To make new television, it helps if you’ve watched a lot of old television. That’s a lesson evident in Poker Face, the crime-thriller series created by Rian Johnson and starring Natasha Lyonne, which makes its debut January 26 on Peacock.

Lyonne — creator and star of Netflix series Russian Doll — plays Charlie Cale, a woman employed by a casino with a preternatural ability to tell when people are lying.

As Johnson, the writer and director of Knives Out and Glass Onion, explained to Dave Itzkoff of The New York Times, the self-contained installments of Poker Face are a deliberate throwback to a style of TV storytelling that Johnson grew up with in the 1970s and ‘80s.

“That’s when I had control of the television,” Johnson said. “And it was typically hourlong, star-driven, case-of-the-week shows.”

They weren’t only detective programs like Columbo and Murder, She Wrote, he said, but also adventure series like Quantum Leap, The A Team, Highway to Heaven and The Incredible Hulk, which were notable for “the anchoring presence of a charismatic lead and a different set of guest stars and, in many cases, a totally different location, every single week.”

Those ever-changing elements kept things fresh and surprising, he said.

READ MORE: Natasha Lyonne and Rian Johnson Trace the TV Origins of ‘Poker Face’ (The New York Times)

Poker Face is not a whodunit but an “open mystery” because the audience starts out each episode by seeing who did it, how, and why, before Charlie begins to investigate. Johnson himself calls this mystery subgenre a “howcatchem,” where it’s very much about the detective versus the guest star of the episode, as Johnson also confirms to Brandy Clark at Collider: “These are not whodunits, these are howcatchems. Show the killing, and about Natasha [Lyonne] vs. the guest star.”

As Clark points out, the benefit of these types of shows is that a viewer can jump in at any time, without wondering or worrying if they need to see the previous episodes to understand the story or the plot.

READ MORE: Rian Johnson Explains ‘Poker Face’s Episodic Storytelling (Collider)

Of course, Columbo is the key reference point and an acknowledged part of Daniel Craig’s character Benoit Blanc in the Knives Out mysteries. Johnson told Rolling Stone’s Alan Sepinwall that he binged the entire series during lockdown.

“My big revelation from bingeing it is, I wasn’t coming back for the mysteries. Although the mysteries are fun, I was coming back to hang out with Peter Falk. And in that way, I feel like those shows have as much in common with sitcoms as they do anything else.”

He added, “It’s not really about the story or the content. It’s about just hanging out with somebody that you like, and the comforting rhythms of a repeated pattern over and over with a character that you really liked being with. That’s kind of what I saw when I watched Natasha in Russian Doll, that made me think this could be interesting.”

Lyonne also said that she loved characters such as Columbo, Elliott Gould’s Philip Marlowe in The Long Goodbye and Dennis Franz’s Andy Sipowicz in NYPD Blue, as reported by Deadline’s Peter White.

Speaking at NBCUniversal’s TCA press tour, Lyonne said that Charlie is “floating above a situation trying to crack a riddle, but also an everyman who has their nose to the grindstone and figuring out the sounds of the street.”

Once Johnson had decided to make her a human bullshit detector, rather than a detective or a mystery writer, he realized he had a problem, but this became the key to unlocking how the show might unfold.

“How was the show just not over within the first five minutes, if she can tell when people are lying?” he told Rolling Stone. “I had her give a speech in the pilot about how it’s less useful than you think because everyone’s always lying. It’s about looking for the subtlety of why is somebody lying about a specific thing. And we found really fun ways to play that at different episodes going forward.”

Although Johnson is red hot and you’d think people would be biting his hand to work with him, he says pitching a more old-fashioned TV format got push back.

“I was unprepared for the blank stares. And then the follow-up questions of, “Yes, but what’s the arc over the season?” I think there is right now this odd assumption that that’s what keeps people watching, just because there’s been so much of that in the streaming world that I think people equate the cliffhanger at the end of an episode with what gets people to click ‘Next.’ But TV before incredibly recently, was entirely in this episode mode. So I know it can work because I grew up tuning in every day for it.”

One reason it’s harder to do episodic case-of-the-week stories is the expense and the production challenge. For example, you keep have to bringing in new guests and visiting new locations.

“Holy crap, it was a headache,” Johnson admits to Rolling Stone. “I don’t think we even realized what we’re up against. No standing sets. No recurring characters besides Natasha and occasionally Benjamin Bratt. But we’re very purposefully going for the Columbo approach of big fish guest stars. So every single one of these episodes, we try and get somebody very exciting to play either the killer or the victim. And it was a lot.”

