And maybe important to the kids who will see it, as well.

“There’s that adage about 10,000 hours of experience,” Fuller says, “and I definitely had that under my belt as a showrunner. You’re the director of directors. I am heavily involved in the design and style of a show. As someone who loves aesthetics and finds great emotion in them, that background gave me the ability to communicate all the things we were trying to achieve.”

Fuller had a simple pitch for Dust Bunny: “A little girl hires a hitman to kill the monster under her bed.” 

The family horror film bursts with as much color as gunfire in a giddy genre mash-up of action and monsters. 

The bunny of the title is a beast under the bed of young Aurora (Sophie Sloan). When it eats her foster parents, she seeks protection from her neighbor, Resident 5B (Mads Mikkelsen). Along their fairy-tale journey, they face off against assassins, the Queen of Killers (played by Sigourney Weaver), and Dust Bunny.

To Aurora, emotions can be as scary as monsters and as thrilling as action. She fights through everything — much like Weaver’s famous heroine in the Alien films, Ripley.

“I talked with Sigourney about how characters like Ripley or Geneviève Bujold in Coma were the women I grew up admiring as symbols of righteousness and goodness,” Fuller says. “As a queer person, they were my heroes. Sigourney said, ‘It’s funny you found power in Ripley; I see her as someone who didn’t have power and had to find it.’ 

“I told her, ‘That’s why she matters so much, not just to queer kids, but to anyone who feels marginalized or powerless. To look at Ellen Ripley and say, ‘If she can survive, I have a chance.’

“That’s such an important message in Aurora: Despite being a little girl, she kept rescuing herself again and again until someone came to help. I hope people who need that encouragement will find something in Aurora they can relate to and be inspired by.”

Bryan Fuller on Reuniting With Mads Mikkelsen for Dust Bunny

The project is a reunion between Fuller and his Hannibal star, Mads Mikkelsen, who plays both an anti-hero and surrogate father. The actor’s stoicism and jumpsuits pop as brightly as the candy-colored action. 

“Mads is a huge Bruce Lee fan, and I wanted him in a yellow tracksuit, fighting with nunchucks,” Fuller says. “It’s pure wish-fulfillment for him. When Mads came in for his fitting, he said, ‘I’ve been trying to figure out who this guy is, who would wear all these clothes, and I finally had to give up and trust you.’”

Dust Bunny was originally planned as an episode of the 2020 reboot of Steven Spielberg’s Amazing Stories, but the series was canceled. The original show debuted in 1985 and was an early production by Amblin Entertainment, the company Spielberg co-founded.

“There was something about the Amblin brand of high-concept, emotional storytelling,” Fuller says, “that gave you an adventure, that gave you young people in danger, that excited me growing up. Seeing those films was appointment viewing, in a way we’ve kind of lost in the cineplex.”

When Fuller was writing Dust Bunny, his playlist included composers Alexandre Desplat, Jerry Goldsmith, and the man behind the Bride of Frankenstein score, Franz Waxman. In the vein of the classic Universal Monsters, Fuller wanted to see the humanity in his big and furry titular creature. 

“I found Universal Monsters so insightful about the human condition and monstrosities,” Fuller says. “Often, we remember the snapshots of those films and usually the monstrous poses, but they are three-dimensional characters with yearning and pain and being marginalized. I find them deeply relatable.”

Fuller is no stranger to writing outsiders concealing their true nature, from Ned talking to the dead in Pushing Daisies or Mikkelsen’s version of Dr. Lecter in Hannibal. 

Fuller and his cinematographer, Nicole Hirsch Whitaker, talked often about the “flavors” of color they brought to the film’s palette. They wanted an aesthetic both savory and sweet. 

“Our movie was mango chicken, not something purely savory like Hannibal or purely sweet like Pushing Daisies,” Fuller says. “We drew inspiration from French cinema. I’m a big fan of French maximalism.” 

Bryan Fuller on POV

Fuller says among the films they discussed were The Umbrellas of Cherbourg, The City of Lost Children and La Femme Nikita, because all had such strong points of view.

To express Aurora’s perspective, Fuller and Whitaker toyed with ARRI lenses, and detuned anamorphics to dial up the anxiety and isolation. 

“We were going through lenses that we pulled, and Nicole removed the matte board at one point,” Fuller said, “and we had this wonderful 3:1 aspect ratio. We looked at the frame and thought, ‘Is there any reason we shouldn’t shoot this in 3:1?’ Because looking at the frame and looking at the model that we had on the other side of the camera, it created a psychological space that captured Aurora’s plight.” 

From Aurora’s perspective, ceilings are tall and hallways are long. Her apartment building is funky and timeless, with its gated elevator, warm colors, and painted snakes along the stairwell. 

The film took advantage of the historic locations in its shooting location, Budapest.

“Location scout Marci Bálint showed us the refurbished Hungarian Treasury Building,” Fuller says. “We debated: Should we choose something more traditional, something that felt specifically European? Not that the apartment building we landed on didn’t feel European in that sort of Beaux-Arts, Art Deco extravagance. Once we settled on that location, it informed the look of this film.”

Outside the apartment, the world is an animal kingdom. Production designer Jeremy Reed packed Aurora’s apartment and other locations, including a shark-infected restaurant in Chinatown, with vibrancy and symbolism. 

“There’s a Chinese zodiac through-line running through many of the characters — snakes, chickens, dragons, pandas,” Fuller explains. The production even considered shooting scenes at a European zoo, but Fuller and his crew felt that the conditions for the animals were inadequate, and that didn’t sit well with them. 

The director, accustomed to television’s hustle and bustle, relished exploring character and story with his department heads like never before. 

“With showrunning, you’re constantly looking ahead,” Fuller says. “As soon as you finish shooting, you’re prepping the next one while still filming, so you rarely live in the moment. Directing let me have a more intimate experience — to live with the actors and department heads, to build meaningful relationships — rather than flying at 30,000 feet as a showrunner, clearing the road ahead.”

Trust was essential to Dust Bunny. Fuller says Sheila Atim, who plays an action-ready social service worker, epitomized the communal atmosphere he seeks. 

“Sheila often stood right next to the stunt performers,” Fuller recalls. “She called out before another take: ‘Bryan, I think the stunt guy’s hurt. I don’t think he can do another one.’ She noticed things I couldn’t see from behind the camera. People looking out for each other, reinforcing that let’s-put-on-a-show energy you hear about in old Judy-and-Mickey stories from classic Hollywood.”

Dust Bunny is now in theaters, from Roadside Attractions.

Main image: Sophie Sloane, Mads Mikkelsen and Sigourney Weaver in Dust Bunny. Roadside Attractions

She played collegiate soccer at Yale University, then represented the Phillipines, where her father was born, in the 2023 FIFA Women’s World Cup. “Maybe It’s Just the Rain” explores the crucial moment for her, her teammates, her family, and the Philippines, which was making its debut in a major FIFA competition. 

“With my national team, I’ve played in stadiums of 60,000 people,” she told MovieMaker. “You feel like an ant under a magnifying glass, and big, simultaneously. You find ways to tune out the noise and remember that you’re still playing the same game within the same four lines that you have your entire life.”

She aspires to think of soccer — which people outside the U.S. more commonly call football — as a live performance. 

“In the same vein as live theatre, you train to perform at a specific event – a tournament, a match – which unravels over a set period, and then it’s over. No-redos, no going back,” she says. “I enjoy translating that approach to filmmaking, where, in a medium where you quite literally can go back and re-do, or go for another take. I always try to preserve that sense of immediacy and presence. 

“With your team, you go through many iterations of planning and preparing, but once the shot is moving, it takes on a life of its own. It’s in motion and it's unstoppable, and acknowledgement of that is sometimes where the best work lives.”

The film just played DOC NYC, one of the most prestigious documentary film festivals, and continues a filmmaking career that also includes her directorial debut, 2022’s “Lahi.” We talked with Bonta about starting as a filmmaker, her political family, and the curious role of french fries in “Maybe It’s Just the Rain.”

'Maybe It's Just the Rain' Director Reina Bonta on Capturing Memories

MovieMaker: Can you talk about how you became a filmmaker and made this film? I understand you were already on a filmmaking path before the World Cup.

Reina Bonta: There was always a camera floating around my house, even from a young age. My father was a neurotic home video dad – so every single birthday party and school play called for his trusty Hi-8 video camera to capture it all. When I had too much energy to be in the house, my parents would send me out into the backyard with a camera to film and burn it off. For that reason, I think I’ve loved the tactility of cameras and making films since I was three years old. 

However, when I went to Yale, I was set on studying Cognitive Science, and on one day working in the neuroscience field. It wasn’t until I took a film class my sophomore year that turned everything on its head, or perhaps, right-side up, and I realized that my goal in neuroscience, of understanding the underpinnings of the human condition, was something I could better accomplish through making films. 

I ended up pivoting entirely, and studying filmmaking at Yale, where I graduated with a B.A. in Film and Media Studies with distinction. And I’ve been balancing my two lifelong loves – filmmaking and playing football – ever since.

MovieMaker: “Maybe It’s Just the Rain” is such an evocative title — why did you choose it?

Reina Bonta: No spoilers here, but voice-over narration is a prominent tool that I use in “Maybe It’s Just the Rain.” A lot of those words have quite a poetic, ethereal feel to them. I wanted a title that both reflected that, as well as spoke to a very common experience in intergenerational AAPI families. 

I’ve had moments with my Lola where she reveals a heavy or traumatic memory to me of her growing up as a child of war in the Philippines, and with a casual swiftness, writes it off almost immediately after: “Oh, but it wasn’t that bad.” “I don’t know why I shared that.” “Maybe it’s just the rain.” 

The film, an unfolding of memories, is an ironic reclaiming of that sentiment, posing a reality where we can share our familial histories with one another, openly and unabashedly.

MovieMaker: I can't imagine the pressure of playing in the World Cup, in front of a stadium and global audience, where everyone cheers every success and scrutinizes every mistake. How do you deal with that pressure? And does it make filmmaking seem less stressful by comparison?

Reina Bonta: With my national team, I’ve played in stadiums of 60,000 people. You feel like an ant under a magnifying glass, and big, simultaneously. You find ways to tune out the noise and remember that you’re still playing the same game within the same four lines that you have your entire life. 

I like to think of playing football as a live performance. In the same vein as live theatre, you train to perform at a specific event – a tournament, a match – which unravels over a set period, and then it’s over. No-redos, no going back. 

I enjoy translating that approach to filmmaking, where, in a medium where you quite literally can go back and re-do, or go for another take. I always try to preserve that sense of immediacy and presence. 

With your team, you go through many iterations of planning and preparing, but once the shot is moving, it takes on a life of its own. It’s in motion and it's unstoppable, and acknowledgement of that is sometimes where the best work lives.

MovieMaker: How did you go about this logistically? Were you the only one filming, for example, during post-game celebrations? Or did you have a crew? Did you have a crew at the games, or were you able to access existing footage, given how extensively covered the games are?

Reina Bonta: In truth, I never had any real intention of making a documentary about my team’s debut at the World Cup. As a filmmaker, and perhaps because I picked up the neurotic home video gene from my dad, I brought a small handycam that I had recently bought at a flea market in Chile when my team was training there for a few weeks, to the World Cup. 

My intention was to capture meaningful moments, but I had assumed they would likely sit on a forgotten hard drive thereafter. When I was flicking through my footage after the tournament had ended, I felt inspired – and suddenly became very awake to how important this moment was for women’s football, for the Philippines, and for our ancestors – and decided to create a short film out of the material. 

The heart of “Maybe It’s Just the Rain” is that very handycam footage, and I worked closely with FIFA to fill in the match footage gaps, as well as threaded in decades-old home archival material, to create a real tapestry of different textures and eras fused together in the short.

MovieMaker: I was struck by all the McDonald's fries at the post-game party — does everyone just like fries? Are the players not able to eat McDonald's during the competition? 

Reina Bonta: There is naturally a lot of physical preparation that goes into playing at the World Cup. It’s the biggest stage that exists in football. And as a professional athlete, you constantly follow a strict training regimen, staying disciplined in a lot of different areas, to stay at the top of your game. But after our World Cup journey ended – and this memory will always be a tender one – we made a team trip to McDonald’s. Who knew loads of warm french fries and salty chicken nuggets would be the thing that consoled us and helped bring us back down to earth. 

In the film, I also find it heartwarming the way that fries are framed as a symbol of girlhood. Yes, we are elite athletes. But we also eat junk food and sing ballads and jump on our beds in our pajamas. 

MovieMaker: Do you ultimately want to stay in the sports documentary space? Obviously this doc is about more than sports.

Reina Bonta: I have a soft spot in my heart for sport documentaries. I’ve spent much of my life within the world of elite athletics, and while I’ve watched countless films about women in sports, I’ve rarely seen ones that are made by female athletes themselves. There’s a gap between experience and observation, and I’ve found purpose in closing that distance. 

As a professional footballer, I’m drawn to stories that reflect the complexity of athletes. I find that athletes are often framed as one-dimensional figures of discipline or triumph, and I’m far more interested in the soft underbelly, in exploring the fourth, fifth, and sixth dimensions of athletes that we rarely get to see. I like to approach sport as a framework, where the “A plot” isn’t necessarily the competition, but rather the athlete and human behind it.

Right now, I’m developing several projects in the sports documentary space. But beyond nonfiction, I’m also working on my first narrative feature film, and all my work is grounded in that philosophy.

MovieMaker: Your dad is the Attorney General of California — a job previously held, of course, by Kamala Harris. Did you ever want to go into law or politics?

Politics have always been a strong presence in my household. Beyond my father serving as California’s Attorney General and my mother in the State Assembly, both of my grandmothers are lifelong activists and respected community elders. I’ve always been inspired by that legacy and excited to explore my own political voice through the powerful lens of film, a passion that’s been echoed and encouraged by my family, which means the world to me.

MovieMaker: As you've gone on your festival journey, have any experiences really stood out? Any moments, for example, when you felt like the audience really got it?

“Maybe It’s Just the Rain” has had an incredible journey on the film festival circuit: nineteen film festivals and counting around the world. Each stop has been inspiring and memorable. At Cannes, where the film was part of the Marché du Film, I had the surreal experience of nearly tripping over Naomi Campbell and stumbling on the red carpet, the kind of humbling, heart-racing moment that reminded me how lucky I was to be there. 

Then there was our screening at the Los Angeles Asian Pacific Film Festival, where my entire family filled the theater and my Lola glowed, and became the star of the night.

Most recently, I’m particularly honored to have “Maybe It’s Just the Rain” included in DOC NYC’s prestigious Short List, recognizing us as a strong contender for the Academy Awards and other awards season honors. It’s a milestone that feels both exhilarating and grounding, as well as a validation of the deeply personal story at the core of the film.

Beyond the festival circuit, the film’s impact campaign has become one of the most meaningful chapters of its life. I’m currently organizing a football clinic in the Philippines for young, under-resourced girls, which is an extension of the film’s spirit and an opportunity to give back to the community that inspired it.

It’s been profoundly gratifying to watch “Maybe It’s Just the Rain” take on a life of its own, and I can only hope it continues to ripple outward. 

“In this film, we didn’t go forward with technology,” Sayeed explains. “We went back to where I felt was a sweet spot in technology. We shot film, and we also set for ourselves very specific parameters.”

His only two references, he says, were cinematographers Sven Nykvist and Gordon Willis — “in very specific periods in their careers.”

Sayeed focused on the decade of Nykvist’s work that included Ingmar Bergman’s The Silence and Persona and ended with Nykvist winning the best cinematography Oscar for the Swedish director’s 1972 Cries and Whispers. And Sayeed focused on Willis’ work from 1977 to 1988, a period that included the Woody Allen comedies Annie Hall, Manhattan and Zelig.

“What Luca wanted to do was put some restraints around the technology that we used, so it only functioned inside of that time. And I feel that was an amazing and incredible exercise for us to do,” Sayeed says. “We only used lighting units from that time, we only used lenses from that time, and film cameras within that timespan as well.”

The result is a very modern drama starring Julia Roberts, Andrew Garfield and Ayo Edebiri that looks and feels analog. 

“I’m not sure the technology is going in an interesting direction,” Sayeed says, “because digital is just an emulation. It’s not an organic process, it’s code. I’m more interested in the organic than I am in code.” 

Malik Hassan Sayeed on Working With Spike Lee and New York City

Sayeed, who was born and raised in New York City, was the cinematographer for Spike Lee’s ’90s films Clockers, Girl 6 and He Got Game. He also shot Hype Williams’ 1998 Belly and videos for music icons including Nas, 2Pac, Jay-Z, Lauryn Hill, and Beyoncé.

He is known for keeping an eye out for cinematic images on location in his endlessly photogenic hometown. But After the Hunt was shot mostly on stages, forcing Sayeed to adapt.

“I’m a New York-based, foundational location cinematographer,” he says. “We do not shoot on the stage. I think I’ve never shot on a stage in New York.” 

But constructed sets offer more control, which Sayeed says is why Guadagnino decided to shoot for five weeks on stages and backlots at Shepperton Studios, near London. 

“I think he was kind of slightly burnt out on the exercise of shooting locations,” Sayeed says.

Environmental control comes at the expense of happy accidents born from natural conditions. Which made Sayeed even more determined to evoke spontaneity. 

“We are basically hunters of that magic. This is what we look for, we find, and search out in physical reality,” he explains. “A light bounces off a window across the street; it’s doing something interesting and coming in this way. We’re constantly looking for that. In this context, you don’t have that, so you have to almost manufacture it.

“We’re trying to manufacture the happy accident,” he continues, “and this is what me and my gaffer are constantly doing with lighting. We’re looking for the thing that the light happens to be doing that it wasn’t intended to do.” 

After the Hunt follows Roberts as a Yale philosophy professor entangled in a campus scandal when a close colleague (Garfield) is accused of sexually assaulting her own pupil (Edebiri). 

Sayeed recalls catching a glimpse of a happy accident while pre-lighting one of the film’s most dramatic scenes, in which Garfield’s character crashes Roberts’ classroom to confront her.

“I saw it as we were moving around — the side of the light was producing the best quality of light,” he explains. “So we took a bunch of the lights that would do that and just used the side of the lights to light the scene, as opposed to directly lighting the scene.”

The classroom scene was one of the few shot on location, using Cambridge University as a stand-in for Yale. The bulk of the production demanded Sayeed work with green and blue screens, requiring frame-by-frame VFX compositing in post-production to seamlessly blend the action in the foreground with the environment in the background, which was shot separately in New Haven, Connecticut.

“Some scenes were shot inside that were supposed to be outside, but we made it look like it was outside,” he says. “It was a lot of that kind of work on this, so it was a different kind of project for me.”

So different, in fact, that Sayeed was uncertain about how it would all come together in the end. 

“I wasn’t sure that we were going to land the plane based on all of that effects work,” he says. But he credits the “phenomenal” post-production team for piloting the film to a very satisfying completion. 

After the Hunt and the Search for Silver Linings

For Sayeed, cinematography is about searching and receiving. He’s constantly looking for a glimmer or a shimmer that will inspire his next move behind the camera — a practice that has prepared him to embrace hardship on and off set.

“I’m a silver-lining hunter,” he says. “I am searching for the silver lining at this point. I’m embracing it. Because this is what we’re constantly looking for and looking to receive. So, if we embrace it, that means we have to embrace the hardship that comes with the silver lining.”

Sayeed recently worked with Guadagnino on the upcoming Artificial, in which Garfield will play Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI and one of the key figures in the artificial intelligence boom.

Despite promises that AI will automate our lives in ways we never imagined, many — including some who work in the field — believe it may also be a source of great human hardship in the coming years. They fear lost jobs and incomes, an increasing wealth gap, and the loss of artistry, as well as the potential environmental threat of data centers sucking up water to cool hardware. 

For all the concerns that the dystopian Terminator 2: Judgement Day and The Matrix may soon look like documentaries, Sayeed believes AI competition will compel humans to make art that only humans can. 

“I feel like it’s an opportunity for humans to not accept mediocrity. We have to be greater. We have to privilege human greatness, because a computer can copy mediocrity, but it can’t really copy human greatness,” he says.

“This is an opportunity for us to privilege that, and put that at the fore, and stop accepting things that are not the greatest that we can do. 

“And to me, that would be a silver lining for us in this moment, that we push it, and we’re forced to push it because of what we think AI is going to do to us, and how it’s going to harm us. I think we’re greater than that. We’re way greater than that at our best.” 

After the Hunt is now in theaters, from Amazon MGM Studios.

But what they all have in common is her empathy for outsiders. 

“All of my films have to do with people who are on the fringes of society,” says DaCosta. “People on the fringes feel as though they don’t have the authority to fully live.”

Hedda, based on Ibsen’s 1891 play Hedda Gabler, stars Tessa Thompson — who also starred in Little Woods and appeared in Marvels— as a woman who feels trapped in her loveless marriage. 

Over an intense night on a centuries-old estate, her desire for control and power leads her to manipulate those around her. The film is a study of the self-sabotage that can occur when one internalizes societal boundaries. 

“Being a minority, I think that is something that we all wrestle with. But even culturally, in terms of class, there are parts of society that we’re told we’re not allowed to access,” says DaCosta. “Or there are goals and dreams for ourselves that we’re sometimes told we shouldn’t achieve. I think if we buy into those things, we do limit ourselves.”

Jumping from genre to genre, and across visual styles, DaCosta rejects limits. For Hedda, she closed herself off from more than a century of stage and screen adaptations, even stepping away from Ibsen’s original text after her first draft to ensure her film would stand on its own.

“I wanted to make sure that with the changes that I made, the movie could live as it was meant to live,” she says. Only then did she “re-invite the original text back into the process,” negotiating a dialogue between her vision and Ibsen’s.

One of her most radical changes was reshaping the film’s central rivalry by turning Hedda’s nemesis, Ejlert Lövborg, into a woman named Eileen, played by Tár actress Nina Hoss.

“I think making Lövborg into a woman shows yet another hard, scary path that Hedda could have taken. She’s smart enough to, but didn’t,” DaCosta explains. “You have another woman who’s choosing a hard path. There are so many paths to freedom that are open to her, but they’re hard and scary. I think having Lövborg be a woman brought that to the fore.”

