Producer Hsinyi Liu on Forging a Path From Taiwan to “Fleabag” & “The Ballad of Wallis Island”
Moving halfway around the world to live and work in a different culture and language presents inevitable challenges, but there is also a wealth of opportunities available to those who leave the familiar behind and immerse themselves abroad. This was the case for Taiwan-born and raised producer Hsinyi Liu, who learned the joys available to ...
Reel Returns: Connecticut’s Film Investment Fuels Economic Growth in a Competitive State of Play
The evening before my conversation with Jonathan Black, a co-founder of the Connecticut Film and TV Alliance (CTFTVA), he was attending a hearing in Hartford. The Finance, Revenue, and Bonding Committee was listening to public testimony on Connecticut Governor Ned Lamont’s proposed film tax credit cut from 30% to 25%, a move that could strike ...
Inside “The Residence”: Creator Paul William Davies on Crafting a White House Whodunit
The Residence, produced by Shondaland for Netflix, is the much-anticipated whodunnit that is Shonda Rhimes’ second show set in the White House. The first, of course, was another beloved, Kerry Washington-led Scandal, which dealt in the shadowy world of Washington’s Olivia Pope, the queen of fixers. Now Rhimes and her collaborator Paul William Davies return ...
How “Severance” Cinematographer David Lanzenberg Captured a Chilling Corporate Nightmare
Severance earned 14 Emmy nominations the first time around, and after a three-year hiatus, the show has reignited fan frenzy as it builds toward the Season 2 finale streaming Friday [March 21] on Apple TV +. Again, bifurcated employees and their bosses (Adam Scott, Britt Lower, Patricia Arquette, John Turturro, Zach Cherry, Tramell Tillman and ...
“Mickey 17” Production Designer Fiona Crombie Creates a Playful Pattinson-Verse for Bong Joon Ho’s Black Comedy Space Epic
The underdog hero of Bong Joon Ho’s Mickey 17 is sweetly naive everyman Mickey (Robert Pattinson), a failed macaron shop owner on the run from a bloodthirsty creditor in the year 2054. Mickey finds a way out of his predicament, but it’s bleak—he signs up as an Expendable, a human test subject for a space ...
SXSW 2025: Tapping Into Texas’s Vast Potential to Become the Next Cinematic Frontier
This year’s SXSW film festival in Austin blew into town with a considerable tailwind of enthusiasm for the Lone Star state’s film and TV future. Every state in the union can claim unique cultures, geographies, and mythologies, but there’s no disputing that Texas looms very large in our collective cultural imagination. It’s a state that ...
No Cuts, Pure Tension: “Adolescence” Director Philip Barantini on Crafting Netflix Thriller in Unbroken Single Takes
British actor Stephen Graham is so reliably intense he played Al Capone for Martin Scorsese in Boardwalk Empire, stared down Al Pacino in The Irishman, executive producer and co-starred in the bare knuckle boxing drama A Thousand Blows, and earned the prestigious Officer of the Order of the British Empire (OBE) award for his contributions to UK ...
From Wings to Stars: Costume Designer Gersha Phillips on Redesigning Captain America
Gersha Phillips is no stranger to the kind of immediately recognizable costumes that tell a viewer immediately what world she’s in, like the intergalactic looks and Starfleet designs she crafted for the recent Star Trek feature Section 31 and the Star Trek series Discovery and Strange New Worlds. Skewing to the realism side of the closet, Phillips ...
From “Elf” to “Blue Bloods”: Veteran Producer Santiago Quiñones on the Unique Advantages of Filming in New York
Santiago Quiñones was a co-executive producer on Blue Bloods, CBS’s long-running police procedural that followed the Reagan family through their dynastic run within the NYPD. Quiñones, a born and bred New Yorker, joined the show assuming that, like previous projects, he might be moving on after a little while for another opportunity. Instead, he stayed ...