READ MORE: ‘Glass Onion’ Director Rian Johnson Is Giving Us a ‘Knives Out’-Style Mystery Every Week (Rolling Stone)

Indeed, the cast list across the season includes Adrien Brody, Ellen Barkin, Nick Nolte, Stephanie Hsu, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Ron Perlman, Chloë Sevigny, Lil Rel Howery, Clea Duvall, Tim Blake Nelson, and many more.

Asked during a Q&A panel at the Winter Television Critics Association Presentation whether he writes specifically to those guest stars, he replied: “In the room, sometimes we’d have a placeholder actor, and it would end up being them, or surprisingly someone else. A benefit of this subgenre is that it is the guest star’s episode, and you see them go head-to-head with Natasha.”

Johnson continued to sing the praises of television in front of the ballroom full of television reporters and critics — saying he preferred the “pace” of this newfound process vs. film. Each hour-long Poker Face episode took about three weeks (one for prep, two for shooting) to complete. Compare that with making one film over the course of “several years,” as he put it.

READ MORE: ‘Poker Face’: “Endless Possibilities” For Natasha Lyonne’s Human BS Detector To Keep Solving Crimes Past Season 1 (Deadline)

“I loved that in each episode we’re in a different environment, it’s a whole new cast— it’s like making 10 mini movies,” Johnson told IndieWire’s Tony Maglio. “I literally dove into it like it was one of my movies. I really jumped completely into the deep end of the pool.”

READ MORE: Rian Johnson Now Thinks Making TV Is ‘Much More Fun’ Than Movies (IndieWire)

Johnson has previously directed for TV, notably on two episodes for Breaking Bad including the show finale “Ozymandias.” Episode two of Poker Face, which he directed, was shot in Albuquerque.

“I haven’t been back there since we shot ‘Ozymandias,’” he told Rolling Stone. “It was so much fun being back in town. A lot of the same Breaking Bad crew were on our crew, and it felt like a little homecoming.”

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Troll from Netflix has seen some highly impressive viewing figures since its arrival on the platform and quickly became its best performing non-English film. This breakdown comes from Naman Ramachandran at Variety: “With a total of 128 million hours viewed and still counting, the film has taken the top spot on the non-English Netflix Top 10. It is in the Top 10 in 93 countries including Norway, France, Germany, the US, the UK, Japan, South Korea, Brazil and Mexico.”

READ MORE: ‘Troll’ Becomes Netflix’s Most Popular Non-English Film (Variety)

Monster movies have always had a wide fan base and Troll has all the attractions and tropes those fans like — a cityscape destruction, believable and well-executed VFX, a credible folklore backstory, and a monster with feelings and a purpose. Something that Renaldo Matadeen picked up on in his review for Comic Book Resources.

“The remains of his tribe got left in a palace under the Royal Palace, which means the troll king’s domain has been desecrated. So, he’s stomping his way to Oslo to destroy the place for what happened to his family and to crush the symbol of Christianity, politics and corruption.”

READ MORE: How Netflix’s Troll Dwarfs the MonsterVerse’s Kong & Godzilla (Comic Book Resources)

Yes, Troll was partly inspired by King Kong, including Godzilla vs. Kong, but don’t forget Cloverfield with its clever “monster in a city” reality. But one of the most important aspects of the production was to keep it very Norwegian notwithstanding the monster action at its core. Espen Horn, producer and CEO of Motion Blur, explained the vision. “It was a big and important dream for us. That we should use Norwegians as crew, SFX and VFX vendors as much as possible because we wanted to show the world that this was genuinely a Norwegian or Nordic film,” he said.

“That was very important as even as the film has a classic monster genre formula to it, as some people claim, it was important to us to maintain originality in terms of the characters, mythology and the nature of how we are as people. I think the audience were happy that we kept the Norwegian originality.”

Half-jokingly, Espen saw that owning the Troll story included some gentle reprisal for a fellow Scandinavian country’s appropriation of another folklore legend. “It was after Finland ‘stole’ the copyright of Santa Claus from Norway. Finally, we could copyright the Troll and insert some Norwegian DNA in to the story,” he said.

“It was essential that the people as well as the Troll were the heroes. Very often when you watch a monster movie it feels like explosions and the fights are more important than the love of the characters or the creature.”

Again reviews bought in to the sympathy for the monster, this from Noel Murray at the Los Angeles Times. “As with many other films about lumbering beasties, Troll alternates between making the big guy terrifying and sympathetic. It’s to the credit of Uthaug and his special effects team (as well as the refreshingly unfussy Espen Aukan screenplay) that this troll inspires such conflicted emotions and isn’t merely menacing or laughably goofy.”

