After prolonged closures due to the coronavirus pandemic, movie theaters in the United States and other parts of the world are slowly starting to turn the lights back on, welcome patrons and hear their cash registers ring again.

In modern times, opening weekend ticket sales have been the benchmark of success for any given movie. But in a post-pandemic era, that metric will be less relevant. For one, the scant number of movie theaters that have reopened are limiting capacity to ensure social distancing, putting a cap on the number of tickets that can be sold over a weekend. But beyond that, studios and exhibitors will have to focus more on word-of-mouth — and not just about the films themselves. They’ll be relying on customers telling others that they felt safe seeing a movie in theaters at a time when coronavirus is still rapidly spreading in many areas in the U.S.

For those reasons, distributors aren’t expecting new releases to start with a bang. Though box office reporting has recently started to quietly ramp up again, this weekend is perhaps the most significant yet since cinemas first closed in March. Two new movies — “The SpongeBob Movie: Sponge on the Run” from Paramount and Russell Crowe’s “Unhinged” from Solstice Studios — opened in Canada. Both got off to a slow start, screening in just a few hundred theaters across the country, but plan to expand to more locations in the coming weeks.

“SpongeBob,” the third feature film based on everyone’s favorite absorbent fry cook, amassed $900,000 from 300 theaters in Canada. The animated kids movie is skipping theaters in the U.S., where it will launch on premium video-on-demand before landing on CBS All Access, the streaming service owned by the studio’s parent company, ViacomCBS.

“Unhinged” also debuted in about 300 theaters and generated $582,000 — almost half of what “SpongeBob” made. Solstice Studios’ head of U.S. distribution Shari Hardison said drive-in and suburban locations have been moving ticket sales. “It’s a little upside-down from a traditional release,” she pointed out.

Mark Gill, the president and CEO of Solstice Studios, said opening weekend numbers for “Unhinged” represented a “good, solid start.” He’s aware that releasing a new movie amid massive uncertainty presents a bold risk. But he’s confident that “slow and steady wins the race” during a pandemic, and feels strongly that it will continue to draw audiences as it expands to the U.S. next weekend.

“Canadians might be too nice to go to ‘Unhinged,'” Gill said. He’s optimistic that the movie, centering on a young woman who is harassed by an unstable stranger after a road rage altercation, will have a stronger appeal in the U.S. He notes, “82% of Americans have experienced road rage — the highest number in the world.”

Box office experts concede that the atypical landscape makes it difficult to immediately gauge the success or failure of a new movie. Paul Dergarabedian, a senior media analyst at Comscore, says the film industry will have to use a different approach when it comes to assessing facts and figures in the age of coronavirus.

“For now, most of the traditionally acknowledged metrics of a movie’s performance — opening weekend gross, year-to-date numbers and year-over-year comparisons — have to take a back seat,” Dergarabedian said. “We need to interpret the reported data through the lens of this unusual and indeed unprecedented marketplace.”

Though it’s unusual for a new movie to premiere in Canada before it hits theaters stateside, studios have all but thrown away the conventional playbook given the unconventional times. Indoor theaters in New York City, Los Angeles, San Francisco and New Jersey — among the biggest moviegoing markets in the country — are still closed without a set date to reopen. AMC, Cinemark and Regal, the largest cinema chains in the world, haven’t opened most of their locations yet but hope to be almost fully operational by the end of August. Currently, 1,386 of the 6,021 venues in the country are open, according to Comscore, 316 of which are drive-ins.

Since cinemas were forced to shutter earlier in the year, drive-ins became a boon for the exhibition community, serving as one of the few ways for cinephiles (or those just itching to leave their houses) to safely watch a movie on a big screen. Pre-pandemic movies like Disney and Pixar’s fantasy adventure “Onward” and Universal’s thriller “The Invisible Man,” as well as fresh offerings from smaller studios like IFC’s “The Wretched” and David Ayer’s “The Tax Collector” with Shia LaBeouf, from RLJE Films, dominated the few screens that were able to remain open.

Though a handful of independent distributors continued reporting box office grosses during the pandemic, major studios stopped releasing information about ticket sales altogether. Universal’s “Trolls World Tour” and Andy Samberg’s romantic comedy “Palm Springs,” from Neon and Hulu, screened at drive-ins and simultaneously dropped on premium rental services. But those studios didn’t report grosses.

That’s left those still reporting numbers with bragging rights to claim that they have launched the No. 1 movie in America, a difficult metric to determine by traditional standards given the sparse reporting from studios. Typically, summer fields most of the highest-grossing movies of the year. But as studios have scrapped or delayed plans to unveil blockbuster-hopefuls and others have forged ahead with new offerings, the box office has entered an area of inscrutability. In any case, it has been an unexpected way for smaller films to get their moment of box office glory.

IFC Films is one of the independent studios that has been launching new movies and reporting numbers, finding huge success at outdoor venues. Horror films, such as “The Wretched” and “The Rental,” claimed the top spot on box office charts in recent weeks.

IFC opened sci-fi thriller “Sputnik” in 31 venues this weekend, generating $12,000 in ticket sales. But that wasn’t the studio’s biggest title over the last three days. “The Rental,” the directorial debut of Dave Franco, pulled in $78,000 from 144 screens. That film has been a big hit by pandemic standards, collecting $1.3 million to date. Also from IFC, the Liam Neeson-led romantic comedy “Made in Italy,” pulled in $21,000 from 101 locations this weekend, bringing its total haul to $73,332.

Throughout the rest of August and into September, studios will continue to test the appetite for moviegoing. On Sept. 3, Christopher Nolan’s oft-delayed sci-fi epic “Tenet” is expected to touch down in select cities in the U.S., even without theaters open in New York City or Los Angeles. Disney and Fox’s superhero thriller “The New Mutants” is scheduled to bow a week earlier, on Aug. 28. The reception to those films could determine the path forward for other major films in 2020.

“Are moviegoers ready to return to theaters? That’s the bottom line,” said Jeff Bock, a box office analyst with Exhibitor Relations. “It’s going to be the biggest weekend we’ve seen all summer in terms of how films are presented in 2020.”

Article written by Rebecca Rubin for Variety.

Like many, filmmakers Deon Taylor has been stuck at home during the coronavirus pandemic. And like many, he’s been itching to get back to production.

Inspired by quarantine and lockdown, Taylor told his wife, producer Roxanne Avent Taylor, he was going to make a film. He wasn’t sure how, but after some calls, “Power” star Joseph Sikora and DP Christopher Duskin were on board to join him before a script had been written. Taylor quickly wrote a script.

He gathered his wife, cast (Joseph Sikora, Andrew Bachelor, Anne Ilonzeh, Iddo Goldberg, Ruby Modine, Jessica Allain, Terrence J and T.I. ) and crew and under strict guidelines, filmed “Don’t Fear” in 17 days on location in Kyburz, Calif.

His script follows a group of friends gathered in the remote mountains near Lake Tahoe  to stay at the Historic Strawberry Lodge. What was supposed to be a much-needed getaway and celebratory weekend quickly turns into a nightmare. After waking up to an emergency warning, the friends find out the virus has mutated to a more highly lethal and contagious airborne threat, forcing them to shelter-in-place immediately.

Taylor and Avent Taylor talk to Variety about how the film came together and discuss the protocols they followed on set to ensure cast and crew safety.

When did you and Roxanne start discussing making this movie and being comfortable with the idea of filming with a crew?

Deon Taylor: We went through three iterations of ‘What the hell are we doing?.’ The first thing I did was create this series called, “Black Cheer” and we started interviewing everyone. I spoke to Hillary Swank, Jamie Foxx and Tyrese Gibson about film.

Secondly, there was the Black Lives Movement which I was very active in. I led a march with 53,000 people and they had tracked the march and there were no COVID-19 cases from it.

I had been sitting there too scared to go out, and if we did, we wore masks. I was also thinking about the anxiety of it all, and that’s really where it began.

How did you go about gathering your cast and crew?

Taylor: I told Roxanne I had this idea and I thought it was going to look like a student film with ten people. I called cinematographers and thought I’d get some young people to act in it, but before I knew it, Roxanne looked at me and said, “This is not a student film.”

The original idea was to go to a cabin and have three people in the cabin and do something very small and indie.

She started to show me all these locations and we found one giant lodge. We drove from Sacramento to Tahoe and that’s where it all began. I had no script — just this idea in mind.

The first person I called was Joseph Sikora and I told him I didn’t have a script, but I had this idea. He said he was coming. And so he and the DP Christopher Duskin were the first to say yes.

I started writing the script and Roxanne went to COVID class.

Roxanne, as a producer you had to take that COVID class and ensure safety protocols were met, what went into that preparation and assembling a small crew?

Roxanne Avent Taylor: It was tough because of the unknown and what was going on in the world. Every guild had their safe way for the best way forward. I think it boils down to what’s best for your production. I spent hours on the phone and hours reading everyone’s procedures. I spent time with labs and making sure I understood what the tests were. My heard was spinning as I tried to find the right method.

Article wrriten by Jazz Tangcay for Variety.

Few can argue that Latinos haven’t been greatly underrepresented in Hollywood, particularly at the creative level. A key reason, many say, is an insufficient comprehension of what the terms “Latino” and the gender-neutral “Latinx” mean.

When Hollywood thinks about Latino or Latinx talent, its instinct is to turn to the Oscar-winning Mexican directors Alfonso Cuarón, Alejandro G. Iñárritu and Guillermo del Toro or to acclaimed Spaniards such as Pedro Almodóvar as mistaken examples of inclusion. Most would have a difficult time naming an American Latino filmmaker besides Robert Rodriguez or creatives other than Jennifer Lopez and Eva Longoria. 

Such a superficial grasp of the distinct groups of people included in the ethnic terms “Latino” and “Latinx” has led to the perpetual omission of U.S.-born-and-raised Latinos in front of and behind the camera. Their experiences are either entirely ignored or lumped together with those of their Latin American counterparts, disregarding their unique stories and struggles as Americans with Latino heritage — such as limited access to higher education and a lack of government
funding for cinema. 

“The industry doesn’t understand where U.S. Latinx filmmakers and talent fit in,” says Diana Peralta, an Afro-Latina, Dominican American writer-director, whose film “De Lo Mio” was recently acquired by HBO. “We’re not ‘Latin’ enough, but we’re not ‘American’ enough for them either. It’s the common ‘ni de aquí, ni de allá’ [neither from here nor from there] problem.

A report last year by the USC Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism, titled “Latinos in Film: Erasure on Screen & Behind the Camera Across 1,200 Popular Movies,” noted that among the 4% of films with a Latin American or U.S. Latino director between 2007 and 2018, only one was helmed by a woman: Mexican-born Patricia Riggen. Since the study was released, two American-born Latinas have led major productions. Melina Matsoukas, who identifies as Afro-Latina, directed “Queen & Slim” at Universal, and Roxann Dawson directed the Christian drama “Breakthrough” for Fox.    

“We’re all thrown into these umbrella labels that fail to capture our complex histories of colonialism and racial oppression and how that’s impacted who has access to this industry and who doesn’t,” says Aurora Guerrero, a queer-identifying Chicana director whose debut feature, “Mosquita y Mari,” premiered at Sundance in 2012. “It’s time we have conversations about these differences, and it’s time they are taken seriously.” 

Recent shows like “One Day at a Time,” “Gentefied,” “Vida” and “The Casagrandes” have laid the groundwork for a wave of U.S. Latinx content on the small screen, but wide and diverse representation remains distant. 

Asked how the recent success of Mexican filmmakers at the Oscars affects opportunities afforded American Latinos, Peralta says that while it gives mainstream visibility to the community as a whole, U.S. Latinx directors haven’t significantly benefited from that awareness. 

Guerrero says Latin American filmmakers have a different perspective from U.S. Latinx creatives. “Their stories and their rise to success don’t address the historical exclusion of U.S.-raised Latina filmmakers,” she says. She hopes those who have attained a measure of mainstream recognition use their platform to call attention to the exclusion of Black and Brown U.S. Latinas. 

Guerrero is in charge of outreach at the newly launched initiative Latinx Directors, a free website founded by filmmakers Joel Novoa, Alberto Belli and Diego Velasco. Weary of studios and executives claiming to have difficulty finding Latinx creators, the group has built a site including more than 135 Latinx directors (both American Latinos and Latin Americans working in the U.S.). 

“By grouping everyone from diverse Latinx backgrounds in the site, and also enabling users to filter by heritage, self- identification and level of experience, we will become stronger and more specific while at the same time tearing down stereotypes,” says Novoa. “We wanted to show that there is a huge community of talented Latinx directors from diverse worlds and experiences out there.” 

In allowing those in positions of power to search the growing and highly detailed database of Latinx storytellers, the hope
is not only to see more get hired for a variety of projects, but for the ongoing conversations on representation to address all of the nuances of the culture — because when it comes to Latinos, one size doesn’t fit all. 

Article written by Carlos Aguilar for Variety.

A new proposal for seeing whether a TV or film project presents Muslim characters in dynamic, nuanced and intersectional stories and contexts.

For self-identifying Muslims, there was something to finally cheer when Emmy nominations were unveiled on July 28. Ramy Youssef (Hulu's Ramy), Mahershala Ali (Ramy) and Yahya Abdul-Mateen II (HBO's Watchmen) were all nominated in major categories. While only time and tenacity will tell, it appears we are in a moment of real change in the entertainment industry.

These nominations are a breath of fresh air since racism and vilification have been perpetuated by Hollywood's long history of portraying Muslims and other marginalized groups in the U.S. as less than human. 

After 9/11, the entertainment industry exposed Americans to a surge of violent, inaccurate and inauthentic portrayals of Arabs and Muslims. It wasn’t until advocacy groups protested that we started to see what the industry considered an improvement in representation— “patriotic Muslim” characters. In reality, these patriotic portrayals, in shows like 24, Homeland and Quantico, were red herrings since audiences got to know Muslim characters as good or bad only in relation to terrorism. And, as we see with depictions of characters from other underrepresented communities, audiences are often short-changed from learning about the Muslim character’s history or backstory. They are also often in the background rather than in supporting or leading roles.

Authentic and nuanced representations are urgent given that viewers are more likely to support restrictions on Muslim civil rights and wars in Muslim countries when exposed to these types of one-dimensional storylines.

Fortunately, in the last several years, we have seen more diverse representations of Muslims than we have in the last century that the entertainment industry has existed. Even before Muslim-produced Ramy, and Hala (Apple TV+), CBS, in FBI, introduced us to the first Muslim leading man, played by Muslim actor Zeeko Zaki, and The CW's Legends of Tomorrow features a Muslim computer hacker superhero. The Red Line (CBS) included a queer Indian Muslim recurring character in the series. CBS hired Fawzia Mirza, who identifies as Muslim, queer and South Asian, to write one of the episodes. These nuanced and dynamic portrayals are refreshing and long overdue.

As in the examples above, Muslim characters are being featured in newer and different contexts. However, the credibility of the character is sometimes compromised because networks are not doing basic due diligence. Take, for example, 911: Lone Star (Fox), in which the show’s Muslim character prayed incorrectly. What could have been a great scene turned out to be fodder for Muslim Twitter in May, as many were quick to point out the error.

The industry also needs to get over its fetishization of Muslims as solely religious and political beings. Netflix's Messiah, for example, offers a complex context that includes a refugee crisis and U.S. military interventions. However, Muslim characters are reduced to their politics and religion, and culture and faith are often conflated.

There are about 1.8 billion Muslims globally, and Muslim identity and appearance are incredibly diverse. It is lackadaisical how Hollywood was able to create a “Muslim look” that is Arab and South Asian, and often times with actors outside of those communities. Black people make up the largest group of Muslims in the U.S., comprising 20 percent of U.S. Muslims. And the Latinx community is the fastest-growing Muslim community in the U.S. But we rarely see these portrayals. Expanding storylines that include Muslim characters really requires reflecting the diversity of Muslim communities.

The shift away from stereotypical stories and characters is slowly happening, however, one need not look farther than the recently announced remake of Sinbad to see that the industry still defaults to problematic source material when it wants to tell Muslim stories. True improvement will require new stories, new themes, new ideas and new characters in new contexts. 

We are inspired by the Bechdel Test that evaluates representations of women; the DuVernay Test on racial representations; the Russo Teston LGBTQIA+ representations; and the Riz Test on Muslim representations. These tests offer templates of how to evaluate stories that are trying to avoid stereotypes and to create characters not solely defined by their racial, gender, sexual or religious identity; but rather who are cast in more leading roles with fully realized lives. 

The Riz Test is named after activist/artist Riz Ahmed, who has done a great deal in bringing awareness to the issue of Muslim portrayal. It was the first of its kind to evaluate Muslim representation in TV and film, focusing on how media has historically vilified Muslims as terrorists, misogynists and culturally backward. Given the promising current expansion in portrayals and the vast pool of talented Muslim screenwriters in the industry, we are building on these criteria to raise the bar further.

To that end, we propose the Obeidi-Alsultany Test, which uses the below five criteria to evaluate whether a TV or film project presents Muslim characters in dynamic, nuanced, and intersectional stories and contexts.

The Obeidi-Alsultany Test

1. The project that includes a Muslim character(s) does not reproduce or reinvent old tropes but rather explores new stories and contexts.

2. The project that includes Muslim character(s) has a Muslim-identifying writer on staff to ensure that Muslim cultures, religion, characters and storylines are being portrayed accurately and authentically.

