Sound & Visionaries
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Hard Light and Shadows: Passing Cinematographer Edu Grau
Five weeks is not an unusually truncated preproduction period for a cinematographer on a modestly budgeted independent film like Passing. However, the interval between landing the gig and starting that work is typically longer than the time needed to pack a suitcase. That’s the extent of the notice Spanish DP Edu Grau had before hopping aboard the project—and a flight to New York—after a last-minute crew change left Passing director Rebecca Hall without a cinematographer on the eve of prep. “Rebecca called me on a Saturday, and I jumped on a plane the next day to start prepping the movie,” […]
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Deep Cuts: Licorice Pizza Editor Andy Jurgensen
Paul Thomas Anderson’s films can all be described as “episodic” in various ways—some more explicitly than others. Boogie Nights, Magnolia and Inherent Vice are divided into subplots and adventures, but even more austere character portraits (There Will Be Blood, The Master, Phantom Thread) have a “and that’s when this happened…” bent. But Licorice Pizza, which follows the tumultuous flirtation between 15-year-old actor/entrepreneur Gary Valentine (Cooper Hoffman) and wayward 20-something Alana Kane (Alana Haim) against the backdrop of early-1970s San Fernando Valley, is the first to adopt a memory-based style, in which various sequences flow into each other like a series […]
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Echoes From the Past
In recreating in Mank the experiences from 1930 to 1940 that led screenwriter Herman J. Mankiewicz to write Citizen Kane, David Fincher has said his goal was to make a film that looked and felt of its era. But that fidelity only goes so far: On the visual side, Mank’s black-and-white look is captured in period-anomalous widescreen. Similarly, Mank uses a LCR (left-center-right) sound mix rather than pure mono. “We’re not trying to fool anybody by saying this is a mono mix,” says Fincher’s career-long sound designer Ren Klyce. “The goal was to make the film sound old-fashioned and from […]
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Liberties in the Room
The night after Cassius Clay clobbered Sonny Liston in their first bout at the Miami Beach Convention Center in 1964, the new heavyweight champion, who would later change his name to Muhammad Ali, celebrated his win in a hotel room flush with icons: his friends Malcolm X, Jim Brown and Sam Cooke. They stayed in a room at the Hampton House, a known safe haven for Black people during Jim Crow where social gatherings of various Black icons were not uncommon. Regina King’s feature debut, One Night in Miami, adapted from Kemp Powers’s one-act play of the same name, imagines […]
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A Matter of Balance
Kristan Sprague first heard of Shaka King when they were both in high school, long before either entered the film industry. Though they had friends in common, they only got to know each other when they attended Vassar College and started filmmaking in earnest. Since then, Sprague has edited most of King’s work, from his early shorts to his independent debut Newlyweeds, and now their first studio feature, Judas and the Black Messiah. The film follows the real-life story of car thief William O’Neal (Lakeith Stanfield), who was hired by the FBI to infiltrate the Illinois chapter of the Black […]
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Dressing for the Extremes: Costume Designer Alexandra Byrne on Emma.
With their picturesque settings and unforgettable romances, Jane Austen adaptations have been cinematic staples for decades. The latest, Autumn de Wilde’s Emma, offers a colorful take on Austen’s 1815 tale of a young woman navigating relationships with the know-it-all confidence that goes with being, in Austen’s introductory description, “handsome, clever, and rich.” Much of the film’s distinctive sparkle comes from the costumes created by Oscar-winning designer Alexandra Byrne. Surprisingly, Byrne (one of whose first films was another Austen adaptation, 1995’s Persuasion) hadn’t read the novel before working on the film. “I really, really enjoyed it,” she says. “Sometimes, when you’ve […]
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Moving Through the Frame
Like The Searchers, Nomadland is bookended by a pair of doorways: on one side, the post-Baby Boom American Dream of domesticity and stability; on the other, the siren’s call of the wanderer, beckoning toward the unknown. In the film’s opening frame, Fern (Frances McDormand) stands in the doorway of a storage unit in Empire, Nevada. The Great Recession has swallowed the mining town whole; the 60-something widow takes one last glance at the remnants of her life, packed away in boxes, and climbs into her Ford Econoline van, headed toward the horizon. A year passes before Fern darkens another symbolic […]
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On the Beat
Chicago in 1927 was a fascinating, volatile place. The Great Migration, which saw an estimated six million African Americans leave the rural southern states for the urban north, was in full effect, and the Windy City was an important destination. By the mid 1920s, an estimated 100,000 Black people had settled in Chicago, making the city a hotbed for new cultural developments, especially in music—Chicago is widely regarded as the second stop in the evolution of jazz after New Orleans. The August Wilson play Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom tells one chapter of that evolution through a dramatic imagining of a single recording session […]
