stay for the credits

October 31st
17:58

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Because of the scale of a project like Beneath the Roses, do you have a lot of foreman skills now?

GREGORY CREWDSON: No. The weird thing about that whole body of work is that I’m not particularly good with people, and that photography really is, at the end, a lone thing anyway. One thing, for sure, is that I have a very small group I work with on a continuing basis.

Although in the documentary the smoke-truck guy seemed really busy.

GC: Yeah, he has the biggest job.

Do you do that to mess with the light?

GC: It creates atmosphere, and you see light better. In the end, in the final pictures, it’s just barely in the air. It creates a little texture.

How do you feel about the magic hour?

GC: Funny, because obviously it’s so beautiful, the magic hour, but the whole main reason to be shooting in that hour is that it’s the only window where you can work with the lights and daylight at the same time. It started as a practical thing, and then I started to realize how that’s such a period of transition and transformation. My work’s very much about being between places, and that’s very much about that.

Favorite magic hours on film?

GC: Well, Terrence Malick’s the genius of magic hour. Badlands is one of the most perfect movies. He was notorious for driving producers crazy since he would shoot for only five minutes a day.

When you’re working with the magic hour, aren’t you kind of pushing all day and don’t you end up with this tiny window?

GC: It’s why I can never make a movie. Malick’s starting to work faster, though.

Speaking of slow filmmakers, why doesn’t Wes Anderson make movies faster?

GC: I don’t know if you know, but Wes is one of my closet friends. He usually takes long periods in between films, but he just started shooting again after Moonrise Kingdom, which is very uncharacteristic. I think it’s because the movie is a hit, so he’s striking while the iron’s hot, going straight on to the next. He’s such a perfectionist. Now we’ll see, but he might have a film by as early as next year.

Do you guys bond with being perfectionists over set design?

GC: I think so. I think that was part of our original mutual connection, our connection to one another’s work. I think that’s it, and then just going through life together. Now he’s living in Europe, so we don’t see each other as much.

When you’re working, are there any details in your work that surprise you?

GC: No. When you continually do the same thing in a certain sort of way—the one thing artists do whether they’re filmmakers or writers—they create an iconography of themselves, even if they’re not aware of it. It’s not until later that you realize, Oh, I use a lot of medicine bottles or a lot of nondescript cars with doors open or a lot of pregnant women, or whatever it is. You can’t give a precise sort of reason why, but after a period of time that thing just becomes part of the world you create. (via)

October 25th
11:34

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atencio:

Key & Peele: Pizza Order

This was my favorite script of the season. It’s such a simple idea for a scene, but the escalation between the characters was written perfectly, and it built to a hilarious finish. What made it resonate all the more for me was that I used to do this in high school. I’d go to McDonald’s and want to order a bunch of food because I was super fat, but I’d feel weird asking for three cheeseburgers, so I’d read the order off a little piece of paper and use “we” instead of “I” like I was taking orders for a group of people. A bit of trivia: we shot Keegan’s side of the conversation first, several weeks before we shot Jordan’s side. In Jordan’s original script, all of the people he names were characters on LOST, which is why Keegan becomes obsessed with “Claire.” However, before we could shoot Jordan’s side, we found out that ABC had denied our request to use LOST paraphenalia in Jordan’s character’s apartment, so at the last minute our art department (led by the fearless Gary Kordan) had to scramble to find another movie or show we could reference in the sketch. At the very last minute we managed to get Fox to let us use “Firefly” and Weta to grant us permission to use all the Lord of the Rings characters in the sketch, so we changed the names to be the names of the actors who played characters in those universes. We found a generic action figure to stand in for Claire since we still had to use that name and no one named Claire was in either movies. It worked out for the best, too, because I like LOTR a hell of a lot more than I like Lost.

August 12th
10:58

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"I want the actions the characters take on Breaking Bad to always have consequences. I guess that in itself was a reaction to years and years of television, watching TV shows in which the characters would have some life-changing event where they kill someone or they get wounded and the next week they’re basically back on their feet and there’s no emotional repercussions. That is not reality as we know it to be; it’s a TV reality. That’s because television has to maintain a sort of a stasis and keep the characters more or less in one spot from week to week to allow for continuity, so the viewer can tune in and tune out as they choose. That’s just what television does, and it’s not a bad thing or a good thing. It’s just a structural conceit of television that is time-honored, and it goes back to the beginnings of the medium. But it’s not reality."

— Vince Gilligan (via theongreyjoy)

August 9th
15:59

33 notes

[Character spoilers ahead]

Clothes on Film: Why did you design Bane’s shearling coat yourself? Was it impossible to find multiples of something that fitted your interpretation of the character?

Costume Designer Lindy Hemming: Because of my research for this character; he is a man who has travelled the world as a kind of mercenary. I was looking at two main areas, firstly his military surplus scavenging, which has gone into making up his entire wardrobe and breathing equipment; I fell in love with a very old, matted Swedish army sheepskin arctic wear coat with huge collar and lead weights as buttons, a great characterful garment. Secondly his idealistic, romantic, revolutionary aspirations, which was how Chris Nolan had explained an aspect of him; this lead me to think about the French Revolutionary style / military greatcoat look with ample collars. We also has a feeling that this garment could be a ‘sign/signal’ of the change for the mania in his behaviour of and his worsening destructive megalomania as he enters the football field.

