,” Scott told AV Club. “I thought, now here’s a formidable talent — as an entertainer, as a singer, as a producer and the writer of her own show. A real engine of creativity. Then we met and I liked her immediately.”

For Maurizio Gucci, her husband, Scott was again re-casting, this time with Adam Driver. “Well, I was planning Gucci and I was making The Last Duel. I think Adam was literally trying on the chainmail and I said, ‘You know what, I’ve got a screenplay I want you to read this weekend.’ He said, ‘What?’ I said, ‘I’ve got this really interesting role. You may want to do it. I think you should read it.’ And he read it that weekend and said, ‘Damn, okay.’ ”

READ MORE: Ridley Scott on Adam Driver, explosions, and the subjectivity of art (AV Club)

Scott has gotten a fair amount of flack for the casting choices (American actors and Italian accents aren’t the easiest combination to pull off), primarily from armchair experts commenting on House of Gucci trailers, but clip-based initial judgments don’t tell the full story here.

But even telling a compelling story won’t necessarily shield a biopic director from criticism.

BBC News reports that the Gucci family (who have not been associated with the fashion label since the ’90s) “were particularly offended by the depiction of Reggiani” because both the movie and cast members describe her as “a victim trying to survive in a male and male chauvinist corporate culture”

“This couldn’t be further from the truth,” the statement continued, with the family describing the business when they were at the helm as being “an inclusive company” — which they dispute.

And for her part, the real-life Reggiani nodded approval at Lady Gaga’s portrayal, although she expressed displeasure that the pop star-turned actress did not come to her “out of respect” before taking on the role.

READ MORE: ‘House of Gucci:’ Family hits out at ‘insulting and painful’ portrayal (BBC)

In a review for Variety, Owen Gleiberman notes that “House of Gucci is modeled fairly directly after The Godfather” — in that both films are explorations “about the way that power actually works: in a business empire, in a family, among people who are supposed to be looking out for each other.”

He draws out the metaphor further: Maurizio Gucci is Michael Corleone, Jared Leto’s Paolo Gucci is House of Gucci‘s Fredo.

(Disclaimer: Gleiberman explicitly says that Scott’s latest film is not in the same league as Coppola’s masterpiece, but he does suggest that it might be his best-executed feature since Gladiator.)

Gleiberman writes, “just because the characters in a drama behave in an over-the-top shameless manner doesn’t mean that the film that’s observing them is over-the-top. House of Gucci is an icepick docudrama that has a great deal of fun with its grand roster of ambitious scoundrels, but it’s never less than a straight-faced and nimbly accomplished movie.”

READ MORE: ‘House of Gucci’ Review: Lady Gaga and Adam Driver Rule in Ridley Scott’s Transfixing Fashion Tabloid ‘Godfather’ (Variety)

Other stars in the hugely star-studded ensemble include Al Pacino, Jeremy Irons and Salma Hayek.

Scott told The New York Times about the COVID shutdown of The Last Duel, which gave him more prep time for House of Gucci.

“My team is the best in the business. I remember I was making the first one [The Last Duel] in a rather beautiful place [in the French countryside], and I’m not a great countryside guy because it’s deep-green and damp and I start thinking about that vodka martini around about three in the afternoon, which is fatal.

“Suddenly, there was this monster coming at us called COVID, so I said, ‘We’re going to close down.’ That helped a lot because it enabled me to edit where I got to, but also to get full prep of two months storyboarding Gucci.”

READ MORE: Lady Gaga and Ridley Scott on ‘House of Gucci’: When Beauty Turns Ugly (The New York Times)

House of Gucci was shot over 43 days and in sequence, mostly in Rome, with additional locations in northern Italy. The production crew was able to finish the movie under budget and a week early, even though they shot the film under COVID restrictions.

A fascinating glimpse into how Scott runs his set sees him using one large monitor and six to eight lower monitors, which enable him to live-edit the movie while he’s shooting it.

Kevin Walsh, one of the film’s producers and president of Scott Free Productions, explains, “It’s a discipline he learned from years of working for the BBC and directing live television. This enables him to complete a scene in one or two takes. Since he uses several cameras, he has all coverage he needs. A boon for the actors, who are not saddled with take after take, which saps their creative energy.”

Observes Jeremy Irons, “Having multiple cameras running all the time, means you don’t have to shoot one way and then have to remember what you were doing when you shoot from a different angle, because the cameras capture the whole scene. When I was playing around in a scene with Al [Pacino], the entire scene was shot. And if we decided to do another take differently, that too was completely shot. This approach was very freeing for an actor.”

One of the keys to Scott’s all-encompassing approach to shooting is forging a successful partnership with Claire Simpson, “the best editor in the business, full stop,” according to the director. “You need someone of that quality and taste. And Claire has the best taste.”

On House of Gucci, as well as their other collaborations, Scott has Simpson cutting the film during production, “Because as I’ve learned again from hard experience, you’ve got to keep yourself clean and fresh. If you sit in the editing room or the mixing room, all you do is get blunt. I always have Claire cutting as I go along because then I know what I have.”

Scott’s vision for the visual style of House Of Gucci, according to production designer Arthur Max, “was one of elegance and luxury. The best of the best. A world of privilege with no expense spared — but on a budget and on schedule.”

The main locations in the script for House of Gucci are in Rome, Milan, New York and northern Italy’s Alpine country, though, in actuality most of the film was shot in and around the Italian capital with interiors at the famed Cinecitta Studios.

In addition, the production shot some exteriors and interiors in Milan, including one scene that is designed to look like downtown Manhattan. The production also filmed at a villa near Lake Como. Italy’s Dolomite mountain range stood in for the Alps, where the Gucci family spent their winter vacations.

But the House of Gucci press junket made headlines for other reasons than the cast, crew and look of the film as it caught up with the 83-year-old legend of cinema and his unguarded thoughts on films and critics. Asked how he felt about the box office underperformance of The Last Duel, Scott commented, “It was exceedingly disappointing. The fatal thing is when you think you’ve got it, you haven’t — I thought I’d got it on Blade Runner and I hadn’t! I was crucified by a big critic at the time called Pauline Kael. It’s why I never read critiques, ever.

“You have to be your own decider — if you worry about what the audience is thinking and what they may want, that’s fatal. A good film will find itself, and now Blade Runner is in the Library of Congress.”

Writer/director Mike Mills loves his actors and they in turn love him and his stories. In a an episode of In the Envelope: The Actor’s Podcast, from Backstage, he sings the praises of on-camera muses like Christopher Plummer, whose performance in Beginners earned him an Academy Award, and Annette Bening in 20th Century Women, which earned Mills accolades aplenty, including an Oscar nod for original screenplay.

READ MORE: Mike Mills on Why Writer-Directors Must Follow the Actor’s Lead (Backstage)

Mills never shies from talking about his feelings. His films teem with care, compassion, and affection. His characters exude love, or at least wish they were exuding love.

“It’s such a codependent relationship,” he told The Film Stage of working with actors. “I can’t do what they do at all. I need them so bad — especially me, because my whole thing is people and people’s interior lives.”

READ MORE: Mike Mills on Taking Detours, Geometric Filmmaking, and the Tenderness of C’mon C’mon (The Film Stage)

His latest is C’mon C’mon, a light comedy-drama starring Joaquin Phoenix and Woody Norman as an uncle and nephew, respectively. Like most stories he writes, the film consists of people spending time together, talking about their emotions — or, more aptly, trying to talk about their emotions. Because sometimes these conversations are hard, especially when you’re having them with someone 30 years younger (or older) than you.

C’mon C’mon finds Mills in pursuit of some semblance of hope for the future. Following Johnny (Phoenix), an NPR-esque radio reporter, who travels across the country in search of children’s views of the years to come. Jesse joins his uncle on the trip as his mother, Johnny’s sister, goes to be with his mentally ill, hospital-bound father.

Intercutting the pair’s experiences are real interviews done in search of some larger truth, highlighting a diverse group of teens and pre-teens who voice the same fears and dreams as kids living thousands of miles away. Inevitably, Johnny and Jesse form a gentle bond as the movie progresses, built out of shared time and shared family, as the black-and-white landscapes of several American cities drift behind them.

Below The Line expanded on how Mills’ person life intertwined with the movie. As with Mills’ other films, C’mon C’mon is another typically human character study from Mills that’s inspired as much from his own personal life from becoming a father, as it allows Phoenix to really shine in a far more grounded role than something like Joker (for which Phoenix won an Oscar). It also introduces the world to fresh young talent in Woody Norman, who few will realize is British, since he seems to come across like such a typical American kid.

READ MORE: Director Series: Filmmaker Mike Mills Talks about Making C’mon C’mon (Below The Line)

C’mon C’mon is another black-and-white movie, which is in vogue at the moment in this awards season — Belfast, The Tragedy of Macbeth and Passing all choosing the aesthetic. Variety brought up the choice with Mills, who had called up The Favourite’s DP Robbie Ryan to shoot the movie with the idea of similar rich imagery.

“I freaking love black-and-white movies,” Mills says. “It’s not a binary choice. It’s part of the history of cinema.

“Robbie and I loved the Emma Stone Queen movie, The Favourite, and I like to shoot with no lights. I like shooting with just very little stuff, so I knew that Robbie was down with that. But then also The Favourite had a really strong, classic quality to me, especially in the framing of the close-ups. I knew I wanted that.

“It kind of goes with the use of black and white. I did want a touch of like Casablanca in this movie to me. The coverage is very clean singles. It’s very classic in a way, just the centered locked-off clean singles. That’s like as old as can be, that kind of coverage.”

READ MORE: Crafting the Sights and Sounds of ‘C’mon C’mon’ (Variety)

Initially Mills tested many of the monochrome cameras but because of budget ended up with a stock ARRI Alexa Mini. “We tested a bunch of cameras, and we ended up going with just a normal Alexa Mini, because we didn’t really have a ton of money, and we were traveling around a lot, and we’re doing a lot of documentary stuff.

“There are only two of those Monochrome Alexas, and they’re very expensive. So, we just couldn’t afford it, and we looked at it, we tested it, and we were happy with what we can get on the normal Alexa.

“I love so many black and white movies; I wish there were just more. But then with this story… there’s a lot of reasons. I kept thinking of it as a drawing, like with the immediacy and intimacy of a drawing, as opposed to a painting, and like the sketchiness of it, something that can only be black and white.

“And then, yes, there’s a documentary quality to this movie, but really, there’s also like a archetypal father-son story going on, which is ancient and almost like a fable. Black and white, I thought was a really good framing for that fable part of it. It takes you out of reality, and it takes you out of our time, and kind of transcends time a little bit. “

That was the main reason, this spectrum of going between a fable and a documentary. Black and white is kind of a great thing for doing that, because black and white is trippier than I think most people, because it’s really so abstract. We never see the world in black and white.

Want more? Listen to Mills discuss the making of C’mon C’mon in an episode of In the Envelope: The Actor’s Podcast, from Backstage, in the audio player below:

You can also listen to the A24 podcast episode, “This Odd Situation with Mike Mills and David Byrne,” where Mills and Byrne discuss a series of wide-ranging topics including the world of childhood, collaborators as playmates, the Wim Wenders Easter eggs in C’mon C’mon, black-and-white movies as their own species, bingeing Hitchcock movies during the pandemic, an more:

In an episode of The Wrap’s “How I Did It,” actor Woody Norman is brought to tears discussing his mother’s influence and how he and director Mike Mills worked together to create certain scenes:

The Netflix series Voir, executive produced by filmmakers David Fincher and David Prior, explores how the grammar of filmmaking affects a film or TV show’s meaning.

Three of the six episodes are made by Taylor Ramos and Tony Zhou, who own the YouTube channel Every Frame a Painting, which almost served as a proof of concept for Voir.

One key difference: obtaining the licenses to show content on YouTube was “very constricting,” while, with the combined clout of Fincher and Netflix, it meant almost too much freedom of choice.

“It was mildly terrifying,” Zhou told IndieWire’s Sarah Shachat.

More than just access to money for media libraries and rights lawyers, what Ramos and Zhou had to contend with was the ability to scale how they presented their ideas, expanding from narration over picture to mix in other modes of filmmaking.

“Videos are a weird hybrid that have elements of narrative and elements of documentary,” Zhou explained. “So [there are] elements of this show that tilt towards narrative… or documentary, in our case. We went out and shot interviews, which we would have done in a doc format, or things like motion graphics, like actually building an animated character.”

“Film vs. Television,” narrated by Ramos, examines the differences between the small screen and the big screen, especially the difference between how these two mediums are shot. Cable and streaming have mostly changed everything, where television can now be cinematic and film can be easily watched on the small screen.

Zhou and Ramos’ “The Ethics of Revenge” serves as a meditation on why violence off-screen can be more haunting than violence on screen.

“The Duality of Appeal” takes us through character design by looking at how the human eye processes shapes — what is pleasing and balanced? Ramos and Zhou try to deconstruct why it is we default to the same familiar face for females in animation.

“The thing I’m most proud of learning [was] the process of adapting what was effectively a two-person workflow to like 40 to 50 people,” Zhou said. “It’s one of the weird things that they don’t really teach you in school. They’ll teach you protocols for how to do certain things on set, but they don’t necessarily teach you how to you take something that involves just two people talking and make it 40 people without causing chaos.”

Another episode, “But I Don’t Like Him,” dives into Lawrence of Arabia and the value of films that center on complex or even dark characters. This episode suggests this is especially true of the films of the 1970s and directors like Martin Scorsese.

“Profane and Profound” is Walter Chaw’s personal examination of the Walter Hill film 48 Hrs. and how it connected with him growing up in the mostly white Colorado. He explores Hill’s daring approach in giving the Eddie Murphy character so much agency during a time when that really wasn’t done quite to the same degree — a life-changing revelation to Chaw.

READ MORE: ‘Voir’: Why Crafting Video Essays for Netflix Meant Embracing All Types of Filmmaking (IndieWire)

Some of Our Favorite Video Essays

Memoria, the latest film from Thai writer and director Apichatpong Weerasethakul, was conceived with a sound. He explained the event to Another Mag, “I was startled by the sound of an explosion. It was a bomb, at dawn, not from elsewhere but within my head… It feels like someone snapping a rubber band inside your skull.”

READ MORE: Inside an Elusive Chronicle of Tilda Swinton’s New Film, Memoria (Another Mag)

This strange condition is known as “Exploding Head Syndrome” — a rare kind of parasomnia that can deprive the sufferer of sleep. “For years I usually woke up after three hours of sleep, fresh,” Weerasethakul continued. “Then I entered a ‘drifting’ stage in which scenarios came and went. The images were dim, as if they were in a stage of decay. Logic was not clearly understood. Time decelerated.”

IndieWire classes Memoria as more meditation than movie, a transfixing deep-dive into the profound challenges of relating to people and places from the outside in. Tilda Swinton plays Jessica, a British botanist living in Colombia, who is already feeling out of place when the movie begins as she’s abruptly awoken by a deep, explosive thump that materializes out of nowhere.

READ MORE: ‘Memoria’ Review: Apichatpong’s Latest Is More Meditation Than Movie and Masterful for That Reason (IndieWire)

Jessica describes the sound as “a ball of concrete hitting a metal wall surrounded by seawater” to Hernan (Juan Pablo Urrego), a sound engineer who tries to help her recreate what she heard in a recording studio.

Even more puzzlingly, Jessica seems to be the only one who can hear it. Doctors are unable to diagnose her, though she manages to secure Xanax from a skeptical physician. It’s only when she encounters an unfamiliar man scaling fish in the midst of the Colombian forest that she begins to understand that her ailment is not her own; the sound is not an individual, medical problem but a broad, environmental one.

Film School Rejects reviewed the movie with reverence for the master director’s unique filmmaking gift and his guidance on how to watch it. “The lion’s share of Memoria’s 136-minutes is comprised of wide, static, pacifying shots (thanks to brilliant cinematographer and long-time collaborator Sayombhu Mukdeeprom) that prompt you to either take a nap or enter a contemplative inner arena.

“Movement is scarce and deliberate. Countless shots of Jessica just linger on her in thought, sitting on a bed or breathing in a chair. She seems invariable, but the profound transformation is taking place in the character beneath the surface of the images, and Weerasethakul is measured in how he chooses to communicate that.

“Above all, this might be what Weerasethakul is best known for, what he brings to cinema that no one else does. He creates a sense of internal mystery and a longing for something unseen yet achievable, perhaps a truer self. He’s the guy who brings a threatening dish to the potluck that ends up being everyone’s favorite. But no one can figure out how he made it.