3. The Muslim character(s) is not solely defined by their religion. Religion can be part of the character’s backstory but should not be their entire story. Muslim culture and faith should be accurately delineated.

4. The Muslim character(s) has a strong presence and the character(s) is essential to the story arc and has a rich and clearly defined backstory.

5. The Muslim character(s) is portrayed with diverse backgrounds and identities.

Permanent change requires acknowledging the long-standing, systemic problems that have been tolerated for far too long are no longer viable. To depict people in their full humanity is pretty elementary.   

Article written by Sue Obeidi and Evelyn Alsultany for The Hollywood Reporter.

The star recalls how he fought for his role in Chris Noonan's film, which earned seven Oscar noms and spawned a sequel.

Like its title character, Babe, released a quarter-century ago, is the story of an underestimated little thing that went on to stupendous achievements.

It began as the 1983 Dick King-Smith children's book The Sheep-Pig, about an orphaned piglet who demonstrates a knack for herding sheep. In 1986, director George Miller (Mad Max) was on a flight from Sydney to London when a woman next to him laughed as she read the book. Miller immediately began negotiating with King-Smith for the rights — a process that took nearly a decade, with one sticking point being Miller's determination to shoot in his native Australia. ("Pigs don't fly, and neither do I," said King-Smith, an Englishman who died at 88 in 2011.)

Also slowing things down was the fact that the animals in Babe were going to speak and behave in ways the movies had never seen — and the technology for that wasn't yet available. But by the time production got underway in 1995, with first-time feature helmer Chris Noonan shooting a script he'd co-written with Miller, it was. The four-legged denizens of Arthur Hoggett's farm — a mixture of 500 trained animals and Jim Henson's Creature Shop creations — moved their mouths through CGI magic.

James Cromwell was 55 when he auditioned to play Hoggett and had mostly flown under Hollywood's radar. "It was a little film and I had no [negotiating] weight. I did it for very little money," recalls the Los Angeles-born Cromwell, whom Noonan had to fight for. (Producers wanted an Australian.)

Only once he got to the set Down Under and saw what Noonan was cooking up did Babe's potential begin to dawn on him. "Chris' humanity and heart and sweetness of vision is really imprinted on the way he shot that picture," he says, adding that Miller had a darker vision that he ultimately got to realize when he directed the sequel, 1998's Babe: Pig in the City, which included a realistic dog-drowning scene that Universal execs insisted be cut.

It was the original, however, that captured the world's heart. The $30 million movie ($50 million in 2020 dollars ) made $254 million worldwide ($430 million today) and earned seven Oscar nominations, including those for best picture, best director and best supporting actor for Cromwell — also Emmy-nominated this year for his work on HBO's Succession — who spoke to The Hollywood Reporter about that life-changing performance.

It’s been 25 years. Can you believe it?

Uh, no. I actually don’t think about the years. I try to stay in the moment — in the perpetual now because there’s a lot going on.

Babe radically changed the direction of an already storied career.

I wouldn’t say my career was so storied. It’s a story to me. It was a little blip at the bottom of some other important columns. I had worked 10 years in the theater and I had done a number of pictures — really just [1976's] Murder by Death and [1984's] Tank — but mostly television. I had a really hard time getting people to take me seriously as a serious actor because then there was a division between people who did television and the people who did features.

When my agent, a wonderful agent named [Ro Diamond] would say, "You know, what about Jamie Cromwell?" "Oh we know him, he does situation comedies. [Cromwell's All in the Family character] 'Stretch' Cunningham, Norman Lear kind of things." He said, "No, he’s a classically trained actor. He can do other things." It was really like pulling teeth to get an audition. And so, because Ro had a friend who was casting this picture from Australia and the friend liked my work, I went down and auditioned for the director.

Describe the audition.

I had a great time, a wonderful time. There were no lines, nothing you could read, so you had to improvise. I didn’t know which dialect to do, so I did my cockney dialect. My cockney guy is inside me; he's very familiar to me. So I was quick enough that I stumped the director. He couldn’t go on with improv. But I never heard anything again. I mean, I thought, "Well, that’s that." And then [the director] called me up about six months later and says, "Can you sing?" I said, "Oh, like a bird." I do love to sing. He said, "OK, I really want you. I’m having a lot of trouble with the producer, who wants an Australian, but I want you so I’ll do my best. I can’t promise you anything but I hope it works out." I said I hope so too. Then they came and made an offer. They offered me a very little bit of money.

What did you make of the Babe script?

I had read the script, but I only really looked for my role. It was this film about a pig and the animals talked and I thought, you know, they’re gonna put peanut butter in their mouths. I knew nothing about CGI and nothing about what [director] Chris Noonan and [co-writer and producer] George Miller wanted to achieve, which was to make the animals relate to each other as if they were human beings. In other words, they'd have a human consciousness. Real animals look straight ahead when walking, otherwise they’ll run into trees; but human beings count on their peripheral vision, so they look at each other. And that little difference between the way George and Chris conceived the film was one of the things that made it unique.

But it didn't pay much money, and I’ve got 17 lines. I had a dear friend named Charles Keating, a wonderful actor, and he said, "Hey, listen — it’s a free trip to Australia and if the movie fails it’s the pig’s fault, it’s not your fault. The pig's got most of the lines." I thought, "Yeah. It’s a freebie." That’s the attitude I took to Australia.

Did that alter your outlook?

My attitude changed pretty quickly when I got there because we did a makeup testing. I had grown these sideburns — I don’t know why it occurred to me. I thought, "Yeah, that looks great." I wasn’t really sure about the area of the country that [Hoggett] came from, down near Brighton. He’s got a very particular dialect, and so I had been working on the dialect and did the makeup test, and George, the first time I met him, the first time I saw him actually, he had seen the makeup test, and as he walked past me he said, "Lose the sideburns." I don’t know why, but it just irked me. I said, "No." And he looked at me like, "Are you out of your mind?" I don’t think I said another word to George for the entire shoot of that picture.

George and Chris famously squabbled over Babe until long after its release.

Chris’ humanity and his heart and his sweetness, his vision, was really imprinted on the way he shot that picture. All those qualities are not George's qualities — although he has them; but he doesn’t use them very often when he makes pictures. George thought there should be more edge [to Babe], and he came one day to the set, we were well into it by then, and he pulled Chris away from set down into the middle of the field and I could see them, George and his righthand guy, sort of grilling Chris. Waving their fingers in front of Chris’ face. I thought, "Hum, that’s not so good. Let’s not have that." So I walked down and sort of inserted myself into the conversation, which of course made it more difficult for George to say whatever he had to say and he sort of harumphed and walked away. I don’t think we had anymore problems until much later in the process.

He did the sequel, of course, a much darker version.

That’s funny you should use that word. What Babe was not [to George] was this benign, bucolic story of a pig that has a destiny and a sense of direction and the willingness to be the thing that he wanted to be. The line, the first line of the movie, "This is the story of an unprejudiced heart." OK, so unprejudiced hearts are either really sweet characters that through the dint of their sense of wonder and pureness and honesty manage to survive. But I think what George wanted was more like It’s a Wonderful Life. So you think "A Wonderful Life, it’s gonna be a wonderful life, perfect, everything is perfect. But it gets darker and darker and darker and darker.

So when George made the second one, he believed that you could do that, overcome the first Babe. George finished the picture and he didn’t show [Universal] this picture until it was fully cut, balanced, print. They asked George would he be willing to show the film for management at Universal and their children, their families, before? And George says yeah, sure. Well they got in the first cut when they go to the hospital, if you remember the picture, that’s a vivisection laboratory. There are animals with posts drilled into their skulls and sores, cancers, it was — oh my God.

And then the dog-drowning sequence — my son actually worked on that as a CGI artist, and when I saw that thing I thought, "They can’t show this to kids. The kids’ll freak!" And so they said to George, "You gotta cut the picture. You gotta cut all that out." He said, "I can’t just cut out what you don’t happen to approve of. I have to rebalance the whole picture." And they said, "If you have to rebalance the whole picture just do that because we can’t show that." And so they had to cancel the opening. Well, in Hollywood, when they smell that something has gone wrong, everybody wants to know what's it all about, so they all would call up the studio to find out what happened. Why are you not opening this picture? And what they were told by the publicity department or whoever made those statements, [was], "The film is a little dark." Of course that was in every review. So, it wasn’t fair to George’s film, which is a very good film.

Did he cut those sequences out?

Oh yeah. Absolutely. They really cut the dog drowning sequence down to practically nothing. It’s still pretty harrowing, but I mean, with the way George shot it, you actually think that that’s a real dog that’s going through that. That’s an animatronic puppet. Vivisection was completely gone, and the last part, the terrible thing that happens to all the great apes, to the orangutan and to the chimpanzees, abused by the man who brought them together for this show and kept them locked up and didn’t see them as creatures with feelings and desires and a consciousness — it’s a very powerful theme about how we relate to each other, how we relate to those we consider to be other, which we are seeing a lot in our culture right now. Both of those films were really, really, they were not for kids. They are parables for adults. We didn’t have an opening for our film. Universal was appalled by the film and they wanted to kill the film.

The first one?!

Yes, for Babe. They didn’t want to do anything with the film. So what happened was, they invited the press down to Houston for Apollo 13, a big thing, you know how they invite everybody down, stay in a wonderful hotel. And on a bus, evidently, [the guests] thought was taking them to the airport the next morning, [the studio execs] said, "Listen, um, we hate to do this to you, but we have this other little film about a pig." Everybody in the bus was, "Ughhhh … oh my God." And they showed the film, and not only did all of them really like the film, but Gene Siskel just thought it was the cat’s pajamas. He loved it. And so he pushed it a lot.

The studio opened that film in the middle of the day, in a little theater in Santa Monica, with no press. I don’t know how they got an audience in there. I was there. I hadn't seen the film. So I didn’t know that the opening begins in the slaughter house and the pig that goes to the carnival is saved from the slaughter house while his mother goes in the big truck to be killed. And then it begins with Roscoe Lee Brown’s impeccable, wonderful, magical opening. "This is the story of an unprejudiced heart." And when the first joke came, I heard not the kids laugh, I heard an adult laugh. I thought, "Oh, we got 'em. The adults are in this picture, they’re seeing this picture from the point of view of the animals, the pig."

You've done a lot of great work in the area of animal rights, even getting arrested while protested a lab experimenting on dogs. Were you an animal activist before Babe?

No, no, no. I wasn’t an activist. I had come across the country on my motorcycle in ’75. And I went through the stockyard in Texas for what seemed like an entire day. Animals on either side of the road in pens, as far as you could see, and in the far background you could see the slaughter house, and the smell, the sight, the sounds, the panic, the scent of death almost knocked me off my motorcycle. And I said to myself, I can’t do this. I’ve got to do something about this. And so I thought, "Well, I’ll become a vegetarian." It’s more difficult than I thought because I really liked to eat and it took me a while.

And then when Babe came, we would work with the animals and the animals were trained and they were extraordinary. So I just watched these extraordinary animals do the things that they did — and then I would go to lunch, and bless their hearts the Australians like to kill whatever moves and eat it. And so on the lunch table would be all the animals that I had just worked with. There was duck and there would be lamb. I thought, "Oh man, this is really horrible. I have to go vegan." 

Do you like having a catchphrase? Or does it get tiresome having fans ask you to say, "That'll do, pig, that'll do."

They do very infrequently ask me that and in the nicest possible I say, "No, I don’t want to do that. It exists in the picture. If you want to hear that line said the way you remember, watch the picture." Because that’s my favorite story about the entire experience. That was the final sequence of the sheepherding. And if you know anything about sheep, sheep will never do anything they’re told to do. They are skittish and erratic and ornery. And this wonderful woman from New Zealand had worked with them for the entire five months to get them to walk in unison — 12 sheep, three abreast, four rows — and follow this little pig through this course and then come across from the last obstacle and I open the gate and the pig sits at my feet and the sheep as one move into the little pen and turn around, and I close the gate.

So there was this magnificent set they built for the viewing stand, which was this Edwardian gallery, and they had over 200 local people from this little town. The second AD told them joke after joke after joke while they set up the shots. And then we did the thing. The pig sat down, one sheep came up to him — I couldn’t hear what they were saying, you'd think that they were saying things to each other — and the sheep nodded and the pig turned around and started to do the course and all these 12 sheep walked in unison all the way through, and I opened the gate and they came in and they turned around and I closed the gate and you could hear it — it went "click." And the audience of 200 people went berserk because they’d never seen sheep do that with nobody forcing them or prodding them or shooing them or whatever.

So the thing was at the end, when I turned to the pig and say the line. I said to Chris, "How do you want me to do that?" He said, "Why don’t you do it right into the lens?" And I had never looked at my makeup and my makeup was me, of course, with a little aging, whatever. So I said, "Yes, sure." I turned into the camera and I looked as though I was looking at the pig and I saw a reflection in the lens — and it wasn’t me. It was my father. So as I said the line, "That’ll do, pig, that’ll do," I heard, "That’ll do, Jamie, that’ll do." And that is in that moment, I can’t re-create it for anybody. It was my dead father saying to me, "Well done, son. You did it. You did the work."

Article written by Seth Abramovitch for The Hollywood Reporter. 

As Hollywood makes slow but steady progress on its reopening, California Film commissioner Colleen Bell is expressing guarded optimism about production resuming — but without any exact date yet.

“I think it would be imprudent to say that we know when things will get back to normal, but I can say with confidence that there’s good reason to be optimistic,” Bell said.

All series shooting in California were shut down in March due to the pandemic, including HBO’s Bill Hader comedy “Barry,” ABC’s “The Goldbergs” and “Schooled” and America Ferrera’s NBC comedy “Superstore.”

In mid-June, Hollywood’s major unions released extensive back-to-work guidelines for resuming production amid the pandemic, with a heavy emphasis on testing as they unveiled a 36-page report, titled “The Safe Way Forward.” Around the same time, the state of California gave its blessing for film and TV production to resume, subject to approval from county public health authorities.

A handful of projects have been shooting since then, including pandemic drama “Songbird,” starring K.J. Apa and Sofia Carson with Michael Bay producing; and ESX Entertainment’s upcoming film, “A California Christmas.”

“A lot of very good work has been done by the industry and our public health officials to develop the most comprehensive safety protocols around, and that advance effort is starting to pay off as more productions are able to start,” Bell said this week.

The commission has also been ramping up its activities, announcing on Aug. 3 that California’s production tax credit program had attracted HBO’s “In Treatment” and TBS’ “Miracle Workers.”

Gov. Gavin Newsom named Bell as California Film Commissioner last year as a successor to Amy Lemisch. She is part of the governor’s senior staff in the Office of Business and Economic Development, also known as GO-Biz, and has been in been in regular contact with networks, studios, producers and unions.

When do you think production will resume in California?

The question is straightforward, but providing a meaningful answer is more complex. I think this is the reality for any major production locale — whether in the U.S. or abroad.

California is home to so much of the industry, so it’s no surprise that many projects have continued to move forward here with robust pre- and post-production activity. We are fortunate that so much of this work can be done remotely with plenty of social distancing. We are also starting to see physical production ramp up, albeit cautiously, led by smaller-scale film projects, TV series such as talk shows, game shows and dramatic serials (a.k.a. soap operas). The focus remains appropriately on safety and protecting cast and crew members. A lot of very good work has been done by the industry and our public health officials to develop the most comprehensive safety protocols around, and that advance effort is starting to pay off as more productions are able to start.

I think what is most encouraging is the industry’s eagerness to get back to work in California. We launched the latest edition of our Film and Television Tax Credit Program — called Program 3.0 — on July 1, and the response has been exceptionally strong. We have already announced that two existing TV series are relocating here from New York and the Czech Republic, and we’ll soon announce the list of projects for our next round of feature film tax credits. We are also seeing requests for on-location permits start to pick up through our office and regional film offices across the state.

Despite this momentum, several parts of California are currently deemed COVID-19 hotspots, and that affects all local industries including film and TV production. The good news is that the benchmark infection statistics are beginning to improve.

The bottom line on all this is that the industry wants to work here in California for many reasons, and we can now also factor in the current travel restrictions. I think it would be imprudent to say that we know when things will get back to normal, but I can say with confidence that there’s good reason to be optimistic.

What have you been hearing from stakeholders?

Restarting production amid COVID-19 is a slow and very deliberate process.  Developing infrastructure to meet the new health and safety protocols takes time and adds stress to production budgets. Full resumption of production activity also hinges on various labor agreements. The good news is that we are seeing lots of progress, with reports about how efficiency is improving quickly as more productions get underway and learn to adapt.

Are the stakeholders satisfied with how the process, such as the white paper, have gone so far?

Everyone is committed to getting back to work in a way that protects health and safety; that’s the primary focus.  The white paper was a truly collaborative effort by many leaders in the industry. They were determined to work together and find solutions to the extraordinary challenges presented by the pandemic. It has been clear from the start that all the stakeholders — including studios, guilds and unions — want to work together. The challenges are unprecedented, but there’s a cooperative spirit and determination to get things done.

Do you have the sense that stakeholders are taking the health dangers seriously enough?

Absolutely. It’s clear that the industry has really stepped up to meet this moment. So many different groups are working together within the industry and with government at all levels to bring people back to work as soon and as safely as possible.

Article written by Dave McNary for Variety.

“’You are one of the few designers that can open a movie,’” costumer Mona May recalls Happy Madison co-founder Jack Giarraputo once telling her. Perhaps no appraisal can sum up the fashion-design-trained May’s auteur-like contribution to cinema as succinctly. 

