Jon Watts
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“Day Car Work on Stage is Really Tough”: DP Larkin Seiple on Wolfs
It seems strange to call a $100-plus million dollar Brad Pitt and George Clooney movie a return to a director’s roots, but in a way that’s exactly what Wolfs is for Jon Watts. Like his breakthrough feature Cop Car—a spartan and sinewy 2015 neo-noir made for $800,000 that impressed Marvel enough to land Watts a trio of entertaining Spider-Man movies—Wolfs is a lean, propulsive story that unfolds in a single day with no use for superfluous exposition. Clooney and Pitt star as lone wolf fixers who reluctantly team up when a tough-on-crime district attorney (Amy Ryan) ends up with a […]
by Matt Mulcahey on Oct 4, 2024 -
Road “Flic”: Jon Watts’s Cop Car
One day non-discerning encyclopedists will politely dismiss the new top-of-the-line Cop Car. It is Jon Watts’s second low-budget feature (after the spooky 2014 Clown) made prior to his surprise anointment as director of the upcoming Spider-Man “reboot” (Spider-Man: The New Avenger?), which once again visits Peter Parker during his high school years. That angle is off and condescending. It makes perfect sense that Watts was plucked from indie obscurity to run the show for a pull-out-the-stops studio production loaded with stars, not newbies and B-list actors/executive producers; spectacular CGI and highest-tech editing instead of jerry-rigged FX and less sophisticated montage; […]
by Howard Feinstein on Aug 7, 2015 -
Writer/Director Jon Watts on His Sundance Midnight Premiere, Cop Car
From set, the production executive was on the phone. “There are 10-year-olds saying the word ‘motherfucker!’ she said with concern. Would an “R” rating still ensue? None of us were sure, but we spent plenty of time on conference calls with lawyers trying to figure it out. So, then, when writer/director Jon Watts says below that ten-year-olds saying “the f-word… is a really big deal,” I know what he’s talking about. I haven’t seen Cop Car yet, so I don’t know whether his tyro f-bombs made the final cut. Regardless, though, I love adult movies about kids that are really […]
by Scott Macaulay on Jan 24, 2015