“His films hover in your soul and stay there. In the immediate aftermath, they might make you well up inexplicably at random times in the day or fall into a fit of unfounded laughter. They cut deep into you undetected, like a praying mantis, and it’s only a matter of time before you realize how strong the impact has been.”

READ MORE: ‘Memoria’ is Pure, Distilled Meditation in an Affecting Cinematic Experience (Film School Rejects)

To illustrate how different the experience of watching Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s movies is, The Playlist analyzed a scene where Jessica and a friend browse refrigerated cabinets designed to preserve flowers. “’In here, time stops,’ the saleswoman says proudly, gesturing at the blue cupboards. The same could be said of the film at large.

“A master of slow cinema, Weerasethakul takes his time with every shot; long stretches of time pass without any dialogue or movement. In so doing, the film inculcates a kind of hypersensitivity in its viewers, who become suddenly attuned to each flitting blade of grass or buzzing fly that enters the shot — as well as to their own posture and breathing.

“The awareness is both physiological and ecological, and that’s the point. Memoria is a film largely about the slow, glacial time and the inconsequentiality of humans within it, yet it manages to do so without being dismissive of individual experience.”

Weerasethakul himself described his process. “The foundation is about being strangers in that environment and to embrace that not-knowing quality. I shot the film as chronologically as much as possible. That was the process of working with Tilda and the rest of the crew to get that rhythm,” Weerasethakul said. “This is the key: To slowly get into the rhythm at each location, at that particular time of shooting — what kind of light, what kind of temperature. I don’t know, maybe like meditation in a way.”

READ MORE: ‘Memoria’: Apichatpong Weerasethakul Meditates on Ecology & Time With Tilda Swinton In A Slow Burn Dream (The Playlist)

At the recent Tokyo International Film Festival, Weerasethakul once again dismantled the film for his fans, as Variety reported. “[Sound and vision in a film] are about awareness. Of the character and of the audience. My past films were about that too. It is just that Memoria is about the character listening to the sound. You become synchronized with her,” he said.

“In my other films, there are always layers and layers of audio experience that reflect the way that I appreciate the world.

“Another angle is about the awareness of being in the cinema. So that you understand the illusion of filmmaking. When you understand that, you approach the movie differently. That can be liberating.”

But, he concluded, “The setting [of the film] is an illusion. What interests me is the emotion of the characters or of the film itself. So, whether it is a natural setting or [amidst] architecture, it doesn’t matter to me. The film is like a person. After a while it should be enough that it just gives a hint, and you start to understand or allow you access into that world.”

READ MORE: Tokyo Talk: Apichatpong Weerasethakul Gets Metaphysical Analyzing the Sound of ‘Memoria’ (Variety)

Want more? In the video below, watch director Apichatpong Weerasethakul and actor Tilda Swinton discuss Memoria at NYFF59 with NYFF director of programming Dennis Lim.

It’s been quite a year for Japanese auteur Ryusuke Hamaguchi. Two of his films have gained international plaudits and multiple awards, Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy and Drive My Car.

The former film won the Jury Grand Prize at Berlin, while the latter, which was based on a short story by Murakami Haruki, took three prizes at Cannes, including best screenplay for Hamaguchi and co-writer Oe Takamasa. (Hamaguchi also co-scripted Kurosawa Kiyoshi’s AFA-winner Wife of a Spy.)

Remarkably, Hamaguchi completed both films during the COVID-19 pandemic, says Deadline’s Matt Grobar. “The outbreak of the pandemic shuttered production on Drive My Car for a period of eight months, and while Hamaguchi says he found it hard to balance both projects amidst the circumstances, he notes that they weren’t all bad in the end, given the added time they gave him to meditate on each,” he writes.

Grobar explores the film (Japan’s official Oscar entry) in more detail during a video panel with Hamaguchi via an interpreter:

READ MORE: Director Ryusuke Hamaguchi Interview — Contenders (Deadline)

Before his 2015 breakthrough film, Happy Hour, his films struggled to find distribution, and many are still hard to come by outside Japan. “At best, they may periodically resurface as part of retrospectives,” Ren Scateni commented at HyperAllergic.

But there’s a definite method to how Hamaguchi constructs his stories. Scateni continues her analysis, “Throughout the years, Hamaguchi has developed a peculiar directorial approach, which draws from both stage production and nonfiction filmmaking.

“He then combined this with a documentary sensibility, informed by the trilogy of films he made with Kō Sakai about survivors of the 2011 Tōhoku earthquake and tsunami — a disaster that echoes through the rest of his filmography, from Asako I & II to Drive My Car.”

READ MORE: Ryūsuke Hamaguchi’s Unusual Approach to Filmmaking (HyperAllergic)

Drive My Car tells the story of Yusuke Kafuku, a renowned stage actor and director. Two years after his wife’s unexpected death, he receives an offer to direct a production of Uncle Vanya at a theater festival in Hiroshima. There, he meets Misaki Watari, a taciturn young woman assigned by the festival to chauffeur him in his red Saab 900.

As the production’s premiere approaches, tensions mount amongst the cast and crew, not least between Yusuke and Koji Takatsuki, a handsome TV star who shares an unwelcome connection to Yusuke’s late wife. Forced to confront painful truths raised from his past, Yusuke begins — with the help of his driver — to face the haunting mysteries his wife left behind.

In Dazed, Nick Chen describes the film as “a drama filled with secrets, infidelity, and increasingly complex human relationships,” noting that it follows the Japanese director’s “triptych of twisty, talky stories,” Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy.

“The purpose was to make a long movie and short movies, alternating,” the director tells Chen. “The short movies could be a revision of the long movie, or prep for the long movie. With these three stories in Wheel of Fortune, I tried things I could foresee as obstacles in Drive My Car.”

Chen acknowledges that Drive My Car will be for many viewers their first taste of Hamaguchi’s subtle, slow-burn storytelling. “The recurring image, as suggested by the marketing, is of Yūsuke and Misaki in the vehicle. Despite the seemingly mundane setting, Hamaguchi transforms these Rohmer-esque conversations into cinematic set-pieces. During one tense interaction, the car speeds through a tunnel, picking up the sound of a vacuum; the vehicle then emerges into a snowy landscape to symbolize their emotional catharsis.”

READ MORE: Ryūsuke Hamaguchi: ‘Creativity can be born out of sexual desire’ (Dazed)

Making Drive My Car wasn’t even Hamaguchi’s idea in the first place. “My producer, Akihisa Yamamoto, called me up and said, “Hey, why don’t we adapt a Haruki Murakami story?” the director told The Hollywood Reporter’s Patrick Brzeski at the Cannes Film Festival. “I thought it was an interesting idea, and we agreed that it would be easier to adapt one of his short stories rather than a full novel.

“The characters appealed to me,” the director continues. “So there’s Kafuku, the main character, and Misaki, who’s the driver. They’re not people who initially make their emotions very apparent. They’re the kind of people who are reluctant to talk about their feelings. However, in the car, in this closed space, they begin to open up about their internal thoughts, their internal lives.”

Hamaguchi feels that words and dialog “on their own aren’t necessarily very appealing in a film,” he says.

“But cinema is about movement, so in a very simple way, once you put these ideas into a mode of transportation — a train, a car etc. — suddenly it’s all more watchable,” he adds. “Suddenly there’s the sense of a destination that arises. Also, by having the characters spend a lot of time in one space, I also realized that the changes in their relationship become more visible against that continuous backdrop.”

READ MORE: Cannes: Japan’s Ryusuke Hamaguchi on Adapting Murakami for ‘Drive My Car’ and Vehicles as Confession Booths (The Hollywood Reporter)

In another interview from Cannes, Hamaguchi told Variety’s Rebecca Davis that his past works have often been described as “really chatty” due to their numerous long, meandering exchanges.

“Here, in his largest-scale production to date, it’s the unspoken subtext that steals the show,” says Davis.

“A big theme of mine is really about how communication doesn’t necessarily arise only because there are words,” Hamaguchi says. “I think a lot about how I can effectively use silences in my films, because to me, silence doesn’t necessarily mean two people are not communicating or have no relationship.”

“For Hamaguchi no character embodies his interest in the eloquence of wordlessness better than the character Lee Yoon-a, a mute actress that Kafuku selects to star in his play,” observes Davis. “Through sign language and an almost seraphic beatitude, she delivers some of the film’s most moving moments.”

READ MORE: Hamaguchi Ryusuke’s Cannes Entry ‘Drive My Car’ Explores the Silence Beneath Everyday Chatter (Variety)

AFI Festival programmer Malin Kahn spoke with Hamaguchi during a Q&A for the 2021 AFI Fest, describing the film as an epic examination of loss: “With a delicate emotionality, Hamaguchi explores what is left behind when a love is lost, and a city is decimated.”

In his podcast and article for NPR, Anthony Khun’s take is that Drive My Car is a story of revelation.

Khun notes that the complex layered three-hour movie is adapted from Murakami’s short story, but which Hamaguchi describes as “a big story, of which only little bits are shown, and other parts are hidden.” Hamaguchi’s approach, explains Khun, is to reveal the hidden parts to us, “like excavating ruins.”

Khun points out scenes where Hamaguchi focuses on revealing the characters’ emotions. He quotes the director as saying he never used to believe “the camera has X-ray eyes, and it can even film a person’s soul.” Hamaguchi gradually came to see it that way as he worked on the film, and he hopes the film’s viewers will too.

READ MORE: Japan’s Oscar-nominated ‘Drive My Car’ is a journey through loss, grief and art (NPR)

For The New York Times, Nicolas Rapold interviewed the director at the offices of Janus Films, one of the distributors of Drive My Car. He reports that while Hamaguchi feels Murakami’s writing is wonderful at expressing inner emotions, “it’s really difficult to re-create those inner feelings in film.”

“Fundamentally, I don’t think that Murakami’s works are made for adaptation,” Hamaguchi adds.

However, Rapold is of the opinion that the film both puts a fresh spotlight on Hamaguchi as a major talent and “seems to crack the code in adapting Murakami.”

Hamaguchi’s adaptation also had Murakami’s permission to adapt the book as a film, which was not always the case, reports Rapold. The writer, apparently surprised that the film was three hours long, bought a ticket to see Drive My Car at a local cinema.

“I was drawn in from beginning to end,” Murakami told Rapold. “I think that this alone is a wonderful feat.”

READ MORE: Haruki Murakami and the Challenge of Adapting His Tales for Film (The New York Times)

As well as talking to Hamaguchi, David Canfield gets the insider view on the film for Vanity Fair with contributions from actor Hidetoshi Nishijima (Yūsuke Kafuku), editor Azusa Yamazaki, and Eiko Ishibashi, the musician who scored Drive My Car.

“[Hamaguchi] told me that I should be on set as a director watching the other performers — he kept saying that, by having me watch the other actors, they would perform miracles,” Nishijima tells Canfield. The director gave the actor and his co-stars backstories that were not in the script, but that served to ground them in their roles. He also made them run through the script over and over without any emoting allowed.

 “We have this tendency as actors to read the script in a way where we’re thinking, ‘Okay, why is he feeling this way? How is he feeling this way?’” Nishijima says. “What we did here, though, is hear the words almost as sound. The meaning of the words started to unconsciously seep into the body.”

For Ishibashi, “the script itself felt like a big epic poem, in a lot of ways, imbued with many human histories.”

“It was like I was making music to this kind of poem,” she tells Canfield, while Yamazaki reveals that the director wanted the film edited like a documentary. Shots weren’t planned out, but instead were captured from several angles, an exploratory process that led to continuous discovery in the editing room.

READ MORE: The Lifelike Triumph of ‘Drive My Car’ (Vanity Fair)

Filmmaker Magazine, in its interview with Hamaguchi, wanted to explore his theater and documentary inclinations. “Through the theater milieu, Drive My Car gets fairly deep into the weeds on the process of directing actors, and it lead me to reflect on how you approach staging and establishing trust.”

Hamaguchi’s answer reveals his method, “Generally speaking, I will ask my cast to read the script multiple times until the whole script becomes almost spontaneous for them.

“What I try to keep in mind is to give the actor the best environment, the best situation for them, so that they can be relaxed in front of the camera. I think standing in front of the camera is a scary experience, and even though you get used to it, there will always be an amount fear that will remain. But with this fear, I try to give them the best conditions possible.

“Once we have this trusting relationship, I just give them the freedom of doing what they feel like doing.

“When we are actually shooting the film, the actors don’t really have a choreography in each and every scene. They’re quite free. Of course, we have general rules of ‘it starts here and ends here and this is the thing you have to do,’ but otherwise actors are really free to move and express what they feel at that moment.

“In this movie the cameraman’s framing was pretty much perfect even in unpredictable situations. And each time you are able to make a good image, I always think it’s a coincidence, because the fact that the framing was good at that moment or the emotional communication was good at that moment is always a coincidence.”

READ MORE: “You Never Know When You Will Have a Great Image”: Ryusuke Hamaguchi on Drive My Car (Filmmaker Magazine)

Drive My Car is known for the curative power of moving (in this instance inside a Saab 900) and how it wrests the secrets from the car’s inhabitants in the movie. Hamaguchi cites Iranian filmmaker Abbas Kiarostami as his inspiration. “His films have very striking scenes where there’s a driver and the surroundings are changing a lot. And at the same time, the relationships between the characters are changing as well.

“I began to think that this image was somehow a condensation of life. It’s also the same with Wim Wenders and all of his transportation scenes, where a relationship changes and the fact that the surroundings change at the same time helps you understand that something is evolving. This is what inspires me the most.”

Variety reported that the two award-winning Hamaguchi films have won over not only foreign festival programmers and critics, who have given them rave reviews, but also buyers in markets not often friendly to Asian art films. One is Italy, where local distributor Tucker Film released Wheel in August and Drive My Car in September, starting in Rome.

Head of acquisitions Sabrina Baracetti, who is also the director of the Udine Far East Film Festival, where Wheel In August screened in late June, cites the Western-style theatricality of the film’s three-part structure, while comparing Hamaguchi’s “mastery of spoken cinema” to that of postwar Golden Age titans Ozu and Naruse.

“But he also reminds me of Ingmar Bergman, with whom he shares a power of dialogue, in both words and silences,” she adds. “Hamaguchi is a director and scriptwriter who knows how to harmonize the spirit of East and West, that’s the reason why his cinema has an appeal to Italian audiences.”

READ MORE: Why Hamaguchi Ryusuke Has an Appeal That Stretches Beyond Asia (Variety)

Speaking of directors, the Busan International Film Festival (BIFF) hosted a Special Talk where Oscar-winning Parasite director Bong Joon Ho with Hamaguchi after gala screenings of Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy and Drive My Car. English translation is voiced over Korean and Japanese consecutive interpretation of the live event:

Screen Daily’s Jean Noh reports from the Special Talk between the directors at BIFF, where she recounts how, when asked about how he cast the actors in Wheel Of Fortune And Fantasy and Drive My Car, Hamaguchi told Bong: “I don’t really make actors act in an audition. I chat with them for about an hour. I want to work with people who are interesting when they are talking and who speak their hearts and minds. I think it’s more important that they are showing me their real selves than whether they can act well or not.”

Bong agreed, noting the successful ensemble in Hamaguchi’s Happy Hour with non-professional actors: “I don’t like giving actors a photocopied page of a script and telling them to try it out under fluorescent lights. It’s awkward. I talk to them for 30 minutes to an hour in the office while sharing coffee, and I can see their acting in other films or in plays. That’s how I cast Park Myung-ho, the man in the basement in Parasite. I saw him in a Korean independent film that I liked.”

According to Noh, both directors agreed rehearsal and repetition helped preparing actors to be more at liberty on set, which Hamaguchi said was his way of dealing with anxiety.

READ MORE: Bong Joon Ho, Ryusuke Hamaguchi talk influences, casting and shooting in cars (Screen Daily)

You can also watch the two masters discuss their craft, with English interpretation, on The Film Stage website.

WATCH: Watch a Two-Hour Conversation Between Bong Joon Ho and Ryusuke Hamaguchi (The Film Stage)

Phil Hoad further explores Hamaguchi’s life and work in The Guardian, revealing he was “a typical video game-and manga-loving teenager before access to Tokyo’s glut of arthouse cinemas while at university broadened his tastes.”

His documentary approach was honed by his 2012 earthquake and tsunami study The Sound of Waves and its two follow-ups. This brought new freshness to his work, “being forced to forget about scripts and react simply to what he shot.”

“I learned how to use the camera correctly, which is to bring out the power of reality,” the director said.

Hoad also explores Hamaguchi’s repetitive rehearsal process.

“His idea is that drumming in the lines without emotion allows actors to fully internalize the text, the better to access authentic emotions in them later.”

