Issues
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Editor Joe Walker on Cutting Steve McQueen’s Widows
“A stroke, and then a slap,” says editor Joe Walker. That’s how director Steve McQueen described the tone he wanted in the opening scenes of Widows. The movie opens with a remarkable sequence, intercutting glimpses of the main characters’ family lives with images from a horrifically bloody heist gone wrong — showing, in effect, how four of the women at the heart of the film become widows. So, for example, we see Viola Davis’s Veronica Rawlings passionately kissing her husband Harry (Liam Neeson) and then suddenly we’re in the back of Harry’s van as police fire on it. We see […]
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“Love and Injustice”: Composer Nicholas Britell on the Score for Barry Jenkins’ If Beale Street Could Talk
New York City in the 1970s occupies a special place in the popular imagination; there was a look and feel and, more important, a sound that captured the range of the city from grit to glitz. Barry Jenkins’s new If Beale Street Could Talk is set during this era of New York City, and the look is unmistakable: The backdrop is full of Impala yellow taxis, small shops and cool lofts. Yet the city fades into the background, giving way to the compelling and un-self-consciously presented love story of Tish and Fonny, childhood best friends in Harlem who become lovers […]
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All the Work Without the Workers: Appreciating Sleep Dealer On Its Tenth Anniversary
Appraisal of the aesthetic and intellectual merits of science fiction, not to mention the sheer joy of encountering it, lately tends to be subsumed by talk of the perceived accuracy of a work and its predictions. We are living in the future allegedly imagined by William Gibson or Octavia Butler or Philip K. Dick, while films like Her and Gattaca serve as shopworn reference points in conversations about artificial intelligence and CRISPR. This veneration of the utilitarian function of science fiction at once demands too much from the work while denying its value apart from what might be gleaned from […]
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Growing Up Roeg: Glenn Kenny Remembers Getting Into the Films of the Late Nicolas Roeg
In the hours after I heard of Nicolas Roeg’s death in late November, I wrote on my blog about how confounding and exhilarating it was to be a teenage cinephile in the 1970s, when Roeg was doing what I consider to be his most outstanding work. The notes I posted attracted the attention of a producer for BBC’s World Service, who invited me to do an audio interview. In that interview, I admitted that even as I thrilled to such films as Performance, Walkabout, Don’t Look Now and The Man Who Fell To Earth, I did not, at that time […]
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Matty Libatique on Lensing Bradley Cooper’s A Star is Born
“Music is essentially 12 notes between any octave,” intones Sam Elliott’s character in A Star Is Born. “It’s the same story, told over and over. All any artist can offer the world is how they see those 12 notes.” That nugget of wisdom extends to the realm of cinematography, too, where the artists toil within an “octave,” using notes comprised of medium shots and close-ups, push-ins and tracking shots. But like great musicians, great cinematographers make audiences forget the basics of cinema grammar and lose themselves inside a rush of images, which DP Matty Libatique certainly compels them to do […]
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Production Designer Hannah Beachler on Building Black Panther
Hidden in the midst of a dense African forest, Wakanda’s opulent capital of Golden City is the centerpiece of production designer Hannah Beachler’s world building in Marvel’s Black Panther. However, Beachler’s work on the film extends well beyond that vibrant Afrofuturist utopia, stretching from an Oakland apartment complex to a tony London art museum to a lavish subterranean South Korean casino. Before landing the job — which reunited her with Fruitvale Station and Creed director Ryan Coogler — Beachler wasn’t particularly familiar with the titular Marvel superhero or his isolationist homeland of Wakanda. Luckily, she knew someone who was. “I’d […]
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Skip Lievsay and Craig Henighan on Designing the Sound of Alfonso Cuarón’s Roma
You should be able to watch a movie with the sound off — even before Mac Miller’s 2013 album, this was a phrase you’d hear from some producer or director extolling the necessity of purely visual storytelling. But if this dictum is true, then the inverse should be true as well: You should be able to listen to a movie with the screen turned off. Anyone wanting to try this experiment should start with the soundtrack of Alfonso Cuarón’s Roma, which is an astoundingly artful, immersive and intoxicating work. In addition to the crystalline dialogue tracks, Roma uses bespoke background […]
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Costume Designer Sandy Powell on Dressing Yorgos Lanthimos’ The Favourite
The career of costume designer Sandy Powell spans more than 30 years and three Oscars (for Shakespeare in Love, The Aviator and The Young Victoria) and shows a remarkable range, from period films like the beloved Carol to the mad modern world of The Wolf of Wall Street. Her costumes for this year’s The Favourite, a fiendish vision of Stuart England directed by Greek iconoclast Yorgos Lanthimos (Dogtooth, The Lobster), represent some of the most creative work that Powell has ever done. “I knew that Yorgos would not be doing a conventional costume drama,” she says, “which was what made […]
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Expanding Horizons: How Film Schools Are Adjusting to a More Diverse Future
I’m just going to say it: Every film student should know how to light and photograph a full spectrum of skin tones. But do they? Let me back up a bit. One of my current tasks at USC involves working with a team of faculty members to comb through the websites and resources of other universities to see what they’re doing with regard to equity, diversity and inclusivity (aka EDI). Why? So that we can build USC’s infrastructure, research agenda and programming to better reflect diversity and inclusiveness. I also serve on another committee called Race, Arts and Placemaking (a.k.a. […]
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Are Film Festivals Struggling?
When the Los Angeles Film Festival shuttered after 18 years, the independent film community mourned. There were “R.I.P. LAFF” posts on Facebook, lots of sad emojis and expressions of shock (“absolutely floored,” said one filmmaker). But the closure of LAFF, along with the recent consolidation of the American Film Institute’s two festivals, AFI Fest and AFI Docs, suggests broader challenges for film festivals across the United States, from potential shifts in corporate and individual giving to the incapacity for sustained growth. The good news is that film festival attendance appears to be thriving. “We’ve grown every year, in attendance and […]