It’s also to the production’s credit that the positive environmental messages baked into the story survived without the feeling of being spoon fed any kind of propaganda and without diluting the monster thrill ride. “We tried to do it in our own Norwegian modest fashion,” Espen demurred.

READ MORE: Review: It’s no secret why Netflix’s monster movie ‘Troll’ is so popular (Los Angeles Times)

Jesse Hassenger at Polygon agreed on the lack of a Hollywood ponderous third act in his review. “But there are plenty of advantages to shedding Hollywood-approved bloat while maintaining a kind of gee-whiz energy. Specifically, it resembles Emmerich’s 1998 version of Godzilla, reconfigured for greater speed and efficiency.”

READ MORE: Netflix’s explosive monster movie Troll is a whole new spin on Godzilla (Polygon)

Motion Blur is the production company behind Troll and over the last ten years have been making films and TV including two shows that were signed up for Netflix before Troll, the series Post Mortem and feature Kadaver. Espen, however, was sure it was the right time to attempt a huge monster movie with Scandinavian VFX houses of such quality like Denmark’s Ghost and Copenhagen Visuals, the Norwegian Gimpville and Sweden’s Swiss International. “We realized that with these Scandinavian facilities we had the ability to realize our dreams of creating such a monster, it seemed like the right time to do it.”

Espen describes the origins of the Troll project. “Around ten years ago we were developing a Troll story with another director. Roar Uthaug, the eventual director of Troll, was also developing a similar idea for a film. For various reasons both productions had to be stopped.

“But eventually we got together around three-and-a-half years ago to make a Troll movie. He had a very particular idea of how the story should evolve and had carved out the story and started working with screenwriter Espen Aukan.” The script was written fairly quickly and Motion Blur started to finance it.

Originally Troll was to be financed as a movie theater event with support from the Norwegian Film Institute, “We started to finance it as a typical cinema movie but then Netflix came on board — they bought so much into our vision for the film and how to accomplish it. They were very accommodating to fulfil this vision; it was actually a fairly easy choice to go along with Netflix and then not do a theatrical release.”

It was a 55-day shoot, which isn’t very long, but compared to Norwegian films is on the high side. “Shot in seven different locations including Oslo, so for the production it was very much a road movie in that sense. In one place for three or four days then move the 150 crew and cast to the next location. All were quite difficult to reach. Either up in the mountains or down deep inside a tunnel or a cave. But we got so much help from the local community including neighbors, farmers, engineers, even helping with extras.

“To shoot in rural Norway was a fantastic experience. It was extremely rewarding that when you come to a small place the whole community gathers up and are so supportive. We also had fantastic help from the Norwegian army who were very accommodating in helping us first of all get it right in terms of language and rules and regulations as well as uniforms, guns and helmets, tanks etc.”

But what was Motion Blur’s inspiration for the creation of the Troll? They didn’t want the blundering and small cave troll from Lord of the Rings; in fact, Espen even derided them as “Hairless and stupid trolls.”

“For VFX we used Norway’s Gimpville, Ghost and Copenhagen Visuals in Copenhagen and Swiss International in Stockholm. The monster itself was partly derived from folklore. There is a famous painting by [Theodor Severin] Kittelsen who was one of Norway’s most popular artists, it was the painting that Roar Uthaug had as his inspiration. He always thought, ‘what would happen if we got a real troll walking in to Oslo down Karl Johan, how would everyone respond?’ ”

He worked with a Norwegian artist Einar Martinsen and they started conceptualizing the troll with that thought of Oslo in crisis from a giant creature.

But Kittelsen’s paintings set the scene, “The old Norwegian trolls had trousers, pine trees sticking out of their heads, had extremely large noses, were clumsy and a little bit stupid. We wanted a troll that looked badass but also would have the warm tender eyes of emotions, we wanted him to have memory to show feelings and emotions and the ability to camouflage itself.”

They presented their Troll design to Netflix and the streamer loved it, “We then started to work on the troll with Ghost who did most of the CGI on it. It was important that he was originated from Norwegian folklore — important to Norwegians and to Netflix. It was important that it had good heritage from the old Kittelsen painting and from the old fairy tales of Asbjørnsen and Moe from the 19th century.”

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Perhaps it’s our underlying fear of what AI will lead to, or a horror jolt that we needed to kickstart our year, but the hit movie M3GAN is busting the $100 million worldwide ticket sales barrier on a $12 million production budget. Also, a generous PG-13 rating has lured in the teenage market with even younger kids finding a way into theaters to catch horror-comedy at its best.

Vanity Fair’s Julie Miller looked into the toy slayers and analyzed the genre. “The killer doll trope is nothing new — 60 years ago, a pigtailed doll in ribbons and ruffles named ‘Talky Tina’ took out an evil stepfather in a Twilight Zone episode,” she writes.