This approach bears fruit, as Hoad describes the film as so enigmatic and absorbing that “like Misaki’s ultra-smooth driving, the gear-changes into the philosophical fast lane are hardly noticeable.”

With a nod to the Beatles reference in the title, Hoad feels that with Drive My Car Hamaguchi now has “a ticket to ride in the auteur big league.”

READ MORE: ‘The script is a vehicle’: Japanese director Ryūsuke Hamaguchi on Drive My Car (The Guardian)

Want more? In the video below, watch Hamaguchi in conversation with TIFF programmer Giovanna Fulvi for a Q&A held in advance of the Drive My Car premiere at the 2021 Toronto International Film Festival:

As a rising star of world cinema and a chronicler of the complexity of human relationships, Ryûsuke Hamaguchi takes the stage at the 59th New York Film Festival to discuss his films Drive My Car and Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy:

Paying homage to the tradition of “MA,” or the artistic interpretation of an empty space, in Japanese filmmaking, Hamaguchi pays close attention to the timing, pacing, and “space” within his work. “He keeps tears and drama in check, letting emotion seep in after the heavy blow and in the meaningful silences which, like the negative space of a painting, complete the picture,” film critic Mark Olsen says during a Q&A with the director at JAPAN HOUSE Los Angeles. Watch the full discussion in the video below:

You can also watch Hamaguchi in conversation with “Pachinko” author Min Jin Lee in a Q&A discussion at Film at Lincoln Center:

Or, watch the video essay from Accented Cinema below to learn how Drive My Car utilizes “intertextuality” to add meaning within the film:

From Academy Award-winning writer and director Paolo Sorrentino (The Great Beauty), comes the poetical story of a young man’s heartbreak and liberation in 1980s Naples, Italy. The Hand of God follows Fabietto Schisa (Filippo Scotti), an awkward Italian teen whose life and vibrant, eccentric family are suddenly upended — first by the electrifying arrival of soccer legend Diego Maradona to play for the local team, and then by a shocking accident which leaves him orphaned at age 17.

The Netflix-produced film is deeply personal for Sorrentino while universal in its themes of fate and family, sports and cinema, love and loss.

Much like Kenneth Branagh, who wrote and directed Belfast, a look back in nostalgia to his youth during the pandemic, Sorrentino finally put the script together in 2020 for a story he had had in mind to tell for decades.

“Nostalgia — like melancholy and solitude, when they are not pathological — are feelings I harbor because I grew old when I was young,” he told a French audience, as reported in Variety.

“It’s nostalgia for a youth I never had. It’s the worst kind because it’s nostalgia for something I never had but it’s also the best because reality might have been disappointing, so I can make it up in movies.”

He added, “I am afraid of chaos and reality. That’s why it took me 20 years to make this film: Naples may be a very cinematic city, but it’s too chaotic.”

READ MORE: Paolo Sorrentino Opens up about Chaos, Order and Nostalgia at the Lumière Festival (Variety)

While the drama is led by fictional characters, there are real-life character who surface, too, notably the filmmaker Antonio Capuano (Ciro Capano).

“He was one of the few people who believed in me when I was not believing in myself,” Sorrentino told IndieWire. “Before I met him, I thought filmmaking was too big for me. I wasn’t sure I deserved to become a filmmaker myself. He taught me the need to rely on my instincts.”

The Hand of God premiered earlier this year at the Venice Film Festival, where it picked up the Grand Jury Prize and earned lead actor Scotti the Marcello Mastroianni Award.

“The film is really based on real facts of my life and the reality of my life when I was young,” says Sorrentino. “I happened to live in Naples when Maradona arrived, and I witnessed the whole scenes that greeted him. And my brother did indeed have an audition for a Fellini film. So I’m just putting in the film things that happen in my life. There are a few things that have the time or dates changed for narrative or dramatisation purposes. But the feelings are always authentic.”

READ MORE: ‘Hand of God’: How Paolo Sorrentino Confronted the Greatest Tragedy of His Life With His Most Personal Movie (IndieWire)

Maradona is the late Argentine soccer player Diego Maradona, one of the greatest footballers to have ever lived. The film’s title refers to Maradona’s notorious goal in the 1986 World Cup semi-finals against England, where he cheated by using his hand to score what is perhaps the best individual goal ever.

“Maradona inspired me to become a film-maker,” Sorrentino explains in The Irish Times. “Maradona was my first contact with spectacle — with entertainment — because he was indeed a sportsman, a soccer player, but also an entertainer. It was my first contact with a high form of entertainment. That was my way of getting in touch with art. And not being able to become a soccer player myself, I tried to make films.”

READ MORE: Paolo Sorrentino: ‘Maradona inspired me to become a film-maker’ (The Irish Times)

The Hand of God was shot by cinematographer Daria D’Antonio, who has worked for many years as part of Sorrentino’s camera crew including on Il Divo and The Great Beauty. She is also from Naples, as she explained in an interview with NAB Amplify.

“Both Paolo and myself felt this deep and affectionate connection with places in Naples. I wanted to show them the way I remember and to be faithful to his memory,” she said.

“The concept was to have a very simple look for the film and not to stress the fact that this is a set in the 1980s. We don’t make a feature of it any more than the costumes and set dressing give an impression of the period. We wanted to recreate truth and not do anything over the top visually.”

For this delicate portrayal, D’Antonio selected the RED Monstro paired with ARRI Signature primes. One scene, in which Fabietto enjoys a summer lunch with his family at a country house, was filmed with four Monstro cameras.

“It was shot almost like an action movie,” she says. “The scene has 15 actors and there’s lots of crisscrossing dialogue. Paolo wanted the drama to have the pace of a comedy or action so he wanted a lot of coverage. Plus, we shot outdoors over four to five days with the weather changing so multiple cameras helped give us continuity in the edit.”

This scene, however, was an anomaly. The overall aesthetic was to rein in the director’s typically swirling camerawork for something much quieter and unfussy. There are very few Steadicam or handheld shots.

“It’s a camera that listens,” D’Antonio says of the RED Monstro. “The camera is invisible. My aim was to always respect the sensitive nature of the story, always to focus on the people and the emotion of the scene. We wanted to capture very particular moments, and to avoid large-scale visual constructions in which such moments might get lost.”

Want more? Listen to the cast and crew of The Hand of God talk about their experiences filming this love letter of a film. With topics including family, change, looking to the future, and much more, this 1980-set coming-of-age film is deeply personal for director Paolo Sorrentino:

Writer and director Joanna Hogg first realized that actors simply reading her script wasn’t the way she wanted to hear her story told when she had written her 2007 movie Unrelated. “I wrote Unrelated in a conventional way, and then on day two or three of the shoot, I realized I wasn’t having much fun carrying the script around and getting the actors to say exactly what I had written on the page,” Hogg says.

“A lot of my directing has to do with listening and hearing rhythm and how people say a line, so I just didn’t like what I heard,” she continues.

The Souvenir Part II is Hogg’s fifth feature, a follow-up to 2019’s The Souvenir. Actor Tilda Swinton, who appeared in both parts, summed up Hogg’s process from her point of view in a Q&A held at Film at Lincoln Center. “What Joanna does is make authors of all of us. So you are carrying the narrative and every time you decide to speak, it’s like I’m doing now. I know roughly what I want to say but I’m having to bring the words out and encounter my own inarticulacy and that’s what people do.

“Very rarely in films that are beautifully written by great screenwriters do you actually see, particularly very good performers, do that. You see them being very articulate all the time and saying very written things. So what you get when you have these raw animal people blundering around in a set of Joanna’s is you get people really alive.

“The experience from our point of view is incredibly lively and creative. The thing that I find very interesting as an objective eye is when I first saw the cut and was amazed at how precise it was, given that it is drummed up in this mystical fashion, it’s got a lot to do with how beautifully it’s cut.

“Somehow, around take four, there’s a sort of rhythm, it’s like making music. People know enough what they’re doing but they’re still on their toes that there’s this perfect elision and that’s the take.”

This theme of music extends into the film, as Thrillist’s Esther Zuckerman discovers when she explores the references Hogg drew on for The Souvenir: Part II. Béla Bartók’s opera Bluebeard’s Castle notably makes an appearance in both movies, and musicals are a recurring motif in the films that the protagonists make in Part II.

“At that time [in my life], I was really interested in the musical form,” said Hogg. “Also in the UK, there were various directors making musicals in that Hollywood tradition. It felt like something very much from the 1980s era of the Hollywood musical and the reinvention of it. There were all these artists riffing off the Hollywood musical, including myself as a student.”

While developing ideas for the film, Hogg revisited the songs and artists that shaped her youth.

“Music was incredibly important, and often the choices would have to do with what I remembered from that time, and what music from that time conjures up particular ideas and memories,” said Hogg.

During prep, the director was also “revisiting films about films.”

“I’m not very good at taking ideas from other films. I like enjoying them and appreciating, but I don’t necessarily want to create something like another film,” Hogg said. “I’m trying to be another cinematic pioneer in a way.”

READ MORE: Soul II Soul and Fellini: Joanna Hogg’s Biggest Inspirations for ‘The Souvenir: Part II’ (Thrillist)

Hogg reveals more about her favorite musicals and stocks up on films by Federico Fellini in this short for the Criterion Collection:

Hogg expanded on her process in an interview with MovieMaker Magazine. “I’ll design a setting for a scene, and then the words come out of them because of the situation that they’re in,” Hogg said of working with actors on set. “And then we’ll develop it over a number of takes. So the first take will often be very rough and quite chaotic. Sometimes I like that, and that goes in the cut. Or it’ll get sculpted, so by take 11, everything is more streamlined.”

“Part II jumps off into new territory for me that isn’t necessarily based on how I was as a student,” Hogg explained. “There’s a lot more invention, which is maybe where the feeling of experiment comes from. I didn’t feel like I was stuck with my own life. It travels in different directions, in new directions, and that felt really exciting.

“So it had this sort of chaos. It was fun and really challenging, every day we were shooting what felt like a different film in a way.”

READ MORE: The Souvenir Part II Writer-Director Joanna Hogg Doesn’t Script Dialogue (MovieMaker Magazine)

The film was inspired by Hogg’s graduation film from film school, she told The Film Stage. “Where it differs is that my graduation film from film school didn’t speak about the relationship that I’d been through. It was personal but in a different way. It was about self-identification and accepting yourself, on some level, but it didn’t deal with the relationship.

“I knew that I wanted Julie to make this film. I knew that I wanted her to examine the relationship from Part I, and that was partly the experience of shooting Part I, making me think about that.”

Hogg always conceived of The Souvenir as a diptych, with an A and a B side, so the idea of a sequel, however unorthodox for an indie drama, was baked into the concept. Still, given the open-ended way she generates her films — without much scripted dialogue, leaving ample space for improv both on her part and by cast and crew — that didn’t mean she knew where Part II would end up.

“I initially wrote both parts at the same time, intending to shoot them together,” Hogg explains, “only it didn’t work out that way. So, then I rewrote Part II just before we shot it. It did get quite confusing, having to slip into the second before really making up my mind about what I felt about the first one. But as my films always are, it was a process of evolution.”

READ MORE: Joanna Hogg on The Souvenir Part II, Meta Filmmaking, and Creating an Atmosphere of Discovery (The Film Stage)

“I wanted desperately to make them at the same time, because I thought there was a danger that if I just made the first one, I wouldn’t get the opportunity to make the second one,” Hogg told The New York Times, adding that she was grateful for the extra time. She even believes the second part would have been “a shadow of its current self” if she had shot both movies together.

READ MORE: A Filmmaking Life Gets a Sequel (The New York Times)

The story rejoins film student Julie Harte days after the close of the first chapter. In the raw aftermath of her tragic affair with Anthony, she is in free-fall, just starting to reckon with who she might become on the other side of it. Julie re-enters the world as she knew it — school, friends, parents, lovers, her art and work — but the way she sees that world is new.

As usual for Hogg, the writing of The Souvenir never involved a conventional shooting script. Instead, there was an initial document more akin to a treatment — with little dialogue but rife with vivid descriptions, supplemented by exhaustive, often deeply personal documentation: music, art, films, books, photographs, even diaries and therapist’s notes.

As Hogg revealed to The Film at Lincoln Center podcast, this document was shared with Tom Burke, who plays Antony in The Souvenir, but not Honor Byrne Swinton, who plays Julie Harte in both films.

“He got a lot of information from me about this story. That just seemed right to me that he knew where the story was going, and Julie wouldn’t,” said Hogg. “When we made Part II, of course, Julie was on her own and I thought, ‘Well, Julie now needs to know where she’s going.’ So, she saw the story.

“Honor took it in her own direction,” she continued. “I realized that she’d been observing me during the making of part one. And so, when she’s playing Julie, directing as a film student, it was very strange. It sometimes wasn’t very flattering. She was incredibly clever in her observations.”

READ MORE: Joanna Hogg on the Meta Self-Reflexiveness of The Souvenir Part II (The Film at Lincoln Center)

“I was able to observe her and think about her as Honor but also as Julie and make decisions in terms of that journey and what would happen when,” Hogg told Slant’s Marshall Shaffer. “I really took part two on another journey away from myself in a sense. I experienced a desire in Honor. I saw Honor feeling very imprisoned in a way by the shape of Julie. She’s such an introverted person, in a way that Honor isn’t. I saw Honor really wanting to burst out of this character — or, rather, burst out of a way of being that Julie has — into something more. To expand. That idea of expanding Julie and the story came a lot from Honor, actually.”

Swinton Byrne said the character of Julie resembled her younger self. “It was actually quite organic in a strange way to go back into the introversion and the self-questioning,” she said, adding, “It really was like having an alter ego.

“I grew up so much between the two-year gap between the two films, and it’s magic that the second one begins two days after the first one ends because there’s such a change there. In those two days, those two years for me, so much had snapped and broken and grown. That was just such a fantastic experience. It was really interesting to me to become more Honor in the second one. And I hope that did follow the natural progression of things. It just went a course, and I think it worked quite well. It was like an evolution.”

READ MORE: Interview: Joanna Hogg and Honor Swinton Byrne on The Souvenir Part II (Slant)

“Part II is almost a documentary of the making of Part I,” Hogg told AnOther Magazine’s Claire Marie Healy. “On some levels it actually is, because I was observing myself, Honor was observing herself and myself making the last film, and then all those observations went into this one. So for example, when Julie’s making her film, based on her story with Anthony, it felt very much like making a documentary in a way and it felt like Julie was — Honor was — that director working with a real crew. That crew that she’s surrounded by are actually some of our crew members! So it felt very real.”

READ MORE: Joanna Hogg on Her Deeply Personal Follow-up Film, The Souvenir Part II (AnOther Magazine)

“In hindsight I’m so glad I didn’t shoot the two together, because so much changed,” Hogg reflected. “The idea that Julie was going to make her student film about Anthony was there in early drafts but not really felt-through in any complete sense. Only much later did it become something where the audience experiences not just what Julie makes, but what she dreams — and the actual dreamscape kept developing as the shoot went along.”

The Souvenir: Part II was a Main Slate selection of the 59th New York Film Festival: “Continuing her remarkable autobiographical saga, Hogg fashions a gently meta-cinematic mirror image of the first film, cutting to the quick in one surprising, enthralling idea after another.”

Tyler Aquilina at Entertainment Weekly revealsit took Hogg decades “to be able to process her affair through film; her real-life thesis project was a fantastical short starring Swinton,” and says that while The Souvenir: Part II “moves further away from reality in some ways, it also muddles the swirl of memory, fiction, and metafiction that makes up its narrative.”

Hogg harks back to her phantasmagorical first outing during an elaborate sequence in Part II, which drew inspiration from the Technicolor fantasias of Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger.

“[My collaborators] were constantly asking me about [that sequence], because that was going to be the height of our stylization, which would seem to be something very planned and very organized,” Hogg recalled. “And I knew that I wanted to decide the details of that closer to the end of the shoot, partly because I was observing Julie’s journey and the grief she was experiencing as a character. The ideas weren’t cooked yet, until close to shooting those scenes.”

READ MORE: How The Souvenir Part II helped Joanna Hogg and Honor Swinton Byrne grow as artists and people (Entertainment Weekly)

Cinematographer David Raedeker, who shot The Souvenir Part 1, explains how Part II was continued. “We used a lot of different film formats,” he notes. “We used digital 16 millimeter and film 16 millimeter, digital and film 35, and other formats as well, including Hi8 and archive footage of Joanna’s on Super 8.

“It feels woven together, I think, but each of these different textures really add something, from the real to the hyperreal, and nothing’s arbitrary.”

