Today in Great News: Guillermo del Toro’s Complicated Monsters Find Permanent Home at Fox Searchlight
Guillermo del Toro has been following his passion for decades, and it paid off this award season. Nominated for a Golden Globe and Oscar for directing The Shape of Water, ultimately taking home statues for both, del Toro delivered passionate acceptance speeches that struck an emotional note. The king of creating complicated monsters, we were thrilled to see del Toro reach commercial success. Now, his ideas will be going even farther.
It’s a Battle of the Greats as Science Fiction’s Biggest Awards Announce Finalists
The Hugo Awards have announced their finalists, and it looks like many of our favorites have made the cut. As science fiction’s most prestigious honor, the Hugo Awards are trademarked by the World Science Fiction Society (WSFS) who hosts the annual World Science Fiction Convention or “Worldcon.” This year the final list of nominees is packed with excellent films, television series and books. Blade Runner 2049, Get Out and The Shape of Water—all three films that walked away with at least one Oscar—are among the names vying for Best Dramatic Presentation,
Meet the Man Behind the Fish in Best Picture Winner The Shape of Water
While Andy Serkis has become a superstar utilizing performance capture technology to become The Lord of the Rings’ Gollum, King Kong and the Planet of the Apes’ chimpanzee hero Caesar, another incredibly talented performer has also had a stellar career being utterly unrecognizable. Only this actor mostly performs behind latex masks and within very heavy, hot body suits, and he’s finally getting his due. His name is Doug Jones,
How The Shape of Water‘s VFX Producer Turned a Monster Into a Romantic Lead
In the final part of this two-part interview, visual effects coordinator and frequent Guillermo del Toro collaborator Luke Groves reveals how he worked with the filmmaker to craft some of The Shape of Water’s most awe-inspiring sequences and reveals how he and the visual effects team at Mr. X walked the line between CG magic and practical effects to create movie magic that looks impressively real.
I want to talk about the opening sequence because I know it was shot wet-to-dry which is absolutely incredible.
The Shape of Water‘s VFX Producer on Creating the Year’s Most Unique Leading Man
For all its ambitious underwater sequences and that stunning central creature, it’s oddly easy to forget the technical majesty at work in Guillermo del Toro’s meticulous, Oscar-nominated The Shape of Water. Not for its lack of quality, in fact, quite the opposite. The work, which makes every inch of del Toro’s beguiling fantasy possible, is so seamless as to give the impression that even the film’s most outlandish design elements are through some mysterious magic,
Oscar-Nominated Cinematographer Dan Laustsen on The Shape of Water‘s Fluid Fable
As part of our Oscars week coverage, we’re re-posting our conversations with some of this year’s Oscar-nominees, as well as publishing new interviews with those vying for Oscar gold this Sunday. Cinematographer Dan Laustsen is nominated alongside Roger Deakins (Blade Runner 2049), Bruno Delbonnel (Darkest Hour), Hoyte van Hoytema (Dunkirk) and Rachel Morrison (Mudbound). The full list of the Oscar nominees can be found here.
Danish cinematographer Dan Laustsen worked alongside Guillermo del Toro on and off for two decades,
Watch How They Made an Amphibious Creature a Credible Romantic Lead in Awesome The Shape of Water Video
You don’t get 13 Oscar nominations for nothing, folks. Guillermo del Toro’s lovingly made, gorgeously realized The Shape of Water is that rare film—both a technical and emotional triumph. You don’t have much time to marvel at the technical stuff because you’re pretty much immediately swept away by the emotions of the story, by the radiant performance of Sally Hawkins, as the mute heroine, Elisa Esposito, and her utterly believable, ultimately incandescent love for the Asset,
Shape of Water Director Guillermo del Toro Delivers Gorgeous Golden Globes Speech
With seven Golden Globe nominations, The Shape of Water took home only two, but it included one of the most impactful wins of the night. In a quiet moment after Oprah rocked the house, Guillermo del Toro finally got his moment on the stage. As Best Director for his film The Shape of Water, the visual genius gave an understated but poignant speech about the power of movies in his life.
Blade Runner 2049, Three Billboards & The Shape of Water Lead BAFTA Noms
The British Academy of Television Arts has announced the nominations for their film awards for 2018, known as the BAFTAs, with Guillermo del Toro’s glorious creature feature, The Shape of Water, netting a best 12 nominations. Del Toro’s surprisingly tender film, which won him a Golden Globe for Best Director and Best Score for composer Alexandre Desplat is nominated for Best Film, Director, Actress, Score, and Original Screenplay, among others. This is a haul Doug Jones’ aquatic fish-man could appreciate.
Cinematographer Dan Laustsen on The Shape of Water‘s Fluid Fable
*We’re sharing some of our favorite interviews of the year this week in our ‘Best of 2017’ roundup.