Her bold colors, unapologetically soft silhouettes and feathery boas — signature touches that at once highlight comedy, beauty and authenticity — helped define a genre of film. From “Never Been Kissed” to “Romy and Michele’s High School Reunion,” “Enchanted” (for which she was nominated for a Costume Designers Guild Award) to “The House Bunny” to Amy Heckerling’s seminal Jane Austen spinoff “Clueless” (now celebrating its 25th anniversary), young women in search of their identity are the backbone of a number of May-costumed movies. The designer says those films feature stories of women “learning something very feminine about feeling good in [their] skin,” adding, “This is my life message: being free, in love, happy and yourself.”

Many of these films show off May’s facility for giving characters extensive fashion makeovers, even under difficult circumstances. In fact, she enjoys the sense of accomplishment. “It’s challenging to deal with insecurities, budgets and time constraints,” she says. “But creating a transformation is telling the story of a woman’s arc. I am a sucker for it when a woman becomes themselves.”

May bemoans that Hollywood has been shying away from women-centric stories. “People want them, but [studios focus on] global tentpoles,” she says, supporting a return to female-driven comedies. “I’ve done movies [recently], like ‘Banana Split,’ about two girlfriends. I’ve started to prep ‘Mixtape,’ which is a wonderful [’90s-set] story about a girl who finds a cassette tape of her [deceased] parents. I have to go a little bit to a different world to find these stories. They are few and far between.”

May is quick to credit her collaborators, notably Drew Barrymore in the climactic “Meant for Each Other”-themed prom in “Never Been Kissed,” which features characters styled as Shakespeare’s Rosalind and Orlando, Barbie dolls and Tom Cruise’s Joel from “Risky Business.” May brought all the cosplay ideas to the table. Most memorable to her was Barrymore’s final transformational dress — a sweet pink chiffon number with a low neckline, cut on the bias. “Soft, beautiful and [with] all the layers she always had,” May recalls of the actor. “There she was, almost naked, completely open.”

From Barrymore’s thrift store-inspired, ’50s-esque granny dresses in “The Wedding Singer” to a showstopping power suit worn by Elaine Hendrix’s cool fashion editor in “Romy and Michele,” timeless looks have also been a throughline in May’s career. “A couple of decades later, I still have new fans,” she says, “young [people] inspired by [work] that transcended generations.” 

To May, color means emotion. “I paint with color,” she says. “[Alicia Silverstone’s] yellow suit in ‘Clueless’ is like sunshine!” Another favorite: pink, as demonstrated by Lisa Kudrow’s reunion minidress in “Romy and Michele” and the above-mentioned frock from “Never Been Kissed.” She calls the color “beautiful, sophisticated and underused” and offers it perhaps the ultimate testimonial. 

“A funny thing my friends say is that I’ll have a pink boa on my grave,” she says. “I don’t mind that.” 

Article written by Tomris Laffly for Variety.

As a theater chain whose business model relies on serving food and drinks during movies, the Studio Movie Grill might be facing even more challenges than the rest of the exhibition industry.

But Dallas-based Studio Movie Grill is still offering snacks and meals in both the theater auditoriums and lounge areas at the chain’s nine locations that are currently open. With the “grill” concept at the forefront of their brand, the chain is taking precautions to make sure customers can continue to drink and dine, and finding new revenue streams with private theater rentals.

Studio Movie Grill began reopening locations in Georgia, Florida and Texas in late June at 50% capacity — all states that saw surges in coronavirus cases over the summer. Staff are required to undergo a health check prior to starting their shift and wear face masks and other protective gear.

“Bar stools are completely removed for now, in the area directly at the bar to ensure social distancing,” explained marketing chief Tonya Mangels. “We have very large spacious lounges with significant booth seating and bar seating. The lounge booth areas are socially distanced with every other booth ‘closed’ right now with health and safety signage indicating as such.”

Moviegoers can still order an Alright, Alright, Alright Old Fashioned featuring Matthew McConaughey’s Wild Turkey Longbranch Bourbon — but they’re asked to wear masks when they’re not sipping cocktails or munching on snacks in the theater, and also wear them in restrooms and lobbies.

With the COVID-19 pandemic in its fifth month, the North American moviegoing business as a whole is operating at less than 20% capacity.

The three biggest chains — AMC, Regal and Cinemark with nearly 1,500 locations — have announced they will reopen during mid to late August. Theaters in Los Angeles, New York and many other locations have not yet been given an approved reopening date by their health departments.

Smaller chains are facing numerous challenges, from the recent Universal VOD announcement to customers reluctant to return to movie theaters while COVID-19 numbers are still high, though starting to decline in some areas.

Seven of Studio Movie Grill’s shuttered locations are in California, where Governor Gavin Newsom hasn’t said anything about lifting the ban on movie theaters opening.

Founder and CEO Brian Schultz told Variety that patrons in the Golden State are well aware of the risks: “Our California guests remain the most vocal about the safety of returning to Studio Movie with our protocols,” he added.

But Schultz is optimistic that business is rebounding, and he said sales are increasing 3% to 5% each week. The chain has seen solid returns from its offer to rent out auditoriums — which can accommodate several dozen patrons at once — for $200.

“Just like our guests, we have been excited to return to the movies safely,” he added. “Our option to rent out private auditoriums has given our guests the chance to return to movies on the big screen in a way that is comfortable to them.”

Schultz said the private bookings have been “wildly successful.”

Several Studio Movie Grill filmgoers told Variety the staff was attentive in following safety protocols. Olivia Zehmer, of Georgia-based fire safety equipment concern Twelve and Associates, said she was pleased about how a recent company outing had turned out with close to 40 employees and family members attending.

“I’m the company’s organizer of these event and we usually would go to a Braves game or a bowling alley, but that wasn’t going to be feasible,” she said. “We chose ‘Ready Player One’ as something that families could watch. People are itching to come out and for a lot of us, it was the first time we had been to an event since the pandemic started.”

Cody and Teresa Dolan said that they decided to hold a birthday party for their 12-year-old daughter at the the Houston Studio Movie Grill and screen “Spider Man: Far From Home.”

“We have to be super-careful because our daughter’s health and the staff was very conscious of following the health protocols with masks, gloves and social distancing,” he said. “Everyone had a grand time. The kids were so grateful to see their friends, and the adults were happy to get out of the house.”

The Dolans were so pleased that they organized a second outing for their daughter, four of her friends and four teachers.

Mangels said Dave Franco’s horror movie “Rental” was the top performer last week. The IFC release is also available on-demand.

“The new content from smaller distributors continues to get audiences in at pre-pandemic levels and clearly indicated demand is there when we have new content,” she added. “This week we look forward to the opening of ‘Waiting for the Barbarians’ starring Johnny Depp and Robert Pattinson, and ‘Black Water Abyss.'”

Currently, Studio Movie Grill has six theaters open in Texas and it’s looking to reopen soon at outlets in Arlington and Plano along with a site in Duluth, Ga.

Paul Dergarabedian, senior analyst with Comscore, says the chain’s focus on providing a premium experience helps distinguish it from other theaters.

“Studio Movie Grill is nimble, innovative and passionate about movies and the moviegoing experience and during COVID-19, these are particularly relevant attributes,” he said.

Dergarabedian says he thinks the future of moviegoing in theaters that create a curated environment with a “high-end feel,” and in a time when more and more titles are premiering at home, that’s the kind of experience Studio Movie Grill is hoping will continue to draw moviegoers.

Article written by Dave McNary for Variety.

Veteran stylist Zerina Akers talks to The Hollywood Reporter about the biggest project of her career, how many outfits the music superstar wore in the Disney+ film and what's up next for her.

Zerina Akers is surrounded by flowers. 

It's Monday morning, and the world had the weekend to digest the Disney+ debut of Beyoncé's Black Is King, the visual album that serves as the companion piece to her music release, The Lion King: The Gift. While a weekend is plenty of time for peers, fans and fashion houses to send colorful arrangements Akers' way, it's far from enough time to dissect the cultural references, hidden meanings and fashion pairings of her work as the film's costume designer in a project hailed as "visually stimulating," "impeccably styled" and "dazzling, but also carefully calculated" by Vogue, The New Yorker and The New York Times. 

"The weekend has been overwhelming," Akers explains to The Hollywood Reporter by telephone. "I'm so humbled by everything, that it was well-received, that people got it, and we were able to provide a much-needed escape and reality check with everything that's going on. It was this burst of joy that we all needed as one collective of people, of humanity."

Akers is quick to give credit to Beyoncé and her collective of collaborators — including creative director Kwasi Fordjour, tailor Timothy White and their team of stylists and assistants — as she explains the massive feat of pulling off the year-long project. It gave her the opportunity to outfit Beyoncé in a parade of looks from couture houses to upstart designers while also dressing family members (Jay-Z, Tina Knowles Lawson, Blue Ivy and twins Rumi and Sir), supermodels (Naomi Campbell and Adut Akech), Oscar winners (Lupita Nyong'o) and African superstars (Yemi Alade, Shatta Wale, Wizkid, Tiwa Savage, Busiswa, Mr. Eazi).

Akers opens up to THR about her biggest challenges, favorite ensembles and all of the cultural references — from money and status to marriage and family — that are woven throughout Beyoncé's latest artistic offering. 

Let’s start at the beginning with the first vision of Beyoncé on the beach in the Wendy Nichol dress. On Instagram, you wrote that it’s the perfect way to start with the right amount of nothing…yet everything. Why that dress?

Wendy Nichol designed the beach dress on "Drunk in Love," this very sheer, languid, slip dress. This started out as the nude version of that same dress. I wanted her to feel kind of stripped down, where everything was sort of falling apart, sort of falling away, where it meant nothing, where it almost wasn't about the clothes. Wendy was able to do it in a way where it still very much felt like a couture trend. We added silks, organzas and charmeuse strips on top of it, and built on top of that as a base. For that look and that designer to end up back on the beach in a very different way on this album now — two albums past the Beyoncé album — I thought was really quite powerful. She's a mother of three now, and it’s a full-circle moment with that designer. It’s really beautiful.

From there, the film explodes with fashion with dozens of looks. I know this is might be a silly question, but what was the most challenging sequence to create?

I'm trying to comb back through all of the looks in my head. The largest singular project I've ever done was "Mood." So to digest all of those looks...we had 70 people on set. It wasn't dressing a mob of 70 people and they're in that one look; it's then we have the club scene, and then we have the tea party and the dinner table. That was a huge undertaking like creating a chess board. That, in and of itself, that entire song, that entire video, was, I'd say, the most challenging.

I also wanted to create leopard and animal-print ensembles that spoke to the real woman while trying to strip away some of that fear of wearing animal print. A lot of people shy away from it. [We also] utilized historical references, playing with opulence, and pulling some of these tribal references, the use of cowrie shells and things like that. Going back to when cowrie shells were treated as currency in Africa and bringing that into this opulent space by wearing it on a hat, on a headpiece, on a belt so that it’s present and represented. It was just a phenomenal, phenomenal video to work on.

I had to pause several times, in "Mood" and also "Brown Skin Girl," to see how many people you designed for in various sequences. You mentioned 70 on set for "Mood." Do you have numbers for the entire project?

I tried to count. I tried to count even on Beyoncé, and I stopped somewhere at 63 but I feel like it's more like 65. Then we're never going to talk about the ones that didn't make it in the film, then we're at like 70. That's just on her alone. Again, in that project, it was one thing to have 70 people; another thing is to have to funnel them and dress them, let's say, in five different, large scenes, from the synchronized swimming, to the club, to the chess scene. So, I don't have a [total] count.

I wanted to go back to the animal print because it figures prominently. You said people shy away from it and it also can overpower an individual. Here it's done differently. Can you talk about the symbolism of that, and why you relied so much on animal print?

I wanted to take these stereotypes that are often portrayed with black people, whether it be of African descent or in the diaspora, of how we represent luxury and how we project luxury and opulence. They maybe call people ignorant for wanting to wear a gold chain or wanting to kind of overdo it. Wealth looks very different in black and white, and it really ties back to the decadence in many African cultures. Let's say, from Nigeria, in weddings everything is custom made in the same fabric for entire bridal party, or the entire bridal party and their family. Then they change looks halfway through the reception. At the end, there's a celebration where all of the guests throw or pin money onto the bride and groom as an offering to them. They come with purses full of money and they just throw it at them. It’s a stunning ceremony from top to bottom. We pulled from references like that.

Coming from one end of the diaspora, where we're sort of judged in a way for kind of wearing gold chains and rappers, but it's all sort of one thing. It's all a cellular memory. Using Duckie Confetti and those money-print pajamas, and then she puts in the diamond teeth — it's playing in that space. Tying it back with the stereotype, when you want to wear something tribal or feel ethnic, it’s an animal print, you know?

Right.

So we took that, elevated it and made it decadent. I don't know if I've ever seen mixed animal prints done in such a way on any runway in a way that's wearable. It’s usually more scaled back, as in one piece, and not mixed. I've been trying to look back to see if I overlooked something because I don't think I’ve seen it. To take that and turn it on its head, and then utilizing [Poppy Lissman black bar sunglasses] to create this sense of anonymity. You have this black bar across her face. I remember [Jean-Michel Basquiat] saying that when he would cross-out words, that's when you wanted to read them. Taking away the eyes in that shot, you are allowed to see yourself. She becomes anyone, she becomes everyone. To me, that was one of the stronger and more fun looks to work on.

You tell a story by placing luxury houses like Valentino, Burberry, Balmain, Alexander McQueen alongside rising-star designers, many of whom you've worked with in the past, whether it was Formation or just other looks, like d.bleu.dazzled—

Jerome LaMaar has done dresses for us.

Yeah. Can you explain the importance to you and to Beyoncé of using lesser-known Black designers in this film and what you hope people take from that?

Beyoncé does not care who the jacket is by. If it's a beautiful jacket, it's a beautiful jacket. She's not, "Oh, I'm going to take the Chanel one over the Jerome LaMaar one." It's which one looks better. "Oh, this I love. This is bringing something that represents who I am and who I want to be." With some of the larger houses, I love that I was able to support those that supported us. I mean, Olivier [Rousteing] has come through for Beyoncé in more ways than one. Riccardo Tisci at Burberry, I wanted to support his tenure there because he has been there for her for more than 10 years — for many years — with past stylists. He's always come through. I liked having this space and platform to say, "Thank you," and still pull them in in these larger visual pieces. The Burberry cowhide look on the horse, when that circulates, she’s also wearing [Ariana Boussard earrings and bangles]. From the Valentino look, she’s also wearing A-Morir sunglasses by Kerin Rose Gold. Mixing the high and low so when those looks circulate, it makes such a profound difference in the careers of these designers and these businesses. That’s the power. It's kind of like Robin Hood in a way, a fashion Robin Hood.

Speaking of Tongoro with Sarah Diouf, Beyoncé was the first to wear her brand when she wore it on a boat. It was casual. She posted a picture. Then she wore her again on a trip to South Africa. Even at that point, I think she was still the only one to wear her brand. Since then, Sarah has gone from employing seven people to employing 50. The reach of families that that then helped and feed, just by her diversifying who she's wearing. It promotes and inspires people to also diverse their spending and shopping and open their eyes a bit. It creates a domino effect that is much needed in the world. We get used to shopping on Amazon or other very easy ways, but there's so much out there. There's so much amazing talent.

Black Is King is also such a moment for bling, body paint, head pieces and accessories. As a costume designer, it must have been fun to play in that world and add all of these extra elements to take everything over the top. Do you have a favorite moment?

For one, [Francesca Tolot] on the black and teal body paint really, I think, became a star of the show. But Neal [Farinah] and Nakia [Rachon Collins] killed the hair. Those head pieces were to die for and provided the much-needed exclamation point to a lot of these looks. I’d say one of the favorite headpieces was the headpiece with the horns for the cowhide look that [echoes] the Egyptian goddess, Hathor, and pulls in references to tribes in the Congo. It just really blew me away. They really became the stars of the show as well in "Brown Skin Girl" with all the beads. That look was definitely [one of] my favorites.

What was it like to be on the set of the "Brown Skin Girl" shoot? It’s such a family affair with Kelly Rowland, Tina Knowles-Lawson, Blue Ivy and then with Naomi Campbell, Lupita Nyong’o, Adut Akech, etc.

Oh, I mean, a dream! I got to dress Naomi Campbell! It was almost like inviting people to your home. When you invite people to your home, you bring out the good china. You're going to serve them in your Hermes tea cups. You're going to go all out. That's how it felt to have the guests on the set and to actually be able to dress them. Naomi Campbell in the Schiaparelli was just to die for. I love Daniel Roseberry's collection, and was so blown away by the exaggerated silhouettes that he's creating. To place that look there and on her was breathtaking. The McQueen and the Jil Sander on Adut [created] a mother-daughter vibe that is so beautiful.

We shot Lupita in New York separately. To work with such an actress was a little bit intimidating, I must say. She's a very strong woman. Her presence is monumental. She's very confident and sure of herself. I was proud to be able to find things that she liked that contributed and tied everything together. My favorite on her was that rosette Rodarte when she's in the mirror. It's just really beautiful with white on white rosettes.

There’s a duality of light and dark in several scenes, and others where the contrast is pops of color that are monochromatic. What were the conversations you had about black and white?

Talking about the chess scene, in developing the “dark side,” for me, it represented the indigenous spirituality. When you look at the bishop, I wanted it to feel like almost a voodoo priest, because there's this concept or notion that it's evil, and that's not the case. I wanted to show the essence of that in the chess piece. I hope that throughout the film, people can take and start doing research on indigenous spirituality, and that we all don't have to necessarily practice one thing. There is a lot of power, and that it's a bloodline thing.