Film Comment caught up with Joanna Hogg for its podcast while she was attending the 59th New York Film Festival, while Honor Swinton Byrne joined the conversation from Edinburgh via Zoom. The lively chat touches upon the film’s layered approach to autobiography, its precisely contrived naturalism, and how the film’s soundtrack draws from Hogg’s memories of youth.

READ MORE: The Film Comment Podcast: Joanna Hogg & Honor Swinton Byrne on The Souvenir Part II (Film Comment)

For Hogg, memories — hers or Julie’s — are subtly linked to shifting color palettes, according to Vox’s Alissa Wilkinson.

“In the film’s earliest scenes, as Julie’s parents try desperately to buoy their daughter following Anthony’s death, the family is shown all sitting at a dinner table spread with white linens, wearing white clothing, in a very brightly lit dining room. Even the food (white fish, white potatoes) matches. In Julie’s memory, her parents are working hard to keep things light in the face of her monstrous devastation.

“Not long after, an image of a little bright red blood accidentally smeared onto bedsheets gives way, in the next scene, to a flashy red car on a movie set. There’s a woman in the car, wearing a red dress, dabbing red lipstick onto her lips with her fingers, her nails painted a fiery shade to match. A few scenes later, Julie has handed out copies of her screenplay to the film program advisers, tied with bits of red ribbon.

“Did all of these things look this way when they really happened? Only Joanna Hogg knows — or maybe she doesn’t. Maybe the memories have flashed back to her with this coloration because they’re imbued with a different emotion, even one that is hard to express. The Souvenir: Part II is in some ways a valentine to Hogg’s younger self, who was fumbling through her own messy emotions by making art.”

READ MORE: One of this year’s best movies is about its own making (Vox)

Director Joanna Hogg discusses The Souvenir Part II at NYFF59, with NYFF Director of Programming Dennis Lim:

AV Club’s Vadim Rizov feels the film portrays a life transformed by the collective nature of filmmaking: “Just as Julie radically adjusts her artistic goals, The Souvenir: Part II changes its shape as necessary to suit each moment of her growth.

“She grows along multiple axes, her healing process linked to her increasing technical competence and acumen. By film’s end, she’s directing music videos for a living. This is not an unambiguously positive arc: Hogg made videos and TV for years after graduating in 1986, before finally directing her first feature, Unrelated, in 2007.”

READ MORE: The Souvenir: Part II is the rare sequel to improve on its terrific predecessor (AV Club)

BFI National Archive curator Will Massa and film critic Beatrice Loayza explore past and present work of Joanna Hogg in the British Film Institute’s “BFI At Home | Filmmakers in Focus” series:

The Atlantic’s David Sims hails Part II as a “refreshing” when compared to the raft of franchises clogging theaters: “The film lets Julie make mistakes as she tries to express herself through art, demonstrating both compassion for Hogg’s fictional self and gentle self-critique.

“When [Julie] finally shows audienceshercompleted grad-school project, her new maturity is evident. Hogg depicts the work as a gorgeous, abstract piece of art cinema, a blend of her own youthful obsessions and her present-day experience behind the camera.”

READ MORE: A Movie That Reimagines What Sequels Are For (The Atlantic)

Some impressions were not as rosy. Igor Fishman at In Review Online is disappointed, calling Part II “a protracted epilogue to a film that never needed one.”

“It lacks a driving force, and for the first time, Hogg, a director whose idiosyncratic filmography has been marked by confidence, appears to be grasping in the dark.

“We watch the same gorgeously composed images of The Souvenir become so devoid of feeling or power. This aspect becomes most obvious in looking at The Souvenir: Part II’s ending, which reduces Julie to a mere character; her pain, her grief, her creative ambitions all caught in a loop of artifice, nothing but a film within a film.”

READ MORE: The Souvenir: Part II | Joanna Hogg (In Review Online)

However NPR’s Justin Chang doesn’t perceive the film as ever being narrow or solipsistic: “It’s a wonderfully generous movie, sardonic in tone but rich in understated emotion. Hogg regards her younger self both critically and affectionately, and she shows an instinctive fairness toward all her characters.

“She’s also extremely attentive to how they look, talk and present themselves: Rather than overdoing the big ‘80s hair and obvious needle drops, aside from one exhilarating use of the Eurythmics, she channels the vibe of the era with exquisite subtlety.”

READ MORE: ‘The Souvenir Part II’ is a near-perfect sequel about loss and art (NPR)

The film moved The Knockturnal’s Joshua A. Guttman to tears. But it’s empathy rather than sorrow: “Even outside of filmmaking, anyone working a job in their passion can relate to this film. It’s hard enough to put so much of yourself in your art, but when you’re still reconciling your feelings and relationships, you’re almost forced to confront those uncertainties with yourself through your art.

“It helps that this film isn’t just one long anxiety attack. The moments where Julie starts to forge new relationships or little things start to work out in her film feel like a giant exhaled breath. There are moments when you see why artists put up with all the stress and anxiety, how it can be worth it for those moments. Not only do I want people to see this movie, but I also hope they’re as touched by it as I was.”

READ MORE: NYFF Film Review: ‘The Souvenir Part II’ A Fascinating Journey in a Film Student’s Mind (The Knockturnal)

BY BRETT MOSS

Rob Hardy, BSC, ASC, a British cinematographer known for his work on “Mission Impossible: Fallout” and “Ex Machina,” shot on the Sony F65 and F55, and “DEVS,” shot on the VENICE, recently had the chance to try the new VENICE 2, creating a short film as a real-world test for how he would use the camera on an actual project.

Hardy recently used the new Sony VENICE 2 digital cinema camera for something of a trial by fire, with a short project, entitled “Venezia,” that would mimic many of the challenges of a complicated digital video shoot.

Hardy explaina: “What we’re doing is putting it through its paces on a set using actors with a piece of drama with all of the issues and problems that may come with that. In other words, time pressures, having to move quite quickly in terms of lighting those things. I really wanted to see how the camera would perform in that context because that’s essentially how I would use it.”

He said, “The opportunity to use VENICE 2 is actually a really fantastic one because it’s a real test. I mean, that’s essentially what this is. We’ve designed [this shoot] so that we’re effectively testing this camera for the very first time in a real filmmaking scenario.”

Hardy’s “Venezia” is a lush period piece he created to leverage and showcase the camera’s wide dynamic range, color science, and natural skin tones inherited from the original VENICE, and even better low-light performance as values for dual base ISO have bumped up to 800 and 3200.

SonyCine provides basic information on the camera’s features and specs ⸺ 8.6k image sensor, improved ISO — while also illustrating better battery power management and a lighter overall package than its predecessor, the VENICE.

He adds: “This is the first time I’ve ever used that large 8.6K sensor, and we were lucky enough to get some anamorphic lenses, for the full cinematic effect, that will really utilize that whole sensor. As a result, it was quite astonishing.”

Also quoted in the piece is Peter Wignall, Steadicam operator on “Venezia,” who said that the camera was light enough to use with a Steadicam rig.

We’re effectively testing this camera for the very first time in a real filmmaking scenario.

Rob Hardy

Seconding that is Chris Williams of drone operator Flying Pictures, who also noted the camera’s skimpy battery appetite. “I was expecting to be changing [batteries] between each flight but no, we’ve done two flights and I’ve still got 50% left on the [drone’s] batteries, which are powering the gimbal, the camera, the video link and the lens control as well. It’s a much more compact package within the gimbal.”

He adds, “The new VENICE 2 makes flying it on a drone possible. It’s going to last forever in the air.”

Read more about “Venezia” by Rob Hardy, BSC, ASC – Shot on Venice 2,” which also includes several related videos along with a demo of footage shot.

More VENICE camera tests, from Robert McLachlan, ASC, CSC, and Claudio Miranda, ASC, are below:

About half way into Jane Campion’s new movie, the knot tightens. It is imperceptible, such is the pace of the way in which tension is built, but it grips, much like the onscreen portrayal of cowboys painstakingly braiding new rope from rawhide. Given that this is a Jane Campion film, the metaphor is surely not coincidental.

Based on the 1967 book written by Thomas Savage, The Power of the Dog contains all the trapping of an archetypal Western but deviates dramatically from cliché.

In his review for The New Yorker, film critic Anthony Lane notes that the film’s title is taken from the 22nd Psalm in the King James Bible: “Deliver my soul from the sword; my darling from the power of the dog.”

“As the movie ends,” Lane posits, “you can’t help asking yourself: Who exactly is the dog, and who’s the darling?”

READ MORE: “The Power of the Dog” is Jane Campion’s Anti-Western (The New Yorker)

“Our main inspiration in terms of other films was A Man Escaped (1956) by Robert Bresson, where simplicity and minimalism is used to craft an incredibly tense story,” explains director of photography Ari Wegner, ACS (Lady Macbeth, Zola) and winner of this year’s TIFF Variety Artisan Award. “Everything in the film from score to color palette to wardrobe and camera movement is very unshowy. No one element and certainly not the cinematography should not be grabbing your attention.”

Yet grab it does, as The Power of the Dog seduces the audience with an accretion of detail amid the foreboding hills of Montana. Even this feels dislocated since the production shot in the Hawkdun Ranges in Central Otago in South Island, New Zealand. Its sparsely populated, grassy plains and rocky mountains proved a remarkable match for Montana.

Campion has described the deeply complex central character Phil Burbank, a brilliant but cruel, hyper-masculine cattle rancher, played by Benedict Cumberbatch, as one of the all-time great characters of American fiction. He is in an impossible situation of being an alpha male who is homophobic and also homosexual.

Wegner spent roughly a year working with Campion, location scouting, storyboarding, and developing the visual style for the film, as well as working with production designer Grant Major (Oscar winner for Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King).

“For me that was incredibly exciting,” says Wegner. “Not just the prospect of working with Jane on such an amazing story but to be able to prepare properly and spend the time to get it right. I’ve shot there before and I know how the landscape changes from season to season. It was really important for us to spend time at the location in the season that we were going to be shooting. I didn’t do any other projects in that period, familiarizing myself with the property to find the great angles and getting to know the light.”

The property is the large ranch house and outbuildings built in the style of 1920s Montana. This is a settlement on the cusp of modernization, where saddle-hardened cowboys live uneasily with cars and trains, college education and civil society of the nearby town.

“I read the book as soon as I got the call from Jane and its descriptions of the land, the house and the characters within it as well as the minute details make up a holistic world,” Wegner says.

She participated in decision-making about the location of the house and throughout the art department build ensuring that the set allowed her to best capture the interplay of shadow and light that unfolds so dramatically in the mountain ridge behind the set.

“Shooting in New Zealand can take a lot of patience and endurance to deal with really intense weather, but it’s a wonderful experience,” says the native Australian. “I’ve always loved it. It’s a landscape that gives so much. You can photograph a vast plain with a mountain range that rises up behind it as one image, which is something that is not possible in Australia.”

“I was attracted to this concept of a very bright exterior with interiors that are very dark,” she tells Leslie Combemale. “Because the outside is so bright, coming inside feels really dark, and I think both Jane and I really loved the juxtaposition of this brutal, harsh outside, where you see everything, then coming back inside where everything’s a lot more shadowy, and maybe you only see glimpses of light. I think that’s in the characters as well.

“They’ve got an exterior that they project, which is clear, and then their interior world is a lot more nuanced, and, at times, quite dark. We worked a lot with the production designer, Grant Major, who is a wonderful collaborator and an amazing artist with what he does, to make sure that the house we were designing had a dark interior, with floorboards and timber panels on the wall that are dark, to create a kind of claustrophobic grandeur.

“It is also a space where, especially for Rose, she’s always hyper-aware of where Phil is. Within that darkness, you sometimes feel like he may be somewhere you can’t see. There is a thriller or horror aspect to it, of this monster in the house where there’s no escape.”

READ MORE: “Power of the Dog” Cinematographer Ari Wegner on Finding the Light in Jane Campion’s Mythic Western (The Credits)

Wagner described the meticulous planning that went into the film to MovieMaker Magazine’s Caleb Hammond.

“It can’t be underestimated how long planning takes,” she told Hammond. “For me, it’s at least 100 hours to properly plan a film. But it’s probably like four or five hours max of storyboarding before your brain melts down.

“Jane and I did about a month one-on-one together. We went out of town close to the location. So we’re in the office with turned-off phones and emails, and just got to work. We probably had at least four weeks of full-time storyboarding. It was probably about five or six hours a day of that, and if we were to take a break, it would be like, ‘OK, let’s go for a drive and go on location to see if this plan actually works in reality.’

“Or ‘Let’s go for a walk and talk about how we’re going to do some other difficult thing.’ Just being together, planning — 100 hours is the bare minimum to do it properly. And that’s one-on-one without any distractions. It’s my happy place when I’ve got that. Everything becomes easier after that.”

READ MORE: Power of the Dog Cinematographer Ari Wegner on the Daily Storyboarding Max ‘Before Your Brain Melts Down’ (MovieMaker Magazine)

Planning the production, Campion and producer Tanya Seghatchian met with novelist Annie Proulx, who wrote the short story “Brokeback Mountain” and penned an afterword to Savage’s book in 2001. They discussed writing about the American West from a female writer’s perspective. Her encouragement, Campion says, was incredibly helpful in giving her the confidence to tell this very American, masculine story.

An important reference for Campion and Wegner was the work of photojournalist Evelyn Cameron, who documented the American West at the time the film is set. They also referenced Time magazine archives, featuring photography of cowboys of the era, in addition to the Ken Burns documentary series The West, which offered the team a snapshot not only of 1920s Montana, but everything that came before it.

“Cameron’s diary and photographs offered an insight into that world from a woman’s and an outsider’s perspective,” Wegner says. “Her pictures — there is one of a woman standing on a horse that feels super conceptual — evoke a strong feeling that these characters could be alive now. We wanted to create that kind of realness in the moving image.”

Any desire to shoot on film was taken out of their hands because the location was so remote dailies could not be processed in time (and the cost of insurance was prohibitive).

“There are no labs in New Zealand that can take that scale of dailies footage and the idea of shipping unprocessed camera neg is a really scary process for everyone — myself included,” she says.

She shot large-format on Alexa Mini LF paired with vintage anamorphic Ultra Panatar lenses to frame actors against the vast landscapes. The while the interiors of the ranch house, with its Swiss-style wooden architecture are dark. She bounced light off molded glass to simulate moonlight and the brooding atmosphere inside.

Toward the end a sequence takes place in a barn at night between Phil and Peter (played by Kodi Smit-McPhee). There’s so much hiding in the shadows. Everything begins to lean closer: Phil rolling a smoke in a macro closeup, a very tactile shot that unfurls into a slow build that climaxes with the sensual gesture of Peter holding the cigarette to Phil’s lips. Macro shots of rope plaiting are used to underline Phil’s desire and the sexual tension between them. The scene cuts to the horses as a way to transition out of the sensuality into the morning light, but retain the mood and let it sit in the air.

It deconstructs the myth of Marlboro Man.

“The idea of giving love and attention to a macro shot was definitely in the language of the film from the start,” Wegner says. “We know by virtue of the script how much attention we’re going to pay to things like hands on rope, playing the piano, playing the banjo. It’s an easy thing to say you’ll grab a macro but it’s harder to shoot. I had a whole list that we storyboarded and handed to (Steadicam/A Cam) Grant Adam to get. In a way there is something more iconic in the detail and texture of these shots than any of the big vistas.”

Jordan Kisner, in her profile for The New York Times, notes that even Campion’s “softest works” have a touch of what the director describes as “what was nasty, what isn’t spoken about in life.” Yet tenderness remains a through line in Campion’s films.

“Tenderness is very important to me,” she tells Kisner. “Because it is what brings me to my vulnerability, I guess. And I feel like that’s probably a hard place for me to go to, and it is the place where I feel most touched by life. I guess it’s the leading edge, you know, of my experience.”

Kisner writes that “tenderness” isn’t the first word that comes to mind when she considers Campion’s work:

“I cannot shake the image of the title character in her first feature, Sweetie, shoving porcelain horse figurines into her mouth and chewing them until blood spills out of her smile. But after a while, the tenderness starts to emerge. It’s a bit like the experience of looking for a long time at a portrait and then realizing, as you look, that the reason the portrait makes you feel so much is the way the painter worked with the negative space, the shadows, the things you don’t immediately know you’re looking at. Tenderness may not be the first thing you see in a Campion film, but it is fundamentally what she’s painting with.”