The process of shedding expectation around a story to rebuild it anew is one of DaCosta’s signature moves. 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple is a sequel to Danny Boyle’s 2002 apocalyptic 28 Days Later, a story of the rage virus and its survivors, and arrives in January. It follows 2007’s 28 Weeks Later, directed by Juan Carlos Fresnadillo, who co-wrote the screenplay, and Boyle’s own sequel, 28 Years Later, which arrived this past summer. Like 28 Years Later, The Bone Temple is written by original 28 Days Later writer Alex Garland. 

DaCosta approached Garland’s script with bold ideas about the aesthetics of her film.

Boyle’s original 28 Days Later was filmed primarily with a consumer-grade digital camcorder, and 28 Years Later was shot on cameras that included an iPhone 15 Max. DaCosta filmed The Bone Temple on the Arri Alexa 35, a top-tier digital cinema camera, eschewing Boyle’s gritty, handheld aesthetic to create a sequel that is visually and philosophically its own.

“Danny Boyle is a one-of-a-kind, brilliant, creative man, and trying to make something in his image is impossible, but also wasn’t interesting to me as a director,” she says. “And I have no curiosity about shooting on cell phones.”

She adds: “The gift of Alex Garland’s Bone Temple script is that no filmmaker would make it the same way.”

Nia DaCosta on Her Hedda Contributors

DaCosta’s interest in the arts was ingrained early by her mother Charmaine DaCosta, who may be best known for her work with the reggae group Worl-A-Girl. Charmaine DaCosta combined artistry and pragmatism, once telling her daughter: “You want to be an artist, I support that. But know you will be poor. Like, you will really struggle for money. But the money will come.” 

DaCosta accepted her mother’s advice as she pursued degrees at NYU and London’s Royal Central School of Speech and Drama. She learned “to keep creating and not ask for permission,” committing not only to her own growth but to pulling her peers up alongside her. 

“Your peers are so important to your growth and development,” she notes. “You hold hands as you come up together.” 

One of those peers is Thompson, a foundational part of DaCosta’s creative world.  

“I love her so much. She’s one of my closest friends. She’s like a sister to me,” DaCosta says. “We both really love what we do. So when we’re not talking about personal things, we’re also helping each other out with our careers. I like to call myself her shadow manager. I’m definitely invested in how she does.”  

She has a similar bond with Hedda  and The Bone Temple cinematographer Sean Bobbitt, who has worked on films including Hunger and Judas and the Black Messiah. Their relationship began when DaCosta was a young production assistant, shuttling him to a lens house in New Jersey. Instead of making small talk, she peppered him with questions about lenses and framing. Her eagerness left an impression.

More than a decade later, she sought him out to shoot The Marvels, valuing not only his experience but his humility.

“He is incredibly honest. He’s clear. He has no ego,” DaCosta says. “He’s so creative and approaches his work from a place of character and drama.”  

Their sets become places of discovery, defined by curiosity. “In every job together, there’s this endless curiosity around how we can shape an image. It doesn’t have to be extreme. It can be something small, but impactful for the story,” DaCosta says.  

Nia DaCosta Wants 'Bad Behavior' in Movies

Her films preserve jagged edges and the messiness of humanity rather than sanitizing or simplifying characters. That approach allows room for strangeness, subversion, and growth.

“I’m so drawn to people who are complicated and weird and left-of-center,” DaCosta says, explaining that the familiar tropes of a “strong” or “elegant” Black woman feel stifling. 

“Those are boring tropes. They’re so static and one-dimensional that they can do more harm than good. So yeah, in my corner of cinema, I want bad behavior.”

She is drawn to horror, she says, in part because of how well it can hold contradictions. 

In her version of Candyman, for example, artist Anthony McCoy (Yahya Abdul-Mateen II) is unwillingly pulled into the Candyman legend when William Burke (Coleman Domingo) seeks to use him as a tool of vengeance against racist violence. 

But DaCosta can also find complexity in a comic-book movie: In The Marvels, Carol Danvers (Brie Larson) wields such immense power that she can’t remain in any one world for long. Her near-limitless strength isolates her, forcing a kind of cosmic solitude.

“I think about characters like that a lot to help me avoid limiting myself,” she says.

Hedda is now in theaters and on Prime Video, from Amazon MGM Studios. 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple arrives in theaters January 16 from Sony Pictures Releasing. 

Main image: Nia DaCosta photo by Meg Young. Background, clockwise from left: Hedda, Prime; The Marvels, Marvel Studios; Candyman; Universal Pictures; 28 Years Later: The Bone Garden, Sony Pictures Releasing.

“I think you should be scared to present stuff because that means that you're doing something original and different,” she tells MovieMaker. “Hopefully we see more things that are different and creative minds can just really go for it.”

The animated hit, which Kang co-directed with Wish Dragon veteran Chris Appelhans, is Netflix’s most popular film in the company’s history, with more than 325 million views. That’s just one of the records it has broken: Its two-day theatrical sing-along release this past August gave Netflix their first top box office position ever, breakout single “Golden” spent weeks atop the Billboard charts. 

The musical action comedy from Netflix and Sony Animation follows the K-pop group Huntr/x, which consists of Rumi, Mira, and Zoey, who moonlight as demon hunters. The film balances anime-influenced art with unforgettable songs and silly jokes, like Mira and Zoey chanting "couch couch couch" in anticipation of some much-needed rest post-tour. It’s all held together by the girls’ friendship, even through hard times.

“There was always that desire to show a different kind of female superhero that's silly and not afraid to look stupid,” Kang says.

Kang, who has worked as a storyboard artist on Over the Hedge and Shrek Forever After, and as head of story on The Lego Ninjago Movie, was inspired by Korean mythology and a long-braided character named Rumi. When she brought the idea to Sony Pictures Animation, producer Aron Warner paired her with director Appelhans, who immediately saw the potential. They co-wrote the screenplay with Danya Jiminez and Hannah McMechan. 

We spoke with Kang and Appelhan about meeting for the first time, seamless voices, and being “fueled by fear.”  

Maggie Kang and Chris Appelhans on Their KPop Demon Hunters Collaboration

Moviemaker: Maggie, since this all started with your character Rumi, how did you land on the idea of KPop Demon Hunters?

Maggie Kang: There was always that desire to show a different kind of female superhero that's silly and not afraid to look stupid and likes to eat and was just always trying to be funny. That's kind of who I am. I just wanted to see that female character and that was the tone I wanted for all the girls. 

With Rumi, I think specifically we really loved the idea of our movie about demons, inner demons, and her inner demon. Being a literal demon felt like a fun way to play the main character and have her be this kind of burdened person, but also finding silliness in her so that she's not a total drag, because that could be really annoying for a main character. That "couch, couch, couch" scene served a lot of purposes, but one of the things was like, “Okay, let's see. We may be a little silly before we get to know what her huge emotional turmoil is.” 

Moviemaker: Chris, how did you get on board and what did the co-director partnership look like between you and Maggie? 

Chris Appelhans: I came right off of finishing Wish Dragon and was really tired. I was like, “Yeah, I'm going to take a nice long break and not do anything.” And then Aron Warner, who originally brought this project to Sony with Maggie, was like, “Oh, you should hear about this thing. It's right up your alley.” Then I met Maggie. I was playing it cool on the surface, but within 10 minutes I'm like, “Okay, this idea is amazing — this person has good taste.” 

On a personal level, I've been trying to figure out a good excuse to make a movie about music that wasn't a conventional musical, and I just never had an idea that clicked. So this was an awesome opportunity to see what was possible by taking the pop music form and trying to tell stories with it without losing the cool part, which is what happens so often. 

It was a great mashup of stuff that we both liked and I felt like the partnership was so easy. We pretty much saw the same movie in our heads. I think there are things that you want in a partnership that is a shared vision. But also there's stuff that Maggie could bring to the girls' relationships, to the comedy, to the range that I could never do. 

Maggie Kang: I think it got to a point where one of us would be away and we'd be confident enough knowing that the other person wanted the same thing. We would make decisions for both of us. 

Chris Appelhans: Even the writing, we would pass the Final Draft files back and forth and once somebody does a pass. It always felt like that whatever was missing from the scene, the other person would have an angle on. 

Moviemaker: When the film was first announced, it was part of Sony Animation's more mature slate. Was there an earlier juncture where it was darker before it became more family oriented?

Maggie Kang: Yeah, it was, and this was even before Chris came on. It was never really my want to make a movie that was very dark and very adult, I guess kind of like Blue Eye Samurai. That's such a cool show. But me, I'm always going to be stupid, funny, and I'm sure that there is a movie that does both of that, but it wasn't really the thing that I wanted to do. So I think where we landed tonally is exactly the movie that I wanted to make really from the very beginning.

Moviemaker: Tell me about finding the perfect assembling of the singers and the voice talent corresponding to the girls. You have two voices for one character and everyone’s just seamless.

Maggie Kang: [Laughs] It wasn’t, like, planned.

Chris Appelhans: What helped is we took a long time to cast all the parts, voice and singing. As in animation, we worked so hard on writing the characters and temping their voices, and screening the movie three or four times. By the time we were casting voices, we really knew who these girls were inside and out. We could not only pick the right actor or singer, but communicate very clearly about what's happening inside of Rumi, Mira and Zoey. So that when Rei Ami or Audrey Nuna are performing the lyrics, they're as tuned in to who this person is and what their desires and insecurities are as Ji-young Yoo or May Hong would be doing the voices. 

Maggie Kang: I think even when we were writing the music, we knew who the characters were. And so even in their verse or the lyrics that they're singing, we wanted to infuse that personality in them. When it came time to cast the singers, we knew the type of vibe we needed for each of the characters. When we met them, it was like, “Oh my gosh, you are the characters!” We feel that way about the voice cast, but also about the vocal cast. It’s so crazy. 

Moviemaker: I've seen so many different artists saying, “I have not been able to touch my pen for months, and this movie brought it back.” How does it feel to know that? 

Maggie Kang: It's amazing that it sparked creativity in other artists. It's a hard time for original IP, and I think everybody wants that and obviously the audience does, too. So for the artists specifically, I would say it was hard making this movie.

It's pretty terrifying to put a new thing out there — even something like corn eyes or how stupid the girls are and how they eat on the plane. You're like, “We don't know if people are going to like this. It could be too much.” But we didn't want to dumb it or water it down. We wanted to present it the way that we wanted to do it. 

That’s scary at times. But I hope that we can see more projects and more movies that are just kind of fueled by fear, because that is true passion. I think you should be scared to present stuff because that means that you're doing something original and different. Hopefully we see more things that are different and creative minds can just really go for it.

Chris Appelhans: I think if you said we're going to make an animated movie about shame, I don't think that's like a real catchy pitch. We tried really hard to think about what that meant. It is a very personal story, even if it doesn't necessarily seem like it on the surface, if you see the title. And I think, to what Maggie said, original IP is personal. Inherently because somebody has to want it to exist so bad that they bring it into the world. 

I think hopefully this will crack the door for more and also give people that conviction to go out there and put all of themselves into a piece of work.

KPop Demon Hunters is now streaming on Netflix.

Main image: KPop Demon Hunters. Netflix.

The film, playing at the Micheaux Film Festival this weekend, depicts a mother who breaks into her ex's house to retrieve her son. Smith, out of love for both of his parents, refuses to point fingers or say which parent is right or wrong — both love their child, and do what they think is best. The film escalates with an unrelenting tension that keeps audiences deeply invested in the fates of the father, mother and son.

"The easy way to tell this story would have been to create heroes and villains: my dad the villain, my mom the hero. And there was indeed a draft of the script where that was the case, but that portrayal was not only uninteresting, it lacked nuance, complexity and truth," Smith tells MovieMaker.

"My goal with the story was never to simplify the characters or paint them as black and white, but it was always to create characters that were flawed, desperate and unwavering in their pursuit of what they considered  to be 'the right thing.'"

In addition to being a filmmaker known for unflinching storytelling, Smith is a film professor at the University of Texas at Austin, where he was also the inaugural Associate Dean for Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion in the Moody College of Communication. His films, which include the short "Katrina's Son," the feature Wolf and the documentary Juneteenth: Faith & Freedom, have played and won awards at more than 150 film festivals.

We talked with Ya'Ke Smith about gray areas, teaching the next genration of filmmakers, and the aspects of a film that can never be compromised.

Ya'Ke Smith on 'The Ohio, Texas Remix'

MovieMaker: How did you become a filmmaker?

Ya'Ke Smith: I was an artist before I was anything else. I sang in the choir. Played in the band. Acted in church and local plays. And watched tons of movies. The connective tissue between all of these mediums was my love for telling stories and my desire to use those stories to impact people in meaningful and long-lasting ways.

Although all of these artistic forms could arrest people and expand their world views in unique and interesting ways, film for me felt like the singular way to reach the most people because more people participate in the communal act of watching cinema than any other creative medium. To that end, I saw Boyz N The Hood when I was 11 years old and it totally blew my mind. It was a revelation — seeing a story about a community and individuals I recognized portrayed with such humanity, empathy, and depth.

Tre, Ricky and Doughboy were my friends, cousins and God brothers. John Singleton saw them in ways that other filmmakers hadn't. That was the moment I knew I would be a filmmaker, and was also the moment I set out to learn all I could about the craft. I made my first film when I was 15 and have been making films ever since.  

MovieMaker: Can you talk about the true story behind "The Ohio, Texas Remix"?

Ya'Ke Smith: The first memory I have of my dad is him coming to Texas to pick my sister and I up for what was to be a summer, but turned into two years. What I didn’t realize at the time — I was seven or eight — was that my parents were still married and that my mom and dad were in the middle of a bitter custody battle.
Because they were still married they both had parental rights, so no attorney would take my mom's case or help her fight to get us back.

One attorney in particular had some off the record advice for her: Drive to Ohio, kidnap your children, bring them back to Texas. And once she did that, he could begin divorce proceedings. Although my mom didn’t have to do it (we eventually ended up being sent back) this story is a reinterpretation of that period in my life.

The story always felt like it was torn from the headlines, and so I wanted to exhume the true story, but sprinkle in genre elements to really make the experience resonate with audiences. It’s tragic, funny, suspenseful and ultimately a love letter to both of my parents. 

MovieMaker: You do a beautiful job of making everyone in the film sympathetic — our allegiances shift a few times, but we ultimately end up wishing everyone could find a way through this painful situation. How did you make sure everyone’s perspective was reflected and respected?

Ya'ke Smith: As a child you’re only privy to the side of the story that you get from your parents, but as you become an adult yourself, your realize that truth is relative, that your parents aren’t perfect and that even at their worst times they did the best they knew how to do with what they had at any given season of their life.

Neither of my parents were “right” in this situation, and there’s a part of me deep down inside that feels like neither of them were “wrong.” My goal was to color between the lines and create not black and white characters, but characters that existed in the gray areas, because that’s where most of us exist; and most of the time, that’s where the truth exists. This gray, murky, messed up place is where the heart of human existence lies and it’s in this place that we must come to terms with whatever decisions we make. It was with this ethos that I rendered my characters. 

MovieMaker: How did you cast your excellent actors?

Ya'Ke Smith: I always tell my students that audiences can forgive many things, but bad acting and heartless storytelling are two of the things that they can’t contend with. When thinking about the casting for this film, I knew that I needed performers who could color between the lines and find the humanity in their characters without judgement or surface level analysis.

I’d directed both Veronika Bozeman, who plays Cheryl, and Sean Nelson, who plays Dante, on television shows before, and really enjoyed the experience of working with both of them. I called them up to see if they’d be willing to come to Texas for a few days and work on the film, and they both graciously agreed. 

The other actors are from Texas, some of whom I’d worked with before — like my wife, Mikala Gibson, who played the gun-toting best friend — while others were cast from local talent agencies and backstage. Each cast member brought something unique to the project, and the film wouldn’t be the same without their valuable contributions. 

MovieMaker: You also do a really good job of ratcheting up the tension. How did you and your team keep making this more and more intense?

Ya'Ke Smith: When I pitched the film to my creative collaborators, I said it was the love child of Set It Off and Kramer vs Kramer, two films that I appreciate for very different reasons. Although those two movies  couldn’t be more different, the thread that I kept pulling at when thinking through how I wanted to render the story of "The Ohio, Texas Remix" both visually and thematically, was the tension of desire versus reality.

In Set It Off, all the characters are looking for a better life, but their reality (and greed at times) keeps pulling them back into a world they so desperately want to escape. In Kramer vs Kramer, both parents selfishly want full custody of their son, but after battling it out in court, they realize that they may need to relinquish custody in order for their son to have a stable and uncomplicated life.

By harnessing the tension of both films and using them as my guiding light, I knew I had to find a way to marry the heist/thriller elements of Set It Off, and remix them in the family drama world of Kramer vs Kramer. In order to pull that off, my team and I talked a lot about how to keep the stakes constantly rising, yet grounded in reality.

One thing we decided is that the film’s visual language would not only put us in the emotional headspace of the main character, but that we would also use the camera as a tool of disorientation. We also discussed at length how critical it was that all the elements — visual and aural — kept the audience on the edge of their seats throughout the film, and how the pacing of the film should quite literally make us question everything we thought was true just moments before.

I have to give a lot of credit to the crew — mostly students by the way — for taking my vision and pushing it even further. 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8cHCoyJXwxA

MovieMaker: What’s the biggest obstacle you had to overcome or problem you had to solve to make this film?

Ya'Ke Smith: Time and budget constraints were a major challenge for us. We filmed the project in just 2.5 days, and our budget was only half of what we really needed to make it happen. This called for some inventive problem-solving, long hours, and a crew that was incredibly dedicated and hardworking. 

One story that highlights this is when I received a call on the second day of filming informing me that the young man responsible for watching over our location had to leave due to a family emergency. With $100,000 worth of equipment in the house, leaving it unsupervised wasn’t an option. Since I was across town handling other shoot-related issues, I called my producer, who was running on just a few hours of sleep, and asked him to rush over. He stepped up without hesitation. 

Then there was the situation with our craft services person, who had her car broken into and needed to leave to deal with it. While she was gone, the rest of us jumped in to make sure everyone had what they needed to keep going. Overnight shoots can be grueling, so we made sure to keep the caffeine flowing. Surprisingly, she returned because she really valued the camaraderie we had built on set.

Of course, there were some disagreements along the way, but we worked through those and truly came together as a team to bring the project to life. 

MovieMaker: Finally, you teach film at UT Austin — can you talk about how that’s helped you as a filmmaker? (I know this could be a book, apologies.) Has it been a drawback at all in terms of the time commitment of teaching?

Ya'Ke Smith: Teaching is both one of the most rewarding and demanding professions you can pursue. It not only consumes a significant amount of your time, but also requires immense energy to nurture the talents of emerging artists. But that challenge is also what makes it so fulfilling.

As I assist someone in figuring out their story problems, I often end up discovering things about my own work, too. Some of my students are incredibly sharp and have a natural talent for understanding story structure. When I share film cuts in class, their feedback often helps me break through creative blocks. The reciprocal nature of teaching in a creative field is like no other, because creativity is like an electrical current. As a professor I turn on the light, which in turn ignites the creative life force of my students.

Also, as I mentioned earlier, my students play an integral part in my creative work because they fill a lot of the crew roles in my films. So as challenging as it might be, being a professor is an occupation that has allowed me to create a steady catalogue of film work. 

"The Ohio, Texas Remix" plays Saturday at the Micheaux Film Festival in Los Angeles.

Main image: "The Ohio, Texas Remix." Courtesy of Ya'Ke Smith.

Albuquerque and Santa Fe have been known in recent years for drawing big investments from heavy-hitters like Netflix and NBCUniversal. But Arndt represents a scrappy, inventive DIY scene — he made "Breakups Suck" as part of his graduate project from the University of New Mexico.

"Breakups Suck" played the Santa Fe International Film Festival Saturday and plays again Tuesday. It follows a young man named Luca (Jack McLaughlin) who wants to breakup with his girlfriend, Ruby (Willow Glenn.) The problem is, she's a vampire, and tends to think in forever terms.

We talked with Arndt about the influences for his entertaining short, starting a film career in Albuquerque, and seeing every Godzilla movie.

Ben Arndt on Making 'Breakups Suck'

MovieMaker: The look of this is so cool and unique — you nod to Nosferatu, but the low-fi black and white also reminds me of Clerks. The mix of scary and slacker is really disorienting and fun, because you never know where the movie will go. How did you land on the look of the film?

Ben Arndt: The aesthetic of the film came from a couple of different places, one of them being A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night. The 2014 Iranian black-and-white vampire film was heavily influential on both the visuals of this film, and its approach to depicting vampires as mythological beings in urban and contemporary settings.

I also have a background in primarily black and white films — my previous work "The Box at the End of the World" was in black and white as well. It was shot by the same cinematographer as "Breakups Suck," Chance Holmes-Snowden. Something about black and white has always stuck with me as a filmmaker, and I find the lack of color often forces me to be more mindful of my framing and blocking. It also helps that Chance is incredibly talented at utilizing minimalist lighting to get amazing contrasting shots.

MovieMaker: I'm a sucker, no pun intended, for a splash of color in the midst of black and white. You very effectively include a single blood red envelope. How did you achieve that effect in 2025? I'm guessing differently than Spielberg did in Schindler's List?

Ben Arndt: The red coloring effect is thanks to my incredibly talented colleague Noah Tucker, who is a local colorist who specializes in post production. He used Davinci Resolve, which can actually track the motion of certain objects, and using a color wheel, can isolate certain shades. This process took a lot of trial and error, and often involved us framing out certain parts by hand. It was a labor of love for sure! I have a hunch it was likely a different process from Spielberg's.

MovieMaker: How do you like the Albuquerque film scene, and living in ABQ in general? Did you grow up with Breaking Bad, and did it influence your desire to work in film? 

Ben Arndt: I am a recent graduate from the University of New Mexico, and have been an ABQ local my whole life. While Albuquerque isn't always pretty on the outside, there is something about its people and culture that truly makes it stand out. While there is a large studio industry presence in this city, I'd argue there is an even larger indie filmmaker scene here.

So many people have untapped creative potential and energy who have a burning desire to create and express themselves. It results in several pockets of filmmakers who come together and pool resources to create art that you wouldn't find anywhere else. 

MovieMaker: What are you general influences?

Ben Arndt: My biggest general influence is definitely the Godzilla franchise. Every week growing up, my dad and I would bike to the local Hastings and we'd rent one of the Godzilla films to watch together (there are 38 films in total, god bless his patience).