Going to the monochromatic looks ... I love color. It just brightens the day. I'm not an all-black girl. I'm more of a pop of color. If it's a gray day, you're going to find me in a yellow suit. I love to play with color. Spiritually as well, there's a lot of power to pull from it when you can play there. In a lot of the monochromatic dressing, it reminds me of grandmothers. Your grandmother going to church and taking time to put together a look, find lilac shoes to match her lilac dress and then putting on a lilac hat with a bag and gloves.

Also, for example, in Nigeria, monochromatic dressing from head-to-toe represents opulence and decadence in many ways. Wearing your Sunday's best, that’s when you could get out of your uniform and put on your best. And a lot of people in the South, their mothers and grandmothers wore uniforms as they worked so that would be their day to get out of that. I liked playing in this space of this kind of all-in-one, sort of kind of very custom, very — you have to kind of hand-pick it, you had to get it made, or you had to get it dyed — and taking the spirit of that into these looks.

I'm going to apologize in advance for asking this because I know this was a year-plus of your life and many sleepless nights so it isn’t fair to pick one but do you have a favorite fashion moment in Black Is King?

Right? [Laughs] Thank you for your consideration. Can I give you three favorite moments?

I'll take them all.

I love the tea party scene. I wish I could have just lived in that world a little longer. This very girly meeting, very feminine and dainty gathering of women, I think is something that we all dream of. We'd love to have a nice chat with our girlfriends and then catch up and just debrief. It's soft, but it feels tough. It's floral from head-to-toe, but there's a woman in a do-rag, and then it's still in support of the matriarch. That was a really fun one to style.

Another one I love is Timothy White, who's been Beyoncé's lead tailor for 20 years. He's kind of her Bob Mackie. He's an unsung hero on our team, and many people don't really know who he is. He made the exaggerated black gown in "Brown Skin Girl." Alongside the Valentino look, it has really become an iconic Bey image that represents the film and what it is. That's one of my favorite looks. He really went all out. He did the teal fringe look in "Water," and the red fringe look in "My Power," and so many other things. He's a godsend.

You posted that the yellow Adama Paris look is "very dear" to you. Why is that?

The color yellow speaks to very powerful spiritual entities and across platforms. So, whether you're speaking to an Oshun in the Yoruba culture or you're speaking to St. Anne, it pays homage to ancestral spirits — whether that be in Africa, Brazil or through Cuba — those that have uplifted us in an unseen way. It’s very special.

Speaking of special, you also got your designs in there with the tweed bathrobe and the head wrap. Tell me the story behind that?

I wanted a lot of Chanel in "Mood." We were supposed to shoot it in September or August but we didn't shoot it until the end of September. So, I had to give back all of the samples because we had them for too long. Chanel didn't make a tweed bathrobe, and I had this idea of this tweed bathrobe. I wanted her by the pool in this bathrobe with the towel, but I wanted it to feel like this opulent tweed to tie back to this particular community. That's where that was born. I just designed it. It had a bit of a train. I wanted the towel to feel like a beach towel and a head wrap and an African head wrap. That’s where that came from.

There's another thing we worked on. Natalia Fedner made a really flat, gold headpiece, similar to the one that Nija wears in the yellow in "My Power." On Beyoncé, she wears it in "Already." She's sitting on the ring and there's a gold medal. That one, we took and put sort of all of these different earrings, these gold earrings, which for a lot of young black girls are their first piece of jewelry; these tiny, gold earrings that are a symbol and connection. Often it can be the only family heirlooms that people have, their grandmother's gold rings. I wear mine all the time. My grandmother, she's still alive, thank God, and we switch rings. She gives me rings and buys me gold earrings, and that's a special connection for us. It's a pillar. To utilize these, from simple gold to bamboo earrings, all on this headpiece, where she's crowned in this nostalgia in a way was quite fun. I ended up turning that headpiece upside down in a way.

Beyoncé wrote on Instagram that the film now serves a greater purpose, arriving at this time, and the hope is to present elements of black history and African tradition, which I think, in large part, is accomplished by your collaborations. What is your hope for how fashion or the world responds to this moment?

I think Beyoncé is leading the charge in creating real change through this film. Just with the combo of the independent and couture designers, it really creates a space and a platform for access. That is phenomenal.

For myself, I started the Instagram page, Black Owned Everything. In less than two months, it's grown from three followers to almost 140,000. It shows that people are ready. There's a hunger. Beyoncé amplified that with "Black Parade" and created a directory so you can go to Beyoncé.comand find all of these brands. Real change is happening. We’re able to contribute to a real shift, and it's growing.

We have more work to do, but in terms of the film, the film just gives you a nice visual escape into that world, and also provides the platform. The work is day to day. We're off to a really good start in creating some real change and giving visibility to black designers, black companies, black-owned businesses, black creators, and then we can expand that into other cultures as well.

What's the next step for Black Owned Everything?

I actually haven't shared with anyone. I am creating a marketplace platform, an e-commerce space, to invite a nice, well-curated selection of these designers to sell their clothes in one place that will make it easier for consumers while also giving people access to a larger market. The people that are in my community, at my arms' reach, they get funneled there. People that are engaging in the platform now, they get visibility from a lot of high-end brands and fashion people. And the space will feature black creators; health, wellness and yoga instructors; things like that. Give me a few weeks and we'll be launching soon.

My last question: What's next? Are you taking a vacation?

Oh, I wish. No, no, no. Chloe and Halle have way too much coming up. And I have to prepare Beyonce's fall wardrobe. I don't think I'll get a vacation just yet, but I hope to design more. I hope to get my hands dirty a bit more in the design world, and create things of my own. It's fun.

Article written by Chris Gardner for The Hollywood Reporter. 

The snaking rhythm and ripple of The Good, the Bad and the Ugly (1966); the pastoral atmospheres of Days of Heaven (1978); the icy tension of The Thing (1982); the elegiac beauty of Once Upon a Time in America (1984); the swelling heartstrings of Cinema Paradiso (1988)… the prolific film scores of Italian maestro Ennio Morricone not only elevate classic scenes onscreen; they seem to live with us beyond them, in surround sound. The news of Morricone’s death this week, aged 91, bears a particular emotional weight, so vast was his repertoire (around 500 scores), and so intimate its connection with countless listeners. In the 2019 book Ennio Morricone: In His Own Words, he said that “Most of the time, people experience the music in a film as a subconscious suggestion… In other words, music manages to show what is not visible, to work against the dialogue or, even more, tell a story that the images do not reveal”. What makes a truly great film soundtrack might be a perennial question – but Morricone left us with timeless responses, across a multitude of genres.

British composer, dramatist and broadcaster Neil Brand has explored the technique and power of film soundtracks throughout much of his work, including the acclaimed BBC series Sound Of Cinema: The Music That Made the Movies. It’s a theme that stems from Brand’s own childhood passion for movies: “I’d go to the cinema and see this massive technicolour thing with extraordinary music pouring out… When I got home, if the music was still ticking over in my mind, I’d sit at the piano and I’d be desperate to pick it out, find out how the chords worked,” he recalls. Great film music somehow retains its magic, even when its familiar melodies are laid bare.

“I do think we are all musical receptors, at a very deep level,” says Brand. “We have that in our ancient DNA, and because film music is working at a deeper level than language and intellectual thought, maybe it’s hitting us all at that level. In a funny way, talking about that means that you recognise it, but it doesn’t change its power.”

There is a universal relatability to a brilliant film score, even in fragments. Morricone is credited for (re)defining the sound of the Western (although his music obviously went much further than that); meanwhile, US composer John Williams summons otherworldly adventures, across the Star Wars and Superman sagas, ET and more. When Brand reminisces about leaving a busy cinema screening of Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977), I instantly think of Williams’s five-note UFO synth motif: “Every single one of us in the crowd looked up at the sky when we walked out,” said Brand. “Suddenly, we were in a world where that was possible. I wanted the real world to be like film… and music is the thing that will allow you to do that.”

Our modern viewing habits (home streaming; mobile downloads) can’t quite replicate the immersive, communal quality of the classic cinema experience; classic film music also invariably gives rise to copycat scores, as Brand notes, laughing: “There was a time where it felt like every superhero movie started with a dark, brooding pan across a city, and a low note that just stayed there for ever.” Still, he adds, wildcard creativity has proved a potent highlight, across generations of film scores. “It was Morricone’s maverick-ness that made him stand out,” argues Brand. “There was no chance that any of the other golden age film composers would ever use a whistle, a handslap and a whipcrack in their music – and here it was, in The Good, the Bad and the Ugly: part of an incredibly bananas take of what constituted a film score. Now if you go to the cinema and hear something really surprising, it’s such a breath of fresh air.

“I think Morricone is a really interesting mix [for] a popular populist composer. His first stuff in the early ‘60s was pop, very melodic, but with these bizarre but brilliant sounds in there. One of the things that informs that is the intellectually rigorous crowd that he hung out with, Il Gruppo: this group of Italian composers making avant-garde improvised jazz, using odd textures.”

Morricone is a prime example of how great film music can be sophisticated yet unpredictably playful. His varied themes feature countless irrepressible melodies, whether it’s the intensely poignant Once Upon a Time in the West (1968), the whimsical Fun is Beautiful (for Carlo Verdone’s 1980 comedy), or the unapologetically romantic 1971 piece Chi Mai (which later became a hit single in its own right). He never lost that pop sensibility, continuing to work throughout his career with chart artists from Mina and Zucchero to the Pet Shop Boys.

Morricone’s film scores also bring a profound resonance, along with catchy hooks. In a 2008 interview recorded for BBC Radio 4, he told Christopher Frayling: “What I look for as a composer for cinema is the underlying story in a film; the story that cannot be told through images or through dialogue.” According to Brand, “Films like Once Upon a Time in the West and Once Upon a Time in America may have had a pragmatic, hard-nosed approach both to the characterisation and the plot, but Morricone’s music gave this incredible emotional depth. In A Fistful of Dollars (1964), Clint Eastwood only has about 25 lines, but the music that plays as he heads off towards his next gunfight puts him in the pantheon of great heroes of all time. You care about him; the music suggests that something has happened in his past that has scarred him so much, he has to go on this solo quest to bring justice to lawless places. Whereas in the plot, he’s doing it for money!”

Some of the greatest film music has also been fuelled by a rapport between the composer and the filmmaker. Classic creative partnerships have included the likes of Bernard Hermann and Alfred Hitchcock (from Psycho, Vertigo and North By Northwest to the shrill electronic effect in The Birds); Nino Rota and Italian heavyweights Federico Fellini and Luchino Visconti (Rota also wrote the legendary score for Francis Ford Coppola’s The Godfather); and Hindi film music icon RD Burman with director/producer/writer Nasir Hussain (not least on 1973’s influential Yaadon Ki Baaraat). A more recent collaboration that has stood out has been French electronic artist Para One’s gorgeous scores for Celine Sciamma (for her contemporary youth dramas and the 2019 period feature Portrait of a Lady on Fire).

"An overly aggressive shortened theatrical window could have an adverse impact on the mid-to-tail end of a film's life," Mark Zoradi told analysts.

Cinema giant Cinemark is not game for the reduced 17-day theatrical window that fellow exhibitor AMC Theatres and Universal Pictures recently struck an agreement for, CEO Mark Zoradi said Tuesday. 

"We believe an exclusive theatrical window is critically important," he said. "While we have publicly stated we're willing to have conversations with our studio partners to evolve with them, we are mindful that an overly aggressive shortened theatrical window could have an adverse impact on the mid-to tail-end of a film's life," Zoradi told analysts on Tuesday about the window-crashing deal after the company released its second-quarter earnings.

The Cinemark boss said he would negotiate with the major studios about shortening the theatrical window. "We will be very careful and methodical about how we approach any change to the theatrical windows. We continue to carefully analyze and research this matter. And we will endeavor to ensure any modifications are in the best interests of the overall industry, our company and our shareholders."

At the same time, Zoradi would not be drawn on how many days would not constitute an "overly aggressive shortened" theatrical window that he warned against, adding he would leave that discussion to direct talks with studios.

Zoradi added the major studios weren't suddenly ramping up negotiations to collapse the theatrical window. "I wouldn't say there's been any aggressive new discussions that we're in the middle of. I would characterize it as ongoing," he told analysts.

But he again gave little away on the nature of the talks. "We are open and active with discussions, but relative to negotiations, I would stop there," Zoradi said.

The historic Universal-AMC agreement will allow the studio's movies to be made available on premium video-on-demand after just 17 days of play in cinemas, including three weekends. That shatters the traditional theatrical window of nearly three months before studios can make movies available in the home.

It initially covers AMC's U.S. locations, but the two partners will also discuss a potential international rollout. AMC, the world's largest theater chain, will share in the revenue from PVOD, but the two sides haven't disclosed financial details.

NBCUniversal CEO Jeff Shell last week called the AMC partnership "groundbreaking," reiterating PVOD was a "complement rather than a replacement for a robust theatrical release." He commended AMC and CEO Adam Aron for their vision that "together we can build a new, more attractive business model for us both." Shell also signaled that Universal was hoping to reach similar deals with other exhibitors.  

Wall Street has been debating the impact of the AMC-Universal agreement on studios and cinema chains. MofffettNathanson analyst Michael Nathanson called the development "a groundbreaking moment for the film industry." But he also said: "We worry that the near-term impact on attendance can be more substantial, and consumers in the long run will continue to opt to watch more non-blockbuster films in their homes going forward. Of course, the lower box office attendance will also negatively impact high-margin per cap spending on food and beverages."

Article written by Etan Vlessing and Georg Szalai for The Hollywood Reporter.

To say that documentarian Tiller Russell has a knack for discovering unconventional characters is an understatement. From NYPD cops running a cocaine ring (2015’s The Seven Five), to a Russian mobster, a Cuban spy and a Miami playboy conspiring to sell a Soviet sub to the Cali cartel (2018’s Operation Odessa), the filmmaker has more than earned his gonzo doc bona fides. And the weird winning streak continues with the director’s four-part docuseries The Last Narc, premiering on Amazon Prime Video today.

The story catalyzing Russell’s latest is one familiar to any viewer of the first season of Netflix’s Narcos: Mexico — the 1985 kidnapping and murder of DEA Agent Enrique “Kiki” Camarena. It was a case that ultimately fell to special agent Hector Berrellez, the heroic protagonist of The Last Narc, to investigate. What Berrellez uncovered, and relays with startling frankness to the camera, is a strange saga involving intricate layers of government coverup on both sides of the border, suggesting that the crime was never really meant to be solved (and leaving Camarena’s grieving widow, also prominently featured in the series, without closure to this very day). In fact, the special agent’s whole premise is so farfetched as to be easily dismissed as a crackpot conspiracy theory — if it weren’t for several other corroborating interviews Russell conducts, including with the informants who eventually came clean to Berrellez. Specifically, these are the three former, and still intimidating, Jalisco State policemen who served as bodyguards for the Guadalajara Cartel drug lords Rafael Caro Quintero and Ernesto Fonseca Carrillo (El Chapo’s onetime bosses).

So to learn more about bringing Narcos fiction back to fact while simultaneously crafting a narrative out of the real-life hunt for Silk Road founder Ross Ulbricht (Russell’s thriller Silk Road, which was set to debut at Tribeca, will be released later this year), Filmmaker reached out to the intrepid director a few days before The Last Narc episode one hit the small screen.

Filmmaker: So how did this project come together? I read that you’ve been wanting to tackle this story for the past 14 years now.

Russell: I’ve been fascinated by this story for more than a decade. I had a hunch that if done correctly, it could be both the intimate story of a murder, as well as a sprawling epic about the drug war.

So I carefully nursed the sources, built the relationships and bided my time until I had the right canvas on which to tell it. Then I dug in my with my filmmaking team and together we blasted out of the cannon. It’s been a long, surreal voyage into some dark and dangerous places — and this is what we came back with. I hope that we have done the story justice. It means a tremendous amount to all of us.

Filmmaker: How did you meet all these incredible insiders in the first place and get them to trust you enough to go on camera with their stories? It seems these are not the types of folks who would generally trust anyone.

Russell: A mentor and friend of mine, the journalist Charles Bowden, introduced me to Hector 14 years ago. He told me, “This man is at the center of the biggest story in the history of the War on Drugs – and nobody knows the truth about it.” Chuck died before he could finish reporting the story. Basically, I picked up the baton he left behind and ran with it. The series is a tribute to him.

Filmmaker: Interviewing drug lord bodyguards about a notorious murder of a DEA agent — one that may have involved a coverup by several governments — strikes me as a tricky undertaking, to say the least. That said, you’ve delved into dangerous subjects before with your prior docs. So what lessons in safety did you take away from having directed Operation Odessa and The Seven Five? Were precautions any different this time?

Russell: Documentaries need stars just like feature films do. And the act of telling the story is a performance by the subjects. So a long gestation period was critical to building the bonds of trust necessary to explore the deepest and darkest corners of these people’s souls.

I knew that in Hector we had our central character. But when we started rolling the cameras on Jorge Godoy, he pushed away the table, clambered to his feet, and drew his pistol. And I thought, “Holy shit. This is going to be a wild one.” That turned out to be a profound understatement.

I’m magnetized by crime stories because they are as close as we get to war in civilian society. The stakes are literally life and death. And this one was both a crime story and a war story. So I approached it very carefully and very reverently.