Danish cinematographer Dan Laustsen worked alongside Guillermo del Toro on and off for two decades, so when it came time to shoot The Shape of Water, he shared the director’s penchant for precision. Lush, lyrical and rich in metaphor, the film pays homage to Universal Pictures’ 1940’s-era monster as it follows Sally Hawkins’
The Last Jedi, Blade Runner 2049 & Wonder Woman Among Oscar’s Visual Effects Shortlist
The Oscar race for Best Visual Effects this year might be the stiffest in recent memory. The Academy has released this year’s shortlist, and it stands to reason that this could be the most challenging group of films they’ve had to winnow down in a few years. A few of the reasons include the wide range of genres these effects were deployed in, the culmination of a groundbreaking trilogy (the Apes franchise), and creature features from some of the most creative filmmakers on the planet.
Costume Designer Luis Sequeira on Giving The Shape of Water its Sartorial Form
Guillermo del Toro’s much-anticipated suspense-fantasy fairy tale The Shape of Water opens this weekend. Much of the moody, Cold War-era film is set in a secret government laboratory, where mute, kindly janitor Elisa (Sally Hawkins), forges a deep bond with a mystery aquatic Amazon creature referred to in the lab as the Asset. For research or worse, various factions want the Asset killed, and with the help of co-worker Zelda (Octavia Spencer) and her artist neighbor Giles (Richard Jenkins),
Guillermo del Toro Shares Looks at Latest Revelatory Creature from The Shape of Water
There are few filmmakers working today who have delivered more revelatory creatures than Guillermo del Toro. The auteur behind Mimic, The Devil’s Backbone, Blade II, Pan’s Labyrinth, Hellboy, and Pacific Rim has proven time and time again he’s the king of complicated monsters. In his upcoming film, The Shape of Water, del Toro has taken a career’s worth of know-how and poured it into a creature,
Appearances can be Deceiving in Final The Shape of Water Trailer
Creature from the Black Lagoon was one of the early movie monsters that made audiences fear what could be lurking in dark waters. Guillermo del Toro has taken what appears to be a close cousin of the lagoon dweller, and transformed him into a leading man. The final trailer for The Shape of Water pulls the aquatic man-fish (Doug Jones) into the light so that we can see the misunderstood soul more clearly.
Creature Feature: The Shape of Water‘s Guillermo del Toro is the King of Complicated Monsters
Director Guillermo del Toro’s upcoming film The Shape of Water, his most anticipated work since Pan’s Labyrinth, is a romantic horror fairy tale that won the Golden Lion at the 74th Venice Film Festival earlier this year. The story of lonely, mute janitor Elisa (Sally Hawkins), who befriends and then falls in love with “the Asset,” an amphibious creature-resident of the high-security government laboratory which she cleans by night,
TIFF 2017: The Films That Made the Biggest Splash
While no clear Oscar frontrunner emerged from this year’s TIFF which closed Sept. 17 after an 11-day cavalcade of 339 films, there were no real clunkers, either. Sure, anticipated titles such as George Clooney’s Suburbicon and Alexander Payne’s Downsizing may have underwhelmed, but there were surprisingly solid showings from many studio releases and indies, pointing to a spread-the-wealth awards season.
Sally Hawkins in The Shape of Water.
TIFF 2017: Guillermo del Toro’s The Shape of Water Swimming in Oscar Buzz
For fans of Guillermo del Toro (and we are legion), the success of The Shape of Water thus far is not surprising, but it is hugely welcome. The auteur behind the phenomenal Pan’s Labyrinth has had his share of ups and downs, losing dream projects like The Hobbit and his long-suffering and ultimately thwarted attempt to adapt H.P. Lovecraft’s “At the Mountains of Madness,” delivering bombastic,
TIFF 2017: What We’re Excited About This Year in Toronto
It’s not the only major film festival this season — Venice and Telluride rolled out first and boasted many of the same marquee titles. But the Toronto International Film Festival, running for 11 days, beginning this Thursday, September 7, and carrying on until the 17th, has a ton of cache. Not only does it take place in one of the friendliest, most cosmopolitan cities in the world, but TIFF has a strong record of showcasing eventual awards-season winners,
Watch a Clip From Guillermo del Toro’s The Shape of Water
Guillermo del Toro films are always an event, and his latest, The Shape of Water, is currently the talk of the Venice Film Festival. Fox Searchlight has released the first clip from the film, which features Sally Hawkins as a lonely woman named Elisa, who works as a janitor at a top-secret government laboratory. The lab is home to one very special inhabitant, a humanoid creature that lives underwater (think of an amphibian-human without language but with incredible grace).
Fall Film Preview: Major Directors Return With Passion Projects
What other than looking to fall’s slate of Oscar-baiting films will get us through the dog days of summer (besides, right now, an air conditioned theater and a cherry coke the size of our head)? Of course it’s far too early for much buzz to build up, but we still know which of the big studio releases, coming out when the weather cools down, are on our personal must-see roster.
The Kenneth Branagh-directed adaptation of one of Agatha Christie’s most iconic novels is the fourth film iteration of the detective drama,