READ MORE: Inside Jane Campion’s Cinema of Tenderness and Brutality (The New York Times)

Want more? Watch Jane Campion, Benedict Cumberbatch and Kirsten Dunst discuss the making of The Power of the Dog during a Q&A at the 2021 AFI Fest:

Campion, Cumberbatch and Dunst also appeared at Film at Lincoln Center:

You can also listen to Campion’s interview with Scott Simon for NPR, where she discusses why she was initially drawn to the story.

“I think what most impressed me was that it was clear that Thomas Savage had lived on a ranch, that this was his life,” Campion tells Scott. “This was not writ large and some sort of romantic version of the West. Thomas Savage moved to a ranch with his mother, which is the story which is really told in the film as well, and the brother of the man that his mother married was talented — like, great chess player and, you know, went to Yale, et cetera — but also, like, a really hardened cowboy and terrible bully.”

READ MORE: ‘The Power of the Dog’ is Jane Campion’s first film in 12 years (NPR)

What Campion loved most about Savage’s book was the cowboys and cowboy life, which have “always been a big thing for me,” she says. “But, you know, I guess the honesty, the truth of it and the fact that it had a narrative that just grew more and more interesting and exciting. And, you know, I really didn’t know where I was with it. Like, what’s going to happen? Who’s going to be hurt? Something’s going to go wrong, I just know. And it really surprised me at the end. I had to sort of go back and check it.”

Check out the full interview in the audio player below:

Jane Campion and producer Emile Sherman sat down with Screen Australia to discuss their collaboration and the challenges they faced while filming on the South Island of New Zealand:

You can also listen to Campion discuss what she calls “The Last Scene” for The New York Times video series, “Anatomy of a Scene,” featuring a moment between Phil and Peter inside the barn. “It’s the culmination of their relationship and so many different parts of the film that have been seeded right from the very beginning coming together,” she says.

Ostensibly focused on the braiding of a rope, the sequence has elements of seduction, but the intentions of the characters may be a bit more complex than what is directly shown:

Listen to a conversation with Campion, Wegner, editor Peter Sciberras, production designer Grant Major, costume designer Kirsty Cameron, supervising sound editor Robert Mackenzie, and production sound mixer Richard Flynn:

Watch this directors roundtable hosted by The Hollywood Reporter, which gathers together Kenneth Branagh (Belfast), Jane Campion (The Power of The Dog), Guillermo del Toro (Nightmare Alley), Asghar Farhadi (A Hero), Reinaldo Marcus Green (King Richard) and Pedro Almodóvar (Parallel Mothers) to discuss their films:

For even the most seasoned of natural history producers, filming behavior literally in a new light is extremely exciting and introduces a whole new level of previously hidden animal communication.

The BBC, in co-production with Netflix and Australia’s Channel 9, has produced Life in Color which, using new camera filtering systems, allowed the filming of UV and polarized light in the capture of land and ocean animal behavior.

The critically acclaimed series is hosted by David Attenborough. Series producer Sharmila Choudhury, who has been involved in many of Attenborough’s productions, told camera manufacturer RED, “When we contacted David about wanting to make a series on this subject matter, he said he had wanted to make a series about color since the 1950s!”

Life in Color sets itself apart from other natural history documentary series in that it explores the extraordinary ways that animals use color for survival. The team tried to cover a range of different kinds of animals to reveal how they see and use color. “Most mammals see fewer colors; they are effectively red-green color blind. On the other hand, many birds, insects, and fish can see colors in the UV range. And some animals also use polarized light to signal with patterns that we can’t see,” explained Choudhury.

The filmmakers teamed up with scientists who study animal vision and developed specialist camera systems that allowed them to record colors in polarized light, and in the UV range.

Adam Geiger, who filmed the coral reef sequence alongside Rory McGuinness, ACS, explained the technical breakthrough that allowed the new shots, “First, it’s critical to understand how animals perceive their world, and for that, we relied on scientists Viktor Gruev at the University of Illinois, and Justin Marshall and Sam Powell at the University of Queensland’s Brain Institute,” he said.

“UV and polarization photography has been around a long time, but what makes this series unique is combining both visible light imagery and those other wavelengths in the same image.

“Rory McGuinness and I shot the underwater sequences in several locations. The stories feature small, fast-moving animals, no less extraordinary for their size, but challenging to film underwater. We spent a lot of time with our researchers to learn the behaviors of each species, to be as prepared as possible in the field.

“We chose two primary camera systems: a RED HELIUM in a Nauticam housing, and Sony F5/RAW in a Gates housing. For both systems, we had a variety of lens and port options that could take us from the macro to the micro.”

“One of the most amazing revelations came from little fish on the Great Barrier Reef,” Choudhury continued. “To our eyes, a shoal of yellow damselfish all look exactly the same. But when you view them through a UV camera, you see that some have dark spots like freckles across their faces, while others have bright patches that reflect UV light across the body. These are actually different species and the fish can use those UV colors to tell each other apart. It’s a code invisible to us — and to large predatory fish that can’t see UV, either — so these patterns avoid attracting unwanted attention.”

For other more land-based behaviors, documentary and wildlife cameraman Vianet Djenguet hiked into the forest of Park de la Lekedi in Gabon to explore the male Mandrill’s vibrant colors that assert the primate’s dominance in a group. Djenguet and a small crew spent three weeks documenting their behavior.

Due to the focus on color, the cameraman took a different approach to capturing the Mandrills. “I used a low-angle method to emphasize their size, making them look larger to accentuate their features and colors,” he says. “I also made sure I set my RED GEMINI on the IPP2 and wide gamut RGB mode to capture every color the sensor can see.”

READ MORE: Life in Color: A Glimpse Into a New Spectrum (RED)

Another segment in Life in Color filmed in West Papua, Indonesia, focused on the magnificent bird-of paradise. Tim Laman, an American ornithologist, wildlife photojournalist and filmmaker, staked out the male’s display perch for several weeks. He filmed with a RED HELIUM 8K from his hide and had numerous DSLR and GoPros set up on branches around the display site that were controlled remotely.

Birds-of-paradise never cease to amaze with their unique and bizarre displays that are unrivalled in the animal kingdom. “Our eyes have three color receptors,” Choudhury explained, “but birds have four, allowing them to see in the UV range too. UV colors are particularly bright, so they can be very effective in dark rainforest habitats. The magnificent bird-of-paradise makes sure that his plumage stands out better by cleaning his arena of any leaves. Against a plain brown canvas, his colors appear brighter and more dazzling.”

Choudhury says that the series didn’t set out to address environmental problems, but during filming they discovered that climate change was affecting the lives and colors of some animals in ways they had not expected. “Many animals living in cold habitats, such the arctic fox and mountain hare, change their brown summer coats for white winter fur to afford them better camouflage. But as our world warms and snow cover melts away earlier and earlier every year, these animals are often out of sync and mismatched with their habitats, making them more vulnerable to predation.”

Surprisingly, other species are attempting to fight back against global warming with color. On Australia’s Great Barrier Reef, almost half of the corals have died off over the last 15 years due to the warming of the seas. But in the last decade, scientists have discovered that some dying corals have started to produce bright fluorescent pigments that act as sunscreen in an effort to protect themselves.

Want more? Watch this behind-the-scenes video from Mashable, “How David Attenborough’s ‘Life in Color’ captured what the eye can’t see,” featuring series producer Sharmila Choudhury and executive producer Colette Beaudry:

By Adrian Pennington & Julian Mitchell

The cinematography of Succession is full of flaws. Yes, one of the most popular and critically acclaimed TV dramas of the moment seems to get away with imprecise framing, characters who block other characters and awkward focus pulls — all the things that in the normal world of TV styling, and especially with the kind of budget HBO puts behind a prestige show like this, would have the camera operators fired.

Of course, the flaws aren’t flaws, but carefully designed into the visual grammar of the show. The show is consciously shot as though a real camera were in the room, often at the expense of ideal compositions, and a big part of why that is has to do with how the show treats its camera like it’s a character.

Thomas Flight, a video blogger, has dissected all this in a video:

Since the show is mainly driven by dialogue between various people in a room it could easily be a very formulaic and boring, Flight says. Yet many of these conversations feel tense and exciting. It’s also a show about a group of people who aren’t particularly nice yet you find yourself getting engrossed in their drama. Why?

Because the camera crafts a character that doesn’t exist consciously on screen, but one that sits in the unconscious mind of the viewer that aids in the telling of the story.

This style of cinematography isn’t new. The pilot to the series is titled “Celebration,” which is a reference to the 1998 Danish film Festen (The Celebration) made by director Thomas Vinterberg. Festen was the first film in the Dogme95 movement that employed handheld camera work and an approach to filmmaking that attempted to mimic the conditions of documentary filmmaking.

Succession takes cues from Dogme95, cinema verité, and other styles that use documentary techniques to create fictional stories.

“Even though it is not a documentary or a mockumentary the scenes in Succession are still shot as if the camera-operator is in the room with the characters attempting to capture things as if they were real events,” Flight explains.

“A more formal narrative show would place the camera between the characters and the actors would pretend it isn’t there. But filming in an ob-doc style the cameras are forced to the sidelines. The camera operators don’t want to get in the way so they end up looking around the people in the room to get the best view. Sometimes the result is less than ideal compositions.”

If it feels like the cameras are actually in the room, it also feels like there’s an actual person operating them in that room. They are not just objective floating observers. Where they look and how they move has a subjective motivation and personality to it, Flight contends. This creates the opportunity for the character of the cameras to express itself.

Flight says the camera acts like a player in the game being played on screen.

Succession is about the schemes and machinations of the family as they each try to achieve what they want. It’s like a game. They have strategies and they talk about making “plays.” The board of this game are the spaces on screen and the conversations between characters. Often the goal is to accomplish what they want while hiding their true intentions.

“The actual lines the characters say are often meaningless while the real meaning is in the looks and glances and expressions of characters caught off guard by the camera in the room.

“All the players know they are playing this game so each character is also trying to understand what the other character’s hidden motivations are. Reactions, hidden subtle expressions, body language are all clues that the character and the audience can use to understand what the character really wants or really means.”

In the same way the characters in the scene are scanning each other for clues that betray their real intention, so are the viewers and the camera operators in the scene.

The show’s style doesn’t always stick to these rules. Once the conventions for a show are established you can break those norms to create contrast for a specific impact. For example, the energy of the cameras often matches the energy of the scene. When the family is scrambling around trying to say the right thing, the camera searches and dives as well. In other scenes where the characters feel safe or in control the camera calms down. At times the cameras use smoother movement, dollies or even slow-motion in contrast to the frenetic handheld movement in the other scenes to build tension.

Unlike nearly all of 2021’s high end episodics, the multi-award winning Succession is shot on Kodak Vision3 500T 5219 35mm film (HBO’s The White Lotus is another one from a small bunch).

Succession is shot in 1.78:1 aspect ratio on an Arricam LT and ST both with Leitz Summilux-C and Angenieux Optimo lenses. The 35mm film was scanned to 4K for the DI.

The use of film is usually prohibitively expensive on a multi-location show like this one. But the feeling was that part of the success of Succession is the suspended reality that the medium gives this heightened story of a powerful and vastly rich family in conflict.

The third season of Succession premiered recently, rewarding fans’ anticipation and continuing to chart the mutually destructive conflicts of the Roy family as they scramble for control of their patriarch’s media empire as his health starts to fail.

For Season 3, it had to be more of the same as far as the look was concerned. Light Iron colorist Sam Daley has been on the show since the pilot and agrees that the use of film was vital to the tone of the series. “A proprietary film print emulation LUT is used in the grade to maintain the look of film.”

From that pilot episode, cinematographers Patrick Capone and Christopher Norr had used “underexposure to soften the contrast.” But that wasn’t the only way that the show’s aesthetic distinguished itself as Daley further explained.

“Succession’s camera style is iconic,” Daley continued. “Handheld, snap zooms, searching, finding the actors rather than placing the camera in front of them. This lends a documentary style to the popular HBO dramedy.

“You’re a fly on the wall watching the Roy family scheme with and against each other. But there are Shakespearean moments as well, so the look of the show is rooted in both realism and classicism.

“Cinematographer Andrij Parekh and I established this look in the pilot, and series cinematographers Patrick Capone and Christopher Norr have skillfully maintained this throughout some of the most challenging situations of any episodic show on television.

“Staying true to the analog tone and texture of film is vital to the look of the series, so I approach the grade as if I’m in a telecine environment,” the colorist added. “I work very hard at finding the right primary grade with just offset and lift-gamma-gain.

“I use secondaries sparingly as too much artifice would distract from the realism. The beauty is already there in the negative, you just have to dial it in and let the story and performances take center stage.”

A biopic about Diana, Princess of Wales, director Pablo Larraín’s Spencer imagines what might have happened over three pivotal days during the British royal family’s annual holiday celebration leading up to her decision to publicly separate from Prince Charles in 1992. “The marriage of Princess Diana and Prince Charles has long since grown cold. Though rumors of affairs and a divorce abound, peace is ordained for the Christmas festivities at the Queen’s Sandringham Estate,” reads the film’s synopsis. “There’s eating and drinking, shooting and hunting. Diana knows the game. But this year, things will be profoundly different.”

Spencer is written by Oscar-nominated screenwriter Steven Knight (Locke, Peaky Blinders, Dirty Pretty Things), and shot by director of photography Claire Mathon (Portrait of a Lady on Fire).

Formerly Diana Frances Spencer, the Princess of Wales captured the hearts of millions of people from all around the world following her engagement to Charles in 1981, and she remains widely mourned after her tragic and untimely death in 1997. Given the amount of publicity surrounding the couple’s union and subsequent breakup — thoroughly examined in the most recent season of Netflix series The Crown — it’s no surprise that Larraín would opt to narrow the focus on his subject’s already very well known life for his own film.

“We all grew up understanding what a fairytale is, but Diana Spencer changed the paradigm, and the idealized icons that pop culture creates, forever,” Larraín says of his decision to take on the project. “This is the story of a Princess who decided not to become a Queen, but chose to build her identity by herself. It’s an upside-down fairytale.”

As Polygon’s Robert Daniels notes, Diana’s return to the Queen’s estate in Park House is both “a heartening homecoming and an unfortunate duty, causing a wellspring of grief to affect her in varying fashions.”

But Daniels says Larraín is “too smart to limit Spencer to honing in on Diana’s relationship with the other royals around her.” Setting this story during Christmas establishes the relationship they have in the very beginning of the movie. “Instead, he pulls focus by depicting how Diana is trying to protect her sons from the royals’ archaic, closed-off traditions.”

But with the “looming presence” of Prince Charles and Major Gregory, extreme rules, and her own internal struggles, “the mania she feels makes her Christmas holiday more of a fight for survival than a getaway.”

READ MORE: The Kristen Stewart movie Spencer is more real-life horror story than Princess Di biopic (Polygon)

A.O. Scott, in his review for The New York Times, writes that Spencer is a Christmas movie, a horror movie and a psychological thriller, as well as “a love story, a melodrama of maternal devotion, an early-’90s fashion parade and a very British baking show.”

It might be tempting to view the film as a mere sidebar to hit Netflix series The Crown, Scott argues, “lingering over a minor episode in a vast epic and isolating a single, relatively minor character amid the pomp and pageantry of palace life,” but “that is exactly wrong,” he says.

“Larraín and the screenwriter, Steven Knight, offer not a footnote but an ardent and unsparing rebuke to the mythical monarchist mumbo-jumbo that the Netflix series (to which I am entirely addicted) exists to promote. The conceit of The Crown is that, for all their flaws, defeats and compromises — or because of all that — the members of the House of Windsor are fundamentally more interesting than anybody else. Their dilemmas are more exquisite, their choices more tragic, than anything the commoners can know.

“This is a persistent conceit in the literature of power, one that Larraín, wielding his camera like a rapier and Jonny Greenwood’s lacerating score like a stiletto, leaves in tatters.”

READ MORE: ‘Spencer’ Review: Prisoner of the House of Windsor (The New York Times)

From the release of the first full trailer for the film, Kristen Stewart received glowing praise for her portrayal of Diana. “Kristen Stewart is one of the great actors around today,” Larraín enthuses:

“She is where she is now because she has something very important in film, which is mystery. Kristen can be many things; she can be very mysterious, very fragile, and ultimately very strong as well, which is what we needed. The combination of those elements made me think of her. The way she responded to the script and how she approached the character is very beautiful to see. She has created something stunning and intriguing at the same time. As a filmmaker, when you have someone who can hold such a dramatic and narrative weight just with her eyes, then you have the strong lead who can deliver what we were hoping for. She is a force of nature.”