My policy with both cops and criminals is that I’m a storyteller. I say to each of them, “Your tool is a gun, mine is a camera. I’m not in your world, I’m a chronicler of it. I will treat your stories with reverence and follow them wherever they lead. And I will never bullshit you.” Then I just hope and trust that that respect will see me through to the other side.

Filmmaker: You don’t really feature anyone who might dispute the accounts of any of your main characters. So did you reach out to folks who may have disagreed with Berrellez’s conclusions? Did you speak with insiders who declined to go on camera?

Russell: Our sources lived this. They witnessed and participated in every event they recount. So these are firsthand, first-person stories. And these people have been vetted by the DEA, the US Attorney’s Office, and the American judicial system.

The people who our witnesses implicate were contacted directly and told in detail about the allegations. They chose not to participate in the film, which is acknowledged in the ending. Everyone has a right to tell their story – or take it to the grave with them. And I respect that.


ilmmaker: Your narrative feature Silk Road is also coming out this year. How did you balance the two projects? Were you working on both simultaneously?

Russell: Juggling The Last Narc and Silk Road simultaneously (as well as a Netflix series you’ll hear more about later) was the most intense experience of my professional life. There were days when it felt like too much to carry. But I knew that it was perhaps a once in a lifetime opportunity to tell two iconic stories about the drug war — bookends in a sense. And there are clear harmonic resonances between the two projects. In fact, I put Jason Clarke (the star of Silk Road) and Hector together because I had a hunch they would learn something from each other. Imagine that lunch!

And thanks to a superhuman wife, great producers, and a brilliant band of talented collaborators, I survived the undertaking and am on the other side of it. Most of all, I’m just excited to share these stories with the world.

Article written by Lauren Wissot for Filmmaker Magazine.

Launching a career with a strong short is a hallmark of the independent film scene. The best shorts of the year commonly attract attention from festival programmers, managers, producers, agents. And in addition to generating recognition and industry interest, many shorts do more — they establish not only a voice but also subject matter their makers go on to explore with even more depth, nuance and subtlety in future works.

Currently in release from IFC Midnight and attracting much-deserved attention is Natalie Erika James’s Relic, which artfully lodges an exploration of dementia and elder care within a genuinely scary haunted-house horror story. Starring Emily Mortimer as the daughter trying to aid her widowed mother (Robyn Nevin), who is succumbing to the fog of Alzheimers’s while living alone in her secluded house, the feature is an outgrowth of a short, Creswick, in which the bare bones of the story — a daughter, a mentally failing parent, a house, and some supernatural presence — are first presented.

Another psychologically charged and highly recommended short viewable online is Meredith Alloway’s Deep Tissue, currently premiering as part of The Future of Film is Female. Alloway, who is a frequent contributor to Filmmaker, stars as a woman for whom a professionally-administered mid-afternoon body massage becomes, for the viewer, a shockingly visceral experience. Yet in a gory work that flirts with body horror, there’s real tenderness and empathy here. Deep Tissue shares with Relic an unexpected, beautifully-executed final turn that emotionally recasts all that we’ve seen before. 

For Filmmaker, James and Alloway did a virtual sit down talking about their paths so far as women working in horror and genre-adjacent areas. In the conversation below, they discuss formative influences, the path towards directing, identifying collaborators and, of course, the next-step possibilities of the short film.

James: It was such an interesting time [watching your film] — it was kind of sinister but had this erotic edge. But then at the end it was almost like this playful, light romance. I really dug it.

Alloway: Thank you! I know you’ve talked about influences growing up, watching Asian cinema and horror. What was the first hardcore genre film you remember watching as a kid?

James:  I watched The Shining pretty young — it’s a pretty common answer. My brother, who is four years older than me, was really into Stanley Kubrick. I was scarred very young by that bathtub scene. The other film that I saw with friends when I was 11 was The Others. It was the first time we went to a cinema without parental supervision. It scared the shit out of me, but was so fun [to watch] with friends and have that communal experience. I think that really stuck with me. What about you?

Alloway: The first time I remember seeing a horror film in the theater with my friends was Swimfan when I was in eighth grade.

James: Wow. Like a slasher film.

Alloway: Yes. And I think, you know, when you’re in seventh or eighth grade you’re just starting to like people and understand what trust means. And that film is a Fatal Attraction type of story. I remember seeing that and then the conversations everyone was having after — it gave such a platform for us to talk about those kinds of things.

But going back, The Lost Boys. I literally wear a side-dangling earring because Keifer Sutherland has this earring that he wears. My dad loved horror films. He was the guy that would get every horror film at Blockbuster. He didn’t care how crappy or “B movie” it was. But, like, Rosemary’s Baby — movies that I think I was probably too young to see — I think shaped me on a subconscious level.

James: Horror is so broad there are so many subsets. Where would you say your main interests lie? You know, some people are really into witches or vampires….

Alloway: That’s a good question. I think I’m interested in characters, and I let the character dictate what the genre is, in a way. Deep Tissue is very much inspired by an actual massage that I got in my house.

James: Oh yeah? Was it similarly kind of sinister? Was there a bit of a threat?

Alloway: No, not at all!  I think the visuals of the film came from the fact that it was the first time I had a masseuse in my house — a very sweet man. But again, stranger, man in your apartment. It was my roommate’s birthday, so she had flowers everywhere, and I put on classical music, and I was like, this is so bizarre, you know?  I wrote the first draft of the short right after. 

James: So it almost sounds like there were your preconceived notions about what [the massage] should be, but also the male presence, being alone and the kind of the inherent weirdness of that when [the man] is a stranger. It sounds like [the experience] was a bit heightened and felt almost like a set up of a date, weirdly. And that plays into the short, yeah?

Alloway: Absolutely. As you have been saying about Relic, the short explores topics that we’re afraid to confront. We can do that within the horror genre. I don’t want to say we’re “normalizing things,” but we’re making them available to explore in a way that maybe is a little bit less daunting than if it’s within a straight drama.

James: Yes, I think [horror] also externalizes or physicalizes those things. That feeling that you had is on screen [in your short], and it’s translated not as cannibalism but as a really sensual erotic act. So I think that’s the wonderful thing about it. It’s so visual and so cinematic.

Alloway: Thank you! I’m really curious about how you developed your vision for Relic and then how you found the right producing partners and got it made. What was the journey of moving from your short, Creswick, into your feature?  I’m in that position right now where I have producers and I’m working on my feature script, so I’m very curious about that transition. 

James: My Australian producers approached me after seeing my graduate film back in 2011. They had just done Justin Kurzel’s The Snowtown Murders, so, you know, to me, they were the ultimate producers. I was so stoked to have even gotten a meeting with them, and they were like, ‘Oh, do you have any feature ideas?’ And I had nothing because I just come out of film school. You’re just burnt out after film school anyways. But I wrote a treatment in two weeks that was crap, and they very wisely passed on it. And then we kept in touch on email, but we didn’t really meet up for another four years. So [a meeting] that was seemingly a failure paid off in the long run.

When I started writing Relic, they were really interested and came on board. They already had a bit of history of working with international partners, which meant that they were already actively looking to people that they previously worked with. But for me the turning point was getting US representation. That came about directly through making the short film and traveling with festivals and meeting people and getting write ups. 

Alloway: There’s this similar narrative I was told before graduating theater school — you graduate and need plays ready to go. And if your short is playing a big festival, you need your features lined up. But sometimes that doesn’t allow you to focus on what’s right in front of you.

James: Yeah, it’s a lot to expect of yourself. I think it’s a lot to expect of graduates to have everything sorted. You need life experience to have things to write about. So for me, I took a year off after graduating, and then I did go back to university, but it was just paying for deadlines essentially. I thought I’d make this film in Beijing, and I didn’t feel like I’d do it if no one was pushing me to. But that’s so interesting that you did playwriting. How did you transition into filmmaking?

Alloway: I made my first film, The Doll, when I was 10, and I played a Barbie doll that came back to life to seek revenge on the world who didn’t buy her. (And by the world, I mean my friend Mallory.) So I’ve been making movies for a long time, but I really got into theater in high school. I went to SMU in Texas. SMU was like the only acting program I found where I could do an emphasis in playwriting and directing. I was a film minor at first, but yeah, theater is so all consuming and the film minor felt almost like film studies. I knew I couldn’t do both. I think studying theater just gave me appreciation for dialogue and a love for Shakespeare and language. Directing actors, too.

I moved to LA after school and started writing for this site, the Script Lab. I was learning about screenwriting by writing reviews and doing interviews and pieces on screenwriting, and then I fell into going to film festivals. I fell in love with interviewing people. I always knew I wanted to make films, but I spent a lot of time figuring out what I had to say, what story I wanted to tell.

James: I think that’s so crucial. There are so many scripts that you read and get to the end of and go, “It’s well written and an entertaining ride, but what does it ultimately amount to?” Filmmaking is two years minimum of your life, and unless you really believe in what [a film] has to say, it’s a really hefty price to pay. I love the craft, but not enough to put that much of myself into a project unless I really believe in it. Everything I’m writing about is just essentially stuff that matters to me — the big philosophical questions that you have about your life or the world as it is.

Alloway: You have mentioned that your grandmother had Alzheimer’s, and that [you were also inspired by] this house that she had. What was that real-life experience that then informed both the short Creswick and Relic?

James: It’s a few things. Part of it is the mass of guilt — processing your guilt and your grief surrounding the subject. A lot of the time people with Alzheimer’s can feel like they’re living in two timelines. And if you think about what ghosts  are, or the supernatural, [they are] things from a different time in the present. And so that felt like a parallel that really fit; [with Alzheimer’s], people talk to people who aren’t there, or are from another time, or they regress to childhood. [Those were] some of the experiences I had with my grandma — her being convinced that there was someone in the closet. You know that that’s not real, but it’s still a very sinister, uncanny, supernatural feeling. Those were the things that tied the idea of exploring Alzheimer’s through the haunted house together.

Alloway: I haven’t had someone in my family go through that. But I’ve definitely dealt with someone close who I’ve tried to understand the way that they’re viewing the world — why they do what they do and say what they say. I can totally see how that links to a years-long artistic exploration.

James: Yes, that’s right. There’s something really exciting about starting a project and not necessarily knowing the answer. It feels almost like there’s like a risk there or something. You know the parameters of what you want to explore, but it always changes as you’re writing.

Alloway: With Deep Tissue, my producers, Joshua Wilmott and Rachel Walker, were really good at seeing the questions I was asking that I didn’t know I was asking and pushing me to explore those further. Deep Tissue started because I had an idea to explore toxic relationships and codependency through the lens of what these characters do in the short, without giving any spoilers. Maybe two years before I wrote this short, I had developed a feature set in Texas about a couple like this. But it just never quite clicked for me because I just felt Texas wasn’t quite the landscape for it. And then when I got the massage and ended up writing the short, there were already deep-rooted questions I had that this one massage incident triggered. Rachel was always like, “You’re exploring body image stuff here, and let’s lean into it.” And so then throughout every draft and in the edit and the whole project, we really tried to raise questions as opposed to answer them.

James: There are so many different ways that ideas come to you. Sometimes they are more cerebral and other times you just write on intuition. And you don’t really understand what it means in an analytical sense until you make or write the thing. I think you’ve got to be open to both sides, because if you’re too cerebral about projects, I think they can feel a bit stilted or lacking spontaneity or life. So I think a marriage of the two is good. In terms of your feature, does that mean you’re expanding Deep Tissue or is this a completely different project?

Alloway: This is a different project. I won’t say too much about it but I’m very excited! It’s a New York City story. With Deep Tissuepeople said, “Just make it a feature.” But what these people in the short are doing to each other is very complex, and I found you can’t tie it up in a movie. I think their desire, or fetish, is a compulsion that I don’t think can be properly explored unless you take it slow and focus on the romance. So I have a pilot, and I’m developing it as a series.

James: It’s wise to know the difference because not every idea is a feature, right? It’s good to know what format your story is suited for. You see online so many short films that have been optioned that are just a visual hook or a motif. There’s so much you have to build around that idea to create a feature film. Definitely for Relic, we had the first draft before we shot Creswick. I think it would have been quite hard to go the other way around.

Alloway: Writing a feature is such a different journey than writing short. Do you have a writing partner? How much of Relic changed in the production phase? 

James: Yeah, I have a writing partner, his name’s Christian White, and we met at the Palm Springs Film Festival. We work really closely together, although we don’t write in the same room, so we’ll just basically spend a bunch of days plotting, outlining — basically chatting through everything — and then we’ll go off and we’ll either split it in half or one of us will do the first pass. We’ll just go back and forth and obviously come back together to problem-solve creative solutions for obstacles, that kind of thing. From the conception of the idea to shooting the film was about four years, so it was a fair chunk of time. It wasn’t nonstop work, but we did about four rounds of development. The government gives you money to do a draft essentially.

Alloway: That must be nice!

James:  Yeah, I mean, it’s not like a shit ton of money, but it’s still very generous. You’ve got to jump through hoops to apply and all that, but it’s good. 

In production, it didn’t really change. There was one scene that got rewritten after I had some discussions with the actors — that was a really tricky scene as well to shoot. It was very emotional.

Alloway: Which scene was it?

James: It’s the scene where Edna is in the forest burying the photos. It’s essentially her last lucid moment before things kind of hit the fan. So yeah, it was amazing to collaborate with Emily [Mortimer] and Robyn [Nevin] and go, “Okay, let’s reshape this.” Over the four years that we were writing the script, I think all the superficial stuff changed a lot. If you read the first draft of the script, it was more of a brother/sister story. There were still three generations, but there were two protagonists. We shifted to focus on the women because those relationships just felt richer and more interesting. But it was essentially still talking about the same thing, and still had that balance of horror and beauty and still with a really emotional note at the end. I guess it changed over time in external ways, but the core of it has remained the same. Do you find that as well with your work? That it can change quite drastically?

Alloway: At least with my feature that I started writing last June, it’s about simplifying. The first draft was more like a Clean, Shaven or like Naked — a one-character downward spiral. And it’s still a downward-spiral film. But yeah, like how you narrowed the brother and sister into one protagonist, all of the flashy stuff has kind of fallen away and it’s just getting to what the spine of the story is.

I wanted to ask you for advice because I’ve never directed a feature. It feels like something you  almost have to train for. What are the things that for you were the biggest challenges? 

James: Good question. For me, the biggest challenge stepping up was that in shorts, I’m very used to planning everything to a tee. I’m sure you’re the same, you shot design or whatever it is. And in a feature, your experience might be different, but there are a lot of moving parts, and over a six-week period, things just inevitably shift or you run into really practical problems. You can’t shoot things a certain way, and so a lot more improvisation was required. That was something that was daunting. But I think something you learn to get used to as well, and it’s actually really exciting, is riding the chaos to a certain degree and trusting your instincts. Sometimes you fuck it up, but sometimes you find that your ideas on the spot are better than whatever you had in your head in the first place.

I didn’t necessarily have this problem, but I know talking to my producers, who’ve worked with a lot of first-timers, that sometimes you put too much pressure on yourself to have all the answers. Whereas you should really take into account that you’ve assembled this team and they’re there to help you. So if you make yourself an island, you’re going to have a bad time. But if you just are open and say, “Look, I’m not sure yet, what would you suggest,” that is probably a better way to go because, presumably your team has got great ideas too. I think the real skill of directing is curation, though. It’s knowing which ideas are going to derail your “vision,” and which ideas are going to help you with that. My impression of working in the States is that the director is God or something. Whereas in Australia, it’s a little bit more egalitarian. So don’t believe the hype, you’re human.

Alloway: I’m on the same page. People ask me all the time, “How are you in Deep Tissue? And you wrote it, you directed, you produced it?”

James: Yeah, I was going to ask! 

Alloway: I always say, “My team!” My DP, Justin Hamilton, and I went to high school together, and Josh and Rachel, too, we’ve all known each other for a long time. With Deep Tissue, I cast myself because I felt I was the best person for the job, I knew the character so well. About casting Peter Vack, he’s also a filmmaker and is incredible. I was setting myself up for collaboration. I really had to tell myself, “If anyone on the crew thinks that you’re not directing the movie because you’re also in it, who gives a fuck as long as the movie turns out well.” I [said to myself], “Don’t try to prove anything to anyone. Make this about collaboration, make it about the project.” But we basically had a system. Rachel studied acting at NYU. We speak the same sort of — I don’t know, like Stanislavsky or Meisner — acting language. We went through the script. I was like, “These are the acting beats that I want to hit. If this isn’t coming through, come talk to me.” Josh is also my editor and has been on set for my past few shorts. So he was there, watching to make sure we got enough tail on a shot, or letting me know if something we wanted to accomplish wasn’t reading. And then Justin, I just trusted him. I didn’t need to be obsessive about framing. Like you were saying, we were very specific about the shot list and how we wanted things to look and reference.

James: That’s so impressive. I cannot imagine directing and being in front of the camera. I feel like it’s just such a different headspace. You have to be so in the moment with acting, and directing is the big picture.

Alloway: I would warm up and prepare for a scene the same way I would if I wasn’t directing. Also, I’ve directed so much within a scene just from being in theater school that it felt really natural. I will say that for the actual massage scene, I had the monitor on the floor. We had one shot to get it right! We couldn’t screw it up. With Relic how did you approach actors? Did you have conversations ahead of time? Accommodate how they like to work and then bring in your own ways?