The original Godzilla, also known as Gojira, always stood out to me because of how it was able to take a larger than life mythological character and concept, and interweave it into a heartfelt and emotional core. Bringings this back to Breakups Suck, It was important to try and ground the  mythological concept of vampires in something emotionally resonant, like a break-up. Some other directors that inspire me are Kiyoshi Kurosawa, Ryusuke Hamaguchi, and Denis Villenueve.

MovieMaker: How did you assemble your cast and crew?

Ben Arndt: My cast and team is made up of classmates and friends I've made while pursuing filmmaking. I try not to pick crew or cast based on portfolios or clout, but rather based on who I feel I have the most chemistry with and who pushes me as an artist. I love developing organic relationships and friendships with the people I work with because not only does it help us work together more seamlessly, but it also tends to make my sets more comfortable as well.

A quote that my dad told me once that stuck with me was: "Leadership isn't about always having the right ideas, but rather creating an environment in which the best ideas can be had." As for my principal cast, Jack Mclaughlin is a UNM-based actor whose work had gotten my attention in the past, and Willow Glenn was someone I had a history of collaborating with, whose talent consistently blew me away.

Both of my leads are so incredibly talented and from the moment I watched them seamlessly improve 10 different versions of the breakup in rehearsals, I knew I had found my Luca and Ruby. 

"Breakups Suck" screens in Albuquerque Sunday as part of the Santa Fe International Film Festival, one of our 50 Film Festivals Worth the Entry Fee. You can read more of our festival coverage here.

Main image: Willow Glenn in "Breakups Suck." Courtesy of the film.

The film, making its world premiere this weekend at the Santa Fe International Film Festival, features the renowned cellist playing "Amazing Grace" as buffalo storm majestically across the Blackfeet Nation, the federally recognized tribal land bordering Glacier National Park in Montana.

For a few brief moments you're transported by images and music, to a timeless, dreamlike place. But the film's purpose isn't just to transport you: "Blackfoot Buffalo Yo Yo Ma" was commissioned by Indigenous Led, a Native-led nonprofit that has worked for years to try to restore buffalo to their ancestral homelands.

"For around 150 years, buffalo haven’t existed on this land, nearly driven to extinction by genocide and the colonization of Turtle Island, also known as the United States of America," says Hunter Robert Baker, who co-directed the film with Elias Gallegos.

We talked to Baker about the film's mission, creating a cinematic dream, and the stunning moment Yo-Yo Ma touches a buffalo.

MovieMaker: Can you talk about how Yo-Yo Ma came to be involved in this project?

Hunter Robert Baker: Yo-Yo Ma has been an advocate of this restoration effort for years, wanting to honor the power of relationship with these sacred buffalo relatives, called “iinnii” in the Blackfoot language.

In May, Yo-Yo Ma traveled to Blackfeet Nation to add his artistry to the chorus that calls to the sacred buffalo relatives. Yo-Yo performed “Amazing Grace,” a medley that provides hope and unity during divided times.

The film culminates in three parts - IINNIIWA: The Blackfeet Buffalo Story, Act I, Act II, and Act III. Act II is a documentary that will premiere in New York City and in Montana on Blackfeet Nation. Santa Fe audiences will see Act I during Santa Fe International Film Festival.

MovieMaker: How did you and the other filmmakers get involved?

Hunter Robert Baker: We were honored to have Chris Eyre [Smoke Signals, Dark Winds] as our Executive Producer, serving a crucial role for the film. He had a vision of these sacred relatives on their journey back home. In a dream moment, Yo-Yo shows a sign of respect and honor by touching forehead to forehead, a connection that unites heart and soul. This scene is meant to evoke a time when people and animals lived in close relation with one another.

My dual role as cinematographer allowed me to observe, respect, and honor these iinnii buffalo. The collaboration between Elias and me meant a closer lens on the vital nature of this story. 

Hunter Robert Baker on 'Blackfeet Buffalo Yo-Yo Ma'

MovieMaker: The visuals in this film are so stunning — were all the buffalo real? Were any VFX used to capture so many of them running together?

Hunter Robert Baker: I can say with immense gratitude that all of the scenes of buffalo running through the landscape were filmed in-camera. This is a tremendous thanks to the Blackfeet Buffalo Program and fantastic wrangler team who raise and care for the Buffalo as they are guided towards their rewilding release. 

The Blackfeet Buffalo Program has been at the forefront of returning buffalo to the Blackfeet territory for more than two decades. In June 2023, the Program made history by returning 49 iinnii to their homelands at the base of Nínaiistáko, or Chief Mountain—a site sacred to all Blackfeet. The homecoming was a moment of fruition for the long-time partnerships between the Blackfoot Buffalo Program, Blackfeet Fish & Wildlife, Glacier and Waterton Lakes National Parks, and the Native-led nonprofit Indigenous Led.

MovieMaker: Is the scene when Yo-Yo Ma touches the buffalo real? How did you accomplish it?

Hunter Robert Baker: Yo-Yo Ma is a wonderful human radiating positivity in every direction. Of course, safety was a big concern for the shoot. As producers, we don’t encourage anyone to ever touch buffalo. They should always be observed and respected from a safe distance. This scene is a dream and meant to represent a time when people and animals lived in close relation with one another. The film does have some movie magic to capture this scene safely.

As we filmed Yo-Yo’s performance, it actually evoked a real reaction from the iinnii buffalo nearby and they made their way closer and closer to Yo-Yo. It shows that music has the power to unite.

MovieMaker: Can you detail the Santa Fe connection to the film?

Hunter Robert Baker: Chris, Elias and I are based in Santa Fe, New Mexico. We have a wonderful filmmaking community here that supports and respects Indigenous stories. I have been working in the Southwest for 13 years, spending extensive time on Navajo Nation. After a decade, I came to Santa Fe and discovered for myself the passionate community of art supporters. 

MovieMaker: Can you tell me a little more about Indigenous Led?

Hunter Robert Baker: Indigenous Led is a native-led nonprofit organization whose work is focused on science, youth and the rematriation of buffalo on Indigenous lands. Their work is extensive across the country. They support and believe art and film have the unique ability to unite, heal, and evoke a conversation around meaningful change.

The best part of this project was really learning about the youth of Blackfeet Nation. For around 150 years, buffalo have been gone from these lands. Multiple generations grew up, lived and passed on without ever seeing their sacred iinnii relatives, an animal that is directly tied to their Blackfoot language and origin story. Now, thanks to these wonderful organizations, the youth are growing up with buffalo around them, on their lands, and in their ceremonies. The return of buffalo is giving the youth a way to connect with their origin story, their Blackfoot language, and their ancestry. This effort begins a process of healing generations of destruction and looks toward a brighter future.

"Blackfeet Buffalo Yo-Yo Ma" plays Sunday at the Santa Fe International Film Festival, one of our 50 Film Festivals Worth the Entry Fee. You can read more of our festival coverage here.

All photos courtesy of the film.

The Australian-born Oliphant has mercilessly and incisively caricatured every president since Lyndon B. Johnson in a career that spanned 60 years and included winning the Pulitzer Prize in 1966. After working for The Washington Star, he began syndicating his work to a vast audience through Universal Press Syndicate, finally retiring in 2015 — though Oliphant, now 90, has still managed a few astute mockeries of President Trump since then.

The film goes back several centuries to track the history of political cartoons — when they were lithographs and engravings – and makes the case that they were the first memes. It also explains why they're endangered as print media loses influence, and the Trump Administration moves with a heavy hand to silence critics.

A Savage Art makes the case that cartoonists are often the most effective and direct critics of politicians, which often makes them targets for censorship. Everyone from presidents to religious leaders and their many defenders took issue with Oliphant's cartoons as he bludgeoned hypocrisy in all forms, by the left and right alike.

The film plays Saturday at the Santa Fe International Festival, and marks a strikingly detailed and thoughtful debut by Banowsky, who until now has had a wide range of high-level roles in the film business that fueled his desire to direct. We talked with him about meeting Oliphant, calling out corruption, and why AI can never replace a great pen-and-ink drawing.

Director Bill Banowsky on Making A Savage Art: The Life & Cartoons of Pat Oliphant

MovieMaker: Pat Oliphant, like you, is a longtime Santa Fe resident. Is that how you came to meet him? 

Bill Banowsky:  My wife Susan Banowsky and I moved to Santa Fe from Austin 10 years ago.  Our first Christmas Eve in Santa Fe was a beautiful snowy evening, and we went around the neighborhood with some new Santa Fe friends to various houses that were hosting parties. The first place we landed was the Oliphant home.  

For years the Oliphants had had a big Christmas Eve party every year. We walked into the house. It was full of music and people and fun. I looked to my right and saw this guy sitting in the corner with white hair wearing a white puffy jacket and a red scarf. It was David Byrne. Then I saw Terry and Jo Harvey Allen. And the Ambassador to the U.S. from Australia. There were so many interesting people in that house that evening. We lived just around the corner from the Oliphants and became fast friends. 

MovieMaker: Were you a fan of his work before? What draws you to it?

Bill Banowsky: I had heard of Pat Oliphant, but was not well aware of his work.  I knew he was a celebrated, Pulitzer Prize-winning cartoonist, but I didn’t fully appreciate his career until I started interviewing him for this film, which we began in the summer of 2018, seven years ago.

MovieMaker: You're a film producer, founded Magnolia Pictures, served as CEO of Landmark Theaters, launched Violet Crown Cinemas, and have been general counsel to multiple media companies. But this is your first time directing. How did your past experiences help you as a director?

Bill Banowksy: My experiences helped me understand what to look for in a documentary film that could potentially appeal to a theatrical audience. I’ve seen what had worked and what had not. And I’ve dabbled in documentary filmmaking in the past 20 years. Fifteen years ago I served as Executive Producer for an Alex Gibney film called Casino Jack and the United States of Money. I had gotten to know Alex when we worked together releasing his film Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room.

I pitched him on a story about Tom DeLay, this pre-MAGA corrupt congressman from Texas.  He liked the idea.  At that time he had become interested in what was going on with a DeLay adjacent character, the super lobbyist Jack Abramoff, another corrupt guy in politics. Alex and I decided to make that film. My role was to help Alex raise the money. I really had no hand at all in making it.

Then, a few years later, while living in Austin, I became interested in another story about political corruption involving Gov. Rick Perry of Texas and his efforts, working with conservative think tanks and the like, to transform the two elite public research universities in Texas, the University of Texas and Texas A&M, into something that looked more like trade schools.  Their goals were to get control of these places by firing university presidents and stacking the boards of regents.  

That led to me hiring a director to help me make a documentary about the systemic defunding of public higher education.  That film is called Starving the Beast: We covered six elite public research universities across the country. James Carville was a star of our film, as he was very focused on what was going on with the defunding of public higher education in Louisiana.  

The film was prophetic, I think, when you look at what is going on now with the attacks on higher education by the Trump administration. I was the Producer of the film and was very involved in making it, conducting interviews, raising the money, helping create the storyline. That experience inspired me to want to make my own film, a film that I had complete editorial control of.

MovieMaker: What did you learn from directing that you didn't know about film from your past experience?

Bill Banowsky: They say documentary film making is all about the editing. I think that’s largely true.  We had four different editors work on this film over the seven years we spent making it.  The last editor was Michael Linn, an incredibly talented filmmaker and editor I had met through a mutual friend, Chris Eyre.  

Michael and I spent a week in Chris’s house in Santa Fe while Chris was away working on Dark Winds.  I then spent another week living with Michael and his family in South Dakota, spending all day and much of the night in the editing room with Michael. That’s when the final film started to come into focus. I loved working with Michael.  He is a superb editor who listened to what I wanted to see on screen, and he made it happen. Learning deeply about the process of editing is what I most appreciate about the experience of making this film.

That, and working with my producing partner Paul O’Bryan, my longest friend in the world.  We grew up together in L.A. in the 70’s. Paul is an accomplished editor and filmmaker who has worked in the film industry his entire career. This film doesn’t happen without Paul coming on board three years ago.

MovieMaker: The film focuses on pressures on political cartoonists to tone down their political criticisms. How do you think those compare to the pressures today on late-night hosts, including Stephen Colbert and Jimmy Kimmel?

Bill Banowsky: We didn’t intend to take seven years to make the film, but it’s actually a good thing that we did. The timing for this film is right now. A Savage Art speaks to the importance of satire and free speech and journalism, things that are directly under attack today in our current MAGA experience, more so than ever in our lifetime. Nixon had an enemies list, but he didn’t act on it the way that Trump does.

Two-time Putlizer Prize-winning cartoonist Ann Telnaes was with The Washington Post when we interviewed her for the film; she is no longer there. She quit when her editors refused to publish a cartoon she made making fun of Jeff Bezos  — bending the knee (and delivering the cash) to Trump.

Pulitzer Prize-winning cartoonist Adam Zygllis, also in our film, is currently dealing with death threats against him and his family on account of a cartoon he published after the Texas floods making fun of the MAGA Republicans. That cartoon drew ugly comments from the White House, which led to the death threats. As we point out in the film, this work can be dangerous.

MovieMaker: A Savage Art makes the intriguing point that political cartoons were the first memes. How do you think AI videos that mock political opponents, like those often posted by President Trump, fit into that history? Are they continuing the tradition of political cartoons, or breaking from it?

Bill Banowksy: Maureen Dowd, who is magnificent in our film, recently lamented about the rise of memes amid the decline of editorial cartooning. Maureen’s point was that memes cannot replace political cartoons. I could not agree more. Memes are not art. I could go online this morning and buy a meme-maker program and publish a meme this afternoon.  I could not create a political cartoon.  

Memes and AI generations are not art, nor are they original works.  Political cartoons are original works of art, combined with satire.  Memes are other people’s work combined with satire. A meme is half a political cartoon.

MovieMaker: What does Pat Oliphant think of the film?

Bill Banowsky:  You would need to ask him that question. He is an amazingly funny and smart guy.  I recently asked him if he liked the film and he said "it’s for s---.”  And then a sly grin came over his face.  I think he likes it, but who knows.

A Savage Art: The Life & Cartoons of Pat Oliphant plays Saturday at the Santa Fe International Film Festival, one of our 50 Film Festivals Worth the Entry Fee. You can read more of our festival coverage here.

"I thought of the parallels between trying to reach out to other species, and the times in our lives when our families can feel completely alien to us," he tells MovieMaker. "I believe each person contains a universe of their own emotions, thoughts, and experiences, and finding someone who understands us can at times feel like trying to find life on other worlds."

The comedy stars Chloe Bennet (Interior Chinatown) as Minnie, a journalist seeking access to Area 51, and Phil Dunster (Ted Lasso) as Rex, her cousin and a punk-rock guitarist fresh from rehab. Jennifer Beals also stars.

Hello Out There takes advantage of a vast range of New Mexico locations, which makes its screening Friday at the Santa Fe International Film Festival a kind of homecoming.

We talked with Blum — who has worked on Broadway, film, TV and video games — about why aliens are so much in the zeitgeist, and shooting a story where so much depends on the actors.

Otis Blum on Hello Out There

MovieMaker: What message did you want to convey with the film? Why include the alien aspect?

Otis Blum: I wanted to explore the idea of connection. Is it possible to connect with other beings, and if so how? During the depths of the pandemic, I noticed an uptick in stories about aliens in traditional publications like The New York Times, New Yorker, and The Economist. It made sense to me — at a time when we were and still are desperate for connection, of course we would look up and wonder if something was looking back.

MovieMaker: You're based in Los Angeles — how did you find filming in New Mexico? What drew you there, and where did you shoot specifically?

Otis Blum: I love New Mexico so much. I've been visiting the state since I was a child, and I have family that lives out there. I wrote this script with the purpose of telling a story in New Mexico and highlighting the beauty and wonderful peculiarity of this enchanting state. Filming in New Mexico was wonderful.

With all the production that happens in the states, there are many talented and experienced crew people that were vital to the making of this film. We were able to shoot on location in Roswell, White Sands National Park, Albuquerque, and Santa Fe, with the unique look and feel of each place elevating the look and feel of the movie.

MovieMaker: At one point your characters are at the gates of Area 51 — are those the real gates of Area 51? I thought it was impossible to get that close, so I was very intrigued.

Otis Blum: I'm glad you were intrigued! Those are not the real gates of Area 51. We studied lots of photographs and a producer visited the location, getting as close as legally possible, so we worked hard to authentically recreate it. That scene was shot at a private airport outside of Albuquerque. The real Area 51 is in Nevada, and I'm proud to say we shot every scene in New Mexico!

MovieMaker: How did you enlist your very good actors?

Otis Blum: I sent them the script and they wanted to be a part of it! When pitching to them I emphasized that the movie rests entirely on the performance of the actors. I admire each and everyone of them as naturalistic performers - Chloe, Phil, and Jennifer don't perform characters, they create real people. We started off by casting Minnie, and then finding the Rex that had the right chemistry.

Chloe and Phil had tremendous rapport from the very start. We did a lot of character work and rehearsal before we started shooting. In the process we discussed the themes of the story, and each actor had some form of personal connection to both their character and the larger story.

We couldn't find the right Judith for some time, and Jennifer Beals came on to the project a week or two before we started shooting, and I'm so grateful she did. I was so grateful to have such experienced talent on my first feature. 

MovieMaker: What was the biggest obstacle you faced in making this film, and how did you overcome it?

Otis Blum: There were two really big obstacles. One was the logistical headache of shooting in a lot of locations across the state. I have to thank my production team for playing jenga with schedules and transportation to make sure we got all the locations we needed.

The second obstacle was New Mexico weather. We shoot a lot of this movie outdoors, and New Mexico weather can be very fickle in the summer. ... I would wake up in the middle of night checking the weather app on my phone. We were incredibly fortunate that the weather never caused us to miss a day. We only had one thunderstorm delay. There were some brutally hot days, but we had a dedicated team who was watching out for our health and safety making sure we were hydrated, shaded, and safe.

Hello Out There plays Friday at the Santa Fe International Film Festival, one of our 50 Film Festivals Worth the Entry Fee. You can read more of our festival coverage here.

Main image: Hello Out There. Courtesy of the filmmakers.

Not only did it become the title of her feature directorial debut, but Singh stars in and produces the dramedy, which debuted at the Tribeca Film Festival and plays this weekend at the Santa Fe International Film Festival.

Pinch revolves around an aspiring travel blogger named Maitri (Singh) who travels with her mother and their neighbors to the annual Hindu festival Navratri. On the way, she is groped by a respected man in the community. Later, she gets retribution by pinching a woman in the crowd and blaming him. What follows is a darkly comedic story about the female experience, mother-daughter relationships, grief and trauma.

“My job is done,” Singh tells MovieMaker. “I was trying to tell the story I wanted to tell and people can take what they want from it. For some people it’s healing. For some, it enrages them. For me, life is absurd and I like to find the absurdity in it. You can have pain and joy co-exist and uncomfortable humor is my own way of dealing with trauma.”

Initially planned as a short, Pinch became a full feature after the film’s cinematographer and co-writer Adam Linzey hopped on board.

We talked with Singh at Tribeca in June about the importance of community in making the film, the power dynamics of assault, and balancing comedy with trauma. 

Uttera Singh on Balancing Comedy and Pain in Pinch

Amber Dowling: You wrote the script in English and then translated it to Hindi. Did you have difficulty with some of the nuances?

Uttera Singh: Those nuances don’t always translate and I found that out the hard way when I sent the first version to one of the actors I really wanted to play my mother’s friend. At first she refused to do it because she said it was bad. That it was really bad, because the Hindi didn’t flow. I was so hurt at first, but then I reread it and she was right. It needed two more passes to get the right flow and have it make sense. I had given up hope on her when she said she didn’t like the script, but when it was ready, I resent it and she agreed to do it. 

Amber Dowling: The movie seems to normalize healing from abuse and the collective trauma that women go through — was that the intention?

Uttera Singh: Yes, and one more thing was that I also wanted to talk about how we sometimes leave men out of the conversation. Men also go through abuse. Women come together and talk about it and heal together, but men don’t necessarily get that. This isn’t to diminish what women go through. That can still exist while including men in the conversation. I read this incredible book called Invisible Women, where Caroline Criado Perez talks about how assault isn’t a gender issue, it’s a power issue. That’s such a powerful statement. 

Amber Dowling: How did you want to treat the comedy of it all, given the dark subject matter?

Uttera Singh: I had to hold myself back and not treat the assault part in a funny way, because I wanted to be sure we were being sensitive and careful about treating that with care and realism. But the rest? I just see life as very absurd. I always got in trouble for laughing at the wrong moment. I lean more into that side of myself now and accept that it’s okay. 

Amber Dowling: The film has a budget of less than a million. How did you piece that financing together and make what you needed to happen?

Uttera Singh: The best thing that happened was I went back to my hometown in India and made it there. My whole community showed up, and there were privately raised funds, but also a lot of beg, borrow and steal. 

One of my favorite examples was that we needed a red refrigerator for the apartment. My cousin called a neighbor, who swapped fridges so that we could use hers for like a month. Other people lent us their living room furniture. It was just so sweet. It makes me emotional to think of where people were just showing up. This was made with a lot of community love. 

Amber Dowling: Did that community also factor in for the big crowd shot, where the title pinch happens?

Uttera Singh: Yes, that was extremely challenging and we only had the jib for two hours — that’s what we could afford. People traveled to bring all of the equipment up and that was something we only had for two hours. We were fighting the sun and we had 150 people from my parents’ villages who showed up. People were just standing there. It was hot but we needed the shot. At one point one woman held my hand and said, “It’s okay. Get your shot. We’re standing. We’re here.” I get so emotional, because that’s how the movie got made. By other people showing up. 

Amber Dowling: The music threads the narrative together in a really compelling way. What was your inspiration for it?

Uttera Singh: The one thing I kept telling my composer, Raashi Kulkarni, was that I wanted it to feel like an anxiety attack, like a panic attack. I wanted it to feel like Maitri’s heart. Even when I was writing this, I would put on really aggressive music with drums and percussion. Raashi did an incredible job. 

Amber Dowling: What other notable challenges did you face in making Pinch?

