Interviews
Interviews
-
Cue the Sun: DP Steve Yedlin on “Wake Up Dead Man”
After spending the last Knives Out entry on a billionaire’s private Greek island, master sleuth Benoit Blanc’s latest mystery Wake Up Dead Man takes him to a remote parish in upstate New York to solve the murder of a priest (Josh Brolin). It’s a classic locked door mystery, with Brolin’s monsignor stabbed mid-mass in a closet a few feet from his pulpit. The suspects include a recently reassigned young priest (Josh O’Connor) and a tightly knit clique from the church’s flock (Jeremy Renner’s recently dumped doctor, Cailee Spaeny’s injured concert musician, Andrew Scott’s paranoid novelist and Kerry Washington’s lawyer). Like […]
-
Release the Beastgrip: DP Anthony Dod Mantle on “28 Years Later”
When 28 Days Later arrived on screens in 2002, it marked a leap forward for both zombie movies and digital cinema. Eschewing the shambling undead of George Romero, the film’s infected sprinted after prospective human snacks. Technologically, 28 Days Later represented one of the first wide theatrical releases to shoot on digital cameras. Director Danny Boyle and cinematographer Anthony Dod Mantle belatedly returned with 28 Years Later. With the British Isles quarantined from the rest of the world, the story follows a 12-year-old boy (Alfie Williams) who leaves behind the relative safety of his island community to search the infected-strewn […]
-
“Red is Always Surprisingly Challenging on Focus”: DP Caleb Heymann on “Stranger Things,” Season Five
The fifth and final season of Stranger Things required a full calendar year of production in Atlanta, a marathon of 240 shooting days that will bring the beloved Netflix series to a close with eight super-sized episodes. A job of that scale and duration is an arduous undertaking that could rightfully intimidate any crewmember. For Caleb Heymann, it’s kind of his thing. The cinematographer has spent much of the last five years shooting color contrast-laden Netflix feats of endurance in Georgia. That association began with the 100 days Heymann toiled on the trio of Fear Street films that the streamer […]
-
Subterranean Histories: Laura Poitras on “Cover-Up”
When we meet Seymour Hersh at his Washington office in Laura Poitras’s and Mark Obenhaus’s Cover-Up, the veteran journalist is framed by papers—documents piled on his desk, notebooks stacked against the wall, binders stuffed into bookcases. The man who began his career in 1959, broke stories about the My Lai massacre in Vietnam and prison torture in Abu Ghraib and penned provocative counter-histories about the killing of Bin Laden and the 2022 bombing of the Nord Stream pipeline is very much still at work. (Now on Substack, he’s recently been writing about the genocide in Gaza, Trump administration plans to […]
-
Source File: Mark Obenhaus on “Cover-Up”
Mark Obenhaus has had an extensive career in television documentary, having worked with ABC News as well as on the PBS series Frontline, Great Performances and The American Experience. His subjects have ranged from the Kennedy assassination to UFOs to Robert Wilson’s groundbreaking opera, Einstein on the Beach, and he has won five national Emmy awards, two for the Frontline series “Abortion Clinic” and “Living Below the Line.” He worked with Seymour Hersh on projects including the Frontline documentary Buying the Bomb and brought his long relationship with Sy and understanding of the reporter’s working methods and very understandable sensitivities […]
-
The Music Guides the Way: Oliver Laxe and Gaspar Noé Discuss “Sirāt”
When Oliver Laxe’s Sirāt premiered at Cannes this year, it caught both those familiar with his work as well as new viewers off guard; that the film takes an unexpected turn in its second half is only part of its disorienting effect. Where his first three, score-free features defaulted to the quiet and contemplative, Sirāt is nearly an action movie and accordingly nerve-wracking, increasingly suspenseful and—thanks in large part to Kangding Ray’s excellent electronic score—sometimes so deafeningly loud that it’s been known to literally make projection booths shake. With a larger budget and longer schedule than Laxe has had before, […]
-
Small Talk is Optional: Jim Jarmusch and Amalia Ulman Discuss “Father Mother Sister Brother”
Across his 45-year career, independent auteur Jim Jarmusch has continually returned to a particular type of film in which feature-length narrative is broken into a series of short, discrete episodes united by place (Mystery Train), time (Night on Earth) or activity (Coffee and Cigarettes). Through their internal correspondences and connections, and perhaps because of their fractured nature, these films, liberated from traditional three-act structure, produce sly epiphanies and unexpected pleasures. Jarmusch’s attraction to filmic miniatures continues with Father Mother Sister Brother, in which the connective tissue is, yes, the family. (In a clever bit of calendaring by MUBI, the film […]
-
Before and After Sunlight: DP Autumn Durald Arkapaw on “Sinners”
Set in the Jim Crow South of the 1930s, Sinners finds twin brothers Smoke and Stack (both played by Michael B. Jordan), flush with bootlegger cash, returning to their Mississippi hometown to open a juke joint. The venture proves short-lived as an Irish vampire (Jack O’Connell) and his minions crash the party on opening night. Once the fangs come out, Sinners cinematographer Autumn Durald Arkapaw, a horror neophyte, found herself in unfamiliar territory, especially compared to the film’s genre aficionado director Ryan Coogler. “I’m actually not that well-versed in horror,” said Durald Arkapaw. “It was a new genre for me […]
-
Horrifying Looks: Costume Designer Kate Hawley on Guillermo del Toro’s “Frankenstein”
Guillermo del Toro’s films are instantly recognizable for their fantastical Gothic imagery, and the director’s adaptation of Frankenstein is one of his most decadent stylized works yet. The film—which stars Oscar Isaac as Victor Frankenstein, Jacob Elordi as the Creature and Mia Goth as Lady Elizabeth Harlander and Baroness Claire Frankenstein—boasts stunning costumes befitting its epic scale. Frankenstein’s costume designer, Kate Hawley, is no stranger to the writer-director’s distinctive visions, having previously worked with him on Pacific Rim and Crimson Peak. She likens this film, with its two-and-a-half runtime and intricate worldbuilding, to “a massive opera.” Earlier in her career, […]
-
Paris, Remembered: Production Designer Katia Wyszkop on “Nouvelle Vague”
In setting out to make Nouvelle Vague, his effervescent ode to the birth of French New Wave cinema, Richard Linklater knew from the start that realizing his artistic ambition—to dramatize Jean-Luc Godard’s making of Breathless—would involve revisiting both the film’s experimental, guerilla-style production and the larger time and place that gave rise to it. To bring audiences back through history to Paris circa 1959—not only to the same bustling streets and lively corner cafés where Breathless filmed but also the intimate apartments, hotel rooms and offices where Godard and his collaborators convened—Linklater turned to French production designer Katia Wyszkop (The […]
