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Before and After Sunlight: DP Autumn Durald Arkapaw on “Sinners”
Ryan Coogler and Autumn Durald Arkapaw on the set of 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… Read more
Horrifying Looks: Costume Designer Kate Hawley on Guillermo del Toro’s “Frankenstein”
Mia Goth in Frankenstein, Photo by Ken Woroner, courtesy of Netflix
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… Read more
Paris, Remembered: Production Designer Katia Wyszkop on “Nouvelle Vague”
Matthieu Penchinat, Guillaume Marbeck and Aubry Dullin in Nouvelle Vague Photo by Jean-Louis Fernandez/Courtesy of Netflix
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… Read more
Revolutionary Sounds: Sound Editor Christopher Scarabosio on “One Battle After Another”
Teyana Taylor, unnamed infant and Leonardo DiCaprio in One Battle After Another
Christopher Scarabosio only needed 15 minutes to start dreaming. The supervising sound editor and re-recording mixer was jet-lagged, drifting between trips to London, when writer-director Paul Thomas Anderson asked him to watch the first hour of One Battle After Another.… Read more
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Tension and Releases: Editor Ronald Bronstein on “Marty Supreme”
Ronald Bronstein premiered his feature Frownland at South by Southwest the same year as Josh Safdie’s short We’re Going to the Zoo played, and he felt a pang of insecurity when he saw it. “I was like, ‘Oh, my God, there’s somebody also vying for the same kind of immediacy,” said the veteran writer-editor. “It was like my feet were made of lead; this guy was like a helium balloon.” Back in New York City, Josh introduced himself to Bronstein and convinced him to play a character based on his own father. Bronstein helped write and edit the project, which […]
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The Notes of an Age: Composer Bryce Dessner on “Train Dreams”
Composers are often brought on to score a film very late into the process, but Bryce Dessner was writing music for Train Dreams before director Clint Bentley began production. A longtime collaborator of Bentley’s, alongside his creative partner Greg Kwedar, Dessner has scored every narrative film project of theirs, either alone or with his brother Aaron, beginning with Transpecos. “Because we’re old friends, I was aware that they were thinking about [adapting Train Dreams] for a long time,” explains the musician. “I had read the book [and] early versions of the script. There’s a lot of information in the early […]
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History Made Concrete: Production Designer Judy Becker on 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 of building a better future. As Tóth works to reclaim his life, legacy and marriage to wife Erzsébet after being forcibly separated from all three, this decades-spanning immigrant saga—which Corbet directed and produced from a screenplay he co-wrote with Mona Fastvold—settles in Philadelphia, where Tóth is offered the commission of a lifetime, albeit at a steep psychological cost. For production […]
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Ways of Seeing: DP Jomo Fray on 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 was an entirely different matter: A puzzle that required months of tests, a 33-page typed shot list and an assortment of creative camera rigs to solve. The debut narrative feature from Oscar-nominated documentarian Ross, Nickel Boys details the brutal experiences of two Black teenagers at the segregated Nickel Academy reform school in Tallahassee, Florida, in the early 1960s. Initially, the […]
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Silences and Explosions: James Harrison and Paul Cotterel on Crafting Blitz‘s Sound
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 water hose, which whips around and knocks one of them unconscious. Within the foggy confusion, their shouts and commands get lost in the unrelenting, roaring soundscape, punctuated by distant air horns, panicked screams and a whistling aerial assault. It’s a blistering sequence, an aural nightmare that sets the mood for a war movie full of unexpected, terror-filled situations. Normally, sound […]
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Until the Last Beat: Nick Emerson on Editing 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 caucus wishing to return the Catholic church to its dogmatic past and a liberal wing pushing for a more open-minded future. As dean of the proceedings, Fiennes is tasked with shaking off his own crisis of faith in order to guide 120 fractious cardinals sequestered in the Vatican to a consensus on a new leader. The parallels between the film’s […]