“Captain America: Brave New World” Composer Laura Karpman Crews a New Beat for a New Cap
The Academy Award-nominated composer Laura Karpman is now a consistent voice in the Marvel Cinematic Universe. She scored Ms. Marvel, The Marvels, and What If? Now she adds Captain America: Brave New World to her impressive resume, which also includes American Fiction and Lovecraft Country. In the tradition of Captain America movies, a conspiracy is ...
Brazilian Sociologist & Film Expert Ana Paula Sousa on the Power & Promise of the Oscar-Nominated “I’m Still Here”
One of the most striking scenes in Walter Salles’ I’m Still Here does not depict any of the violence instilled by the military regime that ruled Brazil for over two decades; nor does it show the despair of having a loved one vanish without a trace, while those so obviously responsible unashamedly deny any involvement. ...
From “Day of the Jackal” to “Captain America: Brave New World”: DP Kramer Morgenthau Breaks Down 70s Thriller Inspiration
Sam Wilson returns in director Julius Onah’s Captain America: Brave New World, here to take on twin domestic threats. Sam (Anthony Mackie) and his sidekick (and replacement as the Falcon) Joaquin (Danny Ramirez) have been sent to Mexico to stop Sidewinder (Giancarlo Esposito) from making an illegal sale. Sam and Joaquin recover the items but ...
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 ...
From Acclaimed Ads to the Andes: Director Dougal Wilson’s Charming Feature Film Debut “Paddington in Peru”
Arguably the world’s most beloved (fictional) British immigrant, Paddington the Talking Bear arrived in London from South America in 2014 by way of the eponymous animated hit movie. Three years later, he returned for a sequel opposite Hugh Grant. This month, PG-rated Paddington in Peru (in theaters) continues the adventure as the marmalade-loving creature, based ...
Red Alerts & Cherry Blossom Brawls With “Captain America: Brave New World” Production Designer Ramsey Avery
When Steve Rodgers (Chris Evans) passed the Captain America shield to Sam Wilson (Anthony Mackie), the former Falcon sidekick had big boots to fill. The same could be said for production designer Ramsey Avery in developing director Julius Onah’s Captain America: Brave New World, which has earned over $200 million worldwide at the time of ...
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 ...
Be Still My Bursting Chest: “Alien: Romulus’s” Oscar-Nominated VFX Team on Finding Fresh Horror for the Franchise
Alien: Romulus Visual Effects Supervisor Eric Barba and FX Designer Alec Gillis bring the past and future together. Set between the events of Ridley Scott’s ferocious opener Alien and James Cameron’s muscular sequel Aliens, Barba, Gillis, and their team fused the tangible, practical horror and decay of the original films with a more modern, rock-and-roll sensibility. The ...
Electric Shock: How “A Complete Unknown’s” Oscar-Nominated Sound Team Re-Created Bob Dylan Going Electric
In the first part of our conversation with the Oscar-nominated sound team of James Mangold’s music biography A Complete Unknown, they talked about delivering an intensely music-centric film without using playback and differentiating between the soundscapes of 1961 New York, when Bob Dylan (an immaculate portrayal by Timothée Chalamet) first arrives in the city, and ...
“The Substance” of Nightmares: Oscar-Nominated Makeup Effects Master Pierre Olivier Persin on His Terrifying Transformations
Since its release last fall, writer/director Coralie Fargeat’s body horror thriller The Substance has artfully shocked Academy Award voters to the tune of five Oscar nominations, including Best Picture, Best Director, and Best Screenplay. Outstanding Actress nominee Demi Moore portrays aging actress Elisabeth, who gets way more than she bargained for after injecting herself with ...
“A Complete Unknown”: Orchestrating 60+ Live Performances for Oscar-Worthy Sound
In one of this year’s tour de force performances, Timothée Chalamet’s Oscar-nominated portrayal of one of America’s greatest singer-songwriters took almost six years to perfect (partly thanks to COVD-19 delays in production). For director James Mangold’s music biopic, A Complete Unknown, Chalamet not only learned to play the guitar and harmonica for the film, but ...
