“Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Road Trip” Director Marvin Lemus on a Family Adventure Through New Mexico
The title says it all: Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Road Trip is a PG comedy that follows a rambunctious family on an RV trek through New Mexico. Their destination? A very old village in Mexico, home to an ancient stone idol. By returning the haunted talisman to its ancestral home, ...
Producer Joseph Patel Explores Sly Stone’s Life & Legacy in “Sly Lives! (aka The Burden of Black Genius)”
Prodigiously gifted songwriter/singer/arranger/producer/bandleader/keyboardist/guitarist Sly Stone gets his well-deserved close-up in documentary makers Joseph Patel and Ahmir “Questlove” Thompson‘s SLY LIVES! (aka The Burden of Black Genius). After earning an Academy Award for Summer of Soul, producer Patel and director QuestLove decided to deep-dive into the life and music of the man whose multi-racial band once ...
How Director Mohammad Rasoulof Shot his Oscar-Nominated “The Seed of the Sacred Fig” in Secret
Iranian filmmaker Mohammad Rasoulof wanted to tell a big story — so he went small. The Seed of the Sacred Fig explores his country’s authoritarian rule, repressive justice, patriarchal dominance, and women’s rights through its impact on one family. Taking place during the 2022 Woman, Life, Freedom movement, a nationwide protest sparked by the arrest of ...
“Nickel Boys” Writer/Director RaMell Ross on Camera as Consciousness in His Oscar-Nominated Film
An introspective, promising teenager hitchhiking to college gets a ride in a car that turns out to be stolen. The driver is Black, and so is the boy. Deemed an accomplice despite his innocence, Elwood (Ethan Herisse) is remanded to Nickel Academy, a segregated Florida reform school. Nickel Boys, the Oscar-nominated film based on Colson ...
Issa Rae on the Importance of Filming “One Of Them Days” on the Streets of Los Angeles
In its opening weekend, One of Them Days earned back nearly all of its $14 million dollar budget, cementing its status as a comedy hit, the number two spot at the box office, and led many on social media in a rallying cry for more Black, female-led comedies. One of Them Days is centered on friends and ...
Oscar-Nominated Makeup Artist Julia Floch-Carbonel on the Beauty of Transformation in “Emilia Pérez”
Emilia Pérez made history by casting Karla Sofía Gascón, the first transgendered woman to be nominated for a best actress Academy Award. The musical melodrama from director Jacques Audiard centers on Gascón’s portrayal of Mexican cartel boss Manitas, who undergoes surgery to begin a new life as Emilia. Nominated for an astonishing 13 Oscars, the ...
Making Macondo: How the “One Hundred Years of Solitude” Cinematographers Brought Gabriel García Márquez’s Epic to Netflix
Directors Alex García López and Laura Mora have undertaken the historic feat of adapting Nobel laureate Gabriel García Márquez’s 1967 novel, One Hundred Years of Solitude, into a sixteen-part Netflix series, the first half of which was released on December 11. Unlike the book, which moves back and forth in time across seven generations of ...
Best of 2024: “Shōgun” Editors Aika Miyake and Maria Gonzales on Cutting Mariko’s Heroic Path
*This interview was selected by measures having nothing to do with science as one of our standouts from 2024. Miyake and Gonzales unpack how they helped the story of Anna Sawai’s incredible Lady Mariko. The first season of Justin Marks and Rachel Kondo’s masterful Shōgun was an expertly paced slow-burn drama that plunged viewers into 17th-century ...
Best of 2024: MPA Creator Award Recipient Writer/Director JA Bayona’s Epic Journey
J.A. Bayona’s Society of the Snow, a reimagining of the real-life 1972 Uruguayan plane crash in the Andes Mountains that caught the world’s attention, is a viscerally astonishing feat of empathetic filmmaking. It was nominated for two Oscars: Best International Feature for Spain and Best Makeup and Hairstyling (Ana López-Puigcerver, David Martí, and Montse Ribé), ...
From “Kill Bill” to Martin Scorsese to “Shōgun”: Producer Eriko Miyagawa on Her Hero’s Journey
A lucky break followed by a realization that the road ahead still won’t be a smooth march toward success is a pattern recognizable by many in the entertainment industry and beyond. The fortuitous happenstance for Eriko Miyagawa came in the form of an email saying that Quentin Tarantino was shooting in Beijing and looking for ...