“In the decades since, there have been knife-wielding dolls, deranged puppets, demonic fetish figures, and diabolical porcelain dolls fronting horror films.” But maybe the effect is easily explained by Frank McAndrew, a psychologist who has researched the concept of creepiness.

“They have eyes and ears and heads and all of the things that normal human beings have,” explains Frank “But there’s something off — the deadness in their eyes, their blank stares. They’re cute and they’re supposed to be for children,” he says, but the human realism causes “our brain to give off conflicting signals. For some people that can be very discomforting.”

McAndrew further defines that dolls are especially effective horror-movie antagonists because murderous streaks seem so unlikely in a child’s toy.

READ MORE: M3GAN and the History of the Creepy Killer Doll Phenomenon (Vanity Fair)

But perhaps the most interesting aspect of M3GAN is how a seemingly CGI-laced movie was made for only $12 million. The mid-sized budget was perhaps a consequence of shooting in New Zealand during COVID — since at the time the country hadn’t yet been exposed to the pandemic. But it was also due to the skills of a young local actress, Amie Donald, who played the demented AI and ended up doing her own stunts.

Jen Yamato at the Los Angeles Times tracked down the actress’s movement coaches. “Casting local performer and international competitive dancer Donald, now 12, to physically embody M3GAN turned out to be fortuitous. Although it was her first film role, the actor, who has also since appeared on Sweet Tooth, was off book within a week and loved doing her own stunts. ‘She was just extraordinary,’ says director Gerard Johnstone,” Yamato reports.

“Working with movement coaches Jed Brophy (The Lord of the Rings) and Luke Hawker (Thor: Love and Thunder) and stunt coordinator Isaac ‘Ike’ Hamon (Black Adam), she developed M3GAN’s physicality, which becomes more humanlike the longer she’s around humans. She adopted barely perceptible movements — a slight cock of the head, a step a bit too close for comfort — to maximize the unsettling effect M3GAN has on people.”

Donald proved to the director how well she could do her own stunts and even on the first day of shooting, nailed the all-fours forest move you can see on the trailer after perfecting it at home. “All of a sudden we get this video from her mother, where Amie had just figured out how to do this on the carpet at home,” said Johnstone. “And she could run on all fours!”

READ MORE: Puppets, fake tears, a young dance phenomenon: How ‘M3GAN’s’ killer doll came to life (Los Angeles Times)

CGI was definitely minimized in the movie, but WETA Workshop contributed additional designs to the film, and Oscar-nominated Adrien Morot and Kathy Tse of Montreal-based Morot FX Studios were entrusted to smooth out the joins of animatronics, puppets, posable and stunt M3GANs, as well as Donald herself.

Director Gerard Johnstone was also keen to bring a level of humor to the movie and find ways to echo his own experience of parenthood, as he told Gregory Ellwood at The Playlist. “But what I brought to it was definitely my own sense of humor and my own experiences as a parent. I wanted to put as many of my own struggles and anxieties and frustrations that I was having as a parent into this movie. Parenting in the age of AI and iPads isn’t easy.”

READ MORE: ‘M3GAN’ Director Gerard Johnstone Loves That You Think It’s A Comedy, Talks Sequels & More [Interview] (The Playlist)

Speaking to Valerie Ettenhofer in an interview for Slash Film, Johnstone cited Edgar Wright and Simon Pegg’s rom-zom-com Shaun of the Dead as teaching him a significant lesson in style. “My big lesson from them when I first watched  Shaun of the Dead…  was just how seriously they took both genres,” the director shares. “If I was going to do this, I had to treat the horror as seriously as I did the comedy.”

Johnstone struck a balance between horror and comedy with his first film, Housebound, which he continued with M3GAN, Ettenhofer notes, “a movie that offsets its most violent and unsettling scenes with moments in which the titular android does a hair-twirling dance or breaks into spontaneous song.”

Johnstone also namedrops a few other greats that he considers fun horror touchstones. “I’m a big fan of Sam Raimi, Drag Me to Hell and The Evil Dead trilogy.” He also commends Wes Craven, plus the “very deadpan” films of Joel and Ethan Coen, which he says employ “just a very dry tone, but you can tell they’re secretly making comedies.”

READ MORE: M3GAN Director Gerard Johnstone Learned A Key Lesson From Shaun Of The Dead [Exclusive] (Slash Film)

All the film references in the world mean for nothing, however, when your movie becomes a litany of Internet memes, which M3GAN quickly generated. Karla Rodriguez at Complex put it to the director that once a part of your movie or a part of the trailer becomes a meme, you know you’ve struck gold.