Uttera Singh: There were so many things, as with any indie film. We were just trying to take boulders up the hill, and we were like, “One more step. One more step.” Sadly, one of the big things that wasn’t a challenge but just a sad thing, is that Nitesh Pandey, who plays the assaulter, passed away a couple of months after the movie. So we never got to show him the film. Not that that’s the most important thing, but he was the nicest and so supportive of the movie. 

Pinch plays Saturday and Sunday at the Santa Fe International Film Festival, one of our 50 Film Festivals Worth the Entry Fee. You can read more of our festival coverage here.

Main image: Pinch, courtesy of Pinch. 

"Shelly's Leg" tells a story that sounds made up: In 1970, an eccentric young stripper named Shelly Baumann lost her leg in a freak parade canon accident, and used settlement money to open Shelly's Leg — one of the nation's first openly gay gathering places.

Watching "Shelly's Leg," by filmmaker Wes Hurley, you sometimes get the sense that this might all be a fun put-on — because the talking heads in his short documentary are so sweetly wide-eyed, the shots so beautifully composed, the footage as pretty as too-good-to-be-true AI.

But "Shelly's Leg" is totally true, And the people in it are very real. The film, now playing at the Santa Fe International Film Festival, has a striking beauty and out-of-time quality thanks to Hurley's clever approach to re-enactments. He enlisted modern-day actors in period garb to read interviews with real life collaborators and witnesses to Shelly's tale, then aged his footage to make it seem decades-old.

Hurley was born in Vladivostok, in the Soviet Union, and attended the University of Washington after immigrating to the U.S. with his mother. He has written, directed and produced dozens of award-winning shorts, three feature films and two seasons of Capitol Hill, a series he created for Huffington Post. His documentary short "Little Potato" won a Jury Prize at SXSW, and his autobiographical comedy Potato Dreams of America premiered at SXSW 2021 in the Narrative Feature Competition, then won Best Screenplay at Outfest that year.

We talked with Hurley about turning tragedy into fun, recruiting Kathleen Turner for "Shelly's Leg," and decidedly not using AI.

Shelly's Leg Director Wes Hurley on a Unique Approach to Documentary Re-Enactments

MovieMaker: How did you become a filmmaker?

Wes Hurley: I majored in painting and theater, but always knew I wanted to be a filmmaker.  I bought my first used camera after graduating from college and started by filming theater, music and burlesque live shows.  After getting to know a lot of Seattle performers and I began to cast them in short films and it grew from there.  I made my first two features guerilla-style with no crew but big very casts.  Over the years I've assembled a creative family of collaborators in Seattle that I always work with.

MovieMaker: How did you first learn of Shelly's Leg, and why did you want to tell this story? 

Wes Hurley: A few years ago I read the book Gay Seattle by professor Gary Atkins.  It's a local history book but it's written so well — it reads like a thriller. One of the stories in the book was about Shelly's Leg. I instantly knew I wanted to make a film about it after finishing my feature. As in my biographical feature Potato Dreams of America, I'm drawn to wild true stories that are stranger than fiction.  I love how tragedy and comedy can overlap in real life, just as in art. Shelly's Leg story is sad but also very funny and it's ultimately about what we choose to do with the cards we're dealt.

MovieMaker: I was sure at a certain point the film was all AI, and I even wondered if Shelly's Leg was a real place. (It is, of course.) The reason I thought it was AI is because the aged footage looked a little too good and pretty. Can you tell me about the historical re-enactment process you used?

Wes Hurley: I haven't heard anyone compare it to AI before, but I was definitely concerned that it would happen while making the film, considering that I worked so hard to make the footage seem authentically vintage and that is very rarely successful in films.  The conversations about AI were really starting to ramp up around that time and people were telling me about all the things that AI can already do. 

I find all of that extremely disturbing and it was important for me to specify that I'm not participating in that technology in any way, shape or form. In terms of making it look 70s, it was a really fun challenge. Not working with a big budget, it was about curating everything that goes on camera very very carefully — finding the right actors for the roles, finding little corners of the city that could pass for another era and working with our brilliant costume designer Ronald Leamon. 

I overlaid actual film grain over the final footage to get the right look, along with color correction and other effects. For sound, I worked with Paul Miller at Bad Animals to create scratchy older sounding recordings for all the interviews. I do all of my own color but I don't know how to do sound mixing. Paul really captured the quality I wanted in our mix. I think he did an amazing job.  

MovieMaker: I assumed other people must have thought this was AI as well, given your disclaimer at the end.  

Wes Hurley: An even bigger concern for me was that people wouldn't believe that it's a true story and that all the interviews are actual things real people said. So I put the disclaimer about all the interviews being verbatim, left by people most of whom are not around anymore. I'm heartened when people don't realize the interview footage was recreated. 

That aspect of the film was most exciting for me creatively but also stressful as I wasn't sure what audiences and festivals would make of it.  I called a few folks deep in the documentary world and explained my process, and they all told me I can still call the film a documentary even though the interviews themselves are re-enacted.  I've never seen it done before in a doc, though I'm sure I didn't invent it and there are other films like this out there.

MovieMaker: The voice I wish I'd heard more was Shelly's — I assume she never sat for a lengthy interview? 

Wes Hurley: Yes, sadly Shelly did not give any in-depth interviews. And she passed away before I learned of her story. I've read through a thousand pages of legal documents pertaining to her post-accident lawsuit — those had some of her testimony but nothing much of substance or interest there.  Except for the quote I use in the film where she wonders to her lawyers whether the whole cannon accident was a hallucination.  I thought it's so fitting for her entire life story and the story of her club and human condition in general.  I also thought it was very funny - her attorneys must have not liked it.

MovieMaker: How did you cast your amazing actors? 

Wes Hurley: I tried to find actors who look as much as their real counterparts as possible.  For guys that was trickier since these men in the film are all hippies and have longer hair and wigs look fake. The one exception was "Mike" — I could not find any images of him or any description. I ended up finding an actor that I really liked but he had a British accent. I decided, what the hell, this guy is great and so natural, and no one seems to remember this man sadly.  So in the movie he's British. I keep expecting someone to come up to me after a screening and ask why "Mike" is British.

MovieMaker: How did Kathleen Turner get involved?

Wes Hurley: I really wanted a recognizable voice that also served as a kind of unofficial spirit of Shelly.  When my producer Eliza Flug and I learned that Kathleen Turner was interested, it was one of the happiest days of my life. I grew up watching Kathleen, she's my favorite actress from that era and her voice brings so much specificity and character to the film. Working with her was a blast.  I have a feeling Shelly is thrilled about Kathleen narrating her story too, wherever she is now.

"Shelly's Leg" plays Thursday at the Santa Fe International Film Festival. one of our 50 Film Festivals Worth the Entry Fee. You can read more of our festival coverage here.

Main image: "Shelly's Leg," courtesy of Wes Hurley.

"A person who mediates emotionally messy conversations between people who can’t face each other? I’d hire one in a second," Anderson tells MovieMaker. "Maybe I need to start my own agency. The idea came from wondering what would happen if someone literally outsourced their most difficult relationship — the kind of conversation that feels impossible to have without a buffer."

The film, which plays Saturday at the Santa Fe International Film Festival, where Anderson will also take part in a post-screening Q&A, also stars Daniel Portman as Chris, the man who needs a mediator, and Mia Tomlinson as Olivia, his long-suffering sister.

Anderson is a British writer‑director who focuses on emotionally grounded, character‑driven films, including 2020's "My Time With Joe" and 2016's "Class 15." We talked with him about emotionally stilted characters, structure, and whether the mediator of "The Mediator" is who she seems to be.

MovieMaker: How did you become a filmmaker? 

Dean Leon Anderson: I’ve always loved films, but for a long time I had no idea how to actually become a filmmaker. It felt like this far-off, mysterious world, growing up in South London. Things really started when a friend received some funding from BBC Films to make a short, and I asked if I could help. I ended up assisting his producer and just absorbed everything I could on his set. That experience lit the fire. I went off and started writing my own scripts right after.

I didn’t have access to funding at first, so I cobbled things together — self-funding, borrowing kit, convincing friends and family to get involved. It was very DIY, but I learned a lot from doing it that way. After a few shorts, I started getting proper support for my work, and things grew from there. It’s been a gradual process, built on momentum and a lot of persistence.

MovieMaker: Can you talk about finding your excellent actors?

Dean Leon Anderson: I was lucky enough to work with Sharon Duncan-Brewster (Dune, Sex Education) on my previous short, "Class 15." I thought I’d written a solid script, but she brought so much depth to her character that it completely raised the bar for how I approached casting "The Mediator." The characters in this film are complex, and I knew I needed two strong leads who wouldn’t just play what was on the page, but would bring their own instincts and challenge the material in the best way.

I met casting director Zyrenka Cox through a BAFTA film scheme, and it was perfect timing. I’d originally pictured older actors in the roles, but her suggestions completely reshaped my thinking, in a good way. She put forward Daniel Portman [Game of Thrones], Mia Tomlinson [The Beast Must Die], and Cat White [Ten Percent], and I immediately saw the potential.

I already knew Daniel’s work, and after talking it through with Zyrenka, I knew he was right for Chris. I auditioned a few actors for Mary, but Cat stood out from the start. I’d seen Gina Bramhill in The Flatshare and was drawn to her subtlety, and Ian Burfield [EastEnders, The Selfish Giant] has a voice that instantly grounded his character. I was very lucky when they all came on board.

Dean Leon Anderson on the Untold Backstory of 'The Mediator'

MovieMaker: Why did you want to tell this story?

Dean Leon Anderson: After making "Class 15," which was set in a classroom during a parents' evening, I became really interested in creating stories within intimate, contained spaces. "Class 15" started off polite and civil, and gradually descended into chaos. With "The Mediator," I wanted to flip that structure — to start in a place of real hostility, with two people who are completely shut off emotionally from one another, and see if they could find a way to something more human.

I’m drawn to characters who are emotionally stuck, and to situations where communication has broken down. There’s something interesting in seeing what happens when you force people into a room, or even a phone call and they have no choice but to face what’s gone unsaid.

MovieMaker: Can you talk about your use of elegant cuts to black to show the passage of time? 

Dean Leon Anderson: Originally, the script had a chapter structure. Each shift in time came with a title and time of day, to mark how long the characters had been in the space together. I’d been inspired by Joachim Trier, whose films often play with structure in inventive ways. I wanted to experiment with something similar, especially since the story plays out over a 24-hour period.

But during post production, once we’d cleared all the graphics for color grading and I got the final graded files back, I realized the clean cuts to black were doing all the work I needed. Paired with the lighting changes and shifts in mood, it still clearly showed the passage of time — and actually gave the film a more restrained, mature feel. So I ended up using my instincts and keeping it simple. Sometimes less really is more.

MovieMaker: [Spoiler warning] Why does the mediator seem to develop such warm feelings for this surly man? To me, the film seems to leave open the question of whether she's actually a mediator, or if the sister has just enlisted her to try to break her brother from his cycle of self-pity.

Dean Leon Anderson: That’s such an interesting observation — and you’re not the first to float that theory! I’ve actually been asked a few times whether I’d consider expanding this world, and if I did, I think it would begin with Mary’s backstory.

She’s such a unique presence. To me, she’s like this quiet knight in shining armor, someone who steps into people’s emotional chaos to help clean it up. I even took her name from Mary Poppins, who famously arrives in the Banks’ lives to sort things out when everything else seems broken. But underneath Mary’s calm, there’s a lot of baggage.

I think part of why she connects with Chris is that, in staying longer than she probably intended, he ends up being one of the few people who actually listens to her. They’re very different people, with very different issues, but in that moment, there’s a kind of mutual recognition, two stuck people seeing something human in each other. I won’t say much more for those who haven’t seen the film yet, but I really like your take. That ambiguity is kind of the point.

MovieMaker: Finally, what's the biggest obstacle you faced in making this film, and how did you overcome it?

Dean Leon Anderson: The biggest obstacle was definitely the lack of external funding. "The Mediator" was entirely self‑funded, which limits what you can do, but it also sharpens your focus. With no script development schemes or external partners involved, every decision had to be intentional and achievable with the resources I had.

At the same time, I was in early‑stage development of my debut feature with the BFI Network, so "The Mediator" became a kind of creative reset, something I could fully own and make on my own terms in the middle of a much longer, more complex process.

Taking on multiple roles, writing, directing, producing, and editing was both freeing and exhausting. I did this because it was important to me that the film felt authentic and intimate, and that nothing got overworked or diluted. I surrounded myself with amazing and experienced collaborators I really trusted, and they made all the difference. Though it was a challenge, it reminded me of why I started making films in the first place: just telling stories in the purest way I can.

"The Mediator" screens Saturday at the Santa Fe International Film Festival, one of our 50 Film Festivals Worth the Entry Fee. You can read more of our festival coverage here.

Main image: Daniel Portman and Cat White in "The Mediator." Courtesy of Dean Leon Anderson.

"My home was gone, and my community was nearly burned to the ground. Picking up a camera so soon after the devastation was cathartic and healing — then, in the moment, and especially now as we share the film with fire survivors and neighboring communities," Goldblum tells MovieMaker.

A writer, director and producer, Goldblum is the founder of Conscious Contact Entertainment, a studio that focuses on telling story that create impact on a global scale. But when the Palisades Fire struck in January 2025, he was suddenly in the center of the story.

The Palisades Fire in the Santa Monica Mountains killed 12 people, and destroyed nearly 7,000 structures. It was one of several major fires that raged simultaneously in Southern California in January, including the Eaton Fire that killed 19 people and destroyed more than 9,000 buildings as it tore through communities including Altadena.

Goldblum hopes that watching Big Rock Burning, which plays Thursday at the Santa Fe International Film Festival and is now available on Vimeo, can help people take stock and think about what's next.

"We had our first screening at Malibu City Hall in late August and most of the sold-out crowd were residents who had lost their homes in either the Palisades Fire, Eaton Fire, or a previous one. To be able to give them a voice was a true honor and a privilege. The overwhelming response from everyone involved in the film was gratitude for me making this, but I should really be grateful for them for allowing me into their most intimate moments during such a vulnerable time," he says.

The film's executive producers include Ricki Lake, whose home was lost in the fires, and Mark Hamill and his wife Marilou, whose home survived.

We talked with Goldblum about making Big Rock Burning, the recovery process, and the interviews he didn't get.

MovieMaker: What was your personal experience with the fire? 

David Goldblum: I was in my home office and looked out the window and saw the fire cloud barreling toward my mountain community. I jumped in my car and raced off the mountain as the fire got closer and closer, leaving everything I owned behind. I think if I left my mountain an hour or two later I might not have survived. I went into action so quickly after the fires and I still haven't really grappled with the fact that so many of us literally battled or escaped the flames. It was surreal.

David Goldblum on the Roles of Mark Hamill, Ricki Lake and More in Making Big Rock Burning

MovieMaker: How did Mark Hamill and Ricki Lake get involved?

David Goldblum: One of our producers, James Costa, had worked with Ricki before. Ricki also lost her home in Malibu and when James sent her the film, she was immediately on board. Although she didn't live on Big Rock, this was Ricki's story too — her and her husband literally fought off the flames with everything they could.

I had reached out to Mark and his wonderful wife Marilou while I was filming and asked if they would be involved, knowing that having someone like Mark on the team would really give us credibility and visibility. Once they saw the film, they also came on board and offered their support. I can't thank all of them enough. 

MovieMaker: Many are under the general impression that insurance or the state and/or federal government will eventually help everyone rebuild. Is that the case?

David Goldblum: To date, there's been three permits given in Malibu since the fires. Three. Seven-hundred-and-twenty homes in Malibu were destroyed. That is not an OK ratio. Insurance companies are not helping the way they should either. 

MovieMaker: Who issues the permits?

David Goldblum: The City of Malibu. Our rebuild ambassador just quit as well.

MovieMaker: People in the film are very critical of Los Angeles mayor Karen Bass, accusing her of failing to adequately prepare for the fires; former mayoral candidate Rick Caruso, for hiring private firefighters to defend his shopping complex; and the Santa Monica Mountains Conservancy, accusing it of acquiring lots of land but not adequately clearing and otherwise maintaining it. Why did you choose not to interview them from the movie, so we could hear their side?

David Goldblum: My goal with Big Rock Burning was to make a film that was a love letter to my community. To do that I wanted to give a microphone to those who felt they didn't have a voice. Through that process, we did hear criticism aimed at various players in Los Angeles for not properly preparing for the fires — from the empty reservoir, lack of firefighter support, no water in the hydrants, budget cuts to the fire department, lack of land management and more. Not to mention we just found out the Palisades Fire was started by an arsonist. I did try to reach out to folks on the other side to get their points of view, but many were not interested in being in the film. 

MovieMaker: Any reaction to the news that a suspect was arrested in the Palisades fire?

David Goldblum: I'm grateful he was finally arrested. It's heartbreaking that somebody would do this intentionally to destroy a city. Hopefully it's the beginning of closure for all the communities that suffered losses in the Palisades Fire. 

Big Rock Burning plays Thursday at the Santa Fe International Film Festival, one of our 50 Film Festivals Worth the Entry Fee. You can read more of our festival coverage here.

Main image: Big Rock Burning. Courtesy of David Goldblum

In Good Fortune, which he wrote and directed in his feature debut, Ansari plays a struggling gig worker named Arj who sleeps in his car and does short-term gigs including food deliveries. Thanks to a "budget guardian angel" named Gabriel, played by Keanu Reeves, Arj ends up switching lives with Jeff, a wealthy tech bro played by Seth Rogen.

Keke Palmer, meanwhile, plays Elena, a woman Arj tries to romance, even if it distracts her from trying to unionize the hardware chain where she works.

"I went and did DoorDash and I talked to people that did that stuff," Ansari tells MovieMaker. "I I interviewed people who slept in their cars. I talked to a guy who tried to unionize his Home Depot to help me write Keke's character. And that stuff is your best friend, because you don't need to live the experience if you do the research, and do a version of living whatever you're trying to figure out."

Ansari said he was inspired by filmmakers like Darren Aronofsky, who did deep dives into wrestling and ballet before making The Wrestler and Black Swan.

Ansari wanted Good Fortune to ring true for people who've worked in the gig economy.

"You want someone who's dealt with this stuff not to watch it and roll their eyes, but instead to watch and go, 'Whoa. How'd they know that?" he says.

Good Fortune captures the dispiriting feeling of doing a good job with no recognition, and always feeling behind. What did Ansari learn on the job?

"Well, of course, everybody knows it's not fun," he says. "But it is a bit dystopian in terms of, you know, so much of your time you're not even getting paid. You're waiting for gigs and driving around town. You're losing money on gas. You have a car that's maybe a little bit older, and it's getting beat up doing all this driving all around L.A. and that's a cost, and you do a delivery and someone might not tip you at all. Or the order's not ready. There's so many things that are going wrong."

"It's also strange how people sometimes, [customers are ]like, 'Don't say anything, just ring the bell and leave.' It just seems kind of weird."

Aziz Ansari on the 'Dystopian' Aspects of the Gig Economy He Addresses in Good Fortune

But some elements are even darker, he says — like realizing that you may soon be replaced by a machine.

"There's now these little robots going around L.A. doing the same thing, and the even darker thing is, if you read up on this, these companies are watching how these drivers are driving, just so they can program it in to a self-driving car eventually," Ansari says.

Ansari's life, of course, is closer to that of Jeff, a wealthy entrepreneur who lives in the Hollywood Hills. Ansari, who recently moved to London, jokes: "I did all the Jeff research, yeah."

Did Ansari get any personal satisfaction from doing a tough delivery job?

"I did it for a couple hours, and I was like, this is hard, and I have so much more empathy for these people than I did, and I'm going to tip them even harder than I used to. And I think Seth said the same thing to me: So many of the conveniences in our lives are built on the hardships of other people. And I don't know what the answer is to that. It's but it's tough. It's a tough thing."

Good Fortune is in theaters Thursday, from Lionsgate.

Main image: Keanu Reeves as Gabriel, Seth Rogen as Jeff, and Aziz Ansari as Ari in Good Fortune. Photo by Eddy Chen, courtesy of Lionsgate.

He has a closer connection to the film than most. 

His father, Richard O’Brien, was writing the Rocky Horror stage musical around the time Linus was born. He was about a year old when it premiered onstage, under the name The Rocky Horror Show, at London’s Royal Court Theatre. And he saw it live for the first time in 1976, at about the age of four, at the King’s Road Theatre. 

“They let me control the lights around the proscenium,” Linus O’Brien recalls. 

His father had started writing the musical as a struggling artist who had come to London from New Zealand. Linus O’Brien was dimly aware of the family’s rising financial fortunes as they moved from a small flat to a bigger house, and began to travel quite a bit. The musical quickly expanded to Sydney, and Los Angeles, and soon all over the world, but hit a snag in New York City, where Broadway audiences regarded its raunchy operatics and B-movie throwbackery with suspicion. 

Another failure — initially — was the film version of The Rocky Horror Picture Show, directed by Jim Sharman, who helped adapt it for the screen.  It premiered almost 50 years ago, on September 26, 1975.

Though the early box office was bad, you probably know what happened next. 

The film quickly became an underground sensation, and has played continuously for the last half century all over the globe, often accompanied by “shadow cast” performances in which audience members act out the movie as it plays onscreen. 

The phenomenon began with screenings in Austin and New York City, where an audience member’s spontaneous eruption at Susan Sarandon’s character, Janet Weiss, during a storm — “Buy an umbrella, you cheap b----!” — quickly grew into a series of audience participation cues that evolved into the shadow-cast performances. 

“It’s the longest-running theatrical release in the history of cinema, and that’s 50 years,” Linus O’Brien says. “And second place is like one-and-a-half.”

An actor and DJ as well as filmmaker, Linus O’Brien makes his feature directorial debut with Strange Journey, a raucous, joyous documentary about the ups and downs of the ultimate cult classic. He interviews his father, who plays handyman Riff Raff in Rocky Horror, and pulls out his guitar in Strange Journey for glorious stripped-down versions of his beloved Rocky Horror songs. 

Other mesmerizing interview subjects include Sarandon; Sharman; Tim Curry, who made his film debut as the "sweet transvestite" Dr. Frank-N-Furter; Barry Bostwick, who played Janet’s straitlaced fiance, Brad; and Patricia Quinn, who played Magenta and brings down the house with a story about kissing castmate Meatloaf. 

