Interviews

The first half of autumn 2023 was not a good time for the domestic box office. The WGA and SAG-AFTRA strikes slowed Hollywood’s publicity machine to a crawl, and if certain summer tentpoles—most prominently Barbie and Oppenheimer—managed to capture audience...

In the long lineage of Oz on screen, makeup and hair have carried as much mythology as the characters themselves—from actress Gale Sondergaard refusing to wear Wicked Witch makeup to the Horse of a Different Color made possible by powdered...

In For Good, the language of costume charts an arc of identity, power, and vulnerability through fabric. Academy Award-winning costume designer Paul Tazewell approaches costumes as the architecture of character, with every fabric and silhouette designed to reveal how Elphaba,...

A title card in the opening seconds of Kleber Mendonça Filho’s The Secret Agent welcomes the audience into a setting steeped somewhere between fact-and-falsehoods: 1977 Brazil, during the country’s military’s dictatorship. “A time of mischief,” as described by the title...

In crafting the visual language of Wicked, cinematographer Alice Brooks and director Jon M. Chu began with words. From that emotional foundation, the pair spent two years trading thousands of images and dreaming bigger than ever before. The vision for...

The philosophy of Oscar-winning production designer Nathan Crowley is simple: If something can be built, it should be built. His experience growing 500 acres of corn in Canada for Christopher Nolan’s Interstellar gave him the confidence to plant nine million...

For virtuoso casting director Bernie Telsey, the long-awaited film adaptation of Wicked offered the chance to revisit a world he helped shape decades earlier when he shepherded the show through its Broadway debut, casting Kristin Chenoweth and Idina Menzel in...

Now You See Me debuted its first trick in 2013 by conjuring a global box office cache of $351.7 million. Three years later, Now You See Me 2 nearly matched that impressive feat, and together the double act brought the...

Founder and operator of Austin, Texas’ Blue Starlite Mini-Urban Drive-In Movie Theatre, Josh Frank is well-versed in the ins and outs of the independent cinema community. In 2024, the exhibitor branched out with his own content series designed to play...

In 2022 an ambitious plan was announced: Legendary helmer Renny Harlin (Die Hard 2, Cliffhanger) would make not one but three new films consecutively based on the hit horror franchise The Strangers. In mid-May of last year the first of...

This September, football returns to the small and big screen with Universal Pictures’ HIM, a first-of-its-kind blend of sports drama and horror from Jordan Peele’s Monkeypaw Productions. Tyriq Withers co-stars as Cam, a budding football phenom taken under the wing...

Directed by Oliver Hermanus and adapted from Ben Shattuck’s short story, The History of Sound traces the bond between gifted music students Lionel (Paul Mescal) and David (Josh O’Connor), who initially meet at the Boston Conservatory in 1917. Years later...