“And they were amazing,” picked up Johnstone, “and I just couldn’t believe how many of them there were. But I thought they were giving too much away in the trailer of the dance scene. I was like, ‘I just want a hint of it, something weird happening to tease people.’ And Universal said, ‘You don’t know what you’re talking about.’ And I didn’t know what I was talking about clearly because people just took it, recut it, put it to different music and it was just the gift that kept on giving.”

READ MORE: Director Gerard Johnstone Shares the Behind-the-Scenes Magic That Went Into Creating ‘M3GAN’ (Complex)

So where does that leave the psychotic M3GAN doll? A scary range of merch maybe, but definitely at least one sequel because, like artificial intelligence, we just can’t get enough of her. Producer Jason Blum has already said as much. “Blum did something he’d never done in his nearly 30-year career: He publicly admitted his desire to make a sequel before the movie even opened in theaters, Rebecca Rubin reports at Variety. “He just felt certain that audiences would instantly fall in love with M3GAN, short for Model 3 Generative Android, whose chaotic dance moves, pithy one-liners and killer tendencies turned her into an internet icon as soon as Universal debuted the first trailer.”

“We broke our cardinal rule,” he says. “I felt so bullish that we started entertaining a sequel earlier than we usually do.”

READ MORE: Why ‘M3GAN’ Convinced Horror Maven Jason Blum to Break His Cardinal Rule on Sequels (Variety)

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“In 2012, a man named Paul T. Goldman tweeted at me,” is how director Jason Woliner (Borat Subsequent Moviefilm) begins, discussing his new Peacock series. “He said that he had an incredible story to tell and had written a book — and a screenplay — about it. He asked for my help bringing it to the screen.”

A decade later and the resultant Peacock series Paul T. Goldman is judged to be “hard to describe, impossible to forget, and one wild ride,” by Consequence TV’s Liz Shannon Miller, who says the bar for the “weirdest TV show of 2023” has been set pretty damn high.

Ostensibly about a man’s failed marriage and claims that he was a victim of his wife’s scam, this is less a shocking tale of sex and crime and more a fascinating portrait of a man and his ambitions: his desire for fame, for revenge. The series depicts its central character “through a lens that is alternately dark, strange, bizarre, and, more often than not, very funny,” Shannon Miller adds.

READ MORE: Paul T. Goldman Is Hard to Describe, Impossible to Forget, and One Wild Ride: Review (Consequence TV)

MovieWeb’s Matthew Mahler calls it “a mind-melting blend of cringe comedy, character study, and meta documentary.”

Ben Pearson of SlashFilm is not the only critic to call the show “bonkers.” He adds, “Since the rise of streaming, many shows have felt as if they were designed by an algorithm and stretched out with the sole intention of keeping viewers engaged with a platform for as long as possible. Not this one.”

First of all there is the show’s odd format, which combines fiction with sort-of reality, scripted with a behind-the-scenes “making of” docuseries.

“Quirky and odd, the show’s main point feels like the fact we’re all the heroes of our story, at least in our own highly subjective eyes,” Brian Lowry reviews for CNN. “It’s honestly hard to know where to begin in describing the program.”

READ MORE: ‘Paul T. Goldman’ blends fiction and reality in a way that’s as odd as it is funny (CNN Entertainment)

Initially conceived as a feature, the project was then due to be made for Quibi — Jeffrey Katzenberg’s ill-fated shortform mobile video platform. When it folded, Peacock picked the idea up and made it into a six-part limited series backed by Seth Rogan’s production company.

Filmed on and off for a decade, with much of the filming crammed into 15 days last Summer, Woliner hired documentarian Jason Tippet in 2017 to bring his fly-on-the-wall style.

“He’ll find a spot and plant the camera and walk away and just kind of roll until something interesting happens,” the director explained to SlashFilm. “So we decided early on to make him that third camera, he’s the part of the process. Sometimes he would just roam around the set and basically follow Paul and be far enough away that people didn’t feel like they were on camera. But everyone on set knew that was the deal, that they were mic-ed and we were recording behind the scenes.”

READ MORE: Director Jason Woliner’s 10-Year Journey To Make Paul T. Goldman, Peacock’s Most Unusual Show [Exclusive Interview] (SlashFilm)

Goldman had written a book, “Duplicity: A True Story of Crime and Deceit,” about the events, along with a screenplay for a film or TV deal that was ignored by everyone except Woliner.

“Every page had mind-blowing things on it,” Woliner tells MovieWeb. “It’s just kind of an amazing peek into this person’s mind and his experience and his perspective, which in many ways was completely different from my own. And then I would find parts of his book that were completely relatable at its core, being about a desire to be loved and lead what you’d consider a normal life.”