Rocky Horror owes its success in large part to queer audiences, who embraced its exhortation to live truly to one’s self, epitomized by the song “Don’t Dream It, Be It.” They kept the film alive in all those midnight screenings, in small towns where Rocky Horror was sometimes the only light in the darkness.

“When the midnight screenings first happened, you would expect that maybe like Los Angeles, Chicago, and New York would have people who wanted to come see it. But it was the smaller cities around the Midwest where it actually had the most impact,” Linus O’Brien explains. 

“You know, 10 to 12% of the human race is LGBTQ. So you go into a city which has 20,000 people, you're gonna have 2,000 people who lean that way, or at least have those kinds of feelings, and they have nowhere else to go. And so Rocky provided a safe space in the community for people who felt marginalized and different.”

Why does he think it lasted so long? 

“It was never intended to have a message, to point you in a direction,” O’Brien says. “It was just meant to be fun. And I think that's one of the keys to the success of it — because if it had tried to preach, people would have gotten challenged, and people would have not liked that. And it didn't, and here it is, 50 years later.”

Strange Journey premiered at SXSW to begin a successful festival run, and arrives in theaters next week. We talked with Linus O'Brien at the Provincetown International Film Festival, where a queer and LGBTQ-friendly audience enjoyed a screening of Strange Journey one night, and Rocky Horror the next.

Like Rocky Horror, Strange Journey is an intoxicating film to watch with a crowd, dreaming and being. 

Linus O'Brien on Making Strange Journey: The Story of Rocky Horror

MovieMaker: What’s it like to grow up with Rocky Horror?

Linus O’Brien: People ask me this, but he's just my dad, and I didn’t you any different: “Oh yeah, this is his job, and this is what he does. He sings songs, you know.” I mean, as you get older, maybe it changes a little bit. Rocky just came in and out of our lives, with the anniversaries and the conventions and things like that, and when a new version of the stage play would come on, we’d go see that. But it was just always there in the background.

The deep appreciation of it probably happened for me while I was making the documentary. At the end of the SXSW screening, there was a man who came up to the stage after the Q&A, and he was shaking, and he said, “I just want to tell you I met my wife at Rocky Horror 32 years ago, and my wife wanted to tell you that if it wasn't for Rocky Horror, she wouldn't be alive today.” 

And that story is told over and over again. I can't think of another work of art, a film, a soundtrack, a stage play, a book that has tangibly saved the lives of, I would say, conservatively, tens of thousands of people. If I say hundreds of thousands, people will think I'm crazy, but it's a distinct possibility that that's the case, given that it's now three generations of people.

MovieMaker: Saved them by letting them know they're not alone?

Linus O’Brien: Exactly. But also giving them a place to go and meet other people just like them. And they don't necessarily even have to be gay or LGBTQ. They can just feel different and just not part of anything. 

I think one of the things that's really amazing about Rocky Horror is that society has an idea of what beauty and sexuality looks like. We always see it on magazines and commercials and TikTok and everything — you’re constantly bombarded with girls with giant boobs and butts and having to be skinny and guys with chiseled abs and jaws, right? So that's kind of the media perception of what beauty is. 

But everyone deserves to be a sexual being, right? And so if you're a little bit shorter, or a little bit bigger, or too skinny, or whatever, you're allowed to feel like that. It allows you that freedom. And the value of that is unquantifiable, really.

MovieMaker: The Rocky Horror Picture Show has grossed well over $100 million on a small budget. It’s cool that your dad had this kind of success making what must have seemed like the least commercial thing. He seems like he gets a lot of pleasure from just holding a guitar.

Linus O’Brien: That's his whole thing, really. He's never chased money. He's never chased roles. If Rocky hadn't been a success, I think he would have been a very successful actor, and would have focused on that a lot more. I think Rocky gave him the ability to say no to a lot of things. 

MovieMaker: I have a friend whose dad revered Bob Dylan, and as a result he hates Bob Dylan — he was always rebelling against this symbol of rebellion. How do you rebel when your dad created Rocky Horror?

Linus O’Brien: The only way I rebelled even slightly, was when I was about 13, maybe 12, someone gave me a tie, and I started wearing the tie with a T-shirt. And my dad was like, ‘Oh, no, take that tie off.’ And so then that made me want to wear the tie more, and it lasted about two weeks. But that was the only small rebellion that there was — almost wearing a tie. 

MovieMaker: This may sound sacrilegious, but I found your movie on a meta level to be as interesting to watch as Rocky Horror, because not only do you get scenes from Rocky Horror, but you also get the story behind it — and to see how well so many in the cast have aged. It's like being involved in this has kept people young, including your dad. 

Linus O’Brien: That's a very nice thing to say. Even if you take out my dad's personal journey, you have the fact that Rocky Horror was only meant to have a three-week run in a theater that held 60 people, and then the explosion of the stage show in London, the success at the Roxy in L.A., the failure at the Belasco Theater on Broadway, the failure of the movie when it first came out, and then the resurrection through the midnight screening – that alone is interesting. 

But we've peppered it with lots of lovely anecdotes, and at the end, it's a love letter to the fans. 

I could watch again and again the parts about the midnight screenings and Sal Piro, the original fan club founder, and the original shadow cast members. When my dad talks about Dori Hartley — the Frank-N-Furter at the Eighth Street Playhouse in the shadow cast — and he talks about her sitting at the front of the stage, and there's a spotlight on her, and her silhouette on the screen, while the audiences are singing the refrains — I get chills every time I watch that. 

Because then you see, “Oh, it's just not some people acting out in front of the stage.” It becomes art at that point. It becomes something completely different. To be able to convey that to people, so they get a real sense of what's happening — I can watch it over and over again.

MovieMaker: Speaking of audience participation, there’s an amazing moment in this documentary where we realize that Rocky Horror is kind of Jack Black’s origin story, because he saw Meatloaf in Rocky Horror and related to him. And now you have Jack Black starring in A Minecraft Movie, which is another film where you have audiences participating and adding a layer by going wild during the “chicken jockey” scene. So it’s all kind of coming together. 

Linus O’Brien: Meatloaf played his dad in the Tenacious D movie in 2006. And Meatloaf said to him, “You know, the last time I sang on film was Rocky Horror, all that time ago.” So that was really cool for him, and it was really cool for me to hear as well.

I don't know too much about Minecraft, but it was very funny to hear it, given that for so long, audience participation has been, you know, solely Rocky Horror. 

Strange Journey: The Story of Rocky Horror arrives in theaters September 25.

Main image: Richard O’Brien, who wrote Rocky Horror and plays Riff Raff, in Linus O’Brien’s Strange Journey

Created by William J. MacDonald, Bruno Heller, and Hollywood heavyweight John Milius (Apocalypse Now, Conan the Barbarian), it was focused on the magnetic portrayal of Gaius Julius Caesar by Ciarán Hinds in Season 1. His performance captured both the mythic grandeur and human vulnerabilities of one of history’s most iconic figures through his rise and fall.

Rome also followed the ascent of Gaius Octavian, aka Augustus (portrayed by Max Pirkis and later by Simon Woods) and the journeys of two soldiers, Lucius Vorenus (Kevin McKidd) and Titus Pullo (Ray Stevenson), whose fates were intricately tied to the events reshaping their world.

The series arrived on August 28, 2005 at a pivotal moment in HBO’s history, between the landscape-changing successes of The Sopranos and Game of Thrones. Filmed primarily at Rome’s Cinecittà Studios, it stood out for its meticulous attention to detail and lavish production design. 

Though initially planned for five seasons, Rome was cut short after Season 2, in part because its production costs were so high relative to its ratings.

Two decades after the show’s debut, we spoke with Hinds about the challenges of embodying one of history’s most iconic figures, the series’ enduring legacy, and striking parallels between then and now. 

Ciarán Hinds on Playing Julius Caesar in Rome

When Ciarán Hinds was first offered the role of Julius Caesar on Rome, his immediate reaction, he says, was “Oh, s---, how the f--- do you do this?” 

Caesar wasn’t just one of history’s key figures, but also one who had been played by countless actors throughout Shakespearean and Hollywood history.Hinds, a seasoned actor with a deep respect for the craft, knew that to play Caesar, he would have to strip away the myths and find his core personality.

Hinds immersed himself in historical texts, including Tom Holland’s 2003 book Rubicon, which offered vivid detail about life in ancient Rome. 

“It’s not a dramatic reconstruction,” says Hinds. “It’s based on fact, but it’s very lively and the characters of other people were very well drawn.”

The series depicted Caesar as a man who, despite his immense power, was not invincible. In one pivotal scene, Caesar suffers a seizure, a moment that underscores his vulnerability. “It wasn’t just about showing him as a great leader,” Hinds explains. “He’s human like anyone else, but he has to hide it for fear of it being used against him.”

The seizure scene was a technical challenge as well as a dramatic one. Hinds worked closely with Nicholas Woodeson, who played Caesar’s loyal slave Posca, to ensure the moment felt authentic. “I had to let go completely, but Nick was there to guide me, to make sure the camera caught everything,” Hinds recalls. “It was a delicate balance, but it worked.”

The Kalends of February

Caesar’s assassination is one of the most famous events in history, and Rome approached it with a mix of historical accuracy and dramatic flair. The series deviated from tradition by setting Caesar’s death on the Kalends of February rather than the Ides of March, a decision that puzzled some viewers but allowed the show to subvert expectations. 

“We all know what’s coming,” Hinds says. “By changing the date, the writers kept us on our toes.”

Hinds recalls the moment Caesar realizes what’s happening: “He’s a military man, so when the first dagger comes out, he grabs the knife by the blade. There’s disbelief, a sense of ‘This can’t be happening, because I’m a deity.’” 

The death reflected Caesar’s hubris: He had grown so powerful that he could no longer see the threats around him.

Hinds returned for the first episode of Second 2 to play Caesar’s corpse — “some of my finest work,” he jokes. 

“Because of the effect that Caesar had on Rome, you had to present his dead body to the people,” Hinds adds. “I was just needed for two days to film other characters’ reactions and feelings.”

Even in death, Caesar loomed large over the second season, shaping the actions of Rome’s surviving characters like Mark Antony (James Purefoy), who came to power after Caesar. 

Consolidating Power

When cancellation became imminent, some of the show’s remaining plots were consolidated into the final episodes. Rome aired before the time when intense social media fandom could help a show’s chances of survival. 

“By the time people discovered it, it was too late,” Hinds says. “But it paved the way for shows like Game of Thrones, as one of Rome’s producers, Frank Doelger, set up that show as well.”

In the end, Hinds’ says Caesar’s line to Mark Antony in Season 1 sums up the series: “If we lose, it’s a crime. If we win, it isn’t.” 

Reminiscing about Rome, Hinds makes parallels between Caesar’s story and Donald Trump’s second presidential term, noting that both men used populism and legal maneuvering to consolidate power.

“It’s a complicated time for America. The parallels of using bribery and the Senate’s own laws against it surfaces from time to time, and that’s happened here. I can see that,” he says.

He recalls the English historian Lord Acton’s observation that power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.

“As far as I know, the American Constitution has set up a resolution so there’s checks and barriers and therefore it will never turn into an autocracy or a monarchy again,” says Hinds. “But it doesn’t seem that way right now.”

Rome is streaming on Max.

The reason Sweeney is mentally editing is that we’re talking in June, but this interview will come out with Twinless’ theatrical release in September, and he wants to make sure one of his answers won’t spoil any of the film’s many turns. 

Making Twinless was a similar exercise in both planning ahead and being in the moment. Sweeney is in almost every scene of the film, usually opposite co-star Dylan O’Brien — they play the pair who meet in the support group. 

Sweeney’s directing involved constant planning and visualization to balance the film’s sumptuous images and tight storytelling. Twinless breathes like a rom-com, but it’s more deftly plotted than many thrillers: If a character mentions something, you can almost be sure it will come back, often in a way that feels both heartbreaking and inevitable. 

From the characters’ first meeting, which establishes that Sweeney’s character, Dennis, is gay, and that O’Brien’s character, Roman, is not — Twinless hints at an array of possibilities about where things could go, in terms of plot, and also genre. 

That required a lot of editing in Sweeney’s head.

“Dylan and I have talked a lot about how I think one of the reasons he’s such a great actor is because he’s so present,” Sweeney explains. “And I, as a director and producer, spend a lot of time thinking ahead… anticipating problems and trying to come up with solutions before the problems happen, which can be really annoying and exhausting.”

Sweeney laughs, then adds: “So much of what I do as a writer and a director is communication. On one hand, art is subjective — you hand it over and it’s no longer yours, and it’s open for interpretation. But on the other hand, the more I can clarify my intention, the higher the yield rate of my intentions getting across. What I like about acting is it forces me to be present and be in the moment.”

Twinless Director James Sweeney on His First 'Little Shows'

Sweeney, who is 35, was born near Sacramento and moved several times as a child, including to North Carolina and Utah, because his father was in the Air Force. He grew up mostly in Eagle River, Alaska, a suburb of Anchorage, and his parents still live in Alaska.

He didn’t have a twin, but did have an older sister. The decade-long-gap in their ages contributed to his sense of independence. 

“I’m a military brat, so I had to start over several times,” he says. “Being an introvert and having to reset multiple times, I kind of created my own worlds to live in, with stuffed animals. My cousins and aunts and uncles can tell you stories about how I would put on little shows when I was a kid.”

He started doing regional theater in elementary school. “I think my first role was as a chair in Beauty and the Beast,” he laughs. “Which had lines, to be clear. I dressed in black and just pushed a chair around.”

He fell in love with TV before film— “because that’s what I had access to growing up in Alaska,” where he only had one movie theater close to home. Eventually a love of writing led him to film school at Chapman University, where he started off as a screenwriting major and then transferred into the acting program, which was interdisciplinary between the university’s theater and film programs.

At Chapman, he realized he wanted to direct. He also met his best friend, cinematographer Greg Cotten, who would go on to shoot both Sweeney’s debut, the 2019 film Straight Up, and Twinless. 

Sweeney was in his early 20s when he wrote the scripts for both Straight Up —  about a man who has previously dated men and tries dating a woman — and Twinless. 

“I guess I’m in a different place now than I was then. But I am interested in themes of identity, themes of permanence. I also love the romantic comedy genre. I’m interested in relationships,” Sweeney says. 

“Straight Up is sort of an exploration of how we do or do not have all of our needs met in one person — whether or not that’s pragmatic or attainable, especially in a modern landscape. I think the romantic comedy sort of sells the notion of one person to complete you. And I guess I, in some ways, try to dissect that through my work.”

Partners in Crime

Twinless also explores the idea of people completing each other — or falling short of each other’s expectations. While Straight Up relies heavily on Sweeney’s chemistry with the film’s female lead, played by Katie Findlay, Twinless is built around Sweeney’s dynamic with O’Brien.

O’Brien started out posting original videos to YouTube in his teens, which led to an acting career. He is best known for MTV’s Teen Wolf and the Maze Runner trilogy, and has recently taken on a series of bold, standout roles, including playing a young Dan Aykroyd in Saturday Night and a brutal pimp in Ponyboi.

Sweeney met him through the Twinless casting process.  

“It was during the pandemic, so we met over Zoom, but we shared the script with his team, and he read it and then watched my film, and it was just sort of, I guess, instantaneous,” says Sweeney. “I think he just really saw my voice. … I write pretty specifically, so when I feel somebody really gets it, I latch onto that. And I felt like he just has the versatility and instincts. 

“I was looking for a partner in crime, and I had heard that he had a really good reputation, on set, as a leader, as a co-star, and I just felt really good about how we would work together,” Sweeney continues. 

O’Brien signed on not just as the co-lead, but as an executive producer.

Sweeney’s attention to detail — and making the complex look elegant — is especially apparent in a house party scene in Twinless that takes a lovely, dynamic approach to the split screen.   

“There’s a visual grammar to the film that starts with the bifurcation of perspectives,” explains Sweeney. “So initially we’re seeing things through Roman’s point of view, then we shift to Dennis’. 

“So the split screen, for me, was sort of the merging of a shared point of view. It wasn’t in the initial first draft. It was an idea that came later and for me concretized the grammar I was trying to build.”

Twinless is now in theaters, from Roadside Attractions and Lionsgate.  

Starring a jittery Théodore Pellerin (Never Rarely Sometimes Always) and a radiant Archie Madekwe (Saltburn), Lurker is a pulsing exploration of the relationship between celebrity and viewer, an intriguing parasocial psychodrama with shades of All About Eve and Mean Girls.

Madekwe plays Oliver, a pop musician whose star is on the rise when he stumbles into the streetwear store where Pellerin’s Matty works. When Matty just happens to put on Oliver’s favorite song, their hypebeast meetcute seems like a sign, and Matty quickly works his way into the pop star’s inner circle of homies-turned-associates.

Lurker is a canny exploration of homosocial tensions in L.A.’s cutthroat music scene. Soundtracked by all-star producer Kenneth Blume, better known as Kenny Beats, it’s one of the slyest, most electrifying movies of the year.

Rounding out the cast are Zack Fox (Abbott Elementary), Havana Rose Liu (Bottoms), Wale Onayemi, Daniel Zolghadri (Eighth Grade), and Sunny Suljic (Mid90s).

Russell is a former music journalist who has since worked on two of the most acclaimed shows of the 2020s, Beef and The Bear. The season two episode he wrote for the latter, “Forks,” earned him a WGA award and was the episode that actor Ebon Moss-Bachrach (Fantastic Four) submitted to support his nomination, and eventual win, for a Best Supporting Actor Emmy. 

Russell wrote Lurker during the early days of Covid. It took a while to make the movie — Lurker almost went into production in 2021 but didn’t get off the ground until 2023.

“Théodore Pellerin was always attached.” Russell tells Movie Maker. “I was a little afraid of him aging out of the world.”

There were a few changes made to the script along the way. While some of them were due to constraints of production, they ended up enhancing the central themes of Russell’s original script. 

“Originally, I had more fashion shows, parties, scene-y things that filled out their day-to-day,” he says.

But as the locations consolidated, the movie became more about Oliver’s intimate world. It only helps raise the stakes. 

“It means a lot more to someone like Matthew to be sitting in Oliver’s bed than to be out in the world with him.” Russell says.

Many of Lurker’s funniest moments come courtesy of rapper and comedian Zack Fox (Abbott Elementary). 

“Zack and I are best friends.” Russell tells Movie Maker. “We’ve known each other for over ten years.”

Russell has directed some of Fox’s music videos, but, Russell explains, “at the time, he wasn’t really an actor. It would have been more of a jump for me to cast him because I knew that he could do something like this, but the role wasn’t originally written for him. And then somehow, once I was done with the script, I realized he was perfect for it.”

As with Pellerin, Fox’s age was an initial concern that actually became an asset. As a longtime music journalist, Russell has met plenty of variations of the characters he writes about in Lurker. “Fox’s character became the slightly older guy who’s weirdly still around — that’s a dynamic in itself,” Russell says.

Russell, who also directed videos for hip-hop group Brockhampton, wanted the cast to feel real to the L.A. music scene. “We just wanted the ensemble to be realistic. We didn’t want college brochure casting, we wanted it to feel like a hodge-podge L.A. group.”

One of those dynamics is that Matty and Jamie are two white outsiders who join Oliver’s tight-knit multiracial crew. While Russell was certainly aware of that tension, it wasn’t central to the script.

“The script was written for the parts to be open to anyone. It wasn’t racially specific,” Russell says. “This configuration worked in the case of this movie, but there could’ve been a version where Ollie and Matty were two white boys. I wanted to stay open to any casting as it came together — Ollie was originally written as an American, but once I started talking to Archie, it made sense if the character was British and a transplant to L.A.”

A major part of this configuration is Havana Rose Liu’s character, Shai. The only girl in the group, she takes her role as music manager seriously. Liu prepared for the role with similar diligence, and shadowed music managers to get into Shai’s mindset.

“I cast based on auditions, obviously, but also in how the actors talked about the role,” Russell explains. “The balance to find with Shai was how her opinion on Matty evolves as the movie progresses. She’s somewhat protective of him at first. She knows that he’s not totally naïve, but she also has sympathy for anyone who gets swept up in Oliver’s world. When Matty reveals more of himself, she realizes she was protecting the wrong side. Havana got that immediately.”

Alex Russell on Imposter Syndrome in Lurker

Russell was coy when asked if he thinks Matthew has real talent. Throughout Lurker, Matty struggles with accurate feelings of being an imposter— even as he fails to articulate exactly what his role is in Oliver’s crew. 

“I’d love to leave the question of Matty’s talents up to the audience. I do think the movie asks about the idea of faking it ‘til you make it. Because Matty is very disciplined; he figures out Premiere and then suddenly is shooting music videos.”

Though we don’t see social media in the film, we’re constantly hearing about Oliver’s posts and pictures from fans invested in the relationship between Oliver and Matty. That feedback is how Matty (and the audience) can measure how well he’s integrated into the crew. 

One might expect a cooler response from Russell about Matty’s seemingly compulsive need for attention, but he was forgiving. 

“He's passionate about impressing and maintaining proximity to Oliver. Oliver is the battery in Matty’s back that makes him figure out whatever skill he needs to develop.” Russell says. “I think so much of why anyone gets good at anything is the desire for attention.”

Given that Matty starts the movie in a trendy streetwear boutique on Melrose Avenue, fashion understandably plays a huge part in Lurker. “You’ll see designer sweatpants on the floor,” Russell points out. The actors’ style pedigrees also played a large part in how each character’s fashion was shaped.

“A lot of the actors also model or have some background interest in fashion, so they were able to imbue the characters with a little bit of their own style.”

Major storytelling happens in the costumes, which were expertly designed by Megan Gray — keep an eye out for an early, revealing glimpse of the fan t-shirts that line Matty’s closet. In keeping with Matty’s character, Gray built a wardrobe entirely thrifted in L.A. with garments from cool but accessible brands: Vans, Dickies, Stüssy, Levi’s, Lacoste, and Carhartt.

For Oliver, Gray looked to her longtime relationship with Loewe for several of the movie’s most emotive moments. (Madekwe has also worked extensively with the designer brand). Oliver sports a show-stopping sinkhole coat during a contentious album cover shoot, and a vibrant, Peter Pan-ish wool sweater when he expresses a desire to make his own family. 

Fans of Russell’s work on The Bear and Beef won’t be surprised that Lurker has a brief, but perfectly sculpted crash out. 

