Columns
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Back to One, Episode 199: Wunmi Mosaku
Wunmi Mosaku won a BAFTA award for Damilola, Our Loved Boy. She was only the second Black actress to win one in 62 years. You might know her from her incredible work as Ruby in Lovecraft Country, Rial in His House, or B-15 in the Marvel series Loki. Her latest is We Own This City, from the makers of The Wire, which premiered Monday on HBO Max. On this episode, she talks about her early days of learning the ropes of screen acting, how rehearsal makes a big difference in her process, why connecting to people is so important to […]
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“Ninety Percent of the Lighting Was Done Pretty Much How You Would’ve Done It in 1979”: Cinematographer Eliot Rockett on the Period Horror Film X
“The story can’t just change midway through,” exclaims a pretentious adult film director incredulously in X. It certainly can in a Ti West horror film, where one of the joys is often the shift from the methodical pace of the opening to the blood-drenched mania of the finale. Set in 1979, X finds a group of ambitious but inexperienced filmmakers heading to a remote Texas farm with dreams of making the next Debbie Does Dallas. However, the troupe fails to inform their hosts – an elderly couple who rent the crew their bunkhouse – about the purpose of their visit, […]
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Back to One, Episode 198: Fiona Glascott
In the new HBO Max series Julia, talented Irish actor Fiona Glascott plays Judith Jones, the real life editor who pulled Julia Child’s book Mastering the Art of French Cooking from the reject pile and turned it into a bestseller. In this episode, Glascott talks about the joy of inhabiting that trailblazer and playing opposite the great Judith Light in a pivotal scene. She also details the unique preparation process she employs when she takes on the young Professor McGonagall in the Fantastic Beasts films, shares an inspiring reason why she doesn’t obsess over landing some ideal role, and much […]
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“I Wanted the Hotdog Universe to Cross Over with the Taxes Universe”: Costume Designer Shirley Kurata on Everything Everywhere All at Once
Beyond the cartoonish mania of the multiverse action-comedy Everything Everywhere All At Once is a story about a mother and daughter, Evelyn (Michelle Yeoh) and Joy (Stephanie Hu). Their family laundromat is on the brink of falling out, though not for want of trying–both strive to get along, but the air between them remains tense and unpleasant. Under a scrupulous audit by a five-time award-winning IRS agent Deirdre Beaubeirdra (Jamie Lee Curtis), the laundromat may be taken away from the family too, and Evelyn’s sweetheart husband, Waymond (Ke Huy Quan), has secretly prepared divorce papers. Eventually, Joy decides it might […]
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“We Can Give Clint Eastwood His Lens”: DP Jessica Lee Gagné on Severance
In Severance, workers at a windowless subterranean cubicle farm have their memories surgically bifurcated. The procedure separates the consciousness of the work self from the personal self—the “innie and outie,” in the parlance of the show—with neither retaining memories from the other half of their existence. Listening to Jessica Lee Gagné talk about her craft, it’s hard to imagine the cinematographer not taking her work home with her. Long after wrapping the show, she’s still irked that the shade of red in a kitchen’s undercabinet lighting isn’t quite right. She’s precise enough to carry .15 ND filters, because she believes […]
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Goodbye to the 14-Hour Day: The Entertainment Industry’s Shifting Work/Life Balance
“[I]t’s as if our whole society is burned out.”—The New York Times Magazine, Feb. 20, 2022 During the ongoing “Great Resignation,” tens of millions of Americans—including those in the film industry—have quit their jobs. But the employment shifts in the entertainment business have as much to do with people leaving their work as with reassessing the ways in which they work. After months of pandemic-mandated pauses and soul-searching, phrases such as “work/life balance” and “self-care”—previously anathema to a culture of all-hours dealmaking and work—have finally arrived. If, as one executive says, “14-hour workdays, sleep deprivation and, too often, unhealthy meals” used […]
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Back to One, Episode 197: Eddie Marsan
Eddie Marsan first came to my attention with his now legendary performance in Mike Leigh’s Happy-Go-Lucky. He has so many layers at play under Scott’s anger, gives so much depth to that character; It is a wonder to behold. He kept doing it in films like Tyrannosaur, Still Life, Sherlock Holmes, as Terry in the Showtime series Ray Donovan, and now in his newest film, The Contractor, opposite Chris Pine. In this half hour, Marsan talks about the formative influence of Leigh on his work and the meaning of the command “dig a hole and sit in it.” He shares […]
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“Is That a 58 Degree Dutch Tilt?”: DP Brett Jutkiewicz on Scream
In the latest Scream installment, “elevated horror” and “requels” are among the contemporary genre trends affectionately deconstructed. The movie also lobs a little friendly fire toward the 1990s slasher revival that birthed the series—a character quips, “It was really over-lit and everyone had weird hair.” There’s not much cinematographer Brett Jutkiewicz can do about the latter, but the former served as a gauntlet thrown down. “When you have a line like that in the script, as a DP you think, ‘I guess I better not over-light this thing. I don’t want to end up as the butt of my own joke,’” […]
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Back to One, Episode 196: Dominique Fishback
Dominique Fishback talks about the characters she plays as if they inhabit her rather than the other way around. This begins to explain the immense, yet subtle, and always authentic power on display in performances such as Darlene in The Deuce, Kenya in The Hate You Give, and Deborah Johnson in Judas and the Black Messiah. Now she stars with Samuel L. Jackson in the Apple+ series The Last Days of Ptolemy Grey. She talks about the interesting way her character, Robyn, disrupted her usual psychological preparation process; where she gets the courage to fiercely advocate for her characters; repairing […]
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“I Think for Every Story There is a Hidden Way to Tell it Best, and Your Journey is to Try to Find It”: Director Rick Linklater on Apollo 10 1/2: A Space Age Childhood
When Richard Linklater was in second grade, he became enthralled by the historical moment that was happening right in his Houston backyard as NASA prepared for the Apollo moon landing. Decades later, it occurred to Linklater that he was probably the only filmmaker who remembered the excitement of that moment and was also that geographically close to NASA, a realization that led to his latest feature as writer-director, Apollo 10½: A Space Age Childhood. Combining the delicate observational eye and ear of Boyhood with the more fantastical animated approach of Waking Life and A Scanner Darkly, Apollo 10½ tells the […]