Woliner not only decided that he would direct a documentary about his production of Goldman’s story, but that Goldman would write and star in all of it. “It was just like, we are filming his writing, and we’re going to see what it reveals,” he said.

“It really was just this kind of falling in love with his mind and then trying to figure out how to translate that into a series, but in a newer thing that is separate from bad or good.”

A tension, which Woliner was keen to exploit, is about how he as a documentarian (and a director of comedy) is telling the story of Paul telling his story. In his interview with Mahler, he calls the filmmaker the “villain of a documentary,” but admits that the show is ultimately his version.

“It’s me telling the story of him telling his story, but it is all filtered through my own perspective. And at the end of the day, I’m the one controlling the edit and not Paul.”

A documentary filmmaker, he says, is “this person who has descended upon the life of a real person and use their life to explore something, to make a point about the human condition or whatever, but they’re the one with all the power, and there is always an imbalance. I hope Paul is happy with the show. I know if he controlled it fully, it would be a very different show.”

READ MORE: Exclusive: Paul T. Goldman Director Jason Woliner Discusses the Making and Meaning of His Mind-Melting Comedy (MovieWeb)

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TL;DR

• In the Apple TV+ documentary “Selena Gomez: My Mind & Me” we see the toll fame has often taken on the star’s mental health.
• We also learn what director Alex Keshishian feels was important while making a documentary of her life: the intrusion of social media and inane questions thrown at the singer on press tours.
• The 93-minute feature was made from more than 200 hours of reality-shot and archive material.

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Though Disney channel star turned pop singer and TV producer Selena Gomez hasn’t shied away from speaking publicly about her mental and physical health struggles over the years, the new Apple TV+ documentary is deeper, darker, and more specific about these incidents. In Selena Gomez: My Mind & Me we see the toll this has often taken on her mental health.

The film is directed by Alek Keshishian, whose previous credits include acclaimed music documentary Madonna: Truth or Dare (1991) that broke new ground in presenting a fly-on-the-wall snapshot of the public and private effect of fame on an artist and those around them.

Keshishian got the gig because his sister happens to be Gomez’s manager as he explained to numerous publications, including a piece he wrote for New Music Express.

They struck up a friendship, and “she asked if I would consider doing a tour doc with her. I said, ‘I don’t think you really want me to do a tour doc with you, because I don’t make the sort of tour docs that everyone’s been doing in your lifetime.

“I shoot cinéma vérité and I’m spoiled because my first experience was with Madonna who gave me access to everything all the time.’ ”

READ MORE: What I learned about Selena Gomez from making a documentary of her life (New Music Express)

Despite that knock-back, Gomez seemed even more keen to work with Keshishian. So they agreed a trial.

It didn’t go well.

“I brought in my crew and we shot for two weeks, then I cut it down to a five-minute [short] so she could see the kind of film I would make. She was like, ‘Wow, it’s beautiful, but could you not show me crying? I don’t want my fans to see me break down like that.’ And so I said I didn’t think it was the right time for me to make a documentary with her. We agreed to just shelve the footage.”

What changed was a charity trip that Gomez made in 2019 to Kenya. Keshishian agreed to go “because it was for a good cause,” and found in the course of shooting in Africa and then press events with the singer in Europe that there was a doc to be made inspired by the conflicting way people treated her fame and her reaction to that.

Gomez herself tells Rachel Handler at Vulture that in Kenya she “realized that people in every part of the world are dealing with the same thing: their minds. Your mind is everything. It provides for your body, for your soul. But when I got to London, I gotta be honest, I was kind of frustrated and didn’t even want anyone to film anything. I was just a little frustrated with some of the questions… the press-tour moments in London and Paris. Those questions were shitty.”

READ MORE: ‘I Couldn’t Believe the Things I Was Aspiring to Be’ (Vulture)

To Keshishian this was the story. “I was more interested in some levels of implicating the paparazzi who are unbelievably cruel,” he told Variety’s Jazz Tangcay. “I showed unrelenting interest [of Gomez] in the press. I wanted to show how cruel some of that stuff that’s yelled to a 24-year-old girl is, how brutal it is. On another level, there’s this misogyny, that the woman is always somehow that dumped one, and that the woman should be jealous.”

READ MORE: Alek Keshishian on Filming Selena Gomez Through Her Darkest Moments: ‘I Would Know When Enough Was Enough’ (Variety)

To Handler he added, “There’s a real part of me that wanted to make a statement to young people that pursuing the artifice of fame and whatever — it isn’t a bunch of roses. It’s not perfect, and in some ways, it can prevent actual human connection. That’s what you see in London and Paris. She’s not connecting with human beings after connecting so deeply with human beings in Kenya. That’s really the shock to her system. That’s what makes her feel sad.”