“It’s one of my favorite scenes in the movie.” Russell says. “It’s still funny to me. The music is so overpowering, it’s exactly how it feels in his head, even though the texts he’s sending are innocuous.”

As in many scenes in the movie, Russell relies on Pellerin’s subtle, but effective, expressions of desperation. “I didn’t have to talk to Theo that much about that scene. Any time there was a silent expression, he just would nail it. It was always perfect.”

Developing the scene was “an exercise in kinetic energy,” as Russell puts it. After multiple takes in the car, they did separate inserts of just the phone in the studio to get closer and closer to the screen. 

“How can we represent what it feels like when a texting bubble shows up?” Russell explains. “We just kept punching in closer and closer. We needed the texts to feel like an earthquake.”

No spoilers here, but the ending was a surprise even to Russell. 

“I knew that would be the last scene, but on the page, it was a lot longer. … But early in the edit, I realized it would be much better to end it sooner. If I’d known that was the plan, I wouldn’t have captured that moment right before we cut.

“Once I found the ending, I thought we had half the movie. An ending is 90% of a movie. It’s what makes it very different from television. You can get away with almost anything in the first half of a film and if the second half accelerates, well, people will forgive it.”

Lurker arrives in theaters August 22, from MUBI.

The film draws on fashion photography and French New Wave, among other influences, to tell a story of betrayal that also interrogates the process of image-making.

But when Smiling set out to add to the visual language of cinema with "kamikaze," he turned to an influence that some filmmakers look down on: internet meme culture.

"Kamikaze" stylishly tells a straightforward story — during a Coney Island fashion shoot, a model named Knives (Dominique Babineaux) finds herself caught between an egotistical social media star (Waylon Rose) and his domineering photographer girlfriend (Clementine Chalfant) as their relationship combusts.

At one point, a character comes to a realization that feels like a car exploding — so Smiling inserts a shot of one, like a meme, in the middle of the narrative. It's the riskiest and most experimental moment of the film, beautifully shot by Timothy S. Jensen.

It's also the moment that most lingers.

"If I'm going to critique image-making, I'm going to use all the tools of image-making in the critique of it," Smiling explains. "In a lot of the frames, the framing is a straight-up references to fashion photographers. And then the pacing of it, especially in the really quick montages, that's me replicating when you're on Instagram, and you're just like, flip, click, click, click, flip, click."

The film is skillfully structured and paced — never too fast or too slow — and Smiling credits that partly to his filmmaking sensibilities combining with an awareness of internet attention spans.

"I constantly just imagine, whenever someone's watching whatever I'm making, that their fingers are drifting up to their little 'Close Window' button," he says. "I'm like, 'OK, cool: You have X amount of seconds before they close it, so you need to do something in that time to just be like, Hey, hey, hey, hey, come back, come back, come back.'"

'Kamikaze' Director Ray Smiling on Advertising and Filmmaking

Growing up in Brooklyn, Smiling was a huge movie fan. But being a filmmaker, he says, "always seemed kind of like being an astronaut, where you're like, 'That's a cool job, but I don't know how one becomes an astronaut.'"

About a decade ago, he started working for the fun, artistic streetwear company Mishka, which bears the motto "wear your weird." When its video director left, Smiling says, he offered to take over.

"They're like, 'We won't pay you any more money. And I was like, don't care.' And they're like, 'We love that,'" he recalls.

That led to Smiling becoming an advertising creative. But when he got on sets for ad shoots, he quickly realized that he really wanted to direct.

"And it took me about eight years to make that happen," he says.

Skipping film school, he instead got paid to learn on the job. He quickly developed a bold, keep-up cinematic style. One of his influences was  filmmaker, music video director, and video artist Kahlil Joseph, whose work showed him that "you can kind of do whatever you want to do with editing. As long as it feels right, you can make things work," Smiling notes.

Smiling's win at Salute Your Shorts — one of our 50 Film Festivals Worth the Entry Fee — is the latest success in a career that is, like the car in "kamikaze," on fire.

In addition to his advertising work for clients including Adidas, Beats by Dre, Under Armour, and the NBA, he directed the TV show Khaki Is Not Leather and the short "Play This at MY Funeral," as well as another short he just completed. He's also just finished writing a feature.

He says that he's always thinking the same thing as he works:

"Am I boring someone? Am I boring someone? Am I boring someone?"

The respect for the audience's time helps him earn the moments when he asks viewers to slow down.

"When I say, 'Let's just look at the ocean for 30 seconds,' it's very intentional," he adds. "And I try to deploy that with with precision."

Main image: "kamikaze," directed by Ray Smiling

It’s more autobiographical than you might suspect.

“These things are messy, but I’ve kind of found that I get really boring as a writer if I do straight autobiography,” Tost explains. “But if I don’t put myself in there — if I don’t put emotional skin in the game — my genre work is just hacky, you know?”

With Americana, he resolves that problem by merging the twisty storytelling of a thriller with elements of his own remarkable life story. He was born in 1975 in the Ozarks, to a teenage mother who soon moved with him to Washington State. He grew up in a trailer at the edge of the Muckleshoot Reservation with his mother and stepfather, who were the day and night custodians at his school. Money was tight.

“I remember one day in second grade, for the first time I wore a button-up shirt from Kmart,” Tost recalls. “And the teacher commented to the class, ‘Oh, isn’t it nice to see Tony in a clean new shirt?’ Which was well-intended, but it kind of makes you want to crawl under your desk and die.”

His stepfather instilled in him a love of country music and Westerns, but could also be cruel. Tost had a stammer as a boy, and “my stepdad would make fun of it, and it would make it worse.”

Writing Americana, Tost gave a stammer to Penny Jo, who, sweet and witty as she is, sometimes has a hard time getting her words out. The stammer makes her dreams of being the next Dolly Parton seem all the more ridiculous to naysayers like her mother (Harriet Sansom Harris) who shows up in Americana just long enough to make fun of her. 

Hoping to leave South Dakota for Nashville, Penny Jo navigates the schemes of an intriguing cast of characters. They include Lefty Ledbetter (Paul Walter Hauser), Penny’s unlikely suitor and partner-in-crime; the scrappy Mandy Starr (Halsey), the young mother of Cal (Gavin Maddox Bergman), a white child who believes he’s the reincarnation of Sitting Bull; and Dillon MacIntosh (Eric Dane), Mandy’s partner, who barely tolerates her son. 

The Ghost Shirt connects them all with Roy Lee Dean (Simon Rex), an unsavory collector of Western artifacts, and Ghost Eye (Zahn McClarnon), who wants the Ghost Shirt back for Native American people. Tony Huss also pops up in a brief, sparkly role.

Tost always loved writing, and movies. But making them didn’t seem remotely possible as he grew up working a series of low-paying jobs: cleaning hotel rooms and condos, counting traffic, clocking in at restaurants and a pickle factory.

He honed his writing at Green River College in Auburn, Washington, then at the College of the Ozarks, back in Missouri. “I would alternate between my academic career and working,” he explains. 

Eventually he earned his MFA at the University of Arkansas and Ph.D. at Duke, and became a very respected poet. He won the coveted Walt Whitman Award in 2003 for his first poetry book, Invisible Bride, and his second book of poetry, Complex Sleep, was published by the University of Iowa Press in 2007. In 2011, he published Johnny Cash’s American Recordings as part of the 33 1/3 books series. 

One of his University of Arkansas classmates, Nic Pizzolatto, was on his way to becoming the toast of Hollywood for creating HBO’s True Detective. He encouraged Tost to try screenwriting as well. 

“The kind of poetry I did was not autobiographical, not confessional poetry. It was like weird, redneck surrealist poetry. And it was mostly like images — strange images that were hopefully capturing a vibe,” says Tost. 

“Basically, it’s like juxtaposing images to create emotions, which is, I think, a pretty decent description of what screenwriting is… You’re trying to create images, situations, dialogue feeding into that. It’s through the juxtaposition or the connection between them that some third thing — this emotion, or this feel — hopefully emerges.”

“Poetry was actually, weirdly, a pretty good training ground. Most of my poems would start long, and then I would just whittle them down to the bare essentials. My screenwriting process is the same: I write scenes way too long, cut them down, then we film them, then I still take even more out of the edit, until, hopefully, it’s just the very necessity of the things, the very necessary little jewels.”

Tost wrote scripts that Pizzolatto shared with his agents, which eventually led to Tost getting his first TV jobs in his mid-30s. He worked on A&E’s and Netflix’s Longmire, where he further developed his skills.

“I was writing mysteries each episode, and that takes a real discipline. That takes a real developed skill set. You can’t just coast by on vibes,” he says.

He then created his own show, the USA Network and Netflix’s Damnation, in 2017, then worked on AMC’s The Terror. He also served as the showrunner on the just-completed Season 2 of the Peacock series Poker Face.

His work in TV fueled his lifelong desire to make a film, and he finally got his chance with Americana. 

“Since I was a teenager, I wanted to be a writer-director — I thought I was going to be like the next Orson Welles, the next Paul Thomas Anderson,” he says. “Then I found myself in my 40s, working in the entertainment industry, and still hadn’t made my first movie. I’d been learning and kept working in a very competitive industry on the TV side of things, and I had a foot in the feature world, doing some rewrites and stuff like that. But I hadn’t yet put my stake in the ground as a filmmaker, and I felt like I was ready.”

He thought back to his childhood, and his mother and stepfather. 

“I was daydreaming for about a year about what ended up being the opening section of Americana, which is basically this white kid who’s obsessed with Westerns and has a perhaps disconcerting feeling that he has a connection with the Native Americans in these old Westerns, and then finds himself in a kind of Old West type of situation with a hated father figure.”

He had first read about the Ghost Shirt while researching his book about Johnny Cash. Once he decided on South Dakota (and bit of Wyoming) as the setting for Americana, he went there and “just drove around for like a week, just going down random back roads. I’d go down a gravel road and I’d find a bar where there’s guys in their 70s playing country music, and I’d just sit there and drink beer and hang out with them.”

He also drove to the Pine Ridge Reservation, of the Oglala Lakota. One memory stands out: “I was just driving down this back road where I couldn’t see anything. And then, in the middle of this field, was this old, beat-up car, and someone had spray-painted on it: ‘You are on sacred ground.’ And that kind of got me in the gut. 

“A version of that made it into the movie — this idea that there is a history to this place. Americana is a fun movie, but hopefully underlying it, there’s a little bit of reality that it brushes up against.”

Tony Tost on Casting Sydney Sweeney, Paul Walter Hauser, Halsey and More in Americana

Tost and producer Alex Saks, whose films include Sean Baker’s The Florida Project, knew that casting would be crucial to getting Americana made.

“Alex Saks was really my partner on this from the script stage,” says Tost. “Since this was a first-time filmmaker, ensemble film, neo-Western set in quote-unquote flyover company, we knew that our only chance to really get this made was with a cool cast.”

They assembled a package of a half-dozen actors, but lost most of them during the financing stage, when performers sometimes have to move on to other projects while the filmmakers wait for money to come through. But they held onto Halsey, who has her first leading dramatic role in Americana, and McClarnon, who worked with Tost on Longmire. Tost wrote the Ghost Eye part with him in mind.

Saks had also been a producer on Baker’s 2021 Red Rocket (Baker’s film before 2025 Best Picture Oscar winner Anora), and raved about Simon Rex’s starring performance. That led to his casting in Americana. 

And Americana hit on incredibly fortuitous timing with Sweeney: She joined the film after the first season of Euphoria, when she was gaining attention for TV roles but hadn’t yet had the major success of 2023’s Anyone But You, which she starred in and executive produced.

“So she was definitely on the rise, but she hadn’t quite exploded,” says Tost. “Before she kind of exploded as a star, she was like a disappear-into-the-role character actress. It was like, ‘She’s got a star quality — she hasn’t done too many leading roles yet. Maybe we can kind of catch her at the right time.’ Which we did.”

Americana was originally called National Anthem, but it got into SXSW in 2023, the same year as another film called National Anthem — Luke Gilford’s acclaimed feature debut. So Tost changed his title to Americana, which had “always been in the back of my mind.”

At one point, one of Tost’s managers watched a rough cut and shared some feedback about the soundtrack: too much country music. 

“And I was like, ‘OK’ — and then I put even more country songs in there. I guess that’s my contrarian nature.”

Though set mostly in South Dakota, the film was shot in New Mexico, which gives it a dreamy, anywhere quality. It takes place in the present day,but also has a timelessness.

“If I get to do a run of movies, I suspect that that’s going to be a weird runner — where they’re set in the modern day, but certain frames or scenes could be from the ’70s, ’80s or ’90s,” says Tost.

Many filmmakers today lament that more people are seeing their films on small screens than in theaters. Of course he’d prefer that people see his movie with a crowd, but Tost accepts the likelihood that more people will watch it on TV: “Hopefully they put the phone down, that’s about the only request I have,” he says.

His gratitude for an audience comes from his years as a poet.

“It’s an art form that I love, but it’s in its cultural afterlife, and it has been for 150 years,” he says. “But if you’re still drawn to it, you’re drawn to it. So that’s where I was — where you’re hoping for, like, 200 readers.”

He spoke with us in the spring, and again at the start of summer, as he looked forward to the release of Americana. He was also looking forward to another road trip, back to one of the states where he went to school.

“We split our time between L.A. and Arkansas,” he says. “My oldest son and I do a drive at the start of each summer from L.A. out to Arkansas, and it’s a highlight of the year… to get out of the L.A. bubble, just as a reminder of how small it is, in a way. That there’s all these other pockets of America out there where there’s stories.”

Americana arrives in theaters Friday, from Lionsgate.

Main image: Paul Walter Hauser as Lefty and Sydney Sweeney as Penny Jo in Americana, written and directed by Tony Tost. Photo by Ursula Coyote/Courtesy of Lionsgate 

The Shrouds, which just made its exclusive streaming debut on the Criterion Channel, follows eco-conscious businessman Karsh (Vincent Cassel), who mourns the death of his wife Becca (Diane Kruger) with a new technology he calls GraveTech. It consists of a shroud containing cameras that allow you to watch a loved one’s decay.

The film raises the question of whether there can be life after death — not for the dead, but for those they leave behind. 

Cronenberg’s films are known for a cool reserve that can play as deadpan humor, and he found that exploring intense emotions benefitted from professional detachment.

“When I was writing it, it was probably the most emotional part of it, but I was laughing too, by the way. But as you’re writing it, you are creating a fiction. So already at that point, you’re distancing yourself fromthe raw emotion of the events of your life,” he told MovieMaker when we spoke at the New York Film Festival in September. 

“And then making the movie is a very technical thing. When you’re in the craft of making a film, that gives you distance. I think to make a really emotionally powerful film, ironically, you have to have distance from that emotion. You can’t be wallowing in your grief and create a good movie at the same time.

He reconnects with his emotions when screening the film for audiences.

“Suddenly, now you’re just in the audience and you have no control over it,” he said. “Now you are in some ways just an audience member, and that’s when it really hits you.” 

Cronenberg’s influence is everywhere, from Julia Ducournau’s 2021 Palme d’Or-winning Titane, influenced by his 1996 Crash, to Coralie Fargeat’s 2024 The Substance, influenced by Cronenberg body horrors like The Fly and Dead Ringers. New corporate attempts to merge our bodies and technology — from Ray-Ban Meta “smart glasses” to palm-recognition payout at Whole Foods — can sometimes recall the moment in Cronenberg’s 1983 Videodrome when James Woods’ Max has a Betamax slipped into his torso. 

We talked with the Canadian mastermind about aging, art, and atheism. 

David Cronenberg on Holding on and Letting Go in The Shrouds

Joshua Encinias: At 82, what do you know about the body that you didn’t at the beginning of your career?

David Cronenberg: Well, there are a lot of things that can go wrong with you that you never knew about. Some of them are very subtle and strange, despite all the literature and whatever research you might have done on health and so on. 

I do find that I spend a lot of time talking to my contemporaries about what’s wrong with them and what drugs they’re taking. In response to that, it’s kind of entertaining and it’s kind of horrific at the same time. But I must say, I know a lot of very young people. I have three children and four grandchildren, and everybody’s talking about that. It’s not really just an age-related thing. Everybody’s dealing with strange stuff. I think it’s partly the accessibility to medical information that you can get from the internet. It’s really unprecedented. For most people in the old days before the internet, you would depend on your doctor for any medical information. 

But anyway, it’s an interesting period. I hope you’ll get to experience it.

Joshua Encinias:In The Shrouds, the sound of Becca’s hip breaking in bed is one of the most disturbing sounds I’ve heard in a long time. But it’s also beautiful, in a way, because Becca and Karsh knew something would happen to her bones if they had sex, and they chose to do it anyway.

David Cronenberg:Yes. I like that very much, and I think you’re right, quite frankly. Our sound guys, our foley guys spent a lot of time getting that right with my guidance, because I’ve experienced that myself. 

Joshua Encinias:Why do you think the Cannes audience didn’t find The Shrouds veryfunny, but audiences at the Toronto International Film Festival and New York Film Festival did?

David Cronenberg: I think the audience felt that they would be disrespectful laughing at a movie about death and grief and all that. It made for a very subdued screening, which is inevitable, but nonetheless, it was a very forceful screening. I prefer the reaction that you would get in Toronto or New York.

Joshua Encinias: Why is the audience at Cannes more serious?

David Cronenberg:You have to remember, the Cannes Film Festival audience is a very strange mix of things: You do have some locals from Cannes, and you have a lot of distributors who are coming to look at your movie to see if they want to make a deal for their territory. You get a lot of celebrities who are showing up. So it’s not really a normal audience. 

Add to that the language factor. The fact that the movie has two sets of subtitles, English and French, as well as the dialogue. Of course, a lot of jokes don’t translate when they’re in subtitles. The final factor is that there’s such pressure. It’s a very glamorous, prestigious event. The red carpet Cannes screening in the evening is a big deal. 

Joshua Encinias: I was at The Shrouds’ New York Film Festival screening that was interrupted by climate protesters. It happened during the scene where graves were vandalized by protestors. Filmmaker Ari Aster was behind me filming the whole thing happening, and that made it feel surreal, or like guerilla marketing. 

David Cronenberg:I didn’t know that. That’s great timing. I wish I thought of doing that, I really do. Even in the movie, it’s mentioned people are protesting Karsh’s graves because he’s injecting technology into the bosom of Mother Earth. It’s ironic they protested this particular movie in which the main character drives an electric car and is very climate-change conscious. I get it. Obviously, they didn’t really know what movie they were interrupting. They just wanted the publicity for their cause.

Joshua Encinias: You’ve said that when you broke out in the ’70s and ’80s, American filmmakers had to hide their artistic ambitions. Why is that?

David Cronenberg:I don’t know if it’s still the case, but American filmmakers really took a lot of strength and protection from saying, “Hey, we’re just making scary movies. Don’t take it too seriously. You don’t want to get too intellectual about it. We’re not like Jean-Luc Godard who says ‘Cinema is truth 24 times a second.’” 

I think it was protecting them, but I think they did have ambition, and they did think that what they were doing was artistically interesting and strong. But it was considered, at that time, bad form to say something like that. It was considered pretentious. Whereas, it wasn’t considered pretentious to me. I just thought, “Hey, that’s the reality.” 

I long ago understood film as a medium of art and that you can do powerful artistic expression through film. If you grew up watching cowboy and sword-fighting movies, which I did, you might think that film is just for kids or just for idle entertainment. And that, to some extent, was the American, Hollywood way. Whereas if you were a European, you were seeing Ingmar Bergman, who I guess in Hollywood would have been considered very pretentious.

In Toronto, I’m halfway between Hollywood and Europe physically, and I think, artistically and emotionally. I always thought that you could do both. Serious filmmakers can make genre or horror films as artistic statements. It’s been done many times in Europe, like Vampyr by Danish director Carl Theodor Dreyer.

Joshua Encinias: At the beginning of your career, unless you were working for Roger Corman, making low-budget horror films was not the way to build an audience. But today, most people begin their careers in the horror genre. What’s changed?

David Cronenberg:I hope I’m not misquoting him, but I think Wes Craven said that I was one of the only ones to truly break out of the genre. I guess that he, George Romero and others tried to do that and were not successful at it, and then reverted to making horror films. I had no qualms about making another horror film, but I was also confident that I had the chops to make a film that wasn’t just protected by the genre. Of course, some of them were other genres, like A History of Violence and Eastern Promises, those little gangster movies. Something like Dead Ringers or A Dangerous Method doesn’t really fall into any genre.

Joshua Encinias:You adapted William S. Burroughs’ Naked Lunch, and Luca Guadagnino just adapted Burroughs’ Queer. We rarely see his work on screen because it’s so difficult to adapt. I’m curious if you have insight about it. 

David Cronenberg:Queer is really an autobiography of Burroughs as a relatively young man. I used some of that in my adaptation of Naked Lunch. I said to William, “I really want to use your shooting of your wife and all of the stuff that happened in Mexico and some of your other works,” and he said, “I don’t separate my life from my art, so ahead.” I’m sure that Luca has a very different approach to Queer. 

I’ve been criticized by some of the gay rights front for suggesting that Burroughs was not 100% gay, or something like that. But I took all of that from his own writing. The fact that it took him a while to come to terms with being gay. And yes, he did marry a woman, she was his wife, and he had a kid. My defense is to say that I’m outside of gay politics one way or the other, but in terms of the movie, I felt it was legitimate in terms of Burroughs in his life.

Joshua Encinias: What did you think of the R-rated version of Crash?

David Cronenberg: I hated the fact that there was an R-rated version because the NC-17 version is the real movie. But those were the times and I couldn’t do anything about it. I was just glad that somebody somewhere had access to the real version, and of course, eventually, that was released as well. It really reduced the number of theaters we could be in because many malls would not show NC-17 movies.

Joshua Encinias:Media theorist Marshall McLuhan influenced and inspired one of your characters in Videodrome. Being an atheist, I wonder if you’ve given thought to McLuhan’s conversion to Catholicism as important to his philosophical underpinning.

David Cronenberg:I’m absolutely sure his Catholicism was important because he was a profound thinker. He was so incredibly literate and well-read, and I’m sure that all of those things came into his understanding of things, including media. I’m sure that it all factored in. There could well be a dissertation somewhere that discusses his religion and his philosophical understandings.

Joshua Encinias:Is your atheism important to the philosophy of your work?

