Columns
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“Family Was Always On Set”: Valerie Weiss on Mixtape, COVID Rehearsals and Why Directing TV is Great
In the new Netflix film Mixtape, 12-year-old Beverly (Gemma Brooke Allen) tries to learn about her late parents by tracking down the songs they loved, a task made difficult by the pre-iTunes and Spotify era in which the movie takes place. The quest to find the songs—a necessity for Beverly given the unwillingness and inability of her grandmother (Julie Bowen) to answer questions about her mom and dad—yields one of the sweetest, smartest, funniest, and most touching coming of age dramedies since Stand By Me, a film with which Mixtape both invites and earns comparison thanks to its skillfully calibrated […]
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Back to One, Episode 180: Rebecca Wisocky
Rebecca Wisocky plays Hetty Woodstone, the deceased Lady of the Manner, on the new CBS series Ghosts, where she’s a stand-out among stand-outs in its impressive comedy ensemble. In this episode, she talks about the absolute pleasure of working on that set and the interesting ways in which the large cast, who more often than not act together in the same shot, find the “music of the scene” together. She has pretty much mastered the art of the guest star role, and has played more than her share of villains. I get her to breakdown her latest in a recent […]
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Headroom, Banding and General F-Stops: DP Haris Zambarloukos on Shooting Kenneth Branagh’s Belfast
Adorned with a wooden sword and a garbage can lid shield, nine-year-old Buddy (Jude Hill) begins Belfast fighting imaginary dragons, cloaked in the bliss of summer. That idyllic youthful revelry is ruptured by an explosion. That blast—and what follows—are based on the childhood remembrances of writer-director Kenneth Branagh, whose family was forced to grapple with the prospect of leaving its tightly-knit neighborhood after sectarian violence erupted in Northern Ireland in the summer of 1969. It’s a dilemma cinematographer Haris Zambarloukos understood well. Born on the Mediterranean island of Cyprus, Zambarloukos and his family departed following a 1972 military coup and […]
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Back to One Episode 179: Alex Hassell
Shakespeare on the stage is his first love, but Alex Hassell loves the camera and it loves him back. Currently he plays Vicious in Cowboy Bebop, the live-action remake of the popular Japanese anime series. On this episode, he talks about being attracted to roles that are difficult, how years of stripped-down live theater work at The Factory formed him as an actor, why he’s more at ease when he doesn’t know what’s going to happen next, his valuable contribution to Joel Coen’s The Tragedy of Macbeth, and how the particular challenges of acting on film excite him. Plus much […]
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Back to One, Episode 178: Jon Bernthal
From The Walking Dead and Punisher to The Wolf of Wall Street, Small Engine Repair, The Many Saints of Newark, and this month’s King Richard, Jon Bernthal has established himself as the hard-working, all-in, go-to, actor’s-actor of the moment. In this episode, he talks about some of the elements he uses—generosity, energy management, isolation, fear-as-fuel, group strength—to do his work, the one thing all great directors have in common, why he’d be just as grateful doing regional theater, plus much more! Back To One can be found wherever you get your podcasts, including Apple Podcasts, Google Play, and Stitcher. And […]
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“97% of the Film Has No Green Screen in It”: Writer-Director Rawson Marshall Thurber on Red Notice
Writer-director Rawson Marshall Thurber makes movies that are so impeccably crafted and deliriously funny that it’s easy to take them for granted; like the classical Hollywood directors of the 1940s to whom he often pays homage, Thurber employs an elegant but invisible style in which an immense amount of effort goes into making his films look effortless. This is particularly true of his latest release, Red Notice, a caper movie of enormous scale that nevertheless remains light on its feet, fast and funny and romantic in the way Ernst Lubitsch and Preston Sturges movies used to be while still delivering […]
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Back to One, Episode 177: Ruth Negga
Ruth Negga loves words. And even someone who doesn’t particularly love words falls in love with the ones spoken by Ruth Negga. It’s not just her Irish accent. She uses words like a master craftsman uses tools. A profound humbleness. No pretension. Just the right tool, used at the right time, to make you understand, to make you believe. Obviously this goes for her acting work too. But, in true master-craftsman-style, there’s no sign of craft. You just believe. Loving got her an Academy Award nomination, her Hamlet got raves on both sides of the pond, and now Passing, Rebecca […]
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“The Horse Needs to Go to the Right”: DP Mihai Mălaimare Jr. on The Harder They Fall, Assembling a COVID-Era Lens Package and On-Set Safety
There are moments in the new Netflix western The Harder They Fall that glean inspiration from Sergio Leone or the paintings of Kadir Nelson, but the film’s style—replete with split screens, zooms and precisely arranged widescreen compositions—was also shaped by cinematographer Mihai Mălaimare Jr.’s choice of lunchtime perch. “Because of COVID, we couldn’t all eat together, so we would each pick our own spots. I always ate up on the balcony of one of the sets,” said Mălaimare Jr. “The crew always joked that was why we have so many high angle shots in the movie, because I would be […]
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20,000 Kelvin at 9 PM: DP Eli Arenson on Lamb
Comedian W.C. Fields coined the often-repeated adage, “Never work with children or animals.” One would assume that aphorism extends to hybrids of the two as well. Cinematographer Eli Arenson learned the difficulty of that amalgamation on the new A24 film Lamb, while also braving a petting zoo’s worth of critters, including horses, dogs, cats and, of course, sheep. Set in the remote north of Iceland, the film finds a sheep farming couple (Noomi Rapace and Hilmir Snær Guðnason) pulled from the depths of grief when one of their ewes gives birth to a part human/part sheep child they christen Ada. With […]
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Back to One, Episode 176: Jason Isaacs
After 30 years in the business, with credits ranging from Angels in America to the Harry Potter films and everything in between, Jason Isaacs has cultivated an approach to the craft of acting aimed at bringing himself fully into the moment. As he talks about in this episode, that approach involves not memorizing his lines, erasing all descriptors in the script, making no decisions before seeing what the other actors bring. “I try to do nothing. I try to be an empty vessel.” In Fran Kranz’s Mass—a real-time, one-room, four-hander where every actor shines—Isaacs plays a father of a child […]