“The Wild Robot” Composer Kris Bowers on Accessing a Robot’s Humanity Through Music
Emmy and Oscar-winning composer Kris Bowers has become one of the go-to composers in Hollywood. Known for his work on films and TV shows like King Richard, The Color Purple, The Last Repair Shop, and Bridgerton, he has created well-known scores for a wide diversity of genres. For writer/director Chris Sanders‘ The Wild Robot, Bowers has added feature animation to ...
“Saturday Night” Star Lamorne Morris on Lighting Up the Screen as “SNL” Legend Garrett Morris
The camera follows Lorne Michaels (Gabriel LaBelle) as he walks backstage through a line of camera crews, flickering lights, shouting cast members, costume racks, and one very random llama. Ninety minutes until air time. Ninety minutes until the first-ever Saturday Night Live. This is the opening sequence for Jason Reitman’s latest film, Saturday Night, about ...
“Casting Director Jennifer Venditti’s Intuitive Touch in “The Sympathizer”
Casting director Jennifer Venditti had one of Hollywood’s great chameleons to work with when she was putting together the pieces for HBO’s limited series The Sympathizer. Robert Downey Jr. plays a quartet of characters in Park Chan-wook and Don McKellar’s adaptation of Viet Thanh Nguyen’s 2015 Pulitzer Prize-winning novel as the Oscar-winning performer is in a constant swirl ...
The Streaming Innovation Alliance’s Mission Continues
The Streaming Innovation Alliance turns a year old today. If you haven’t heard of SIA, you’ve certainly been impacted by its commitment to giving streamers a unified voice so they can keep creating the films and television series you love – and delivering them to audiences when, where, and how they choose to watch. Once ...
“Alien: Romulus” Costume Designer Carlos Rosario’s Retro Vision & Vintage Style Blends – Part One
The only film so far to take this summer’s box office juggernaut Deadpool & Wolverine off the #1 spot for a spell was Fede Álvarez’s sci-fi horror Alien: Romulus, which brought back one of the most frightful monsters in cinematic history—the lobster-like face-strangling Xenomorphs! Taking place between Ridley Scott’s 1979 revered original and James Cameron’s ...
Eye on the Emmys: Outfitting Feudal Japan with Emmy-Winning “Shōgun” Costume Designer Carlos Rosario: Part Two
*After the 76th Creative Arts Emmy Winners, announced on September 8, and ahead of the 2024 Prime Time Emmy Awards on September 15, we’re looking back at our interviews with some of this year’s nominees. Costume designer Carlos Rosario won for Outstanding Period Costumes for a Series for Shōgun, episode 6, “Ladies of the Willow ...
Eye on the Emmys: Emmy-Winning “Shōgun” Editors Aika Miyake and Maria Gonzales on Mariko’s Heroic Journey
*After the 76th Creative Arts Emmy Winners were announced on September 8 and ahead of the 2024 Prime Time Emmy Awards on September 15, we’re looking back at our interviews with some of this year’s nominees. Editors Maria Gonzales and Aika Miyake won the Emmy for Outstanding Picture Editing for a Drama Series for the ...
Eye on the Emmys: Outfitting Feudal Japan with Emmy-Winning “Shōgun” Costume Designer Carlos Rosario: Part One
*After the 76th Creative Arts Emmy Winners, announced on September 8, and ahead of the 2024 Prime Time Emmy Awards on September 15, we’re looking back at our interviews with some of this year’s nominees. Costume designer Carlos Rosario won for Outstanding Period Costumes for a Series for Shōgun, episode 6, “Ladies of the Willow ...
Eye on the Emmys: “True Detective: Night Country” Writer/Director Issa López Delivers a Chilling New Season
*Ahead of the 2024 Emmy Awards on September 15, we’re looking back at our interviews with some of this year’s nominees. Issa Lopez notched three nominations this year—for Outstanding Limited or Anthology Series, Outstanding Directing, and Outstanding Writing (for episode 6.) Issa López loves to challenge herself. The writer/director, best known for the mystical 2017 ...
A Symphony of Success: Emmy Nominees Talk VFX, Composing, and Editing
We had the pleasure of hosting two panels this year—check out our first panel here— ahead of the 2024 Emmy Awards, which will be held live on ABC on Sunday, September 15, from 8-11 ET. For our second panel, our Emmy nominees came from a wide-ranging group of shows—Lessons in Chemistry‘s ace director Millicent Shelton, nominated for ...