David Cronenberg:  100%. An existentialist-atheist understanding of life and human interaction is fundamental to everything I’ve done.

The Shrouds is now streaming on the Criterion Channel.

Main image: Vincent Cassel and Diane Kruger in The Shrouds. Courtesy of Janus Films.

“He's arguably the most successful chef of all time, just in terms of the footprint of his global network of restaurants and now hotels, and he's become a luxury brand in food and hospitality, and that's pretty rare,” Tyrnauer tells MovieMaker. 

“No one's really taken a close look at Nobu. I mean, he's been covered in the press for decades now, but this is a really fascinating, intricate world. He's extraordinarily accomplished. He's changed cuisine with an enormous amount of invention. I don't think people know that these dishes really originated with him.”

Following its world premiere at Telluride, the film made its debut at the Tribeca Film Festival on Wednesday, bringing Nobu back to where it all began: with the first Nobu restaurant in Tribeca in 1994, with business partner Robert De Niro, who is also the co-founder of the festival. The film plays again Friday and Sunday before a theatrical opening in New York on June 27 and a national rollout beginning July 4. 

In the film, Tyrnauer traces the chef’s journey from his troubled childhood in Japan to his culinary experiences in Peru and Alaska. We spoke with the director, whose previous films include 2009's Valentino: The Last Emperor and 2019's Where's My Roy Cohn?, about the difficulties of tracking Matsuhisa around the globe, translation challenges for the multilingual project, and capturing the beauty of the food the chef is so fussy about perfecting. 

Amber Dowling: How did you gain Nobu’s trust for this kind of in-depth look at his life? 

Matt Tyrnauer: He had agreed in principle to do a film and when I agreed to make it, we had lunch at Nobu Malibu and got along immediately. He was very open, very accessible, very generous with his time. What I saw with him is that once he agrees to do something, he's a perfectionist and he does it to his full ability. He'll spend as much time as he needs to to do it, which is not unlike his core mission of perfecting cuisine.

I noticed a lot of integrity in him, and I've seen this in other really accomplished people that I've either written about or made films about. They have a certain work ethic and dedication and focus. He really did bring that to his participation in shoot days, and there were many of them.

Also Read: Pinch Director Uttera Singh Finds Healing in Trauma With Tribeca Debut

Amber Dowling: The film travels to several countries to keep up with Nobu. What kinds of challenges did that present?

Matt Tyrnauer: There were logistical challenges in terms of just moving people around. I like to work with a pretty light footprint and not heavy equipment, because I like to be nimble. But in this case, we needed enough lights and the pretty fancy cameras, because his world is a world of beauty, and shooting food is specialized. So there were two types of kits we used, a cinema vérité kit, and a food beauty kit. So logistically, it presented some issues that way,

He flies private for the most part and he needs to, because of his schedule. So sometimes we would hop on his plane, and that helped a lot.

Amber Dowling: Did you need to hire local crew or was everyone able to travel with you?

Matt Tyrnauer: For the most part, it was the same crew. For me that’s always best, because you need to socialize. When you're basically moving in with someone for a year, you become a part of their life. That's the joy of doing this, and it's a particular world you build for yourself. So there's a kind of film world that is an overlay of the subject’s world, and when things are going well, you integrate and it's an organic process to embed yourself and become a fly on the wall. So you have to all get along, and you have to know when to disappear and appear. If you're taking up a lot of space, you have to learn how to be natural. 

Matt Tyrnauer on Beauty Shots in the Nobu Documentary

Amber Dowling: Did you need to learn any new skills in order to capture the food in all its glory?

Matt Tyrnauer: Shooting food beauty shots is not my core skill set, but I have great DPs I work with. In this case, it was Toby Thiermann and Nick Albert, and they lived up to the challenge and helped me a lot. We were suspending cameras over sushi bars and doing some tricks of the trade to get different angles that would show the composition, because a lot of Nobu’s artistry is in the composition of the plate. That’s a big part of the movie. 

Amber Dowling: Nobu alternates between English and Japanese in the film’s interviews. What was that process like?

Matt Tyrnauer: Nobu is trilingual and speaks Japanese, Spanish and English. His Spanish is arguably better than his English. I can understand some Spanish. I needed, obviously, to have the Japanese translated for me entirely and occasionally during interviews I would have it simultaneously translated so I could understand. He answered in English and in Japanese, and sometimes I used Japanese takes because he's much more articulate in Japanese than English.

He's quite articulate in English, but with a kind of unique vocabulary that he's works in. So we did all three languages, and then we chose where they would go. Some scenes were just in Japanese and we subtitled them, but some takes were in two languages, and we chose which one to use. It was very complicated actually, but I really like having the switching back and forth.

Amber Dowling: In choosing which celebrities to use for the Nobu documentary, did you have to self-edit to stay focused, given how many frequent his restaurants?

Matt Tyrnauer: I never really gave it a lot of thought. I mean, I acknowledge that any restaurant that's really famous has to trade on famous people dining there. It's just part of the business in big cities, especially New York and Los Angeles. So Nobu comes up in L.A. at the height of Hollywood celebrity culture. And his business partner is a major movie star too, Robert De Niro, but I kind of didn't pay a lot of attention to it.

We happened to be shooting one day at Nobu Malibu, where a lot of famous people do eat, and Cindy Crawford and Randy Gerber, who are devoted clients of Nobu, showed up by coincidence. It wasn't planned at all and on the fly we asked whether they would be on camera. We kind of invaded the deck out there, and we had cameras and lights, and the restaurant was going full tilt around us.

I have to say they were great. Nobu made what he calls Cindy rice, which was a dish he named after her. It's a traditional Japanese tempura dish, but he made it for her as a surprise, and we captured it.

Nobu is now playing at the Tribeca Festival.

Main image: Nobu Matsuhisa in Nobu.

Both Carnival Films shows are productions of Universal International Studios, a division of Universal Studio Group. But Carnival's projects remain as British as ever, and that’s by design, says CEO Gareth Neame. 

“I’d like to think that what defines all of our shows is a big ambition to appeal to audiences right around the globe with very British fare,” Neame says.

Carnival Films was founded in London by feature film producer Brian Eastman in 1978, and went on to produce projects for the UK’s BBC, ITV, Channel 4 and Sky, as well as PBS, A&E, HBO, NBC and more. Among its many successes was the masterful 1989 TV serial Traffik, the basis for Steven Soderbergh’s Oscar-winning 2000 feature film Traffic.

In 2004, Neame, formerly the BBC’s head of drama, joined Carnival. The company was sold to NBCUniversal in 2008, and Downton debuted two years later. 

Soon Nigel Marchant, who produced both Downton and another Carnival hit, The Philanthropist, moved in-house to become an executive producer at Carnival, then managing director. 

Now Carnival and British projects in general are on a run — which Neame attributes largely to Downton, an awards magnet that has also spawned three films.

“Downton is very important culturally, but it actually played a hugely important role in globalization of content because it was really the first UK show that achieved the same sale values as a Hollywood show,” Neame tells MovieMaker. 

“Universal’s argument in the sales was Downton Abbey is the best show we have, it’s as good as all the other shows that you buy from us, and we’re not selling it to you for a dollar less than the other shows that you have from us.”

He says that Downton, “without any question… caused the Apples and Netflixes and Amazons of this world to move into London.” He also credits the show’s success with the “big demand for UK talent that we see today.”

Garthe Neame on Carnival Films Reviving The Day of the Jackal

That demand has boosted Carnival’s The Day of the Jackal, a strong Emmy contender after already receiving nominations for the Golden Globes, Critics Choice, and SAG Awards. Eddie Redmayne, the titular Jackal, is among this year’s acting frontrunners. 

The series is a modern-day adaptation of the 1971 novel by Frederick Forsythand 1973 film starring Edward Fox. The original versions told a fictionalized story of an assassin hired to kill French President Charles de Gaulle in the 1960s. 

Redmayne is a former model, but he is “beautifully ugly” as the Jackal, Neame notes. Neame, who had not worked with Redmayne previously, pegged the Theory of Everything Oscar winner as someone “attracted to work that requires a lot of preparation, research, physicality, makeup, and choreography movement.”

“He obviously likes parts that he has to kind of work hard to create,” Neame added.

Neame also says he “was very keen to pay homage” to Fox. He notes that both Fox and Redmayne are “very British,” which is in keeping with Forsyth’s novel: The book spends its first few chapters referring to the Jackal as only “the Englishman,” which made casting an actor “who felt expressly English” crucial, Neame says. 

The Day of the Jackal film was written by Forsyth and Kenneth Ross. In 1972, the year between the novel and the movie being released, Forsyth came out with another novel, The Odessa File. Its big-screen adaptation, co-written by Ross and George Markstein, arrived in 1974. 

Why are we telling you all of this? Because The Odessa File film was directed by Ronald Neame, Gareth Neame’s uncle. Which meant the Carnival chief felt a special attachment to Forsyth’s work.

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For more than 50 years, The Jackal sat dormant in the Universal archives. Neame recalls being “cautious” when he approached Universal with the idea of rebooting the film into a series. But Universal gave Neame its blessing, given Neame and Marchant’s strong history of translating features into TV: Downton Abbey was famously inspired by director Robert Altman’s 2001 Gosford Park, which was written by Downton creator Julian Fellowes. Both the film and series starred the late Maggie Smith.

“When you take a similar idea and then spin it into numerous episodes over multiple seasons, you have something with a really different shape,” Neame said. So, the moment I thought of [Jackal] as a 10-part contemporary show, I got very excited about it and saw the possibilities.”

Sky, Peacock, and Carnival have announced that a second season of Day of the Jackal is in the works.

Revisiting Lockerbie

Carnival’s other big awards contender this season, Lockerbie: A Search for Truth,covers one of the worst air disasters in history, the bombing of Pan Am Flight 103. On December 21, 1988, 259 passengers and crew, as well as 11 people on the ground, were killed when the plane exploded over the quiet town of Lockerbie, Scotland.

Colin Firth stars as Dr. Jim Swire, whose daughter Flora was among the victims. The limited series is told from Swire’s perspective as he helps put a man named Abdelbaset al-Megrahi in prison for the bombing — but then begins to doubt his guilt. 

Swire was the head of a group representing UK victims, and his shifting position on al-Megrahi was polarizing, to say the least. That was Neame’s way into the story.

Neame says he chose to tell the story from Swire’s POV because Swire is “somebody I’ve seen on TV ever since I remember the tragedy happening.” Neame was 21 at the time of the bombing, and Swire was “frequently” on TV in the UK. It certainly helped that Swire wrote a book that could be used as source material for the series.

Carnival Films has many more projects on the way, spanning multiple genres: First up will be the third season of HBO’s The Gilded Age. A new Downton Abbey movie comes out on September 12. 

And Neame and Marchant’s next big swing is Peacock’s miniseries All Her Fault starring and executive produced by Succession breakout Sarah Snook. Dakota Fanning (Ripley, The Perfect Couple) and Abby Elliott (The Bear, SNL) will join her on screen.

Neame describes All Her Fault as “a fantastic new contemporary” that is “part character show, part thriller.” It follows a mother, played by Snook, as she goes to pick up her son from a playdate — and gets a series of terrible surprises. 

The Day of the Jackal and Lockerbie: A Search for Truth are streaming on Peacock.

Main image: Eddie Redmayne as the titular assassin in The Day of the Jackal. Carnival Flms.

The 10-part series revolves around an agnostic sex podcaster (Kristen Bell) and rabbi (Adam Brody) who fall in love only to have their relationship tested by faith, family and friends. Creator Erin Foster loosely based the show on her own life and wanted to mix scripted and unscripted performances from the leads and supporting cast, including Justine Lupe and Timothy Simons. 

With that remit in hand, Peng Correia used anamorphic lenses to create a cinematic look and cross-shot the production to capture all of the spontaneous and authentic moments he might have otherwise missed with a single-camera setup. Things like Brody attempting to open a wine bottle during a dinner party scene, a group hug at the hospital, or the basketball montage that Corey eventually added — and set to Chumbawamba’s “Tubthumping.”

“The show was so fun to shoot because you never saw the same thing on the same take. The actors were wonderful in terms of repeatability, but you never knew where it would end,” says Peng Correia. “If you give actors that freedom, they don’t need to worry about hitting marks or whether the camera is on them. They can just play.”

He adds it was a wild ride given time constraints (each episode shot over five days with only eight hours of production a day), and there were many times they almost blew takes laughing at unexpected riffs or turns. 

“If you don’t have multiple cameras you’re not cross-shooting that stuff, and then you have to track all of these moments that work that are happening off-camera,” he says. “And you have to manipulate them and try to recreate them again and again. The surprise and immediacy, even though these actors are professionals and amazing, gave an electricity to this set.”

POV in Nobody Wants This

Ultimately, Peng Correia’s goal was to deliver everything he could to editing so they could further craft the story from any character’s point of view. Because of that, Corey says the footage she worked with felt engaging and real. In addition to the dialogue, there were plenty of non-verbal moments she was able to play with to help create more chemistry and comedy. Coming from a reality background, Corey went over all of the available footage, then cut it together from the script and her gut. 

“A perfect example is when they’re at dinner and Brody’s character says how much he loves her, and her show, and that her work is important,” she says. “They were cross-shooting at that moment and Kristen took a big bite of bread. That stuff is what makes the human moments of comedy feel real but also cinematic.”

Another essential piece to creating that cinematic feel was the show’s overall look, with backlights and the anamorphic lens, which captures a wider field of view. The creatives wanted to produce whimsy and romanticism against the Los Angeles background, showcasing the places not normally featured onscreen while avoiding romantic comedy tropes.

“We wanted to make sure it felt like real people with a complex. They have problems, but it’s not depressing because it’s funny and these people are supposed to be falling in love,” says Corey.

“Tonally the show is smartly put together and doesn’t feel aggressive,” adds Peng Correia. Even if you watch older romantic comedies like While You Were Sleeping or Nick & Norah’s Infinite Playlist, they have a certain grit and texture to them. We tried to build some of that into the show as well.”

Also Read: Giving Voice to the Adolescents of Adolescence

Grounding Nobody Wants This in Reality

It was also important to Corey not to over score the series, or needle drop just for the sake of it. She relied on ambient music and background noise to help ground the core relationship in reality, but then broke in as needed. 

“It’s a fine line we walked, especially when it came to music,” she says. “We wanted it to fit the characters or come with a commentary. A lot of these romantic moments can come through as just dry and sweet, and these conversations are happening around you, and that’s where the crackle can come in.”

One of the biggest challenges during filming and editing was capturing what was, on the page, described as “the greatest kiss of their lives.” Creating that moment required a cocktail of anticipation through editing and various camerawork, including Steadicam, wide shots and closeups. The final product included a purple light surrounding the characters to create a sense of heightened reality and the musical use of “See Her Out (That’s Just Life).”

“When we saw it on the set that day we were terrifically excited. We had cross-shot all those moments and then we just let it go, knowing they would put it together in a way that made it feel bigger than the sum of its parts. And it was,” says Peng Correia. 

“I was scared, because it says ‘greatest kiss of all time,’” he adds. “But then I watched it and I was quietly looking around like, ‘That’s pretty freaking great, right?’ It was really exciting to be a part of creating something like that and then to see it put together and realize it’s much more than what I thought.”

Nobody Wants This is now streaming on Netflix.

Main image: Adam Brody and Kristen Bell in Nobody Wants This. Photo by Saeed Adyani, courtesy of Netflix.

Then those sounds are seamlessly displaced by a percussive ticking, and a female voice, singing plaintive notes. Adolescence doesn't call attention to it, but the voice belongs to Emilia Holliday, who plays Owen's victim, Katie Leonard.

She has no dialogue in Adolescence — she appears only in grainy CCTV camera footage. But her singing gives Katie a voice, from beyond, recalling her lost promise. She also serves as a kind of telltale heart for Owen, who is haunted by what he's done and can't take back.

The scene represents the flawless coordination between the sound and music in Adolescence, as well as the commitment of supervising sound editor James Drake and composers Aaron May and David Ridley to give voice to the real adolescents of Adolescence, one of Netflix's most-watched and critically acclaimed shows.

The British four-episode limited series was created by two middle-aged men — Stephen Graham, who also stars, and Jack Thorne — and directed by another, Philip Barantini.

But it sounds like the passions and struggles of youth — because Drake, May and Ridley, all of whom are in their 30s, were so committed to centering the sounds of the very young.

The Sounds of Adolescence

Sound design and score blend beautifully in Adolescence, in part because Drake, May and Ridley have worked together before. They all collaborated on Barantini's 2021 feature film Boiling Point, which also starred Graham.

Just as Boiling Point unfolded in a single, continuous shot, so does each episode of Adolescence. The lack of edits gives Adolescence a grounded sense of in-the-moment urgency, and tragic inevitability. Drake, May and Ridley were careful not to overdo sound, lest any artificial element undercut the show's immersive tone.

Viewers feel that we, like Owen, are living through the irreversible. The sound collaborators were acutely aware of the need not to undercut that feeling, or to let audiences off the hook with the kind of excessive orchestration or fussiness that could end our suspension of disbelief. At one point, the show wrings intense emotion from the simple, understated sound of rainfall.

"The wonderful thing is that the material that we're working with is so well-planned and thought through and finessed," says Drake. "From the sound edit and sound design side, it was sometimes about filling space and keeping tension, keeping a mood the same, perhaps just helping to engage the audience at times."

The composers took a similarly naturalistic approach. In Boiling Point, all the music was diegetic, coming from a radio in the kitchen where Graham's character works. The music in Adolescence is mostly non-diegetic, meaning the audience hears it but characters do not. But it is still closely tied to the young people at the center of the story.

This is especially true of a devastating reworking of Sting's "Fragile," sung by an adolescent choir at the end of the second episode.

The inspiration came in part from The Langley Music Project, a recording that Barantini shared with the composers early on. In the 1970s, Canadian music teacher Hans Fenger recorded young students in British Columbia's Langley School District performing songs by David Bowie, The Beach Boys, Paul McCartney, The Eagles and others.

They became a pop culture fascination when they were released as a 2001 album, The Langley Schools Music Project: Innocence and Despair. Listeners were stunned by their commitment, rawness and beauty.

May and Ridley assembled their own adolescent chorus, enlisting students at Minsthorpe Community College in Wakefield, West Yorkshire, the school where the second episode of Adolescence was filmed. (While U.S. community colleges are typically for people of late teens and above, Minsthrope is typically for students ages 11 to 16.)

"There's something about kind of young, untrained adolescent voices singing together, which is stunning and moving," says May. "There existed a choir of like 15 students, but they managed to audition extra students. I think we ended up with a 38-strong choir, and we went for two days and rehearsed them with Dave, who, in a wonderful turn of events, used to run children's choirs in China."

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The inclusion of students who had never been in a choir before gave the group a powerful innocence, as did the atmosphere in which they recorded.

"We were so lucky that there was a slightly out of tune, battered old grand piano in the corner of the village hall," says Ridley. "We felt like we were just pulling ace cards when we arrived there."

They recorded at the village hall with singers as young as 11, some of whom "were brand new to the school, had no idea, hadn't been part of it," says Ridley. "I think they were just trying to get out of school for a couple of days."

But they were perfect. They sounded like the children onscreen because in many cases they were the children onscreen: In addition to singing, many of the teens and pre-teens served as extras.

Drake also recorded the students' speaking voices to create the soundscape of the school.

"In between each takes and rehearsals, I would go around to the ADs and be like, 'Can I get a group of kids and a chaperone?' and we would run off to a quiet part of the school or school field, set up mics, and then get them to do just a whole bunch of things — shouting, having them to chant, 'fight, fight, flight,' or just to walk down corridors and have a chat.

"There's some just lovely little nuggets you'll just hear just pass by your ear as you're moving through a corridor," he notes. "They they did such an amazing job and such a better job than we probably would have gotten if we brought actors in, or tried to bring them into a studio to fake it. ... It's just an amazing library of just real kids from that school chatting."

But no voice is more haunting than Holliday's, as the voice of Owen's voiceless victim.

"We never get to see her say anything, but her voice follows through the whole series, so that you get a sense of her," says Ridley. "We're trying to call to mind a feeling of her being present, and maybe Jamie feeling her presence slightly. But I think that is quite subliminal."

Adolescence is now streaming on Netflix.

Main image: Jamie Miller in Adolescence. Netflix

"Who's There?," directed by Ryan Doris and written by the buzzed-about A24 screenwriters Todd Spence and Zak White, a loving stepfather played by Garland Scott awaits his daughter's return after a big night out. He hears her voice behind the door, but doesn't see her — and soon he realizes something insidious is at his doorstep.

"Who's There?" is about sometimes feeling like an outsider in your home: The dad was married to the now-deceased mom of his stepdaughter (played by Kallie Tabor), and they're still learning to be a family without her.

The process of making the film, which just began streaming for free on Alter's YouTube channel, is also a story of cohering relationships.

Northeast Meets Midwest

Producer Alecia Orsini Lebeda is a key figure in New England film production who met Doris through the pivotal local rental house Talamas, which provides equipment to everything from indie filmmakers to big PBS productions shot in New England.

Orsini Lebeda believes her Massachusetts ancestry may go back to the Mayflower. And when she hears limericks that begin, "There once was a man from Nantucket," she jokes: "I'm related to that guy."

Doris is a transplant from St. Louis who moved northeast when his wife got into veterinary school in the Boston area, and "Who's There?" melds his Midwestern roots with Orsini Lebeda's Massachusetts ties.

He was a theater kid who intended to be part of the acting conservancy at St. Louis' Webster University — until, he jokes, "I realized conservatory means you can get kicked out if they don't like you." He switched to Webster's film school, where you have more control over your fate.

Webster is where he met Spence and White, who graduated a year ahead of him. He was a production assistant on several of their shorts in college, and the duo gained attention this past summer when A24 bought their hot script Mice.

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By then, Doris had already been hard at work on their script for "Who's There?" for more than two years. It started when he was doing lots of commercial work, but wanted to make his own short.

"In 2022, I just called them. I was getting tired of doing a lot of corporate stuff, and was like, 'I gotta shoot something creative,'" he recalls. "I was like, 'Hey guys, let's work on something. Let's just do a few phone calls and let's see what we've got.'