Stewart so fully embraced the character she was portraying, Larraín told Louis Chilton at The Independent, that he didn’t direct her in the standard way. “There was a point that she had such a control of the character, she was so into it so deep… I discovered that on many occasions my best instruction was no instruction. Just stay silent and film her… You understand your own limitations as a man when you’re portraying a female character.”

Stewart’s performance was an unusually intense undertaking. While Larraín doesn’t quite go to the spiritual level Stewart has described feeling on set, he absolutely acknowledges the odd sensations. “She’s not impersonating her, she’s not just playing her,” he insists. “That’s not acting. It’s something else.”

READ MORE: Spencer director Pablo Larraín: ‘Princess Diana was like a Greek tragic character’ (The Independent)

Mathon found Stewart to be a natural in front of the camera, she told Yohana Desta in an interview for Vanity Fair, but, like Larraín, she couldn’t quite put into words what makes her such a transfixing actor. “It’s so easy and almost innate, the way she acts,” she said.

During filming, which included capturing vulnerable close-ups, Mathon and her camera were often just inches away from Stewart’s face. “I often had the feeling that I was almost touching her,” the DP said. “I could feel her breathe and I was watching every single little moment, what she was feeling and the way she was moving.”

Desta notes that both Stewart and Diana were haunted by the “cruel gaze” of the paparazzi, which “made for a darkly meta experience” for Mathon when the cast and crew found themselves overrun by photographers angling to get a shot of the star in character as the late royal.

During production, the line between Stewart and Diana seemed to blur, according to Mathon. “It was weird how much the filming process conflated Diana and Kristen… but it might have added something to the film.”

READ MORE: “It Evokes Ghostliness”: How Spencer and Kristen Stewart Reimagined Princess Diana (Vanity Fair)

The “tentpole reference” for Diana’s character was Gena Rowlands in John Cassavetes’s 1974 film A Woman Under the Influence. “Not maybe in the detail of the character,” Larraín told Charlotte Higgins in an interview for The Guardian, “but in the sensibility.”

Larraín also said he doesn’t think he would have made Spencer without first having made Jackie:

“One thing led to another. Both women that had to deal with the press and media in different ways, both women that were linked to very powerful families married to powerful men, and they were both women that find the way to create their own story and find their identity. But if Jackie’s a movie about grief and memory and legacy, I think Spencer is about identity and motherhood.”

READ MORE: Kristen Stewart on playing Diana: ‘I believe in a lingering energy. I took her in’ (The Guardian)

Larraín’s two 2016 films, Jackie and Neruda, “gave the biopic genre a much-needed jolt,” Matthew Jacobs writes in Vulture. “The thrillingly unorthodox films… reinterpreted their subjects’ public images, zeroing in on singular chapters of Jacqueline Kennedy’s and poet Pablo Neruda’s lives to subvert the cradle-to-grave approach that most filmmakers take,” he explains.

“If the haunting close-ups in Jackie and the noirish lyricism of Neruda are any indication, Spencer will be another mood-driven interpretation of its subject (including a score by Phantom Thread’s Jonny Greenwood and cinematography by Portrait of a Lady on Fire’s Claire Mathon),” Jacobs predicts, adding, “Larraín sees biopics not as historical documents but as fables that can reveal profound insights about human nature.”

But Larraín isn’t interested in deconstructing the biopic genre, he tells Jacobs. “I’ve never done it consciously,” he says. “First, I don’t have a plan of doing this or that type of movie. I’m not trying to build my career so people can create any kind of logic or analyze it in any specific way.”

Larraín insists his films aren’t actually biopics as the genre is defined. “I don’t think I’ve ever done a biopic,” he continues. “I think Neruda and Jackie and Spencer are movies about people in certain circumstances where everything is about to explode. They’re not really biographical analyzations; it’s not the study of a life of someone.”

Moviegoers could misunderstand Spencer, the director cautions. “Before they go to see a movie like Spencer, they might say, ‘We’re going to really understand who this person was.’ No! Wrong number! Wrong movie! We don’t do that! We’re just trying to work with whatever that person was and create a fable out of it. That’s what I’m looking for. We’ll see if it works.”

The key to cinema is to have a character in crisis, Larraín explains. “All the dramatic theory orbits around that somehow. There are movies like Jackie or Spencer where you don’t know what the character wants up until the point of the movie. Some characters don’t know what they want, but a situation makes them understand they are in a crisis. And as the movie evolves, they need to really understand it. So it’s a more existentialist type of cinema. It’s really about the structure, but there’s always something that has to make the character explode.”

READ MORE: Pablo Larraín Isn’t Trying to Reinvent the Biopic With Spencer (Vulture)

Larraín discussed the biopic genre further in an interview with Paul Whitington for The Independent. “Once you understand that whatever you portray will never be that person, it makes you feel freer, it frees you from the conventions of whatever our culture understands as biopics,” he said. “I don’t think a biopic is actually possible, and I don’t think what I’ve done is a biopic, I think it’s more of an anti-biopic, a little slice of someone’s life that might create an emotional bridge towards that figure.”

Portraying a public figure like Diana is a challenge because of the sheer number of people who remember her in vivid detail. But the director couldn’t let the idea of that get to him. “We were looking for the human, the universal in the story. I think there are things related to the voice, and the mannerisms, that Kristen tackled really well, she’s a very gifted and skilled technical actress, but I think that the most difficult thing, which Kristen does really beautifully, is how she can embrace certain emotional aspects of the character in such a way that we believe that they are real, and that’s cinema.”

READ MORE: Pablo Larraín: ‘The more you try to understand Diana, the less you know’ (The Independent)

“There’s something interesting that happened making this movie,” Larraín said during an episode of the MovieMaker podcast. “I thought that we were making a movie mostly about identity… but as we made the movie, I realized that we were making a movie about motherhood.”

The director acknowledges that this may seem obvious in hindsight, “but I have to admit that it wasn’t in the top of my head when we started,” he said. “And that that happened, thanks to those boys, you know, to the kids that actually play William and Harry.”

Larraín saw himself reflected in the curiosity about filmmaking that Jack Nielen and Freddie Spry, who play William and Harry, exhibited on set. “And that also made me understand, what are my limitations as a man, when you’re making a movie about a woman? And that’s where Kristen [Stewart] became so relevant,” he explained.

“I’ve worked with strong and wonderful actresses before, and I think I’ve done that as well in the past — when do you empower them and say, look, how, what do you think about this? And they will tell you, and then you have to follow them and understand that they have a perception of the character that he would never be able to have.”

READ MORE: Spencer Director Pablo Larraín Says His Princess Diana Story Is Really ‘a Movie About Motherhood’ (MovieMaker)

Another key character in the film, Pamela McClintock writes in The Hollywood Reporter, is the wig created by Spencer makeup and hair designer Wakana Yoshihara for Stewart.

The assignment was “a blast from the past,” according to Yoshihara, who had mastered Diana’s much-copied layered look back in 1996, the year before the Princess of Wales died, as part of a test to secure a position cutting hair in a London salon.

“I was thinking, ‘Nobody wants to have a haircut like this,’ “ she recounted of the assignment. “But my senior stylist explained to me, ‘This is like Princess Diana’s hairstyle, this is very classic. If you can do this, you can do any hairstyle.’ So I practiced that hair cutting and then the blow-drying for maybe eight months, at least, until I passed the test.

During production, Yoshihara set the wig each morning, and then brushed, wet it and blow dried it again every night, and sometimes also styled it between scenes.

READ MORE: Making of ‘Spencer’: Kristen Stewart Tries on Diana’s Crown to Tell a Modern-Day Fairy Tale (The Hollywood Reporter)

In a conversation moderated by Peter White, screenwriter Steven Knight and costume designer Jacqueline Durran appeared at Deadline’s Contenders Film: London series to discuss their collaboration on Spencer. The panelists were joined by director Larraín, who participated in the event remotely.

During the panel discussion, Larraín praised Kristen Stewart’s performance in the film. “We all think we know a lot about Diana,” he said. “But as a person, she was mysterious and Kristen can do that very well. I thought she was going to be a different version that would take us to another angle of Diana’s character. She did very beautiful work.”

Durran recounted how representing Diana’s fashion choices was “quite a task,” noting that “it was a forensic operation to work out what themes we would find in her style.”

Watch the full panel discussion in the video below:

READ MORE: ‘Spencer’ Writer Steven Knight: “The Cleanest Way To Get Into A Person Is To Put Them In A Pressure Cooker” – Contenders London (Deadline)

Want more? Listen to Larraín discuss the making of Spencer on WNYC’s All Of It podcast, including how the backdrop of the Christmas holiday was important to generating the film’s storyline and establishing the dynamic between Diana and the royal family:

You can also watch IndieWire’s interview with director Pablo Larraín and Spencer star Kristen Stewart as they discuss Stewart’s performance as Princess Diana and how they were able to create the claustrophobic scenes in the film:

Peter Jackson’s long-awaited documentary, The Beatles: Get Back, arrived on Disney+ on November 25, 26 and 27, Greg Evans reports in Deadline. The three-part docuseries takes audiences back in time to the band’s intimate recording sessions during a pivotal moment in their history.

Initially set for theatrical release in late August, The Beatles: Get Back was originally conceived as a feature-length documentary, according to IndieWire’s Zack Sharf. “Disney+ has now announced the documentary is moving to Thanksgiving and expanding into a three-part series,” he writes.

“I think people will be surprised by the series for two reasons,” Jackson told Sharf. “One, it’ll be far more intimate than they imagined it to be, because everyone is used to seeing music documentaries being a bit kind of MTV-ish, sort of together in a poppy kind of way and it’s just the music, music, music, you know? The music isn’t at the forefront of this film: weirdly, it’s what goes on behind the music at the forefront.”

READ MORE: Peter Jackson Says ‘Music Isn’t at the Forefront’ of Six-Hour Beatles Doc: More Talking Than Singing (IndieWire)

“Jackson spent three years restoring and editing some 60 hours of footage shot in January 1969 by [Let It Be director] Michael Lindsay-Hogg that hasn’t been seen before, and more than 150 hours of previously unheard audio,” Kim Lyons notes in The Verge. “It captures John Lennon, Paul McCartney, George Harrison, and Ringo Starr preparing for their first live show in more than two years, writing and rehearsing 14 new songs.”

The only person in 50 years to have been given access to these private film archives, Jackson found the unseen and unheard material to be revelatory. “In many respects, Michael Lindsay-Hogg’s remarkable footage captured multiple storylines,” the filmmaker said in a statement:

“The story of friends and of individuals. It is the story of human frailties and of a divine partnership. It is a detailed account of the creative process, with the crafting of iconic songs under pressure, set amid the social climate of early 1969. But it’s not nostalgia — it’s raw, honest, and human. Over six hours, you’ll get to know The Beatles with an intimacy that you never thought possible.”

READ MORE: Peter Jackson’s ‘The Beatles: Get Back’ Six-Hour Doc Set For Three-Day Thanksgiving Debut On Disney+ (Deadline)

READ MORE: A Peter Jackson-directed documentary about The Beatles will debut on Disney Plus in November (The Verge)

READ MORE: Peter Jackson Restored So Much Beatles Footage That ‘Get Back’ Is Now a Six-Hour TV Series (IndieWire)

The world had its first taste of Get Back late last year, in a nearly six-minute video montage featuring highlights from the archival materials. Jackson himself introduced the video, noting that he was roughly halfway through the edit on what at the time was meant to be a feature-length project:

“So, what you’re going to see is, it’s not a trailer, those will be coming out next year. It’s not a sequence from the film. It’s like a montage of moments, that we’ve pulled from throughout the 56 hours of footage, that we have. It just gives you a sense of the spirit of the film that we’re making, so let’s have a look at that. Hopefully, it’ll put a smile on your face, in these rather bleak times, that we’re in the moment.”

Variety senior music editor Jem Aswad calls Get Back “a counter-narrative to the glum Let It Be, an alternate history that makes you question what you thought about the original.”

With sound and visuals “approximately three times as bright” as the original 1970 film, “the audio is cleaner, and it’s much lighter and more pastel-colored than the murky browns and blacks of Let It Be. But most remarkably, the mood is three times brighter as well,” he remarks.

The Beatles are in the same 1969 setting as Let It Be, Aswad notes, but now they’re “clowning around, dancing, doing impersonations, embracing, laughing… and almost never not smiling.” He also comments on the “lively supporting cast,” including longtime producer George Martin, “and even a moment where we see the purported wife-rivals Yoko Ono and Linda McCartney laughing together. We see Paul cuddling with his step-daughter Heather, John and Ringo walking with their arms around each other — a family.”

Aswad also asks how all of this incredible footage didn’t make it into the original film. “Maybe the original Let It Be was a narrative of its own,” he muses, “and Get Back is the counter-narrative. And as in life, they’re both true.”

READ MORE: The Beatles’ ‘Get Back’ Preview: Peter Jackson Rewrites the Ending of Rock’s Greatest Fairy Tale (Variety)

“Jackson’s film isn’t just a delicious peek at lost footage (though it is that),” Joe Hagan writes at Vanity Fair. “It’s an amendment to the received history.”

Hagan was given an exclusive look at 43 minutes of footage from the documentary series, as well as a lengthy interview with Jackson about the project.

“Though Get Back is made for modern eyes decades after the events themselves, it’s faithful to the intent of the original, which was to chronicle the band’s return to live performance after they ceased playing concerts in 1966,” Hagan comments.

Let It Be had been intended as a TV series with taped performances of new Beatles songs performed before a small audience. But after Harrison walked out of Twickenham Studios following arguments with McCartney, that “little episode,” as Lindsay-Hogg calls it, was blown up to represent acrimony between Harrison and McCartney and underlying severe tension. “And in fact, it’s just a small little cloud which passes over their working relationship in five minutes,” Lindsay-Hogg recalled. “That’s all it was.”

However, the “little episode” caused a major pivot in the production, Hagan notes, and the television project was reshaped into a feature film in order to fulfil a three-picture deal Beatles manager Brian Epstein had made with United Artists before his death, in 1967. Let It Be was released in May of 1970, just one month after the Beatles had split up, and the rest, as they say, is history.

Jackson chose not to exclude the “little episode” that led to Let It Be — a brief but tense scene where McCartney soothes a wounded Harrison after criticizing his guitar parts — but he decided that he would also show its aftermath, making Get Back more revealing, not less.

For his own project, Jackson decided that when Harrison and McCartney begin fighting—a brief but tense scene in which McCartney placates a wounded Harrison after criticizing his guitar parts—he would show not only that but the aftermath as well. Consequently, Jackson says, Get Back will be more revealing than the original, not less. “It’s a lot tougher movie than Let It Be,” Jackson told Hagan. “I mean, Let It Be couldn’t show George leaving the group, which he did on the seventh day, and then he obviously came back again. Let It Be never showed that.”

“Jackson says he didn’t need to manipulate Lindsay-Hogg’s original footage — or include talking heads to contextualize things — to create a dramatic plot,” Hagan recounts. “The sessions formed their own story, and Get Back, he decided, could simply be a ‘documentary about the documentary.’”

For Jackson, the “little episode” was a perfect opportunity in terms of story structure. “If this was a fictional movie about a fictional band, having one of the band members walk out at the end of the first act—it’d be the ideal thing that you’d actually write into a script,” he says. “So, weirdly enough, these guys are playing out their real life. They were not playing it out [as] a movie or a script — that was the truth of their life. And yet, somehow, in terms of these 21 days, it kind of weirdly fits it. And then the triumphant third act where, against all odds, they’re up on the roof, playing — fantastic.”

Jackson met with Lindsay-Hogg in Los Angeles in 2020 to show him the restored footage. “He showed me a comparison of my Let It Be’s footage and his stuff,” said Lindsay-Hogg, including how McCartney’s hair appeared as a single block of color in the original and “now you can see every single strand of hair.”

In what Hagan calls “a decisive and crucial creative act,” Jackson avoided repeating footage from the original Let It Be, employing alternative camera angles even for familiar scenes:

“One of our mantras is that Let It Be is one movie, and our movie is a different movie, and we’re trying not to repeat any footage, with one or two tiny exceptions where we can’t do anything else. But we’re trying to not step on Let It Be’s toes so that it is still a film that has a reason to exist, and our movie will be a supplement to it.”

READ MORE: The Beatles: Get Back—An Exclusive Deep Dive Into Peter Jackson’s Revelatory New Movie (Vanity Fair)

Jackson discussed Let It Be’s reputation as a “joyless document” of the collapse of The Beatles in an interview with Ben Sisario, music writer at The New York Times, explaining how Get Back tries to fill in some of the gaps left by the first film.