James: I think it’s mostly to do with really in-depth discussions, both about approaches to the work but also in some ways it’s like “trauma bonding” — you just talk about your life a lot and the things that you’ve gone through. It’s not dissimilar to co-writing. When I co-write with my writer, we’re just talking about our lives and finding the common ground. We’re looking at it from both of our perspectives. I think you just have to be really vulnerable with actors because they give you so much and for them to trust you, I feel like you have to really trust them in return. So we just talked a lot about obviously the characters, but also our own lives and how we’ve experienced grief ourselves and family dynamics.

We didn’t do too much rehearsal. Partly, just practically speaking, Emily’s flight was delayed for three days so we only had like two days before we shot. It was just a lot of Skype calls prior to that. She was doing a lot of voice training because she did the Aussie accent. Some actors really recoil from accents and it really disrupts the work, but for her, she saw it as a way to really get into the character. She was brilliant at that. And then I prefer to find it on the day rather than the risk of over rehearsing. But it’s good to break the ice and do a little bit, and we had a lot of stunt rehearsals as well. So that was a great way to get everyone working together. And they all got on really well.

Alloway: I definitely learned the over-rehearsing thing! But I think it also depends on the project.

James: Yeah. If you find something in your rehearsal that you think is like lightning in a bottle, it’s that feeling of trying to recapture it that makes you give bad direction essentially. So I think that’s part of the danger. I mean, it really depends on how the actors like to work. Sometimes you can improv stuff around the script, which has been helpful in the past. If it’s more about trying to just be comfortable in the character’s skin, then that can be useful sometimes. But it really depends on what actors like. Some people say, “No, I don’t want to improv or do exercises, I’m not at drama school!”

Alloway: Mark Rylance is one of my favorite actors. I was covering the press conference for Bridge of Spies, and someone asked about his process. And he leans into the mic and says something like, “I just say the words,” and that was it.

James: Yes! So great and it is so funny, like the differences. I  can’t remember who the director was, maybe David Fincher talking about Alien and the difference between two actors. One needed constant reassurance between takes. The other was just like, “Back off” and could turn on the tears just like that. Everyone’s different, I suppose.

Hey, talk to me about the style of your film. I noticed there’s a lot of slow zooms, the 4×3 ratio. It has a vintage ’70s feel to it. What’s the inspiration for the aesthetic?

Alloway: I think the visuals really were dictated by my experience getting the massage and the juxtaposition of the relaxation — the classical music, the sun shining, the flowers — with this strangeness. And I just love the texture of 1970s films. I was watching Rosemary’s Baby and The Changeling — 1968 and 1980, technically. But I think that the ’70s was a time when really cool filmmakers were making films that felt very character-driven. And what the stories were saying was very strange, like The Omen. When I go back and watch those films, I’m sort of jarred by how realistic but also strange they are, and I tried to honor that. Before I make a movie, I cut together like a ripomatic. I can have a lookbook, but sometimes there’s something tonally that I can’t communicate without cutting a mini version of the tone of the movie in a way.

James: That makes sense.

Alloway: So I basically, I had a lot of like 1960s, 1970s beauty tutorials that I found. They had this “uncanny valley” vibe to them.

James: I know what you mean. But it’s cool how you gave it kind of a modern twist. If you look at a film like The Love Witch, that almost perfectly mimics it, whereas yours has more of a modern immediacy to it.

Alloway: I wanted it to feel real. I didn’t want it to feel like these characters were doing this thing in a world that wasn’t our own world. It was very much like taking the uncanniness of a lot of these ’70s videos and vibes and then really bringing it to reality. Goodnight Mommy is a film that I really love, the camera movement. Relic and Creswick do this as well — they are very much about the tension at the beginning. Grounding the viewer, but using the slow zooms, the stillness. The 4×3 choice was because I was really influenced by Andrea Arnold, and she uses that in Fish Tank. And you really feel the claustrophobia of this girl’s experience with this man.

James: No, definitely. That’s really cool.

Alloway: Before you go, I want to talk about your dream projects. What are the stories you want to tell? Is it just horror? I think some people can assume that, if you’re currently making horror. 

James: I think again, it just comes down to what the film is exploring and the ideas behind it. I think genre is a wonderful, wonderful vehicle. It’s just my taste, I suppose. So I’m writing a folk horror, a demon horror, and another body horror. But I also am really interested in sci fi as well, particularly grounded sci fi. One day I’d love to do an epic. I think that would be pretty sick. Anything with a distinct world. I’m into basically anything that’s just not reality.

Alloway: I agree. I think I’m interested in something that’s slightly heightened, even if the heightened reality is within the character’s mind or POV.  I would love to do an epic, a war film!

And finally I have to say that what I really appreciate about Relic is this new perspective. You bring something fresh — we’ve never seen a haunted house story like it before. And I think it’s important to talk about being women in the film industry and acknowledging how that allows for supporting new perspectives. It’s not just about filling a quota. You know what I mean? 

James: Yeah. It makes total sense. Obviously the numbers are nowhere near parity, but there’s an influx of first-time directors who are women. We’re definitely going to get an awesome cohort of genre female directors. I don’t know how you feel, I consider myself a feminist, like every woman should! But it’s not like I set out to make necessarily a feminist film for the sake of it being a feminist film. The feminism is inherent in the filmmaking. Right? So you can call it a feminist film.

Alloway: Absolutely. Your perspective is inherently feminist, as long as you’re pro women!

James: Yeah, exactly! 

Article written by Scott Macaulay for Filmmaker Magazine.

Jessica Swale’s World War II-era “Summerland,” debuting on demand via IFC on July 31, turns the English coastal countryside into a character in the tale of a reclusive writer played by Gemma Arterton — and the house in which much of the action takes place serves as a portal to those surroundings.  

Making her feature film debut, Swale, the Olivier-winning playwright who penned “Nell Gwynn,” enlisted set decorator Philippa Hart to create the ambience of the house. It’s there that Arterton’s Alice is writing a thesis about the mythology of the area, when a boy — an evacuee from London — is left in her care. Overcoming her initial misgivings, she establishes a friendship with the child that reawakens her emotionally and allows her to reconnect with the memories of a former love (Gugu Mbatha-Raw). 

The house that’s featured in the movie is film-friendly — its exteriors were used in the final scenes of 2007’s “Atonement.” Hart, who has worked on movies including “The Hours,” starring Nicole Kidman as Virginia Woolf, loved that it had the seaside built right into its bones. Production designer Christina Moore, who collaborated with Hart on 1995’s “Sense & Sensibility,” shared her ideas for “Summerland” with the set decorator, referencing Charleston, the East Sussex farmhouse its occupants, painters Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant, had turned into a virtual canvas and which was a meeting place of the Bloomsbury Group, a society of writers and artists that included Woolf.

“When Christina first rang me about the project, mentioning Charleston’s interiors and garden, I knew immediately the spirit of the look that she wanted to achieve — that Bloomsbury English bohemian aesthetic,” says Hart. 

In preparation for filming, Hart and the crew carefully emptied the house of its owners’ possessions and re-dressed it with an eye toward Alice’s hermit-like tendencies. For decor, she and the creative team sourced locally from the town of Lewes. “There are so many great artisans in that area,” says Hart, who runs an interior design company in London. She also relied on local upholsterers and furniture makers.

To demonstrate Alice’s deep connection with the countryside, the decorator borrowed freely from the environs; the home looks directly onto the English Channel and the Seven Sisters — a spectacular series of chalk cliffs on the South Downs. 

“Given the house’s location, we were able to dress it in objects directly from the surrounding landscape and seashore, such as driftwood, bird feathers, shells, pebbles, wildflowers and grasses,” says Hart. “A meandering river valley lay behind the house, and a beautiful open chalk grassland lay all around it.” 

There were also tide pools nearby teeming with life.

“We set up a microscope in [Alice’s] study for her research,” Hart says. “We also created a darkroom in her bathroom that enabled us to dress the interior with photographs of the specimens that she would have collected. In the film, Alice is writing an academic thesis on the analysis of folklore and the science behind the myths, so every surface would be layered with books, notes, photographs, maps and drawings.”

Ultimately, the house became a perfect jumping-off point to establish a solitary life that eventually connects with the wider world.

Article written by Valentina I. Valentini for Variety.

So you’re an actor.

Maybe you’re famous, maybe you’re not. Maybe you work regularly enough to support yourself, maybe you don’t, at least not yet. Maybe you were in the middle of a job when COVID-19 sent everyone home, maybe you weren’t.

It doesn’t really matter. Because at this moment, this endless, unprecedented and anxiety-provoking moment, you and the vast majority of your peers — from the legends to the waiters — are all in the same boat: You’re a performer in a world that is suddenly very much not a stage, at least in the traditional sense.

Sheltering at home, writers can still write, painters can paint, musicians can play and dancers can dance. But acting is rarely a one-person deal; how do you stay in artistic shape without a cast, a director, an audience? In many ways, as it turns out, some playful, some practical, some traditional, all of them creative.

If you’re Dame Judi Dench, you vow to memorize the sonnets of Shakespeare and wind up learning TikTok dances with your grandson. If you’re Mandy Patinkin, you allow your son to post videos on social media (occasionally in service of serious fundraising) that capture your hilarious conversations with your wife. If you once starred in a hit television series, you take part in a Zoomified reunion. And there’s always Instagram — early in the shutdown, “Contagion” star Jennifer Ehle posted videos of her reading “Pride and Prejudice,” in which she also starred — or YouTube; John Krasinski launched “Some Good News” while Josh Gad revealed himself to be a very astute interviewer in “Reunited Apart with Josh Gad.”

Reggie Watts, who continues to work — albeit remotely — as bandleader and announcer for CBS’ “The Late, Late Show,” went one step further and debuted his own platform, WattsApp.

“I wanted to have my own multimedia channel, to post videos, do live streaming, geo-locational-based media,” Watts says. “I also have a store where I sell my old electronics on it, and that’s been doing really well.”

The videos include Watts’ unintentionally prescient series “Droneversations” — interviews that are captured via the ultimate social-distancing device, the drone. Past episodes, filmed before the shutdown, featured Fred Armisen and Jack White; the first installment filmed post-COVID will feature Thunder Cat.

Watts, who shared a particularly emotional episode with host James Corden during the early George Floyd protests, is not daunted by the prospect of the entertainment industry going more fully digital. “It’s all about vision,” he says. “I don’t really notice much of a difference, on camera, in my home by myself, not getting immediate feedback. I’m usually fine with that; I just try to entertain myself and that’s usually OK.”

For some performers, the work is more internal.

Uzo Aduba, a 2020 Emmy nominee for her portrayal of congresswoman and presidential candidate Shirley Chisholm in “Mrs. America,” says she’s been using the time to get back to basics, especially observation.

“Before ‘Orange [is the New Black’] I used to observe people,” she says. “I’d see quirky little things on the train, waiting tables, being in the park — and file it in my brain. That actually has been my greatest exercise — being able to socially distance in the park, mask on, and really sit and observe people. Like parents actually parenting, not what my idea of parenting might be. And not in a crazy stalker way,” she adds, laughing, “but to really take in what is a natural response, what is a consistent response. I’ve filed away quite a few things.”

Especially, she says, the physical details of collective anxiety. Living in New York, Aduba experienced a city besieged by COVID-19, and while she had her own reaction to walking past refrigerator trucks being used as makeshift morgues and hearing ambulance sirens blaring all day — “and when I say all day, I mean all day” — she eventually began watching what those feelings looked like on other people.

“The anxiety is real,” she says. “You can see it everywhere. At a grocery store, at a pharmacy, the number of times people look down at the sticker to make sure they’re six feet apart, the shock you feel when you see someone not wearing a mask. Little patterns of behavior.

“The practical of part of acting isn’t happening, but the foundational and analytical aspects are. When I think of parts I have loved, and I have put my greatest inspiration into, it’s been through the analysis of human behavior.”

She recently watched a woman reading alone in the park, “head down, but watching the world, surveilling who was around her. And a family with a little kid came near, looking for a place to sit. They weren’t even that close to her, but her behavior — like she was reading but her eyes were completely tracking where they were going as they came closer. Her body started to come erect — please don’t sit here — and when they passed, there was relief, in her neck and shoulders. I thought, ‘How often does she have that experience and what is like when she goes home?’

Aduba wonders if all of us aren’t, at a certain level, delivering a performance during this crisis. “There’s awareness of an invisible danger, so we’re always at a high alert. That is what being on the stage is like — a dual life. There’s Uzo and there’s the character I’m playing. I could catch a 108 mph fastball on stage, I’m so aware of everything that’s happening. That’s what it’s like now.”

While venues including the Pasadena Playhouse and the Williamstown Theater Festival are experimenting with recorded performances, some actors are staying in shape the old-fashioned way: through workshops and classes. Director Cameron Watson has been teaching acting classes in a small Hollywood theater for years; when COVID-19 made that impossible, he asked students if they would be interested in continuing online. The result was a resounding yes.

“I started talking to industry friends, casting directors, agents, faculties of theater schools,” he says. “They were all asking the same questions — how are we going to re-invent acting classes, how are we going to do scenes, how are we going to move forward?”

He decided that his first set of classes during the shutdown (which my daughter attended) would focus on self-taping. “That’s going to be the future for some time — how we audition, possibly how we will work.” He brought in guests, including Octavia Spencer and Allison Janney, and discovered that actors want to act and talk about the craft any way they can. “Every month I think people won’t want to come back; every month they want to come back, new people want to join, because there’s nothing else we can do.”

Michael O’Neill will likely be teaching classes, though for him the shutdown was compounded by the cancellation of “Council of Dads,” the NBC drama he had been starring in. “It was the most talented, gracious and least selfish cast I’ve ever worked with,” he says. “So I was mourning the loss of a character I wanted to play for 25 years, and it’s worth the grieving.”

He and his daughters built a garden at their Alabama home — “so we could watch something live and grow” — and he has been working on potential projects. A two-man play about brothers that a friend has written, another play called “Alabama Boys” that he’s been working on with another friend, Thom Gossom Jr., about their different experiences growing up in a segregated state. (O’Neill is white, Gossom Jr. is Black.) “We have a script, but we are revising it in light of current events,” O’Neill says, “because there’s a new consciousness that needs to be addressed.”

Like many of us, Gregory Zarian has been using newfound time to work on long-delayed projects. Only in his case, it isn’t cleaning out closets but shoring up his memory skills. “I’m terrible at memorizing,” he says, “which for an actor is not great.” Zarian, who lives in Los Angeles, has had roles in a wide variety of series,including “Westworld.” But after a recent audition for “NCIS” required that he learn his pages before the filming, Zarian hit the books — literally — to address the issue. “I’m just taking pages out of books and learning them. A casting director once told my brother that if you want to memorize something, you read it out loud 10 times, but I’ve learned that if you whisper it, it becomes more personal and stays with you.”

As a recent Daytime Emmy nominee, for his acting work in in the digital series “Venice: The Series,” Zarian was a judge in other categories and, he says, the lack of current work allowed him the time to really study the submissions “as a master class. Really watching to see if you can tell who is telling the truth and who isn’t.

“I really want to get back to work,” he says, “but I’m kind of loving having the time to work on the details.”

Gabriel Iglesias, a.k.a. Fluffy, is not. Loving it, that is. He really wants to get back to work. His tour has been postponed until September but, all things considered, who knows?

“I’m in enforced retirement,” he says. “I’m used to being in front of thousands of people and now … I’m not.”

From his L.A. home, he has been staying engaged on social media, doing Q-and-A’s with fans — the second season of “Mr. Iglesias,” in which he plays a high school teacher, dropped on Netflix last month — and posting videos on TikTok. “I used to be anti-video, but TikTok caught my attention.”

Meanwhile, he’s bummed about missing Comic-Con, happy about his new Funko line — “they are selling way better than I thought they would” — and trying to figure out what his show will be like post-COVID, in both content and form.

“I just tell things that are happening in my life, and if it gets a laugh, I keep it,” he says. But he doesn’t plan on belaboring the shutdown in his act. “I figure that when we come back to work, everything will be about distraction, so it won’t be a big part of my show.”

His worried about the “when” part, however. “People ask are you doing stand-up online? That’s not stand-up; you are removed from the audience. You need the intimacy. Even in a big arena, the people are there, right on top of you. That engagement needs to be there for the show to feel normal to me. Two people at one table, six feet apart from the next table; it’s not the same. And if they’re wearing masks? I can’t wear a mask for a show. I’m sarcastic in a drive-thru and they don’t get it because I’m wearing a mask.“

He is enjoying the chance to get a full night’s sleep. “For the longest time, I’ve been ‘get up early, get on the plane, get on the bus, do a the show, get in a car, get on another plane ... to get eight to 10 hours of sleep every day? I can’t remember the last time that was possible.”

Many people, actors and otherwise, have used the silver lining of down time as a shield against the multi-tentacled anxieties of the pandemic. Like Uzo Aduba, Ann Dowd (“The Handmaid’s Tale,” “The Leftovers”) believes that much of an actor’s work comes down to paying attention to what is happening when you’re not working. Especially now.

She had just finished shooting the upcoming Showtime series “The President is Missing” when production was halted, so she returned to New York, where for a few weeks she “lived on the joy of having finished something.” Then she and her family decamped to New Hampshire, a place she was quite familiar with in the summer, less so in late winter and early spring. “It’s so beautiful, I loved it. Then insecurity started to surface. I started to feel irrelevant. I wondered, ‘What is this about?’ And then I thought, ‘Oh, right; work.’”