"And we did three or four Zooms in a row where we just pitched ideas, and they had a version of 'Who's There?' that was pretty close to where it ended up. It was sort of perfect for what we needed: It was a single location, it was two actors, one of them is behind the door the whole time. And it had a creature element that wasn't on screen a lot."

That allowed Doris to focus hard on the door — which is on screen a lot — and the creature, which makes a very fast, very strong impression. Audiences at the excellent Sidewalk Film Festival, where we first saw "Who's There?" — gave out a loud collective gasp when it makes an appearance.

'Who's There?' and Opening The Door

After Orsini Lebeda and Doris considered several houses for "Who's There?," they ultimately opted to shoot in Doris' own home. It was perfect in many ways — like the way it would allow swooping shots in and out of windows, and the fact that they would have total control over the set — but the front door was wrong. It needed a mail slot, and Doris' door didn't have one.

"I live right next to a Restore," Dories explained. "So I would just go there every weekend and see if any doors would work: What doors were coming in? I had the measurements, and the plan was like, OK, we'll take off my existing front door. We'll build a door to the exact specs that we need and put the right lock on it, put the keyhole in — all of these elements. And we'll just screw it in the week of the shoot. And eventually, yeah, we found the perfect door."

The process involved stripping paint, installing a mail slot, painting the door, installing it in the frame, and other configuring. But Doris likes that part of filmmaking.

"That's the most fun part — OK, let me get my hands dirty. Let me make the thing to be exactly what we need."

That quality would prove very helpful when it was time to make the monster.

Stop-Motion

To create the creature, Doris and Orsini Lebeda wanted a being that would have qualities of a chameleon, trapdoor spider and praying mantis. They enlisted VFX artist Tim Maupin, who created a CG version compelling enough to shock audiences.

As good as the creature was, it didn't have exactly the feel that Doris had envisioned. And his producer stood by him.

"He's got to feel really good about it," Orsini Lebeda says. "If you're going to make a film, you have to live it to get the film made. But then you also have to really live with it when you need to go out there and show it to audiences. And you better feel good about it."

Soon they met sculptor Doug Armitage, and sent him the script and the version of the film with the CG creature. He was so impressed that he signed on, and so did his brother. They are credited as The Armitage Brothers.

To cover the added costs, Doris reached out to friends and family, showing them the version of the film with the CG creature. They soon had enough money to get a creature sculpted — and Doris and cinematographer Nick Kolinsky did stop-motion recording of a 1/12th miniature over two all-nighters in Doris' basement.

They used a stop-motion program called Dragonframe, and — pro tip — recorded all the movements right side up, then layered the creature into the film upside-down, for added scares.

Falling Back in Love With Short Films

Orsini Lebeda has worked in many elements of filmmaking, as a cameraperson, cinematograper, line producer and production manager — among her credits is the new Cape Cod-shot High Tide, presently earning raves on the festival circuit. Working on "Who's There?" reminded her of early collaborations on 48 Hour Film Project challenges.

But it is also a reminder of how most successful film communities outside of New York and Los Angeles: a group of friends get together and make cool things, trading hats and titles. People who are directors on one film will be editors on another, to repay their gaffers, producers or cinematographers when they go make their own films.

"What this project did for me is, I re-fell in love with short films," she says. "And honestly, I've been saying yes to more short films after having done this project. Because I had kind of left short filmmaking behind.

"I had had a lot happen. I like did my last 48, I had children, I started becoming a serious production manager and a line producer, and I was doing big movies: And it felt like, 'Now we do big things — we don't do short films.'

"And then, you know, I didn't have anything going on. I was like, 'Yeah, this is something I could do. This sounds fun. I love working with Nick. I love the script.' And man — I forgot how much I love doing short film."

Parthenope is an early name of Naples, the Italian city that is Sorrentino's hometown. It is a place the film explores through the life of our heroine. It is stunningly beautiful, but some outsiders underestimate it as provincial, corrupted or disposable.

Dalla Porta believes that her character's smoking is a reflection of the 1960s and '70s, before cancer warnings were everywhere. But there may also be an "autobiographical" element, she notes: Both she and Sorrentino are smokers, though the 27-year-old actress notes that she's cutting back.

"At a symbolic level, I feel that the gesture of smoking is very fascinating," she tells MovieMaker through an Italian translator, Lilia Pino Blouin. If you also love smoking cannabis or vaping cbd oil, you may order your favorite products from tendollarcarts.

"There is a self-destruction component to it," she adds. "There's poison that you're putting into your body. And people that have suffered a lot may feel an attraction to that. They may recognize themselves in this self-destructive gesture."

In Greek mythology. Parthenope was a siren who cast herself into the sea and drowned when her songs failed to entice Odysseus. The film takes inspiration from the myth, but with soaring departures. It has a central tragedy, yes, but Parthenope would never kill herself over a man. She spends most of the film, in fact, brushing them off with elegant charm.

She aspires to be an anthropologist, a keen observer of human behavior — not to be studied herself, despite other characters' frequent comments on her beauty, echoed by critics in nearly every review of Parthenope.

"Are you aware of the disruption your beauty causes?" asks Gary Oldman's character in the film's breezily intoxicating trailer.

"I'm starting to suspect something," she replies.

Dalla Porta was a relative unknown in the U.S. prior to the film, which also features lively, fresh performances by Gary Oldman and Italian actors Dario Aita, and Peppe Lanzetta. She first crossed paths with Sorrentino, the auteur of 2009's Il Divo and 2013's Oscar winning The Great Beauty, when she played a small role in his 2021 film The Hand of God, an Oscar nominee for Best International Feature Film.

We talked with Celeste Dalla Porta about becoming a star, the male gaze, and the importance of Italian film icon Stefania Sandrelli, who makes a pivotal appearance in Parthenope, which just began streaming on Max.

Tim Molloy: Your character is an observer, which can be mistaken for being passive or being inactive. How do you play an active, very conscious observer?

Celeste Dalla Porta: This is a character that definitely does observe everything all around her, and the way that she uses to observe can come off as passive — but it is by no mean passive. It's very emotional, and she allows the people that she comes in contact with to leave a mark, and at the same time, she leaves a mark on the people around her. So what truly matters is this ability to provide space and to open herself up.

Tim Molloy: Every review of this movie that I've read has talked about this being a star-is-born performance. Did it feel that way when you were making it? Does it feel that now has your life dramatically changed?

Celeste Dalla Porta: Well, when I was making the movie, I tried to focus on it as much as possible, and to not think about what my future would be like. I just wanted to be in the present. I just wanted to enjoy each and every day on set, and I did not have any projections about the future.

But naturally, since it was a Paolo Sorrentino movie, and it was a project that was so deeply focused around a female character, the lead character, I knew that there would be a lot of talk about it.

Of course, not so much about me, as such, but about the actress that would play the lead role. And right now, I am going through a time where I'm sort of exploding. There's so much change in my life all around me because of the movie, and I'm in the heart of the promotion, and therefore I'm trying, like I was describing earlier, to be fully present, day by day. Naturally, it's very engaging and emotional as a process. And my life has changed, but in a very positive way.

Parthenope Star Celeste Dalla Porta on Breaking Shells

Tim Molloy: Regarding the symbolism of smoking, do you think the character is self-destructive?

Celeste Dalla Porta: I don't believe she's self destructive. ... She is looking for happiness and freedom. And regarding the gesture of smoking, maybe we can see that as a symbol of some degree of unhappiness, but maybe that's not true either. Maybe she's simply a character who smokes.

And on the other hand, when she's faced with the possibility of something that can be self destructive, I feel that she tries to work on it and to have that evolve — starting from a moment of unhappiness, to lead to a greater understanding of what life is and what human behaviors are like. And indeed, she's an anthropologist.

Tim Molloy: I don't agree with this criticism, but I've noticed that some critics feel that this film is an exercise in the male gaze by Paolo Sorrentino. Did you feel that way?

Celeste Dalla Porta: I don't know to what extent what I think matters in terms of these criticisms on the movie, because at the end of the day, I am the interpreter of this character, and I feel that anyone can think or see into it whatever they want, but I can only focus on the work that I did, that we did together.

It can be a provocation, if you will, on how difficult or how challenging it is to free oneself from a male projection — how challenging it is for a beautiful woman, especially in those days, a beautiful woman who is pursuing her own freedom, how challenging it can be for her to break free from the shells that men created around her.

Therefore, I don't think that there is a political discourse about it or around it in terms of the roles of men and women. I think it's simply a story about the life of a woman and the experiences that she goes through.

Tim Molloy: Can you talk about what you did, watched and listened to for research?

Celeste Dalla Porta: Paulo Sorrentino gave me a lot of advice, and in particular he mentioned two books that I should read: One is entitled Il mare non bagna Napoli, which literally translates as The Sea Does Not Get Naples Wet [a 1953 book by Anna Maria Ortese], and another is entitled Ferite a Morte, which literally translates as Wounded to Death [a 2013 book by by Serena Dandini]. They are two books that talk about the city of Naples, and in particular the city of Naples in the '60s and '70s, or even sooner than that, even an earlier age.

Their books helped me to immerse myself in the atmosphere and the mood of the Sorrentino imagination... what he had in mind for this film and in terms of the smells, of the sounds, and of the different feelings and melancholic mood that this city can evoke in people. So there were many factors that he wanted for me to fully grasp, because I am not Neopolitan. So these books did help me find that sort of mood.

Also, I listened to a lot of music on my own from the '70s, not necessarily Italian music. That was a time of great musical discovery and explosions. And also, Neapolitan music, of course.

And then I watched a few movies. Paulo recommended to me that I should draw inspiration from Natalie Portman's character in Closer. She had a degree of melancholy that he thought could be important to me, and a degree of mystery as well.

And also he mentioned Claudia Cardinale, and Io la conoscevo bene [translated as I Knew Her Well, from 1965]. The main character is Stefania Sandrelli when she was very young. She's very similar to Parthenope.

Parthenope is now streaming on Max, from A24.

Main image: Celeste Dalla Porta in Parthenope. Courtesy of A24.

“There are a lot of assassin characters and stories we see which are from the perspective of that assassin trying to get out — and this one is a character looking to get into the world,” says Wiseman, an action auteur returning to films after years in television.

“I thought that part was fascinating, because what really drives a person to say, ‘I want to become an assassin and a killer?’”

The last film Wiseman directed was the 2012 Total Recall remake, but he’s perhaps best known for directing and producing films in the Underworld franchise as well as directing one of the better Die Hard sequels, Live Free or Die Hard. 

“Film is my love,” he tells MovieMaker, but he’s worked in TV for the last decade largely because he’s “so incredibly picky.” He co-created Sleepy Hollow, which aired 2013-17 on Fox, and then served as executive producer on APB, Lucifer, The Gifted and Swamp Thing.

“And then Ballerina came up,” he explains. “It’s the kind of movie that I go out to see on opening weekend, and I always want to direct what I would go see opening day.

“Then on the John Wick side of it, it also gives a little bit of a window. The Ruska Roma is the same place where John Wick trained. And so, at the same time we’re seeing Eve’s journey, we can imagine this is what John Wick also went through on his rise to become John Wick.”

Wick apparently died at the end of John Wick: Chapter 4 last summer, but Ballerina is set within the timeline of Chapter 3 – Parabellum, so Reeves’ character remains in play. (Also, the fact that a John Wick: Chapter 5 is in the works suggests that maybe he wasn’t too inconvenienced by death.)

As much as the Ballerina trailers focus on de Armas, they also promise the return of other franchise favorites: Ian McShane is back as Continental manager Winston, and so is his trusted concierge Charon, played by the late Lance Reddick in one of his final roles.

And Anjelica Huston returns as the Director of the Ruska Roma’s academy for the criminally gifted. She plays a bigger role this, time as Wiseman’s lens dives deeper into the secret society of assassins. 

The familiar faces and parallel plots help Ballerina pull off a delightful and delicate dance between spinoff, sequel, prequel and origin story, which feels fated to carry the franchise forward — even if Wick is, allegedly, resting in peace under a gravestone marked “Loving Husband.” 

John Wick Producers on Ballerina

Whatever comes next for Wick, franchise producer Erica Lee and her Thunder Road Films producing partner, Basil Iwanyk, are confident that their latest killer can also catch fire with fans.

He notes that the film reunites Wick and de Armas, who first appeared together in Eli Roth’s 2015 horror thriller Knock Knock.

“The first time I saw Ana was Knock Knock with Keanu, which he did right after John Wick. And I remember going, ‘God, she’s really interesting.’ Like, there’s something about her that was just really cool and edgy, just different than a lot of things that I’ve seen before,” Iwanyk says. 

“I think she has a great ability to toggle between softness and vulnerability and relatability, with brutal action and toughness and ferocity.”

Lee adds: “What we didn’t want to do is sort of just make an ice-cold heroine or a character that you could tell was written for a man, and then just sort of gender flipped. We wanted [the character] to feel specific to a woman, and I think Len really intuitively understood how to do that.”

Ballerina started as an unrelated spec script by Shay Hatten, whose agent passed it to Thunder Road seven years ago. The producers brought it to Lionsgate to be folded into the Wick universe and subsequently hired Hatten to work on the screenplays for Parabellum and Chapter 4. Wiseman came on board four years ago to shepherd the development process. 

“I’ve always been a fan of his,” says Iwanyk. “What got us excited about it was our meeting with him and his take, because if you’re going to work with someone on a film that’s in the universe of a pre-existing film, oftentimes a new director will come in and say, ‘I want to change it up, I want everything to be different.’

"And Len came in and said, ‘Here’s what I love about the franchise and here’s what needs to be continued, and here’s what I would do differently.’ He just had a great handle on the material and who Eve was.”

Ballerina Director Len Wiseman on Eve's Props

Thanks to a global pandemic, the writers strike and the actors strike strangling the entire industry, the movie has been in Wiseman’s life longer than any other in his career. 

And Ballerina may be better for it, because the downtime allowed Wiseman to devote long hours to conceptualizing and testing a lot of the craziest kills and action sequences in the film.

“A lot of what I did during the pandemic is just build out weapons and props and shoot stuff in my garage,” says Wiseman, who began his career as a storyboard artist before he started mastering props in the art department on films including Stargate, Independence Day, Men in Black and Godzilla. 

“I’ve been directing for 22 years now, and every time someone yells, ‘Props!’ on set, I still get a little bit of an alert, ready to jump out of my chair,” he says.

In the wonderful world of Wick, the props on screen can be just as important as the people — because the props are so important in killing those people. If John Wick is the most seasoned and polished assassin of the bunch, Eve is greener and scrappier — a character trait reflected in how she fights, and what she uses to beat her opponents. 

One of the moments when the producers knew Wiseman was right for the job came when he detailed how he envisioned Eve using mundane objects as weapons of mass destruction.

“He brought all that kind of knowledge to us,” Lee recalls. “I remember one of his early pitches was, like, how to make an action sequence with ice skates. That was just so cool that immediately everyone was like, ‘We need that in the movie!’”

Ice skates and dinner plates prove to be just as deadly as guns in Ballerina.

Wiseman plotted out every battle with action figures and models before bringing the sequence to a storyboard artist or pitching it to studio execs.  

“I have quite a bit of nieces and nephews, and I’m like the coolest uncle, because I’ve got an entire room of toys,” he jokes. “That’s just how I go about it, how I’ve always done it. If it’s props that I can build, I need to see it before I present it. 

“Like when I was presenting the ice skate fight to Lionsgate early on, I had to buy it, shoot it and put it together. I believe it’s better to show something than to talk about it.” 

Wiseman does, however, enjoy talking about a recurring theme in the franchise: fate vs. free will. 

In the first John Wick, Wick has chosen to retire, but events outside of his control — including a nepo-baby gangster invading his home, killing his puppy and stealing his car — pull him right back into the violent life. As much as he believes in free will, his decisions can seem inevitable.  

The fate vs. free will debate continues in Ballerina when audiences meet a character named the Chancellor, played by Gabriel Byrne, an actor who is really good at being bad. And it continues in Eve’s character arc.

Part of the charm of the Wick films is that the hard-R action leaves just enough room for philosophy: What if free will is a necessary illusion to fuel fate into fruition?

“I think it is,” Wiseman says. “At least for me, if I fully got on to believing that everything is predestined, it would take away my passion for my choices.” 

But in context of the cinematic world of the Ballerina, he says, “every choice you make has a consequence, and so the choices that you make will lead to certain consequences. I do think it’s fated, but the characters themselves are battling that they really do have a choice.”

Iwanyk notes, “I firmly believe in free will.” But at the same time, he describes the characters in the Wick world as “cursed.” 

“Every character in the John Wick movies is a bad guy. There’s no true clean hero,” he says. “I feel like for many of the characters in Wick world, it is fate. They’re cursed. That makes it feel a little more mythological. These people are trapped.”

He adds: “It’s hard not to look at Ana’s character and go, okay, she was destined to end up where she does at the end of the movie. But she also makes some choices to get herself out of a path that could have been much darker and more morally broken.” 

Was John Wick, as a franchise, fated for five films and counting? 

“I think we were probably destined to make the first one,” Lee says, “but the movie gods and the world sort of made it so that we were able to make Ballerina and the subsequent movies.” 

A documentary about the making of the franchise is on the way, too, as is an animated prequel and a spinoff about Caine, the blind assassin played by Donnie Yen in Chapter 4.

“As an independent producer, you sort of never know,” Lee continues. “You read a script and it could be the next franchise, the next Oscar winner, or never get made. There’s so many stories that go either way, and I think there was something that pulled us to that first movie; a lot of decisions and a lot of hope and prayers and magic in a bottle that just worked. And that is not something I ever saw coming, or could have ever planned.”

Also Read: John Wick Creator Has Made Peace With Leaving the Franchise

The appeal of Ballerina, though, really does come down to a few key choices that Wiseman and the producers made early on. Not only does the movie introduce an exciting new faction of foes for Eve (and maybe Wick) to take on in more sequels, but it also establishes an entirely new kick-ass character who feels fresh and distinct instead of a female Baba Yaga.  

“That was very important to me,” Wiseman says. “I have no interest in seeing Ana de Armas doing what Keanu Reeves does. John Wick is the only John Wick.” 

Ballerina is now in theaters, from Lionsgate.

Main image: Ana de Armas as Eve in Ballerina. Lionsgate.

Friendship — DeYoung's feature debut as a writer-director — stars Tim Robinson as Craig, a lonely suburban dad who is married to the mysterious Tami (Kate Mara), but lonely. He becomes platonically smitten with his cool new neighbor Austin (Paul Rudd), a weatherman who embraces adventure. But Craig's efforts to impress and imitate Austin lead to a series of crises.

Friendship is one of the funniest movies we've seen, which is especially striking because DeYoung eschews a comic tone — he looked to Paul Thomas Anderson's grim The Master for aesthetic inspiration.

The film locks into greatness with the casting of the endlessly likable Rudd — who just seems like your cool neighbor — and Robinson, whose uncomfortably perceptive eye for social catastrophes fuels his brilliant Netflix series, I Think You Should Leave.

But Friendship also nails a moment when many men aren't sure how to be men, which is summarized in its provocative, preposterous tagline, "Men shouldn't have friends." At a loss for how to connect, some turn to the caustic theatrics of Andrew Tate-style influencers, while others turn introspective, looking for real ways to grow and improve.

DeYoung, 42, is good at making friends — he met Robinson at the wedding of Robinson's fellow Saturday Night Live alum, Aidy Bryant. But he says the real struggle for many men is to maintain friendships beyond the surface level.

"I think male relationships are hard to continue," he says. "And I really feel like, at least in my generation, we were really under-socialized. I know we're seeing in a big way now almost like a resurgence, an overcorrection in culture, of this type of masculinity that I think is ultimately destructive."

He continues: "I feel like, in general — and I see this in in a lot of my male relationships, even to this day — there's a certain inability to navigate depth and hard moments that are inevitable in a relationship. I see a lot of my friends struggling with it, failing, and trying to get better at it.

"The current kind of masculine wave speaks to an unmet need men are desiring, but they're confused about getting that need met."

You can listen to our full talk with Andrew DeYoung on Apple or wherever you get your podcasts or right here:

Andrew DeYoung on Friendship and Confronting Our Inner Craig

DeYoung is upfront about the fact that he doesn't know what men should do. He just recognizes the dark comedy in the struggle to be a modern man.

"I'm not here to diagnose. I'm simply here to to point out," he says. "And hopefully people get some joy out of acknowledging how kind of difficult and how hard it is, trying to connect with someone in any way, and kind of falling short, and not knowing how to really process one's feelings.

"There's plenty of other resources out there that can invite you into a deeper relationship with yourself that then hopefully opens you up to a greater relationship with others. But what I'm trying to do is simply make a movie that's cathartic, because we're all, I think, deeply kind of feeling separate right now."

DeYoung knows the suburban setting of Friendship well, even though the suburb in the film is snowier than Fresno, California, where he grew up. He studied screenwriting at Cal State State Northridge, and, after graduating in 2005, made short films and became a top TV comedy director on shows including Pen15, AP Bio, I Love That for You, Our Flag Means Death, and Shrill, which starred Bryant.

He thinks masculine bonding is improving with younger generations, "to a certain degree." (See also: the recent TikTok trend of young men calling their friends to say goodnight.) In the meantime, Friendship offers a pretty good primer for aspiring friends on how not to conduct themselves.

"Recognizing ourselves in Craig, the laughs come from watching a guy who doesn't know how to stop himself in ways that we do — most of us, at least. He's getting to do the things that we really deep down, in a primal way, would like to do. But we stop ourselves, because we know the consequences."

DeYoung likes to follow the primal intincts — the ones that feel like they'll resonate forever. When asked what kind of validation he seeks for a script before he decides to invest the years it takes to turn it into a film, he replies: "None. If I feel it, I feel it. That's it."

Also Read: From Mountainhead to The White Lotus to the Diddy Trial, Cuckolds Are Having a Moment

He wrote Friendship in 2020, and made some tweaks along the way with the casting of Robinson and Rudd, especially to give Rudd's Austin more vulnerability. Throughout the process, he always believed in the basic ideas of the film.

"I mean, it's primal stuff, what's in the movie. Any jokes that I wrote in 2020 that that didn't feel like they had staying power, we just cut," he says. "But deep down, the premise of it is primal stuff — connection is like food, shelter, that kind of stuff."

Friendship is now in theaters, from A24.

Main image: Tim Robinson in Friendship. A24.