The Road To Oscar
About half of Nightmare Alley (Searchlight Pictures) had been shot when director Guillermo del Toro decided to shut down production as the global COVID-19 pandemic took hold. Though he wasn’t yet mandated to halt filming, del Toro didn’t want to risk the health and well-being of his...
Director Liesl Tommy recently showed a young filmmaker what a lookbook is, sharing the one she put together for MGM and producer Seth Bernstein as her pitch for Respect, the biopic about the late, great Aretha Franklin. Tommy, of course, wound up getting that gig, marking an auspicious...
Writer/director/producer/editor Sean Baker recalled that his latest film was born out of necessity. When the pandemic lockdown first hit, a planned feature for Baker fell by the wayside. So he “pivoted to something more feasible to make with a skeleton crew.”
From that pivot Red...
It’s already been an eventful awards season for costume designer Charlotte Walter, winning a British Independent Film Award for her work on Misbehavior and garnering another nomination for Belfast (Focus Features).
The latter film--written and directed by Kenneth Branagh...
When cinematographer Drew Daniels got a call out of the blue from his agent that writer-director Sean Baker wanted to talk to him--right when the COVID pandemic took hold and pretty much no one was working--his reaction was immediate. “I’m going to say yes to whatever he wants me to shoot,”...
The late Hollywood columnist and Turner Classic Movies host Robert Osborne referred to Lucille Ball in her heyday as likely being “the most famous woman in the world.” And writer-director Aaron Sorkin’s new film, Being the Ricardos (Amazon Studios), brings us a most challenging week...
Documentaries about Julia Child, “Black Woodstock,” the pandemic and The Velvet Underground and acclaimed international films like Japan’s “Drive My Car,” Iran’s “A Hero” and Norway’s “The Worst Person in the World” just got a little closer to scoring Oscar nominations.
The Academy of...
Robert Mackenzie knows a thing or two about the creation of soundscapes to advance storytelling in film. In 2017 he garnered a Best Sound Mixing Oscar, the Motion Picture Sound Editors Guild Award and the Australian Academy of Cinema and Television Arts Award (AACTA) for his work on Mel Gibson’s...
The classic tale of Cyrano de Bergerac from the play written by Edmond Rostand in 1897 has proven to be timeless. But perhaps the premise of a man who harbors love for a woman--all the while thinking that he was unworthy of her love due to his physical appearance--was more timely than ever as...
For a cinematographer who’s had a hand in significant technological breakthroughs that have facilitated ambitious storytelling--in his Emmy-winning turn on the hit streaming series The Mandalorian, for example, and now on the recently released feature Dune (Warner Bros.)--Greig...