It would seem there is a darker side to fame than thirty years ago and the always on pressure of social media is to blame.

“You’re constantly working on presentation,” he tells Mia Galuppo at The Hollywood Reporter. “I’m talking about people who are really doing social media. So, I wanted to indict fame to a certain degree. I wanted to make people realize this is not all fun and games. She’s not in Paris having a great time. Granted, these are first world problems, you can say, but if you want to know what it does to the mental health of somebody, that level of isolation — it doesn’t make people joyful.

READ MORE: ‘My Mind and Me’ Director on Selena Gomez and the “Isolation of Celebrity” (The Hollywood Reporter)

He whittled down more than 200 hours of footage for the 90-minute feature, explaining to Tangcay at Variety that much of that was archival footage. “I knew I had to tell parts of this story through archival, which is very time-consuming. It took us six months just to do the string outs which meant taking each scene and shortening it.”

He could have released a two-hour, 30-minute cut, “and pleased her fans who would never tire of her,” he added to Galuppo. “But I wanted us to mean something for people down the line who aren’t her fan. One of the things I always kept telling my editors is: I’m not looking to make a room spray of Selena Gomez. I want the most distilled and concentrated version of this story so that you spend 93 minutes and hopefully you come out feeling differently about your own life as well as Selena’s.”

As Handler says, many musicians have done their versions of “personal documentaries,” in which there is a sense that they’re still controlling the final product — that there’s a level of PR machinations going on behind the scenes. So did Gomez want final cut?

“There are a lot of things that I didn’t put into this,” Keshishian tells Tangcay. “It’s a potent experience, but it doesn’t have everything.”

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With the The Banshees of Inisherin, writer-director Martin McDonagh has fused his trademark dark humor with something altogether more profound about the nature of friendship, creativity and mortality.

It follows a soured friendship between the cheerful but dim Pádraic (Colin Farrell) and the more tortured, artistic Colm (Brendan Gleeson), who summarily tells Pádraic one morning that he no longer wants to be pals. Over the course of the film, Pádraic’s initial bafflement curdles into resentment, while Colm’s attempts to stay away from him in their tiny community repeatedly fail.

On the face of it, a relationship breakup is a thin plot on which to hang a film, but this was McDonagh’s starting point.

“I just wanted to tell a very simple breakup story,” he told Deadline’s Joe Utichi. “And to see how far a simple comedic and dark plot could go.”

READ MORE: Director Martin McDonagh Didn’t Want To “Destroy the Legacy” Between Reunited Stars Colin Farrell And Brendan Gleeson With ‘The Banshees of Inisherin’ (Deadline)

For all its comedy, the drama is best described as a melancholic ballad. McDonagh, who won best screenplay at the Venice film festival , says he tried to imbue the friends’ breakup “with all of the sadness of the breakup of a love relationship… because I think we’ve all been both parties in that equation,” he told Miranda Sawyer at The Guardian. “And there’s something horrible about both sides. Like knowing you have to break up with someone is a horrible, horrible thing as well. I’m not sure which is the best place to be in.”

Depicting that sadness accurately was his intent, he explained to AV Club’s Jack Smart: “It was about painting a truthful picture of a breakup, really. A sad breakup, a platonic breakup, which can be as heavy and sad and destructive as a divorce, as a sexual or loving relationship coming to an end.”

READ MORE: How Martin McDonagh made a platonic breakup more devastating than any romantic split in The Banshees Of Inisherin (AV Club)

There’s more to the film than this. Setting the story in Ireland in 1923, with the Irish Civil War playing out in the background, is a metaphor that spins the tale a wider web.

“You don’t need any knowledge of Irish history,” McDonagh told The Atlantic’s David Sims. “All you need to know, really, is that [the civil war] was over a hairline difference of beliefs which had been shared up until the year before. And it led to horrific violence. The main story of Banshees is that, too: negligible differences that end up, well, spoiler alert, not in a good place.”

READ MORE: ‘I’m Trying To Get All The Coolness Out Of My Movies’ (The Atlantic)

The divide between the one-time friends spirals into violence so quickly that the original relatively mild cause for dispute is forgotten. “I think that’s what was interesting about this story, that things unravel and get worse and worse, sometimes without, oftentimes without intending to,” McDonagh told UPROXX’s Mike Ryan. “And then become unforgivable and irreparable. And I guess that’s true of wars as much as is true of this little story about the two guys.”

