Bare-Knuckle Couture: “A Thousand Blows” Costume Designer Maja Meschede’s Knockout Designs
Editor’s note: Spoiler alert! This story discusses plot lines of A Thousand Blows Season 1. The subtle storytelling of Maja Meschede’s costume designs is hiding in plain sight if you’re able to look away from the simmering drama of A Thousand Blows, a six-part series from Peaky Blinders scribe Steven Knight that follows Hezekiah Moscow ...
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 ...
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 ...
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 ...
“Only Murders in the Building” Editor Matthew Barbato Blends on Season 4’s Complex Delights
Only Murders in the Building began as a cozy, non-sequitur-filled whodunit anchored by three immensely winning performances by Steve Martin, Martin Short, and Selena Gomez, and it’s never lost sight of that winning formula. Yet season over season, the series has become funnier, more ambitious, and more heartfelt, increasing the body count, laugh count, and ...
Crime, Crazy Rich Rom-Coms, and More: Producer Janice Chua on Bringing Asian Stories to the World
Raised in a working-class Chinese family in Singapore, Janice Chua says, “Like every Asian person, I grew up with Hong Kong martial arts movies that inspired so much of my imagination. There was a sense of excitement and pride in those action-heavy films with crazy sound effects.” But her world changed when she encountered Ang ...
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 ...
“Shōgun” Editors Aika Miyake and Maria Gonzales on Cutting Mariko’s Heroic Path
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 Japan with a passionate obsession with the rigors and wonders of the period and location. The new Shōgun shifts its center of balance from the swashbuckling but woefully out of his depth British pirate Blackthorne ...
“BRATS” Director Andrew McCarthy on Reuniting With the Iconic Brat Pack
It’s fair to say the youth movie genre in the 1980s was defined by the Brat Pack, the group of young actors who appeared together in such classics as Pretty in Pink, The Breakfast Club, and St. Elmo’s Fire. They are famously familiar: Emilio Estevez, Rob Lowe, Demi Moore, Molly Ringwald, Ally Sheedy, and Andrew ...
“Under the Bridge” EP/Director Quinn Shephard on Lily Gladstone & Riley Keough’s Twisty Murder Mystery
In 1997, fourteen-year-old Reena Virk went to a party and never came home, then became front page news around the world when a tight-knit circle of girls and one troubled teenage boy were implicated in her murder. Journalist Rebecca Godfrey wrote about the crime in her acclaimed book “Under the Bridge”, and now Hulu’s narrative ...
“Shōgun” Stunt Coordinator Lauro David Chartrand-DelValle on Lady Mariko’s Last Stand
In part one of our conversation with Shōgun’s stunt coordinator and second unit director, Lauro David Chartrand-DelValle, he shared details about the extensive choreography training for the cast and what made Lord Toranaga’s (Hiroyuki Sanada) fighting style distinctive. Now, we turn toward Toranaga’s two allies, the “Anjin,” English sailor John Blackthorne (Cosmo Jarvis), and the ...
From Feudal Japan to Tokyo’s Neon Underworld: “Shōgun” & “Tokyo Vice” Director Takeshi Fukunaga Unmasks Japan
Japan is enjoying a moment. Godzilla Minus One landed a Best Visual Effects Oscar and a record U.S. box office for a Japanese live-action film; Hayao Miyazaki’s The Boy and the Heron scored a Golden Globe for best-animated feature, while Shōgun (将軍) and Tokyo Vice have won fans and plaudits around the globe. As the ...
Jake Johnson on his Diabolically Fun Directorial Debut “Self Reliance”
Would you watch a reality show where someone is actively being hunted for a million-dollar prize? Morally, the answer is no. In Jake Johnson’s directorial debut, Self Reliance (streaming on Hulu), he believes the answer is yes. The concept for Johnson’s new film is one he developed years ago after watching a Japanese reality show ...
“The Bear” Season 3 Officially Happening
FX’s brilliant series is coming back for a third course. Hulu has officially renewed The Bear, FX’s critical smash focused on Carmen Berzatto (Jeremy Allen White), a top-flight chef returning to Chicago and taking over his late brother’s sandwich shop. Of course, for lovers of The Bear, that description barely scratches the surface of what this ...
Juno Temple Grabs a Spiked Bat in First “Fargo” Season 5 Teaser
Juno Temple has taken on a vastly different role from her lovable Ted Lasso character in Keeley Jones in the upcoming fifth season of Fargo. FX has revealed a new teaser for their deliciously demented anthology series, and it reveals Temple as Dorothy “Dot” Lyon, a seemingly typical Midwestern housewife who’s made some questionable decisions in her past, a ...
“No One Will Save You” Review Round-Up: A Lean, Mean, Nerve-Fraying Alien Home Invasion Thriller
There’s a lean, mean, and deliciously well-made new thriller that’s officially arrived on Hulu, writer/director Brian Duffield’s alien invasion film No One Will Save You. No One Will Save You is centered on Brynn (Kaitlyn Dever), a talented young woman who’s been alienated from her community and living in her childhood home, the only place she ...
Framing Big Laughs & Real Emotion With “Only Murders in the Building” Emmy-Nominated Editor Peggy Tachdjian
Emmy-nominated editor Peggy Tachdjian had never really cut comedy before leaping into the Building, as it were, of Hulu’s hit Only Murders in the Building. The series was created by comedy legend Steven Martin and John Hoffman and is led by Martin, fellow comedy icon Martin Short, and a perfectly cast Selena Gomez as three true crime obsessives living ...
Director Dawn Porter Details a Complex First Lady in “The Lady Bird Diaries”
In filmmaker Dawn Porter’s newest documentary, The Lady Bird Diaries, Claudia Alta “Lady Bird” Johnson speaks for herself. Porter’s film is based on 123 hours of audio diaries that Lady Bird recorded during the presidency of her husband, Lyndon Baines Johnson. The personal, often poignant diaries reveal the First Lady’s key role as her husband’s ...
“Great Expectations” Cinematographer Dan Atherton Goes Dark with Dickens
How dark is too dark? For fans of Peaky Blinders, the BAFTA-winning period crime series created by Steven Knight, bleak is better. In adapting Charles Dickens’s “Great Expectations,” Knight ramped up the vice and violence for a six-part FX/Hulu series running through April 23) that introduces opium, sadomasochism, attempted suicide, prostitution, F-bombs, and literal butchery ...
“Boston Strangler” Production Designer John Goldsmith Recreates a City’s Nightmare
There’s an entire film genre known as Boston movies, many of which are lampooned for their mangled accents. Good Will Hunting and The Town are two of the best, owing in large part to homegrown talents Ben Affleck and Matt Damon. Boston Strangler, which debuts March 17 on Hulu, can be added to the short ...