Obviously this combination of ideas in a garment did not exist so I decided to set about designing it and having it made in L.A. It was a very difficult project, and there were the issues of multiples, the non- matching aspects of sheepskins, and, for poor Tom Hardy as Bane, an extra hot, heavy horror, as he was already facing torture by face and mouth with the covering mask.

Clothes on Film: How about Bane’s costume underneath the coat (padded vest)?

Costume Designer Lindy Hemming: The padded vest was made as it would have been in the story, from a collection of surplus tent canvas, old webbing belts, metal plates from the door of a jeep, military meshes etc., and was designed to be worn both with and without the leather and canvas back support belt, which Bane needs due to his torture in prison as a child/teenager. These pieces were also needed in exactly identical multiples, and were a very important part of achieving his extreme silhouette; tinkering with his proportions to help make him look more bulky, animalistic and aggressive.

12:04

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“Getting light into the eyes of those characters, all of whom are covered except for the eyes, was the single most important illumination task in the entire picture,” says [DP Wally] Pfister.

Gaffer Cory Geryak fashioned a 1X1 snoot for the lamp, and Pfister used it throughout the shoot as an eyelight for the three masked main characters, Batman, Catwoman and the villain, Bane.

August 7th
12:22

619 notes

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strangewood:

Do you improvise a lot while filming?
Nicholas Ray: The entire ending of In a Lonely Place, for example, was improvised. In Rebel Without a Cause I improvised, one evening at home, the whole scene where Jimmy returns home to his parents after the tragedy. The scene had been bothering me a lot: according to the script it should have taken place in the mother’s bedroom, but it seemed so static to me. So one evening when Jimmy dropped by to see me, I began to discuss the scene with him; I asked him to go into the yard while I played the part of the father in the living-room. I gave Jimmy two contradictory instructions: first to go upstairs without being heard, and then, at the same time, to feel the irresistible need to talk to somebody. I then turned on the television to a channel where the programmes had finished, and pretended to be asleep. So Jimmy comes in and walks past me to go upstairs and it’s then that the contradictory movement gets the better of him: he falls heavily on to the sofa, with a bottle of milk, and waits for me to wake up; at that very moment I exclaimed, ‘Now your mother comes down the stairs!’ And I knew that I’d found the dynamics of my scene. I got the designer to come to my place, and the set we used in Rebel was copied from my own living room where we had improvised the scene. It’s a very satisfying way to work; it was also from this that we got the idea of showing the mother coming downstairs from Jimmy’s point of view. The planetarium, the kids in the car, and several other scenes were also improvised.

[Interview with Nicholas Ray, Cahiers du Cinéma 89, Nov. 1958.]

July 11th
07:25

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drawnblog:

Last night I finally had a chance to watch The Sweatbox, the documentary about the production of Disney’s The Emperor’s New Groove.

When Sting was asked to create the music for the animated feature, he did so on the condition that his wife Trudie Styler document the making of the movie — one that would turn out to involve countless story problems and struggles between the creative departments and management.

The documentary screened at the Toronto International Film Festival in 2002, and Disney seems to have made sure it was never seen again. This work print that floats around YouTube in various places isn’t the final cut of the film (and feels a little Sting-heavy) but it gives great insight into some of the internal struggles that plagued the post-Lion King Disney.

July 10th
14:11

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(via Se7en (1995) — Art of the Title)

Directed by Kyle Cooper while at the newly-formed Los Angeles arm of titling giant R/Greenberg Associates, it’s a short story told in fragments and vignettes, following the hands of an unknown man – presumably the antagonist, John Doe – as he makes entries in his diary alongside clippings from books, self-developed photographs, and found images and objects, giving the audience an intimate look into the mind of a serial killer obsessed with religion and, more to the point, attrition.

It’s a sequence that has drawn comparisons to the grotesque photography of Joel-Peter Whitkin and the experimental self-aware filmmaking of Stan Brakhage, and its format has been likened to Stephen Frankfurt’s title design for Robert Mulligan’s 1963 adaptation of the courtroom thriller To Kill a Mockingbird, which also features close-up photography of personal items to describe the psyche of one of the film’s key players. But it is more likely a convergence of unique circumstances and artistic vision that gave the Se7en titles their own distinct cadence, blending Fincher’s treatment of the film itself with Cooper’s visual interpretation of its narrative.

And what ultimately distinguishes Se7en is its delivery, piecing together bits of leader and other film artifacts with ephemeral imagery and type etched right into the emulsion, all sewn together by Angus Wall’s staccato edit and Coil/Danny Hide’s nail-on-chalkboard remix of Trent Reznor’s industrial hit “Closer.” It’s an effortless presentation which – much like the killer’s diary featured within – wears its construction proudly on its sleeve.

July 9th
18:55

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nathanjohnson:

Hey everyone… really excited to bring you the first taste of the score for Looper!!!