“Everyone sort of thinks it’s a ‘whitewash’ because the Beatles have authorized the film. But actually it’s almost the exact opposite. It shows everything that Michael Lindsay-Hogg could not show in 1970. It’s a very unflinching look at what goes on,” he said.

“Our movie doesn’t show the breaking up of the Beatles, but it shows the one singular moment in history that you could possibly say was the beginning of the end,” he added.

“There’s no goodies in it, there’s no baddies. There’s no villains, there’s no heroes. It’s just a human story.”

READ MORE: Know How the Beatles Ended? Peter Jackson May Change Your Mind. (The New York Times)

But not everyone is necessarily excited about the upcoming series. Variety chief film critic Owen Gleiberman — a self-described Beatles fanatic — questioned the need for a six-hour look back at the Beatles. “So here’s a question,” he writes. “Since we just learned that we’re about to get more of the Beatles, why, in my heart and gut, does it feel like less?”

Although there have been several attempts to re-release it, Let It Be hasn’t been available to watch in recent years, “but it has a place in film history,” Gleiberman explains:

“It’s a scraggly elegy, capturing a certain wistful moment of reckoning that’s part of the Beatles’ story. From the start, though, the premise of Peter Jackson’s Get Back has been that the 50 hours of footage originally shot in 1969 by director Michael Lindsay-Hogg actually tells a different story: a more complex and upbeat one. As any Beatles fan knows, the aura that surrounds Let It Be is a kind of mythology.

“The film showed the Beatles near the end, and it was released after the group had broken up (so it felt like we were seeing them ‘together for the last time’), but, in fact, after the Get Back sessions went south, the Beatles went back into the studio to record ‘Abbey Road,’ an album as pristinely gorgeous in its joy as Let It Be was knowingly ramshackle in its melancholy.”

Gleiberman hopes that Jackson will be provide a more intimate, and revealing, portrait of the Beatles during that time, “one that adds to the group’s mystique,” he says:

“And that’s why The Beatles: Get Back is — or was — a movie I dreamed of seeing in theaters. Today, most music documentaries are streaming only, but the Beatles remain larger-than-life. They turned the entire world into a community, and still have the power to turn an audience into a congregation. If the Beatles aren’t worthy of the big screen, I don’t know who is.”

READ MORE: ‘The Beatles: Get Back’ Is Now a Six-Hour Mini-Series. So Why Does It Feel Like More Might Be Less? (Variety)

Independent’s Ed Cumming notes that while Jackson didn’t want to use any of the same footage from Let It Be, there was still plenty of material to plumb. His approach was to let the archival footage speak for itself. Where other filmmakers might have decided to “cut the footage more dramatically or impose a stronger sense of [their] own narrative on things… Jackson is content to keep a gentle hand on the tiller.”

In Get Back, conversations run on, and the viewer is pulled into these intimate moments between the band. “A common complaint of cultural documentaries is that you don’t get to see the magic happen,” says Cummings. “Well, here it is, two-and-a-half geniuses and Ringo Starr sitting in a room, snapping at each other and still coming up with songs that mean something to everyone you know.”

READ MORE: The Beatles – Get Back review: Peter Jackson documentary is a seven-hour masterpiece (The Independent)

Jackson acknowledged the enormous stakes of taking on a landmark project like Get Back in an interview with Ed Symkus for the Boston Globe. “There was pressure on me the whole time,” he said.

“One of the things that I, as a fan, know very well about the Beatles is that they never wanted to release a project that was substandard. I was very much aware that it had to be as good as it could possibly be,” he continued. “This wasn’t a guy making just another documentary out of stock footage from Reuters or Pathé, without the Beatles’ approval. This is an official Beatles project that I’m shepherding. It wasn’t anything they told me. They didn’t put this pressure on me. I just knew, as a Beatles fan, that, boy, the Beatles never shortchanged anybody. They always delivered the goods, they always delivered something great. And that’s what I had to do.”

READ MORE: Peter Jackson on directing ‘The Beatles: Get Back,’ and getting way, way back (Boston Globe)

Want more? Check out this clip from The Beatles: Get Back, featuring restored, never-before-seen footage of the band practicing “I’ve Got a Feeling.” The clip provides a tiny glimpse into the group’s creative process, as well as the relationship between the fab four: 

In an interview with 60 Minutes, Jackson describes how he crafted the narrative arc of his new Beatles documentary, Get Back, and explains the technical process for restoring footage:

https://youtu.be/FvWFYMk2DPg

In the video below, Jackson tells Newshub entertainment editor Kate Rodger how the production team was able to isolate voices in the restored footage.

“When the footage was being filmed, the musicians weren’t keen on having everything they said recorded, so much so that at times they’d play an instrument at the same time to try and hide what they were saying,” Jackson said.

“With this technology we’ve got, we can strip away the guitar and reveal these hidden conversations that they didn’t want anyone to hear.”

Ahead of the release of The Beatles: Get Back on Disney+, John Harris, editor of the new book of the same name, takes viewers on a delightful journey through London to three key locations from the making of the Let It Be album:

Want more? Hosted by award-winning author Robert Rodriguez, the Something About The Beatles podcast is an intelligent but entertaining examination of The Beatles’ music and career. Spanning three episodes, Rodriguez takes an in-depth look at the making of The Beatles: Get Back:

We don’t know Jeff Bezos, but we know he’s a very competitive man. Why else would he launch his space tourist company Blue Origin against Virgin Galactic? Or his low-orbit satellite internet service Project Kuiper against Elon Musk’s Starlink?

But now he’s taking his competitive streak to global television screens with the new fantasy TV series, The Wheel of Time. As Brad Stone reports in his recent book, Amazon Unbound, Bezos had a clear idea of what he wanted. In fact, Bezos told his executive team, “he wanted his Game of Thrones.”

But, as Alison Herman writes in The Ringer, “The goal was, on one level, almost redundant; isn’t ‘the next Game of Thrones’ just another term for ‘the next TV megahit,’ and isn’t the objective of every TV show for as many people to watch it as possible?”

But the “sorta-pivot” also makes a certain sense, Herman argues. “It wouldn’t be consistent for the Everything Store to specialize in lower-budget series with the look and feel of an independent film — though over the years, Amazon has acquired plenty of those, too. (Annette, the recently released French rock opera with a singing puppet baby, was one of theirs.) As a company, Amazon is nothing if not vast in scale. Perhaps their productions should be, too.”

READ MORE: The Search for the Next ‘Game of Thrones’ Rolls on in a ‘Wheel of Time’ (The Ringer)

GQ Magazine’s Zach Brown sees this particular space race for content as one to reproduce the massive, decade-long success HBO had with Game of Thrones. “In this competition for content and eyeballs, Amazon and Apple have an advantage over their competitors in that they are the two richest brands in the world — so rich that they can afford to follow the whims of their founders, wherever those whims may go,” he notes.

“The company, under the direction of Jeff Bezos, spent $3.2 billion on Prime Video in 2016; by 2019, that number had more than doubled, to $7 billion.

“Money, by the standards of any other studio in the history of television, was no issue. Amazon just had to find the right project. In the end it settled on two, buying a pitch from a relatively untested television writer, in Rafe Judkins, who had grown up reading The Wheel of Time and had an idea about how it might work as a series.

“Amazon also spent a reported $250 million on the rights to The Lord of the Rings and, in time, put both into production,” Brown writes.

“We are all in a fortunate position at the company,” Vernon Sanders, the co-head of television at Amazon Studios, said. “We should be swinging for the fences. So we’re swinging for the fences.”

READ MORE: Inside Wheel of Time, Amazon’s Huge Gamble on the Next Game of Thrones (GQ Magazine)

As for the TV series, which arrived on Amazon Prime Video on November 19 and was greenlit for a second season ahead of the series premiere, the ingredients are all there for a Game of Thrones-like TV feast. The Wheel of Time is one of the most popular and enduring fantasy series of all time, with more than 90 million books sold.

Set in a sprawling, epic world where magic exists and only certain women are allowed to access it, the story follows Moiraine (Rosamund Pike), a member of the incredibly powerful all-female organization called the Aes Sedai, as she arrives in the small town of Two Rivers. There, she embarks on a dangerous, world-spanning journey with five young men and women, one of whom is prophesied to be the Dragon Reborn who will either save or destroy humanity.

Judkins discussed the comparisons between the two fantasy series in an interview with Polygon’s Preeti Chhibber.

“Wheel of Time in the literary world really sits as kind of the pillar between Lord of the Rings and Game of Thrones,” the showrunner said.

“But [the show is] coming out after both of them. So, we have to be mindful of that I think, too,” he acknowledged. “There are things that Wheel of Time created that Game of Thrones did their riff on, and it’ll feel like we’re being repetitive when it was actually in Wheel of Time first… I try to be really true to what the Wheel of Time books are, and what makes them great.”

READ MORE: The Wheel of Time’s showrunner is ready to adapt the unadaptable (Polygon)

Little Black Book’s Laura Swinton takes a look at the marketing campaign for the series, which she says interweaves “inventive activations, collaborative fandom strategies and a dash of the One Power.

“Given the reported $10 million per episode production budget, Amazon wants to make sure that this series pays back — that it is seen and drives Amazon Prime subscriptions,” she writes. And to do just that, “The first step has been to engage the existing fandom — in fact the fandom has been acknowledged even in the making of the show.”

READ MORE: How Amazon Is Marketing The Wheel of Time to Fans and Fantasy Novices Alike (Little Black Book)

In service to that fandom, Judkins and Pike took time to answer questions about the production process and what to expect in the adaptation in a Q&A on Twitter:

pic.twitter.com/EPPzCU20PP

— The Wheel Of Time (@TheWheelOfTime) September 2, 2021

NBC’s Ani Bundel believes the story is a step in the right direction for the fantasy genre. Calling it the “ultimate unfilmable fantasy saga,” this 14-book series “usher[ed] in an era of doorstopper-sized, continent-spanning fantasy epics revolving around ‘chosen one’ narratives.”

“The series was a marvel of meticulously detailed world-building. However, it cared little for momentum,” Bundel said. “Rather than move the story forward, Jordan preferred to devote chapters upon chapters to building out subcultures and customs while reveling in taking the mythos of the Eastern and Western traditions and melding them into a single hero’s tale.”

READ MORE: Amazon’s ‘The Wheel of Time’ looks to push fantasy beyond ‘Game of Thrones’ (NBC)

At TechRadar, Tom Power says this conversion from book to screen for this series will become your new “fantasy show obsession.” Even though the book series is dense, “Amazon’s adaptation has streamlined the novels’ labyrinthine story and worldbuilding as much as possible,” he says.

“From the opening minute of the series’ premiere, we’re treated to a summary of events, courtesy of Pike’s Moirane, that precede The Wheel of Time’s overarching plot. It’s only brief, but it instantly sets the scene for what’s currently at stake in the Randlands, and means that audiences don’t have to sit through a lengthy preamble about its past.”

READ MORE: The Wheel of Time isn’t just a Witcher clone – it’s your next fantasy show obsession (TechRadar)

For the production, The Wheel of Time needed space, and lots of it. Unfortunately, production hubs across the world were full, but eventually they landed in Prague, where Jordan Studios is built, just outside the city and named after the author Robert Jordan.

Fansided’s Dan Selcke describes the colossal undertaking that is and was Jordan Studios. “We’re talking a private stunt gym, a costume department, writers’ offices, accounting operations, a visual effects studio, multiple enormous sound stages all in this building that is 350,000 square-feet.”

Costume designer Isis Mussenden created 350 costumes for the first two episodes alone. “I’ve personally been to Madrid, London, and New Delhi to buy textiles,” she said, “because we have so little here and we need thousands and thousands of meters of fabric to create all of this.”

Then, Selcke notes, there are creatures, including “fearsome beast soldiers” called Trollocs. “You’re sort of saying, ‘Okay, you can’t have any influences or imagery tying into orcs and Lord of the Rings,’ ” said creature designer Nick Dudman. Trollocs are supposed to be tall, “but I didn’t want to put them on stilts because of the fact that we’re running through woodland, and running downhill on stilts is just really not a good idea.”

READ MORE: The Wheel of Time showrunner got advice from Game of Thrones creators (Fansided)

But how do you find out what the secret sauce was that made Game of Thrones such a colossus in the TV ratings war? You could ask the show’s showrunners, and that’s exactly what Judkins did. “Judkins sought out advice from Game of Thrones showrunners David Benioff and Dan Weiss. ‘Just do what you’re going to do,’ they told him. ‘You know what this is. You have to believe in it. These kinds of things have to have an extraordinary clarity of vision to work.’ “

But pre-launch, the talk is still all about the money. Viewers have become accustomed to a kind of scale, or realism, that creeps toward the real. “It’s not like we can go say, ‘Oh, you know, Game of Thrones, season one, they only spent this,’ ” commented Mike Weber, an executive producer of The Wheel of Time. “The audience expectation is coming off of the last season of Game of Thrones, not the first season.”

For the first season of Game of Thrones, HBO spent about $6 million an episode, a number that steadily climbed from there. Amazon and The Wheel of Time? They’re starting at upward of a reported $10 million per episode — for eight total, the first of which will begin streaming in November — just to get out of the gate.

In an interview for The Hollywood Reporter, Pete Keeley asked Judkins about one set piece that’s different between the novel and the series — the changing perspectives within the Trollocs’ attack on Emond’s Field. “Outside of the first book, one of the hallmarks of the series was that you track all of these characters’ POVs. So that was one thing we really felt like we needed to put in the pilot, was much more of an ensemble feeling,” he said.

“So in the books, you only know what happened to one character on Winter Night, but in the show we are seeing what might have happened to each of these characters during that battle, which, it’s not creating something that wasn’t there. It happened. They had these experiences. We just didn’t get to see what they were [in the book] because we were focused on [Rand].”

READ MORE: ‘Wheel of Time’ Showrunner Rafe Judkins on That Shocking First Episode Death (The Hollywood Reporter)

Want more? Watch the Wheel of Time cast discuss the upcoming series during a panel discussion at New York Comic Com 2021:

Amazon Prime Video also released a 360-degree experience for the official trailer to The Wheel of Time, which allows viewers to click and move the trailer in order to watch and hear at all angles. Check it out in the video player below, and possibly find some hidden gems within the various energy waves:

Take a closer look at the world-building that went into the series with Amazon Prime’s bonus “X-Ray” content, including this two-part featurette, “Building the World of the Wheel of Time,” featuring showrunner Rafe Judkins and production designer Ondrej Nekvasil, as well as cast members Rosamund Pike, Marcus Rutherford, and more:

It’s easy to repeat a winning formula in movies, albeit generally with diminishing box office returns. Less simple is to replicate a formula that includes within it the analog creativity of an authentic auteur. It’s to the credit of Disney, and to Marvel Studios president Kevin Feige in particular, that the Marvel Cinematic Universe has continued to expand the rulebook of the blockbuster while retaining some of the spirit of indie filmmaking.

Feige has regularly sought to use emerging indie filmmakers to helm new entrants in the MCU. They include Ryan Coogler, fresh from Fruitvale Station, to make Black Panther; Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck, whose indie fare included Mississippi Grind before making Captain Marvel; and the Russo Brothers, whose comedy starring Owen Wilson, You, Me and Dupree, was the unlikely jumping off point for Captain America: The Winter Soldier; and Avengers: Endgame. (The DC Extended Universe followed suit, notably hiring Patty Jenkins to make Wonder Woman.)

The Marvel boss explained to Variety that the MCU uses so many indie filmmakers because they offer unique points of view that can take you to places you’ve never gone before:

“The real answer is, frankly, continuing what we’ve learned with all of the different types of filmmakers that we have used. When you get people with unique points of views, regardless of the size of film they’ve done in the past, and empower them and surround them with the great artists and technicians that can bring spectacle, that can bring the visuals that a Marvel movie requires, they can take you to places you’ve never gone before.”

READ MORE: Kevin Feige on Chloé Zhao’s ‘Spectacular’ Approach to ‘Eternals’ and Who the Film’s ‘Lead’ Character Is (Variety)

The latest to accept the call is Chloé Zhao, who was tapped to direct Eternals right before she made her Oscar-winning docudrama, Nomadland. That film, set like her previous features in the American Midwest largely using a cast of non-professional actors, couldn’t be more different to the huge production schedules, large star cast and executive micro-management of a tentpole like Eternals. Which is part of the attraction to both director and studio.

“An auteur with an eye for natural settings and a sensitivity for intimate, personal stories, she pushed to make sure her Eternals wasn’t just another computer-generated superhero movie full of coiffed crusaders with ‘Man’ in their monikers,” says Wired.