After fretting a bit, she decided to “get comfortable with the silence, with doing nothing,” she says. Working on “The Leftovers,” she recalls, she learned that people’s ability to sit with grief is very limited. “Unless we can’t get out of bed, we tend to distract ourselves. If we sit now and examine our feelings, we will have learned so much.”

Speaking to theater students online, she reminded them that this is particularly true for actors.

“I told them, ‘You will have periods of uncertainty as an actor. When you are not working, you will need to remind yourself that ‘I am an actor.’ Weathering this virus and not being in contact is a great time to strengthen that skill,” she said. “Actors have to have a perspective of hope.”

Article written by Mary Mcnamara for LA Times.

The young actor draws upon his personal experience with autism while playing one of the lead roles in a new digital television show. 

The new music-filled series “Little Voice,” which debuted on Apple TV+ earlier this month, is a comforting antidote to the hectic 24-hour news cycle set in a pre-COVID New York City. While the show may center around the gifted but self-doubting songstress Bess, one of the show’s real breakout stars is Kevin Valdez, who plays the lead character’s brother, Louie — an aspiring Broadway actor who lives in a group home for those on the autism spectrum. 

Besides “Little Voice” marking Valdez’s first role on television, playing the character of Louie is especially meaningful to the actor, who was also diagnosed with autism at the age of 22 months. His character is unflinchingly outspoken with an affinity for all things musical and Broadway, a passion shared by Valdez himself, who discovered his love for acting early.

At the young age of 14, Valdez got his first acting gig in Cornerstone Community Church’s theatre production of “Cinderella Kids,” going on to appear in shows like "Seussical Jr." and "The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe."

After catching the first few episodes of “Little Voice,” whose launch was perfectly timed with New York’s Disability Pride Month, we virtually sat down to chat with the budding actor to hear more about his role on the show, his thoughts on neuro-inclusivity and what has been inspiring him this year.

1. Your love of acting started so early. What first attracted you to the performance arts, and what keeps you interested and engaged?

I had two friends from elementary school that had roles in a play at Cornerstone Community Church in Manteca [,Calif.], and that pretty much sparked my interest in becoming an actor. After that, I had a part in the next play the church had two years later. I like pretending to be a person that I’m not, so that makes it pretty interesting.

2. Tell us a bit about your current role on “Little Voice,” and what it means to you personally to be able to play a character with autism. 

In “Little Voice,” Louie is Bess’ older brother that is on the autism spectrum and lives in a group home with a few roommates. He’s obsessed with Broadway and finds himself mesmerized by his interests. It really means a lot to me playing somebody with autism like myself because there are some instances where I sort of act like Louie in real life and I can relate a lot to what he has to go through. But we’re all different, and that includes people with autism and I hope that this realistic portrayal can help spread awareness.

3. Why do you think it is important that actors with disorders and disabilities, both developmental and physical, are given opportunities to play roles that mirror those disorders and disabilities (vs. able bodied actors playing those with physical disabilities, for example)?
Each person has their own special talent that is hidden within themselves. Once everybody figures that out, they start to play an important role in society. It’s also because I think they make potential performances more realistic to others.

4. What is the most important cause to you right now that you believe more people should be informed on?

Those with disabilities are people too that can do normal chores like other people can and they should have their voices heard just like everybody else.

5. Speaking of causes that are important to you, who do you think are the biggest Agent(s) of Change in your field and why?

Besides my parents, I think some of the biggest Agents of Change are among Temple Grandin, who helps educate others with her perspective of how people think with autism, Hester Wagner, the program director of Futures Explored, which specializes in giving out potential job opportunities to those with disabilities, for attracting me to this role, and Joey Travolta, the founder of Inclusion Films, for creating a company that calls out for the special talents of people with disabilities.

6. What movie, book or song inspired you this year, and why?

There’s one film that has recently attracted me closer to film, and that’s Ford v Ferrari, since I’m a fan of auto racing, particularly NASCAR. I like the underdog story that was put into the film, and the main key there is that you should never give up and keep on pushing to something you’re passionate about.

7. If you could wave your magic wand, what one thing would you change for 2020?

I think I speak for the world when I say that I want to change the state the current coronavirus pandemic has brought the world in right now. I hate the site of people getting sick, losing their jobs and sometimes succumbing to the disease, and I wish that life will get back to the way it was very soon.

Article written by Austa Somivichian-Clausen for The Hill.

Writer-director Scott Wiper’s The Big Ugly is the best kind of genre film, a crime movie aware of the traditions in which it’s working but not beholden to them; combining elements of ’40s and ’50s crime fiction (Jim Thompson seems to be a particular touchstone) with the flavor of ’70s Sam Peckinpah and Walter Hill filtered through the visual grammar of ’90s Tony Scott, The Big Ugly synthesizes its influences into a unique and compelling western noir. Its emotional power comes largely from Wiper’s richly textured script and the performances by his consistently riveting ensemble, which includes Vinnie Jones, Malcolm McDowell, Ron Perlman, Leven Rambin, Bruce McGill and Nicholas Braun as the players in an oil and money laundering scheme gone bad.

What takes the movie to a whole other level is the consistently innovative cinematography by Jeremy Osbern, who, like Wiper, incorporates a wide array of influences, then dazzles the viewer with inventive ways of reimagining them. Shooting with the new RED Gemini, Osbern creates images that have a classical solidity and resonance but a modern immediacy and impact; the result is one of the best American films I’ve seen so far in 2020. I spoke with Osbern about his work on The Big Ugly a week before its release; the movie’s set to open on Friday, July 24 in drive-ins and whatever indoor theaters are still operating, and on VOD on the 31st.      

Filmmaker: One of the things I liked about The Big Ugly is that it contains elements of classic Westerns and noir films, but combines the traditions it’s drawing from in a unique way. What were some of your influences or visual references?

Jeremy Osbern: When I first talked on the phone with writer/director Scott Wiper, he asked if I’d seen The Outlaw Josey Wales, as he saw that as a visual touchstone for this film. I had literally just rewatched it that week, as my wife and I had decided that we wanted to revisit early Clint Eastwood movies. Eastwood’s DP on that film, Bruce Surtees, has been a definite influence on me, so from that first conversation on, Scott and I really felt like we were on the same page. In a lot of movies from the ’60s and ’70s, darkness was embraced in a way it’s not today. Even in something like The Sound of Music, people remember Maria singing on a mountaintop in bright daylight, but a lot of that movie is almost pitch black. A lot of movies from that time were pushing the boundaries of darkness in really interesting ways. In The Outlaw Josey Wales, there are whole scenes in which you can’t see a character’s face. It’s really bold and ambitious filmmaking that serves a dark story, and that was the starting point we created for The Big Ugly. Scott wrote a really great script, and the majority of these characters are flawed and are in some very dark places thematically. We wanted the visuals to echo the story, so we put them in deep shadow. It’s a little bit Surtees, a little bit noir, and some late ’80s/early ’90s Tony Scott thrown in for good measure. Cinematographer Ward Russell (who shot The Last Boy Scout for Tony Scott) showed me a lot of kindness when I was starting out in my career, offering me tips and buying me lunch when he’d swing through my hometown (we both went to the University of Kansas), so part of these visuals are also an homage to him. One of my proudest moments was on the first day of production, DIT Matt Mulcahey brought images out to set on a laptop and said he wanted to double check that this was the look I was going for before he output dailies, “since right now it looks like an early ’90s Tony Scott film.” I gave him a high-five and we instantly became good friends.

Filmmaker: How did you get the job on The Big Ugly, and what were your initial conversations with the director like once you came on board?

Osbern: I got a call from the film’s producer, Karri O’Reilly. She asked if she could send me a script. I read it and was completely blown away by how good it was. When I read scripts, I usually think in terms of paintings more so than visual references from other movies, and on the second page, Scott had written something like “Soft light through tiny airplane windows. The noir silhouette of a beautiful woman rises from a leather chair.” Instantly, I thought of a painting I had seen by the Argentinian artist Fabian Perez. His paintings usually feature starkly lit people dressed well, but there’s always a sadness behind their expressions, like there’s something missing in their life. Those images seemed to resonate with me as I thought of this movie, so I created a look book almost entirely based on his paintings, and I think it was very much in line with the visuals Scott had been picturing. I flew out that weekend and my first day in Kentucky, Scott and I drove around all day, just the two of us, getting to know each other, looking at possible locations and talking through the feel of the movie. Over the next several weeks, we continued to talk through every scene, visiting locations. A lot of the time, we’d just pull chairs out of a trunk and sit by a waterway, or in the woods, and did a lot of our preproduction outdoors one on one surrounded by nature.

Filmmaker: What kind of camera did you shoot on, and how was it chosen?

Osbern: We were actually the first film to shoot using the RED Gemini camera. RED had developed a new Low Light mode for that camera that I knew would be instrumental in being able to pull off some of our big night exteriors. It was difficult tracking down the very first camera bodies in time, but we got them just before production started, and I couldn’t have been happier with the images.

Filmmaker: What were some of the challenges inherent in being the first to shoot with the Gemini, and what were the pleasures?

Osbern: With the Gemini, I almost had to retrain my brain at times to light for 3200 or 4000 ISO. I feel fortunate that I was in the last generation of cinematographers who learned the craft by shooting on film. My first three features I shot on 35mm. At that time, 500T was the fastest stock available, so lighting for a big night exterior, for example, you might throw 20Ks in condors to establish your base backlight, then throw in some parcans to accent from there. In the Low Light mode on the Gemini, it became apparent in pre-production that I could get away with throwing a bunch of small lights in a condor, sending it high in the air and just dialing in lots of pinpoints of light, rather than big washes, which was even more beneficial for the dark visuals we were going for.

Filmmaker: Elaborate on that a little more. I’m curious what your overall philosophy was when it came to the lighting on the picture.

Osbern: Overall, the key word on set was “darker.” Key grip Michael Stoecker was adding negative fill to every scene to block out ambient light, and it became a running joke for the gaffer, Michael Dickman, to ask me, “You want any fill light in this scene?” The answer to that was always no. A lot of the time, we would only use backlight, or just pound one light into the deep background and the actors would exist in the darkness closer to camera. For one daylight fight scene, we positioned the actors so that they would be backlit by the sun throughout the scene, then Stoecker and his team built me a 20’x20′ floppy, rigged off of a condor that we brought in over camera to block all camera side ambient light. The result is an outdoor daylight fight in which the camera side goes completely black, highlighting the tension of the scene.

Another day, we shot inside a $50 million private jet. We rigged a 20′ black solid frame to a condor and moved it throughout the day to block the sunlight, then rigged 18K and 6K par HMIs outside the plane windows to provide stark beams of light. This was all opposite camera, and everything camera side was blacked out to make an extremely contrasty plane interior.

Filmmaker: What kinds of lenses did you use, and how and why did you select them?

Osbern: This story harkens back to some of the character-driven action movies of the ’60s and ’70s that we don’t really see as much today. We wanted a hint of ’70s visuals to come through, and combined with my initial visual references being impressionistic-style paintings, I wanted to shoot this film on older ’70s Russian anamorphic lenses. I used a set of LOMO anamorphics—especially wide open, they really do have a beautiful, painterly quality to the images. Mechanically, they’re not as easy to work with as modern lenses, but 1st AC Rick Crumrine knocked it out of the park with being able to adapt quickly. He and the whole camera team made everything go really smoothly.

Filmmaker: You mentioned Kentucky earlier. Is that where you shot the movie?

Osbern: We shot on location in Kentucky. We used several small towns to double as the West Virginia oil lands in the story. The people of Kentucky were wonderful and welcoming, but our biggest challenge was that that summer randomly saw the most rain in the history of that area. Almost every day it seemed we had rain. One of our outdoor locations even flooded, and we had to wait for it to dry out before filming there. Eventually, we ran out of rainout locations and had to get really creative with the scheduling to make everything work, but thanks to producer Karri O’Reilly and 1st AD S.B. Weathersby, we were able to complete the film on time.

Everything in Kentucky that season was so incredibly green, especially with all the rain. Respecting the land is a theme that runs through the movie, and that part of Kentucky is beautiful and wild, and it really was a perfect match for the visuals of this film.

Filmmaker: Did you do anything significant in post to augment your work? Tell me a little about how you worked with the colorist—as well as the DIT on set.

Osbern: Matt Mulcahey was the DIT on the film, and he was the best I’ve ever worked with. When I’m working with RED cameras, I’m constantly dialing in look settings from scene to scene and even shot to shot to get it as close to the finished image as I can. Matt would then take that footage and finesse it to get it perfect before outputting the dailies. Our editor, Jordan Downey, was on location with us in Kentucky and started cutting as soon as we began shooting, so Matt made it a really streamlined workflow.

After the film was locked, we did the final color grade with Doug Delaney at Technicolor in Hollywood. Scott had worked with Doug previously and knew he wanted him to do this film. He had just come off of doing the color grade on Captain Marvel, so were happy that it worked out for him to work on our film. I spent a week at Technicolor with Doug and Scott, and we got through the whole film before I had to fly out to start shooting another project, so Scott oversaw the final pass with Doug. Doug is extremely talented, and he was a joy to work with, for sure.

Filmmaker: Another thing I really enjoyed in this film was the ensemble of great character actors. As a cinematographer, how do you see your role in terms of facilitating the actors’ best work?

Osbern: I would say Scott Wiper’s directing style is comparable to that of Robert Altman. I have several friends who worked with Altman, and like Altman, Scott enjoys the freedom to work with the actors in the actual space, to improvise, and create something organic while on set. Both of them like a moving camera that can change from shot to shot, and take to take. The actors would come to set, rehearse in the space, and once we knew the areas, I would light the location to fit the actors, and allowing for a little play shot to shot, take to take.

We had an all-star cast on this one. A Clockwork Orange was the film that made me want to become a filmmaker, so working with Malcolm McDowell was a dream come true, and he was a real champion of the bold look we were going for. I even tracked down a Kinoptik 9.8mm lens like Stanley Kubrick had used on A Clockwork Orange so I could film him with the same lens—it was the only spherical lens I used on the movie. He and I became friends; we would have breakfast together in the hotel lobby, and he even invited me to his 75th birthday party. Ron Perlman was the consummate professional, and is truly an actor’s actor. And Vinnie Jones is next level good in this film. He’s known for playing big, tough, impenetrable characters, but there’s a very warm, caring side to Vinnie. Scott and Vinnie have been friends for years, and Scott wrote this script specifically to showcase Vinnie’s wide range of talents. I think people are going to be really surprised by this film. Vinnie is an amazing leading man.

Article written by Jim Hemphill for Filmmaker Magazine.

“It’s so great that you own a house,” biologist Jane (Jane Adams) says to sister Amy (Kate Lyn Sheil) by phone early in Amy Seimetz’s trippy drama of psychological contagion, She Dies Tomorrow. “This is the best thing you could have done.” Amy has only just moved in, boxes are everywhere, but a new L.A. mortgage hasn’t quelled whatever demons have pushed her to a tremulous and despairing state—Jane can hear it in her voice. “I’ll come over,” Jane says. “Don’t do anything you might regret. Go for a walk. Or why don’t you try watching a movie?” “A movie’s 90 minutes,” Amy replies.

In the time it takes Jane to arrive, Amy drinks, plays Mozart’s Requiem again and again, changes into a fancy dress, smokes, enters into alcoholic relapse, sets a small fire and attacks her backyard with a leaf blower. When Jane finally shows up, Amy makes a stark declaration: “I’m going to die tomorrow.” (Oh, and Amy says that after she’s gone she would like her skin to be used to make a leather jacket.)

That line—“I am going to die tomorrow”—becomes a mantra spoken by different performers throughout Seimetz’s second feature as the story’s scope expands beyond Amy’s house across Los Angeles. (There are great turns here by not just Sheil and Adams but also, among others, Kentucker Audley, Katie Aselton, Tunde Adebimpe, Michelle Rodriguez and, as a grizzled leatherworker, filmmaker James Benning.) Variously a suicidal cry for help, a bleakly comic provocation and an expression of numbed acceptance, the phrase, passed from person to person, is also a marker of viral transmission. Punctuated by strobing disco lights and blasts of orchestral music, She Dies Tomorrowbroadens from an experimental character study of one on-the-edge woman into a haunting and consistently inventive kind of sociological horror film. And Amy’s dark words become—especially when heard through the filter of today, when fractious political speech enables an actual virus to march across the country—the incantation of a dying society.

Or, perhaps, within a film that Seimetz says is about anxiety, the repetition of “I’m going to die tomorrow” is just evidence of racing thoughts. “The word is now a virus,” wrote William Burroughs in The Ticket That Exploded. “The flu virus may have once been a healthy lung cell. It is now a parasitic organism that invades and damages the central nervous system. Modern man has lost the option of silence. Try halting sub-vocal speech. Try to achieve even ten seconds of inner silence. You will encounter a resisting organism that forces you to talk. That organism is the word.”

Seimetz began as an actress in the early aughts, appearing in numerous independent films before directing 2012’s Sun Don’t Shine, a sun-blasted noir that suggested a cross between Wandaand They Live by Night. Following that debut there was more acting—independents as well as studio films and television like Alien: Covenant and Stranger Things—and the STARZ series she created with Lodge Kerrigan, The Girlfriend Experience, for which Seimetz wrote and directed her own episodes across two seasons. Financed in part with fees she earned from performing in the 2019 Pet Sematary remake, She Dies Tomorrow marks a return to her independent roots as well as, with its expressive effects and genre-slipperiness, a bold new direction. Cinematographer Jay Keitel, who shot both Sun Don’t Shine and episodes of The Girlfriend Experience, experiments with filters and theatrical lighting, giving the film’s modish Angeleno homes an eerie luminosity. Tonal changes are sometimes abrupt—a hilariously painful birthday party scene, where the dialogue revolves around dolphin sex, sits just a few moments away from the bleakest breakup you’ll ever see onscreen. And, playing a character named Amy, Sheil is excellent as a woman attempting a new beginning while sifting through the emotional detritus of a past failed relationship—and doing so amidst, possibly, the end of world.