READ MORE: Martin McDonagh On Getting The ‘In Bruges’ Band Back Together In ‘The Banshees of Inisherin’(UPROXX)

There are other layers too. Not least of which is what IndieWire’s Eric Kohn shares as McDonagh’s “deep questions about national identity,” both within the series and his own personal identity. Despite writing Irish characters (in this film and his debut, In Bruges) and setting previous theatrical plays in the country, McDonagh hails from London, although his parents are indeed from west coast Ireland.

McDonagh’s last movie set in the country was the 2004 short Six Shooter, which won an Academy Award. McDonagh’s first trilogy of plays, starting with The Beauty Queen of Leenane in 1996, took place in Galway. His second trilogy — which remains unfinished — took place on the Aran Islands, and Banshees was shot on Inishmore and Achill, two islands off Ireland’s west coast.

Inisherin itself is fictional, partly to put the real events of the civil war at one remove from the events onscreen, and also because he and cinematographer Ben Davis use the landscapes of the two islands to convey the dueling personalities of his two main characters.

“All in all, it certainly seems like McDonagh wants to grapple with the history and personality of the country after setting it aside for almost two decades,” Kohn notes.

At the same time, the filmmaker’s depiction of Ireland risks backlash. “There’s a certain degree of unease in Ireland about McDonagh’s post-modern, heightened versions of Irishness,” shares Irish film critic Donald Clarke. “The films and plays do well here. But there is a tension in Ireland about his treatment of the country.”

Critics also point to supposed southern stereotypes in the Oscar-nominated Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri. Kohn indicates that McDonagh was often lambasted on the promotional tour of that movie for depicting a racist police officer (Sam Rockwell) with some measure of empathy.

“His characters are exaggerated to an almost allegorical degree in order to comment on the society around them, which has led some American audiences to see his view of the country as naïve,” Kohn writes. “Banshees burrows into the stereotype of Irish people at pubs, guzzling pints to the tune of ebullient folk music, and molds it into an emotionally resonant character study.”

That character study is also linked to a meditation on death and how an artist should make best use of their time. In the film, Colm is a musician and wants to use the rest of his days creatively, rather than sitting in the pub with Pádraic talking nonsense. Which raises several questions, including: do you have to be selfish and cruel in order to create? Can an artist be nice?

That is accompanied with a threat: If Pádraic doesn’t leave him alone, then Colm will start lopping off his own fingers.

“I thought it was interesting that an artist would threaten the thing that allows him to make art,” McDonagh said. “Does that thing make him the artist?”

READ MORE: ‘The Banshees of Inisherin’ Confronts the One Subject Martin McDonagh Doesn’t Want to Discuss (IndieWire)

It’s clearly something that preys on McDonagh’s mind. “I’m 52. You start thinking, Am I wasting time? Should I be devoting all my time, however much is left, to the artistic?” he commented to Sims. “That’s something that’s always going on in my head — the waste of time, the duty to art, all that. So you start off being on [Pádraic’s] side and understanding the hurt, but you have to be completely truthful to the other side… You should feel conflicted.”

McDonagh says decided that he’s going to spend what creative time he has left — he reckons “around 25 years” — making films rather than plays. His reasoning? Films are quicker.

“I always used to think they took longer than plays, but with this one we were filming it a year ago, and now it’s out,” he tells Sawyer. “But if you’re lucky enough to have successful plays… to get that right with each move, to cast it and take care of it, go to rehearsals, that’s five years of your life.”

READ MORE: Martin McDonagh: ‘No one really tries to make sad films any more’ (The Guardian)

It was also clearly nagging at him to unleash the genie of Gleeson and Farrell’s chalk and cheese interplay that audiences lapped up in the 2008 cult hit In Bruges.

“It feels like it was two days ago that we made In Bruges together but time passes so quickly,” he said in response to The Playlist’s Gregory Ellwood wondering if there will be a third collaboration. “None of us are getting any younger. I don’t have an idea now, but just that little ticking bomb is somewhere in me. So, I do want to get them back together.”

READ MORE: ‘The Banshees Of Inisherin’: Martin McDonagh Has A Timeline For A Third Colin Farrell & Brendan Gleeson Film (The Playlist)

In The Banshees of Inisherin, McDonagh reunites the pair only to break them up in the first scene. “A delectable bit of cruelty for the audience,” observes Sims.

Although he made In Bruges to his satisfaction, the director apparently faced pressure from execs at Focus Features at every turn. He now insists on having the final cut, which he got for Banshees, a movie produced by Disney-owned Searchlight. Kohn points out that his four movies have all been made for around $15 million, a manageable scale by studio standards that lets McDonagh get away with creative freedom.

“That is the reason why the films are singular,” McDonagh said. “It is all me. It hasn’t been watered down, for good or bad.”

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