According to Nate Moore, a co-producer on the film, Zhao has deconstructed who gets to be a Marvel hero — and reinvented the MCU in the process. It’s that regeneration which Feige and Disney know they need if audiences are to keep coming back for more.

Once Zhao came on board, she reworked the script and made a plan to shoot it in her style: “minimal green screen, lots of location shoots, natural light, wide-angle lenses that can capture both close-up intimacy and vast landscapes within the same frame.

“I’m not going to try to do something different for the sake of doing something different — that’s not interesting to me,” Zhao tells Wired. “There’s no reason for them to get someone like me just to shoot a movie on a soundstage.”

Some Marvel films may need big CGI worlds, but because her movie is about heroes who have been on Earth for 7,000 years, she wanted her cast to be able to interact with real physical spaces.

And while Eternals’ central characters must save Earth from the Deviants, according to Moore the film also challenges assumptions about what comic book characters should look like.

So, Eternals is the first Marvel movie with a deaf star (Lauren Ridloff as Makkari) and also features Brian Tyree Henry’s Phastos, one of the MCU’s first openly gay superheroes (leading to the film facing censorship in places like Saudi Arabia). Several characters are a different race or gender than they were in Jack Kirby’s original 1970s comics.

For Zhao, that’s the point. Talk of inclusion gets tossed around a lot in Hollywood, but it often devolves into box-checking; she wants to honor her characters’ diversity by making their personal identities part of the plot.

“There are many different ways a human being can be heroic,” Zhao says. “I want to explore as many as possible, so that more audiences can see themselves in these heroic moments and feel they can relate.”

READ MORE: Chloé Zhao Upends the Marvel Formula With Eternals (Wired)

Feige likens her to an anthropologist, someone who studies her subjects and then makes films showcasing their abilities. She did it with the real nomads featured in Nomadland and the Lakota rodeo cowboy at the heart of The Rider.

Wired says, “For Eternals, she cross-pollinated the tale of human evolution in Harari’s Sapiens with Marvel’s own mythology to explore how extra-terrestrials would have integrated with humanity over the course of millennia.”

Feige says he told her “that it was her vision for this movie that made me think that, post-Endgame, the MCU could survive.”

She had to do so without her regular cinematographer, Joshua James Richards, and work with Ben Davis, BSC, an extremely experienced DP whose work includes Guardians of the Galaxy and Captain Marvel.

“It was a totally unique experience,” Davis told me. “It was mostly shot single camera ARRI LF on a Ronin rig usually at magic hour. When you’re dealing with a huge cast, in costume, that becomes challenging.

“All of her films are shot in this very realistic drama-doc style and this was no different in many respects. Her shooting style is very spontaneous. There were no on camera rehearsals, very little blocking out. The actors knew that they were required to respond to the scene in front of them. Chloe would give a direction — the objective of the scene — and it was up to all of us in front and behind the camera to respond to that. It took a while for us all to adjust but it was very rewarding.

“Our characters may be gods but she didn’t want any shot to feel artificial and contrived. For her, as soon as you become over dramatic with the look it feels phony. We had to plant these characters within a truth and honesty so you believe where they are and what they are doing.”

By Jennifer Wolfe & Abby Spessard

Okay — 3, 2, 1, Let’s Jam.

That’s the unmistakable opening to “Tank,” the theme song for Cowboy Bebop, a jazz-backed medley of action and intrigue, and one of the world’s most beloved anime series. Created and animated by Japanese studio Sunrise, the sci-fi neo-noir anime ran for just one season, but went on to capture the hearts of multiple generations of fans from all around the world.

A live-action adaptation, arriving on Netflix on November 19, promises to hew closely to the original action-packed space Western. The new series stars John Cho as Spike Spiegel, Mustafa Shakir as Jet Black, and Daniella Pineda as Faye Valentine, three bounty hunters, aka “cowboys,” who form a scrappy, snarky crew ready to hunt down the solar system’s most dangerous criminals — for the right price. Original anime series director Shinichirō Watanabe was brought on board to serve as creative consultant, and Yoko Kanno retuned as the series composer, collaborating with EDM legend Steve Aoki on a retooled version of the theme song.

An early review from Maureen Ryan at Vanity Fair notes how the series is structured so the episodes work together as a cohesive narrative yet still stand on their own. Each episode kicks off with an episode of Big Shot, the show-within-a-show that keeps bounty hunters informed about the latest happenings in the solar system. With each episode focused on the bounty du jour, Cowboy Bebop is a “streaming drama with an overarching plot that also offers episodes that are, especially in the early going, enjoyably self-contained.” And with some world-building and “richly retro production design,” Ryan believes that “this is a show that’s willing to be weird and goofy while displaying a lot of heart.”

But don’t worry if you’ve never seen any of the original anime series or know what is to come in the series. “This light-on-its-feet drama draws on the original, visually and thematically, without feeling overly beholden to it,” said Ryan. “I hope I can say this without the angriest parts of Reddit falling on my head: This version of Cowboy Bebop, in many ways, improves on the original.”

READ MORE: Netflix’s Cowboy Bebop Is the Rare Remake That Works (Vanity Fair)

The Cowboy Bebop adaptation is just one recent example of a classic IP receiving the live-action treatment, but it may be the most heavily scrutinized. Fans scoured the first looks, opening credits and trailers for glimpses of the characters and production design, firing up fierce debates across social media sites. In a move that only stirred the pot, Netflix released side-by-side sequences from both series to demonstrate the production team’s devotion to the source material.

It’s time to wake up. pic.twitter.com/iu6NcCCMMQ

— Cowboy Bebop (@bebopnetflix) November 11, 2021

“Because it’s beloved, we did not want to screw it up,” executive producer Becky Clements told The Hollywood Reporter during a star-studded premiere event at Hollywood’s Goya Studios. “We were terrified because the fan base was so loyal. We always had an eye toward making sure we kept the integrity of the original in the live-action.”

READ MORE: ‘Cowboy Bebop’ Team Says They “Kept the Integrity” of Original Anime Series, Have Plans for a Season Two (The Hollywood Reporter)

CG Magazine’s Philip Watson notes that the reaction to the show’s casting has been largely favorable. “The conflict between the personalities of the crew adds just the right amount of humor to the plot,’ he writes.

“Spike Spiegel is still faithful to his Bruce Lee ideologies, as seen by the brief clip of the wooden dummy actor Cho is fighting in a scene. Jet Black remains as serious looking as ever, and Ein seems to be played by an actual corgi. The setting looks stunningly realistic, and the characters’ costumes are almost chameleons of their anime counterparts, except Faye’s design is revamped in the live-action version.”

READ MORE: Netflix’s Cowboy Bebop: Why Anime Fans Should Care (CG Magazine)

But it would be a mistake to call the new Netflix series a remake, cautions IndieWire’s Tyler Hersko. “Series showrunner André Nemec has stated that he intends for the Netflix show to be an ‘expansion to the canon,’ rather than a shot-for-shot remake of the original series.”

READ MORE: ‘Cowboy Bebop’: Everything You Need to Know About the Live-Action Netflix Adaptation (IndieWire)

“You guys are so lucky that I ran into you.”

Meet Spike Spiegel, Jet Black and Faye Valentine in this exclusive clip from COWBOY BEBOP, streaming tomorrow on Netflix: pic.twitter.com/CbJKRwmkSd

— Netflix Geeked (@NetflixGeeked) November 18, 2021

A “Lost Session” promo for the live-action series features split-screen panels, evoking a comic book sensibility. The promo was produced by Radical Media, led by director Greg Jardin, who spoke with Little Black Book’s Ben Conway about the three-day shoot.

“For the most part, the actors were interacting with practical sliding bars that the art department had built, so that they would have something tactile to actually grab on to and push all around. And then the shots where the camera would laterally track with one character walking into another environment was done using a motion control rig, and a lot of takes,” he said.

“Probably the thing we discussed the most was the best way to pull the split-screen gags off, in particular, the bits where one actor would cross from one frame into another. It required the art department to build a variety of rigs, but it also required the actors to repeat the same actions as close as they could, all at the same distance from the camera, all timed the same, etc, etc. I sort of warned all of the actors in advance that we were going to shoot a lot of takes of all of those moments to make sure that we were covered in post. But seeing it all come together in the edit was so exciting and rewarding that all of the team efforts really paid off.”

READ MORE: Behind Netflix’s Largest Promo Shoot Yet: The Cowboy Bebop “Lost Session” (Little Black Book)

Showrunner André Nemec, who appeared with Cho during a panel discussion moderated by Wired’s Cecilia D’Anastasio for the RE:WIRED virtual conference, said he thinks he’s up for the task.

“I think the real challenge from the beginning was being able to capture the tone of the anime. The manner in which we achieved that was by digging deep into the character work,” Nemec told D’Anastasio.

By finding “the core essence of who these people are,” the filmmakers were able to use witty banter and action-packed fight scenes to elicit dramatic moments. “There was a true depth and a true pain to all of these characters, and a pain that we can identify with the souls of the characters,” Nemec said.

“A hero’s story is only countered by an amazing bad guy,” Nemec commented about Spike’s arch-nemesis, Vicious (played by Alex Hassell). “I happen to love bad guys in film and TV. To me, it was very, very important for us to really get under the skin of who Vicious was, why Vicious was, what is Vicious chasing.”

Nemec recounted how this line of questioning functioned inside the writer’s room. “Now let’s tell the story from Vicious’s perspective. Who is Spike Spiegel to him? To Vicious, Spike Spiegel is the bad guy. Why is that? Where does that come from? And also Julia, I thought it was very important to tell a story about that character that is mostly an idea in thee and not so much of character. In that telling Julia, I wanted to see that character find her own agency to resolve her own problem, rather than being a product of being seen and being rescued, and ultimately getting to a place where she could own her own destiny. That to me was very, very important.”

READ MORE: RE:WIRED 2021: John Cho and André Nemec Wanted to Give Their Cowboy Bebop More Soul (Wired)

Retro tech, Playboy magazine, and even ham sandwiches populate the world of Cowboy Bebop, and that worldbuilding is as essential to the narrative as the multifaceted characters who inhabit it. “What was immediately apparent from the anime is that it’s not a dystopian picture of the future, despite a cataclysmic planet-ending event that sends us to colonize space,” Nemec explains. “In fact, it’s multicultural, and in that multiculturalism we rebuild our society in the nostalgia of the world we came from.”

These retro touches are what make the futuristic yet grounded world of Cowboy Bebop so comforting, Nemec added. “I do believe that in our future, if we found ourselves in this place, we would bring ham sandwiches with us to outer space.

“We all watched Cowboy Bebop 20 years ago. The world, even 20 years ago, was different then it is today. I think it’s nice for us to sort of be growing up and see some of those things that we remember from when the show was actually on the air.”

Martial arts are a major component of Cowboy Bebop, as any fan knows.

There’s “something intellectual about the discipline” of martial arts, Nemec said. “The goal of Cowboy Bebop was always to tell character stories through the action sequences. You’ll notice that each one of the characters plays on a very different style of how they fight, how they deal with conflict, and I think that’s always important because there is the individual component to how all of us take on conflict.

“There’s also so much more to Spike Spiegel than the martial arts,” Nemec continued. “I was saying the other day that as much as there may be an essence of Bruce Lee or an inspiration of Bruce Lee in the rendering of Spike Spiegel in the anime, there is also an incredible rendering of Humphrey Bogart in Spike Spiegel in the anime. It’s a mashup and that’s what Cowboy Bebop always is. It’s a mashup of many ideas. I think that’s why people are so drawn to it because they find something that they can hang onto, something that relates to them, because of that mashup.”

For inspiration, Nemec says, “I spent my entire time watching old noirs, The Big Sleep, and The Maltese Falcon, and Bonnie and Clyde, and Spaghetti Westerns, Dick Donner movies, and 2001: A Space Odyssey. It was a plethora of amazing, iconic, classic movies from different genres because that’s what inspires Cowboy Bebop.”

The most difficult martial arts sequence to film, Cho said, was Spike’s practice session with a wooden dummy in the first episode. “Partially because we couldn’t really hide a stunt man in that scene,” he recounted. “He’s practicing his punches and blocks on a martial arts dummy, and it’s in practice mode, so he’s getting a real workout. That was a tough sequence to memorize.”

The diverse casting of the Netflix series was driven by what Nemec says is the original anime’s “somewhat optimistic view of the universe,” which continues to offer a hopeful outlook despite all of the obvious ills it contains, such as mob bosses, corrupt corporations, and other master criminals.

“The essence of living in the spirit of Cowboy Bebop, to me, is that the cast itself should be multicultural, the genders fluid, and none of these things are active conversations,” Nemec said. “We’ve moved beyond those conversations in the future that I wanted to imagine, that our Cowboy Bebop was taking place in. It was almost this non-conversation that, just again, happened very fluidly.”

Nemec and his team collaborated closely with the original show’s creators at Sunrise. The studio provided them with a plethora of reference materials, including original drawings of characters, props, locations and spaceships.

“The entire team at Sunrise was phenomenal, and they gave us so much information,” Nemec enthused. “I have stacks and stacks of books and other stuff with original character drawings, development notes, props, locations, spaceships, all of this amazing information to draw from.”

But out of all the conversations he had with the studio, the “best words ever” were “Now go make your show,” Nemec recalled. “To be invited into somebody’s very rich sandbox and to be told, ‘Make the castle that you want to make,’ was the most incredible, inspiring thing. That’s what I carried with me through the journey: ‘Be beholden to all and none of it, but as you see fit.’ “

Nemec calls the original Cowboy Bebop “beautiful poetry,” Syfy’s Tara Bennet notes, but that doesn’t mean the show will necessarily translate to a live-action series because the characters “will come across a little archetypal.” In other words, don’t mess with them.

“Spike Spiegel is a cowboy with a broken heart, that really is who he is at his core. Jet Black is the eternal optimist, a grumpy guy with a heart of jelly beans. Faye Valentine, at her core is a survivor. Someone who is not going to let the hardships of the world around her, while they try to keep kicking her down, she continues to press forward,” Nemec told Bennet. “We looked at all of these things. And once we had those, we then began to craft stories for these characters.”

READ MORE: Cowboy Bebop Showrunner Digs Into How ‘Cowboy With A Broken Heart’ Tale Drives Netflix Series (Syfy)

In an interview with Matt Patches for Polygon, Nemec discussed how series composer Yoko Kanno completely reimagined the soundtrack. “Yoko’s involvement in this show to me was paramount to almost everything else,” the showrunner said.

“Anybody who loves the music from Cowboy Bebop is going to love beyond what Yoko has done for us on this show. It is really sensational,” Nemec enthused. “I will hear music pieces come in, we will talk about character and theme, and then when I get those pieces there have been more times than I can remember that I hear something and I’m like… a smile comes to my face.”

READ MORE: The Cowboy Bebop team aims to go deeper than a simple anime remake (Polygon)

In the video featurette below, composer Kanno discusses her musical choices for the live-action adaptation.

Detailing the recording sessions, Kanno says, “What made things very easy this time around was that the same musicians named Seatbelts from 20 years ago were willing to help me. I feel as if I’ve known them all my life. They could take a single melody line and elaborate it into something really cool.”

If you’re just catching up to the series now, be sure to check out AV Club‘s eight essential episodes to watch from the original Cowboy Bebop, all of which are referenced in the opening credits of the live-action Netflix series. Or head over to Collider, which lists seven essential episodes you’ll want to watch before seeing the live-action adaptation.

READ MORE: The 8 Cowboy Bebop episodes to watch, based on the intro for the Netflix adaptation (AV Club)

READ MORE: 7 Essential Episodes of ‘Cowboy Bebop’ to Watch Before the Live-Action Series (Collider)

Want more? Cowboy Bebop fan Ash Parrish and first-time watcher Andrew Webster binged the new series on Netflix, sharing their reactions to the live-action adaptation. Head over to The Verge to read their opinions on the cast, music and worldbuilding.

READ MORE: NETFLIX’S COWBOY BEBOP HAS HEART, STYLE, AND SOME ROUGH EDGES (The Verge)

The stars of the show — John Cho, Daniella Pineda and Mustafa Shakir — also interviewed each other during Netflix’s virtual TUDUM event, Comic Book reports, giving fans a closer look at what to expect from the new live-action series.

If you’d like to watch the interview, the Netflix Geeked account shared the exchange on Twitter:

“Cool, Lost, Hungry” are all pretty accurate when it comes to describing Spike. we asked the cast of Cowboy Bebop to interview each other about the upcoming series. #Tudum pic.twitter.com/fexhRajt01

— Netflix Geeked (@NetflixGeeked) September 25, 2021

SEE YOU SPACE COWBOY…