Sound & Visionaries
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History Made Concrete: Production Designer Judy Becker on The Brutalist
The brutalism in The Brutalist
In constructing The Brutalist, his epic of assimilation and survival, Brady Corbet sought a sense of scale large enough to reflect the ambitious vision of László Tóth, a fictional Hungarian-Jewish architect and Holocaust survivor who flees to America with hopes… Read more
Ways of Seeing: DP Jomo Fray on Nickel Boys
Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor in Nickel Boys
From RaMell Ross’s first meeting with cinematographer Jomo Fray, the director was clear on why he wanted to lens his adaptation of Colson Whitehead’s Pulitzer Prize–winning novel The Nickel Boys from a first-person point of view. How to do it… Read more
Silences and Explosions: James Harrison and Paul Cotterel on Crafting Blitz‘s Sound
Saoirse Ronan in Blitz
At the beginning of Blitz, London is on fire. Against a night sky striated by German bombs, flames engulf obliterated city streets and brick buildings. A platoon of firemen scramble through dense smoke and charred remains to control an errant… Read more
Until the Last Beat: Nick Emerson on Editing Conclave
Brían F. O’Byrne and Ralph Fiennes in Conclave
In Conclave, corruption, betrayal and clashing ideologies turn the selection of a new pope into fertile ground for a taut political thriller as English cardinal Thomas Lawrence (Ralph Fiennes) is caught in the middle of the struggle between a conservative… Read more
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Unholy Melodies: Composer Robin Carolan on Nosferatu‘s Score
For Robin Carolan, working on his debut film score for Robert Eggers’s 2022 Viking epic The Northman was a “baptism by fire.” After closing his influential electronic record label Tri Angle in 2020, Carolan and Sebastian Gainsborough (who records music under the name Vessel) dove headfirst into researching the ethnography of Nordic music to craft the film’s harsh, mythic sound. They used traditional Nordic instruments and modern experimental techniques to approximate the music of the era, a mandate Eggers routinely insists upon for his period genre films. That directive continues with Eggers’s longtime passion project, Nosferatu, a new telling of […]
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The Final Outfits: Massimo Cantini Parrini on Maria‘s Costumes
A sumptuously shot psychological portrait of one of history’s greatest divas, Maria extends director Pablo Larraín’s explorations of iconic, tragically fated women in Jackie and Spencer. Angelina Jolie brings her own glamorous mythology to an impressionistic take on opera star Maria Callas’s final days before her death in 1977 at age 53. Like its predecessors, Maria eschews biopic convention, prioritizing an evocative aesthetic over a tidy narrative as, throughout, we see Callas onstage and off, in black-and-white and color and throughout various stages of her career from the 1950s onward. In all those phases, Callas is inevitably well-dressed in costumes […]
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The Real and the Poetic: DP Darius Khondji on Bardo
Alejandro G. Iñárritu has labeled Bardo, False Chronicle of a Handful of Truths the most difficult film of his career—a bold categorization, considering the intricate single-take illusion of Birdman and the famously frigid filming conditions of The Revenant, both of which earned Iñárritu Oscars as Best Director. But for Bardo cinematographer Darius Khondji, the lure of the project wasn’t the technical challenges, though they were plentiful (including shooting in Mexico City at the height of COVID with long takes, deep focus photography and surrealistic imagery), but the emotional pull of the material. “Almost every single scene in Bardo was a […]
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A Collective Voice: Composer Hildur Guðnadóttir on Women Talking
Upon winning an Oscar for scoring Joker, Hildur Guðnadóttir dedicated it “to the girls, to the women, to the mothers, to the daughters, who hear the music bubbling within,” telling them in her acceptance speech to “please speak up.” So, when she was approached to score Sarah Polley’s drama Women Talking, “after the Oscars were over and I had already given that speech,” the Icelandic composer and cellist remembers being taken aback by her own “knee-jerk reaction” to the project: “Who wants to sit through two hours of women talking?” “I stood up on that stage, urging women to talk, […]
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A Wardrobe of Coats: Costume Designer Eimer Ní Mhaoldomhnaigh on The Banshees of Inisherin
Martin McDonagh’s The Banshees of Inisherin brings the writer-director’s signature caustic humor to the story of Colm (Brendan Gleeson, perfectly surly), who abruptly decides to stop talking to his longtime best friend, Pádraic (Colin Farrell, perfectly perplexed), with devastating results for them both. The film is set on a fictional Irish island in 1923, and the combination of wide-open spaces and unfussy but handsome costuming adds visual dynamism to a film whose appeal is largely rooted in whip-smart dialogue. Costume designer Eimer Ní Mhaoldomhnaigh’s filmography includes works by Neil Jordan (Breakfast on Pluto) and Whit Stillman (Love & Friendship), which […]
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Houses in Motion: Production Designer Rick Carter on The Fabelmans
Production designer Rick Carter caught the eye of Steven Spielberg when he was art director on The Goonies and first worked with him directly on the pilot of Spielberg’s anthology series Amazing Stories. Spielberg told him the minimal amount of train he needed for the episode; Carter ended up giving him more without increasing the budget. “I think I have an ability to prioritize what’s important so that I can put the resources into [those] elements, whether it’s the set or visual effects or any other aspect of the movie,” says Carter. Starting with Jurassic Park, Carter has served as […]