She Dies Tomorrow was set to premiere at the 2020 SXSW Film Festival. That, of course, didn’t happen, but a NEON acquisition did, and the film is scheduled to be released in August 2020. I talked with Seimetz and Sheil about anxiety, real estate and the film’s unplanned resonances with the current times.

Filmmaker: I want to start with an observation of sorts, which is that She Dies Tomorrow is very much a film to just experience. It’s metaphorically and thematically rich, but it’s also kind of a trip, with its lighting effects and sound design and music. So, I thought I’d ask you, Amy, about how much of the film’s sensory intensity was baked into it from the beginning, and how much you added or discovered later in the filmmaking process.

Seimetz: I think it was a little of both, really. It’s an anxiety movie, like most of my stuff is. And because I’ve been writing for TV, I was interested in something that’s not so overt. I wanted to play around with a plotline that was, for lack of a better term, obvious but also obtuse, in a way. Because keeping it obtuse adds to the anxiety, you know? It’s a monster movie, but because you’re not revealing the monster you don’t really know what they’re running from. So, how do you visually and sonically convey that to the audience? 

In the beginning, I wasn’t sure if it was going to be a short film. We shot the film in pieces, and because we had that luxury the shooting could inform the writing. I would shoot some, then I’d rewrite based on the strength of what we were shooting. Every time we’d shoot something, I’d be like, “Oh, we can get away with less explaining and more experience.” And the more we shot, the more I was able to lean into the visuals and sound design and performances, as opposed to overexplaining what [the characters] were feeling.

I’m so blessed to have access to actors who are so good—so giving and trusting. You know that saying, don’t work with your friends? I couldn’t disagree more. I only have the best sort of deep relationships to the films, especially on the independent level, because I’m able to explain and maybe overshare with [my friends] where exactly [the material] is coming from. And so for me, the personal becomes universal because I’m able to work with my friends.

Filmmaker: What was the first scene that you shot?

Seimetz: The very first thing that I shot is Kate inside of my house, her feeling the floors, feeling the walls and putting on the record. That’s my house, and her name is Amy.

Filmmaker: I was going to get to that.

Seimetz: There’s a lot of meta in the film. Sometimes it’s intentional, and sometimes I realized subconsciously I was making these meta decisions. When I started shooting it, I was… I should say frustrated. As an actor, I get to practice my craft quite frequently. I like to go on to sets and then leave and not have it be my responsibility to figure out if the movie is finished. But as a writer—and I’m extremely lucky to be writing for television—and as a filmmaker, it takes so much time to put something together to shoot. So, while I was developing one of these TV shows, I really just wanted to start shooting something. I knew the general idea: my house, that was easy. And it’s Kate and Jay, who shot Sun Don’t Shine. We lived in Miami together and did my second season of Girlfriend Experience. So, it was just really easy to put it together, and I gave myself permission to lean into the moment, into the atmosphere. With TV, or any normal film production, you start production, and it’s a marathon. I just leaned into the “I don’t know quite yet” element and was very present with making each moment alluring in the beginning.

Filmmaker: The idea that depression, anxiety or suicidal ideation could be contagious—did you have that concept at the beginning, or was it more of a portrait of the Amy character in your house?

Seimetz: It was more a portrait. I knew that she was certain that she was going to die tomorrow—what does that feel like? I didn’t want it to be a cancer movie or about battling a disease. Then, when I introduced Jane to the situation, it was really interesting. As soon as Jane came on the scene, I was like, now Jane has to have it. It just fell into place.

Filmmaker: Kate, what were your questions going into this project in terms of how you’d portray a character named Amy in a film directed by Amy and shot in her house?

Sheil: Amy and I have known each other and worked together for a long time, so I feel like there’s a great deal of shorthand between us. When the project started, I knew basically what Amy just said—that this woman knows that she’s going to die the following day. I had to make a decision at the top as to what that would look like for me personally, and there was personal work that I did to try and ground it for myself. But, I feel like you hit on something important, which is the experiential nature of the movie. That was my experience of shooting it, too. Amy was exploring her house with the camera, and she was directing me what to do, so those early shoots were very physical, in a way. You’re listening to the song and touching the wall and that’s a very tactile, simple thing to do. Then, Amy kept expanding the world, which was great. 

Filmmaker: For you, Amy, what was it that personally grounded the film and the Amy character?

Seimetz: [Before shooting] I had an incredible amount of anxiety. I was a first-time homeowner by myself in my house and trying to figure out, am I supposed to have more of a relationship with this house than I feel right now? So, I was actually doing the things that Kate was doing [in the film] and had this sudden [thought] when I was by myself: What if somebody was watching me right now? What if somebody just saw me laying on the floor, touching my floors? They would think I’ve lost it and that I’m suicidal and completely crazy. It made me laugh really hard—I have such a dark sense of humor—because [the behavior] is kind of crazy. But that’s how the style of the movie evolved. While shooting, we’re extremely internal and subjective, then we pop out for these little flutters of comedy. Kate and I talk about this all the time. Anything I find hilarious has a little drop of poison in it. I think Sun Don’t Shine is hysterical. And even parts of The Girlfriend Experience, which is, I think, a secret comedy.

Filmmaker: Was the process of buying your house an anxious one? 

Seimetz: No, it wasn’t, honestly. I didn’t even know if my credit was good enough because when I was younger, I maxed out my credit cards to make my movies and never paid it back, so my credit was terrible. My credit is good now, so I was like, let’s see if I can actually do this. I put a bid on a house and lost, and then—and I don’t know what that says about me—I got really competitive. The second bid I put in, I got it. I was in Montreal filming Pet Sematary when I closed, and I was like, “Oh my god, I have a house that I’m going back to.” I was essentially a vagabond for 10 years, living out of a suitcase, then subletting. So, I come back from Montreal and suddenly own a house. When you go into the arts, you kind of give up the idea of ever owning a house. It was like, what did I just do? And the first thought in my head was, “Well, now you have a free location.” And I just started making the movie.

Filmmaker: The record she puts on is Mozart’s Requiem, which is famous as a sort of death mass. But it’s also an unfinished work, filled in by others after Mozart’s death. Is there a significance to the music choice other than the fact that the work is associated with death?

Seimetz: Well, one, yes, it’s Requiem, and she’s very intentionally playing that to feel something about her death. She’s not sure how to connect to the idea of death, so she’s playing it over and over to find some semblance of what she’s supposed to be feeling. And in terms of it being unfinished, I mean, that’s part of what the movie’s about—you’re never really ready. I don’t know how many people are ever ready for death even though we’re all going to die. There’s no finality except for the actual moment that you die. You can’t solve death.

Filmmaker: Kate, what are the challenges of playing someone who has that inability to connect or access emotion? 

Sheil: The disconnect between wanting to feel the enormity of something and being unable to is something I can relate to pretty easily. As a person who suffers from anxiety, which many of us do, it sort of puts you at a remove from actually feeling the thing that you’re trying to feel. And death is one of those things we’ll be struggling with for our entire lives leading up to it. The enormity of it is impossible to process. The movie is also about the concept of believing people. That is something that I maybe didn’t even realize in the moment of shooting, but there is such an overarching theme of a person speaking their truth, or saying what is happening to them, and that person not being believed. Then, at the end of the day, it turns out that whatever that person’s experience was was the most truthful.

Filmmaker: The Amy character has flashback scenes to an earlier relationship with a man played by Kentucker Audley—your costar, Kate, from Amy’s Sun Don’t Shine. Were the two of you drawing from the relationship in that film in any way or starting from a clean slate? Is that another meta layer in the film?

Sheil: Definitely a clean slate in terms of how we approach the scenes, but I don’t think the slate could ever be entirely clean. Amy was doing something very intentional and smart by having Kentucker play the part because we do have history and a rapport and chemistry. I’ve known Kentucker for nearly as long as I’ve known Amy. I have no idea what anybody else’s experience of it will be, but when I watch the film it seems like we have some sort of relationship. It’s part of an actor’s job, but it can be difficult to fake intimacy. And he and I have actually some level of intimacy as friends. 

Filmmaker: Amy, can I ask you to unpack one thing: the leather jacket? The Amy character goes from web surfing for her cremation urn to wondering if her body can be turned into a leather jacket. 

Seimetz: As Kate knows, a lot of stuff like that starts out as a joke, and then I’m like, “Wait, that’s really great.” Unfortunately, because of loved ones who have passed away, I’ve had to think about those things. And, again, all of my humor has a drop of poison in it. When I had to go through some of these [situations], I would be laughing [while asking], “What urn do we choose? Does it even matter? Maybe we should build [the ashes] into a firework?” This is the gallows humor that happens when shit hits the fan, you know? And what’s the psychology of somebody who is [thinking], “I’m going to die tomorrow”? Seeing, unfortunately, people who were actually dying, their brains go to weird spaces. And so, I jokingly said out loud when Kate was feeling the floor, “What if you say you want to be made into a leather jacket because you realized that the wood on the floor used to be a tree and used to be alive?” I said it to have some levity in the moment, but once I said that, I knew on a writerly level that I had to pursue it. 

Filmmaker: I have to end on the obvious question: What’s it been like seeing your film go out into the world during this time of pandemic, when people have been isolating themselves? I watched the film initially when it would have come out, the time of SXSW. I watched it again before this interview and experienced it in such a different way, especially in thinking about the anxiety of personal encounters during this pandemic—this idea that maybe if someone isn’t wearing a mask something invisible is being passed to you.

Seimetz: Completely. Social anxiety is really heightened for people. I’ve been in quarantine for months, except for going to marches, then I was driving to Colorado. I had my masks and Clorox wipes and hand sanitizer, and I felt like a crazy person because I’d stop to go to the bathroom and I’d be one of the only ones in a mask. I thought, have I just been living in my L.A. metropolitan bubble? In the same way everyone was so shocked by the 2016 election, I thought, am I the crazy one? Am I not seeing what everyone else is seeing? But I kept my mask on.

[The film’s release] is completely surreal. We made it in a vacuum, and what was on my mind was, obviously, my own anxiety but also how contagious ideas can be politically. We didn’t have a proper premiere at a festival, so it’s been interesting having people watch it now, with what’s happening. It’s no longer obtuse—it’s suddenly very literal, which is very strange to me. It’s really interesting that it is about isolation and wanting to connect but not being able to in a lot of ways. You know, my relationship to movies always changes based off of what I’m going through. I rewatch a lot of my favorite films, like Barbara Loden’s Wanda, and [take] a different meaning from them. I don’t want to ignore how traumatic and tragic it is for the entire world, but as a filmmaker, it’s like, wow, I didn’t see the relationship of [this film] to the viewer coming at all, you know?

Article written by Scott Macaulay for Filmmaker Magazine.

The Black Panther Party, with its firm commitment to nourishing and nurturing the children of Oakland’s barely served African-American community, was founded all the way back in 1966. So it’s a bit shocking that it took nearly half a century later for the Radical Monarchs to be born. Or maybe not. After all, historically, queer women of color — like the Monarchs’ tireless co-founders Anayvette Martinez and Marilyn Hollinquest — had never been given leading roles in the Black Panther show.


Fortunately, dedicated feminist and filmmaker Linda Goldstein Knowlton and her all-female team (including EP Grace Lee) are now shining a documentary spotlight on Oakland’s newest (youngest) activist movement: an alternative to the Girl Scout Brownies for girls of color that can go from toasting marshmallows to marching for Black trans lives in a single bound. Or as 8-year-old member Amia puts it at the start of the film, “Something about social justice that is fun is that we get to kind of make history — or “herstory” as we like to say it. And we get to be one tiny little part of it. ‘Cause we all know that a lot of tiny little parts can equal one big part.” (That said, by the time of the troop’s trip to the state capitol to lobby lawmakers at the end, it’s pretty clear these girls’ ambitions are far from tiny. Amia for one takes a spin on the marble floor and sighs, “I was meant to be here.” Out of the mouths of radical babes indeed.)

Filmed over three years, including both before and after the 2016 presidential election, We Are The Radical Monarchs follows not just the third-through-fifth graders as they earn their badges (in such subjects as “radical beauty,” “radical bodies,” and “radical roots”), but also goes behind the scenes with the scrappy cofounders who put their day-job skills in community advocacy and organizing to work. In other words, Hollinquest and Martinez have found a way to harness willpower in lieu of financing to expand BIPOC girl power into a nationwide revolution.

Prior to the doc’s July 20th airing on POV, Filmmaker reached out to the Emmy Award-nominated director to learn more about the inspiring project, including shooting with underage characters and ensuring diversity behind the lens.

Filmmaker: So how did you first encounter the Radical Monarchs and decide to follow not just the troop but the tireless cofounders leading these fierce (and adorable) girls?

Knowlton: I first read an article (“Radical Brownies: is this the future of girl groups?”) about the Radical Monarchs and their cofounders in The Guardian in January of 2015. They had just formed in December of 2014 with a group of 12 girls. They received a slew of press after they were photographed marching in the Oakland Black Lives Matter march – wearing their Black Panther-inspired berets and carrying a banner that read “Radical Brownies” (the group’s original name). I read their mission and vision statements and felt incredibly inspired. I mean, how could I not be? Their mission statement says, “The Radical Monarchs create opportunities for young girls of color to form fierce sisterhood, celebrate their identities and contribute radically to their communities.” Their vision statement says, “The Radical Monarchs empower young girls of color so that they stay rooted in their collective power, brilliance, and leadership in order to make the world a more radical place.”

From the beginning I knew I wanted to follow Anayvette Martinez and Marilyn Hollinquest — the organization’s cofounders — to see how two women who started a group for 12 girls would respond to the pressures of being asked to create troops across the country. At the time, both worked 60-hour weeks as community organizers, plus were taking care of their own families. And when they received requests form over 200 cities across the US for troops, they were basically being asked to start a movement. The biggest change to my initial idea of “a year in the life” of starting a movement was that we followed them for three-and-a-half years.


Filmmaker: As a documentarian, is gaining access different when you’re dealing with underage protagonists? Did you meet with the parents and kids to discuss concerns and negotiate specific boundaries?

Knowlton: It really is all about respect and trust, right? I have worked with younger protagonists in a few films == The World According to Sesame Street, Somewhere Between, and Whale Rider (though not a doc) — so I came to this film with positive examples of working with youth in careful and respectful ways.

After going to Oakland to meet with Anayvette and Marilyn to get their approval to make the film, they had me send an introductory email to all of the families to pitch myself and the project. I explained to them that when I work with children I make clear to the kids that they have the power and agency to always tell me if they are uncomfortable with the camera being on. And also that they don’t have to answer any questions that they don’t feel comfortable answering. And I explained to the families that I’m the parent of a (POC) daughter their own daughters’ ages. As a filmmaker I make the wellbeing of the child a priority.

Then I went back up to Oakland to meet with the parents in person and to answer any questions == and they all gave permission! After filming a couple of Radical Monarchs meetings and interviewing all the girls and at least one of the parents, the trust we were all building with each other really took hold. We became part of the Radical Monarch family.

Filmmaker: I believe you work with an all-female crew, though I’m not sure how many on the team identify as BIPOC. As an intersectional feminist and filmmaker, how do you go about ensuring diversity behind the lens?

Knowlton: We worked with as many BIPOC womxn crew members as possible, whenever possible! I’m LA-based, and this was my first film in the Bay Area, so I relied on recommendations from friends and colleagues to meet a new crew base. I always asked about BIPOC womxn first. Brown Girls Doc Mafia was also an incredible organization/resource that I tapped into. After that it would be about people’s availability for our shoot days.


Filmmaker: What was the editing process like in terms of shaping a cohesive story? You’ve got the Monarchs and the cofounders, of course, but also threads such as the troop expansion (not to mention the backdrop of the 2016 election).

Knowlton: In addition to all of those storylines over three-and-a-half years, my collaborator (editor and producer) Katie Flint got pregnant and had a baby. And I had cancer treatments and surgeries. The editing process was complex to say the least (especially considering we thought we were only going to shoot for a year).

In terms of shaping the story with all that footage, what finally clicked was the idea of showing the many layers of growth of the cofounders and troop one from almost their beginning through the troop’s graduation. Then we grounded that arc with what we called the “external spine” of the story – i.e. what was going on in the country, using the news headlines to track the passage of time and what the Radical Monarchs were always up against. That “click” came after filming for two-plus years. 

Filmmaker: Now that the film will be airing nationwide, how are the Monarchs preparing for the media exposure? Do you worry at all that the conservative backlash — something the cofounders have dealt with since the troop’s inception — might intensify, especially now that we’re approaching yet another fraught election?

Knowlton: I’m going to let Anayvette answer this one. “Yes, anytime there is a bump in our media visibility the trolls come out of the woodwork! We’ll be closely monitoring all of our social media sites, but otherwise we’re just going to keep on pushing and focus on our work and movement. There is too much we want to do to get distracted with all the hater noise.”

Article written by Lauren Wissot for Filmmaker Magazine.