Click above for a little peek into how we created the “Time Machine” cue

June 12th
10:04

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Mad Men's Writers' Room

DAVE ITZKOFF: There’s a traditional model of television writing, where stories are pitched in the writers’ room, assigned to individual writers and then the scripts that come back get rewritten in the room. Is that how “Mad Men” operates?
MATTHEW WEINER: No, no, it’s not like that at all. The outline comes out of the room. Maria and André [Jacquemetton] drive the train on that. I have story ideas, people have story ideas, we break the A, B and C stories. This is all the way “The Sopranos” did it. That’s the only way I knew to do it and we have our own version of it. We cut them into strips and we tape them into an outline of like 45 beats. Some of them we assign to a writer and they go off and write a draft. I see that draft, and if I have time, I give notes. Sometimes it’s like an audition. There are people who write a draft and it’s the end of it. You say, “I don’t think this is going to work out.” But whatever happens, eventually the script comes to me and I start fresh to some degree. And then I do a draft and that goes to the room. They give me their notes, I do another draft, I do another draft, I just keep doing. If I change less than 80 percent of it, I will leave their name on it, by themselves. Now, it’s unfair on some level, because I’m deciding what I change.
DAVE ITZKOFF: Do you think that’s commonplace at other shows?
MATTHEW WEINER: Everyone who has my job does this. They don’t usually put their names on it. It was important for my mental health, to see my name on there for work that I had done almost all of, in some cases. And I never understood it, why a person would want their name on a script if they didn’t write all of it. I would never want my name on something that I did not write most of. Part of television is you get rewritten. When I wrote for David Chase, I kept saying, “I’m going to write a script he can’t rewrite.” That was my mode. Not, “You’re just going to change it anyway.” So that’s the way it works here and I’m very open about it also, and not everybody is.

April 19th
07:00

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pbsarts:

The credits are often the first thing we see when we watch a great film or TV show, but the complexity and artistry of title design is rarely discussed. Creators of title sequences are tasked to invent concepts that evoke the core story and themes of the production, and to create a powerful visual experience that pulls the viewer into the film’s world. In this episode we hear the stories of some of the most inventive people working in the field, including the creators of the iconic Mad Men sequence, the hilarious Zombieland opening and “rules” sequences, and the stirring end credits from Blue Valentine.

January 6th
15:12

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Hidden In Snow by Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross. For The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo.

TERRY GROSS: And that’s music that my guest Trent Reznor co-composed for the new American version of “The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo.” There’s something so industrial, machine-like about - not the keyboard part, but what was going - that kind of whooshing, pulsing thing behind it. What did you use to get that sound?

TRENT REZNOR: We wanted to take lots of acoustic instruments, from strings to lots of different bell instruments and prepared piano - which is what’s featured in “Hidden Snow” quite a bit - and transplant them into a very inorganic setting, and kind of dress the set around them with electronics.

So you were hearing a lot of live, modular synthesizers creating a kind of icy or pulsing bed with something that feels very non-electronic, an organic and imperfect instrument played imperfectly, sitting on top of that. And that’s kind of one of the templates we use for this film.

GROSS: Prepared piano is when you open up the lid, and you kind of stick stuff on the piano strings so it doesn’t sound like it typically should. What did you prepare it with?

REZNOR: We picked up a bunch of upright pianos for cheap, and then we just started trying things, from clothespins to nailing nails into where the strings go, some of it ruining the instrument, some of it just creating imperfections so that you’d have to learn to play certain melodies a certain way because certain keys wouldn’t work. Certain notes would ring in funny ways and create interesting interactions between the notes.

It’s a very hit-and-miss procedure, and also very volatile because you might get something good, but when you - the melody you’re looking for, the string changes or the clothespin pops off, or the item that’s sitting on top of the strings buzzing just right isn’t there when you go back to that note. It’s a frustrating, but fun process to go through.

GROSS: In a way, the kind of sound that you get when you’re doing your more kind of industrial soundscape kind of stuff, it’s, in a way, the kind of sound that we’re constantly trying to block out because there’s constantly, like, soda machines that are like buzzing in the background or, you know, like some kind of like washing machine that you’re trying to tune out or refrigerator that’s vibrating.

You know, there’s so many, like, machines that we really try not to pay attention to. Have you ever, like, focused on those sounds and tried to hear, like, what’s interesting about that?

REZNOR: Oh, very much so. And I think early on in my career, I was heavily inspired by bands like Throbbing Gristle and Test Dept, and films of David Lynch, for example, where the soundscape plays a very important role in the listening experience. In Nine Inch Nails’ catalog, for example, as early as “Downward Spiral,” there was a lot of effort and experiments going on layering in sounds that might bother you under music to create a sense of anxiety.

And I’ve always found that it’s an interesting kind of instrument to bring into the mix, creating melody and/or purpose out of noise, and the various shapes noise can take, whether it could be the hum of a radiator, to a room tone that could be compressed and amplified and even tuned in to kind of become something that makes you - that evokes some sort of emotional response.

(via)