The Pale Blue Eye
Awards

The Pale Blue Eye DP Masanobu Takayanagi on Creating a Distinctive Look for Scott Cooper’s Candlelit Mystery Starring Christian Bale

Scott Cooper‘s latest film, the moody period piece The Pale Blue Eye, is an adaptation of Louis Bayard‘s novel about a series of grisly murders at the West Point military academy in upstate New York, and its distinctive look really helps enhance the mystery at the center of the story. Set in the early 1800s, the Netflix film stars Christian Bale as detective Augustus Landor, who is called to investigate […]

Art Directors Guild
Art Direction

Avatar, The Batman, The Crown, Andor Among Nominees for 27th Annual Art Directors Guild Awards

The Art Directors Guild (ADG) has announced the nominations for its 27th Annual ADG Awards, honoring the best in production design, art direction, and illustration for films, television, commercials, and more. This year’s ADG Awards will be presented on Saturday, February 18 at the InterContinental Los Angeles Downtown. The ADG presents awards to film in four categories, including animation, and eight television categories with all five Oscar nominees in the […]

Owen Roizman
Camera

Oscar-Winning Cinematographer Owen Roizman, Who Shot The Exorcist and Network, Dies at 86

Cinematographer Owen Roizman, ASC, who was nominated for five Oscars during a career that ran from 1970 through 1994, passed away at the age of 86 on Friday, according to the American Society of Cinematographers (ASC). In 2017, Roizman was presented with an honorary Oscar for his achievements and contributions to the film industry, which included nine years of serving on the Academy’s Cinematographers Branch from 2002 to 2011, and represented the […]

Bill Nighy Living
Awards

Living Costume Designer Sandy Powell on Finding the Perfect Suit for Bill Nighy, Men’s Fashion These Days & Disney’s New Snow White Film

The idea of remaking a classic like Akira Kurosawa’s 1952 drama Ikiru might not seem like a particularly prudent decision, but that’s exactly what Director Oliver Hermanus has done with Living, transporting the story to ’50s London with Bill Nighy playing Mr. Williams, a lifelong public servant diagnosed with terminal cancer who tries to make the most of his last few months. While Kurosawa’s film was contemporary at the time […]

White Noise
Art Direction

White Noise Set Decorator Claire Kaufman on Creating the ’80s Look for Noah Baumbach’s Netflix Movie & Dressing Nearly 7,000 Feet of Grocery Store Shelving

Noah Baumbach‘s White Noise, an adaptation of Don DeLillo’s 1985 novel of the same name, is a very different film for the filmmaker behind The Squid and the Whale and Marriage Story. The Netflix film stars Adam Driver and Greta Gerwig (Baumbach’s partner and frequent collaborator) as university professor Jack Gladney and his new wife, Babette, who have recently created a new blended family together. When an “airborne toxic event” […]

Pinocchio
Art Direction

Production Designers Guy Davis and Curt Enderle on Joining Forces for Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio and Turning the Director’s Fantastical Ideas Into Actual Sets

For decades, Oscar-winning filmmaker Guillermo del Toro has been cited as an auteur whose movies often look fantastically original compared to other genre films. The Mexican filmmaker has long valued production design and the artists responsible for it, and that was the case once again with his new stop-motion animated movie Pinocchio, which is now streaming on Netflix.  Once again, del Toro worked with Guy Davis, a renowned comic book […]

Avatar
Awards

Below the Line’s Awards Season Film, Television Craft Interview Round-Up

Now that it’s late December, we’re fully into the awards season where crafts people in the industry get to nominate their colleagues in various below-the-line categories. Unlike the past few years, we’re including both television and film craft here, because many of the guilds and societies will be nominating for their annual awards, which include both film and television. You can also get a quick reminder of some of our […]

Puss in Boots The Last Wish
Animation

Puss in Boots: The Last Wish Director Joel Crawford on Finding the Right Tone and Cast for the Sequel, and Mixing Animation Styles

For more than two decades, DreamWorks Animation (DWA) has been at the cutting edge of computer animation while also constantly pushing the limits of storytelling in that medium. Director Joel Crawford has now been in charge of two recent DWA sequels — The Croods: A New Age in 2020, and its latest release Puss in Boots: The Last Wish, which is meow, excuse me, now playing in theaters. A sequel […]

Namor Black Panther
Crafts

Black Panther: Wakanda Forever: Wētā FX Supervisor Chris White on Exploring the Deep Undersea World of the MCU

Black Panther: Wakanda Forever is currently the third highest-grossing movie of 2022, having taken in more than $400 at the domestic box office. Marvel’s superhero sequel continues the tale of the African Kingdom of Wakanda, albeit with one major difference from the 2018 movie — Chadwick Boseman, who originated the title character, tragically died in 2020, leaving a major absence for writer-director Ryan Coogler to address. Coogler handles T’Challa’s death with […]

Apollo 10 1/2
Animation

Filmmakers Richard Linklater and Tommy Pallotta on Their Animated Netflix Movie Apollo 10 ½: A Space Age Childhood

Boyhood filmmaker Richard Linklater has previously explored the world of animation with 2001’s Waking Life and 2006’s A Scanner Darkly, based on the Philip K. Dick novel. His most recent animated effort, Apollo 10 1/2: A Space Age Childhood, is another one of the Oscar-nominated filmmaker’s more personal films, similar to Boyhood. The Netflix film follows a young lad named Stan who is growing up in the Houston area in […]