Robin Milling

Living Composer Emilie Levienaise-Farrouch on How She Unintentionally Created a Tear-Jerking Score for the Bill Nighy Drama

January 17, 2023 Robin Milling Comments Off

What would you do with your life if you were given a finite number to your existence, with perhaps only months to live? The question is posed by Living, a reimagining of Akira Kurosawa‘s 1952 film Ikiru that transposes the setting to 1953 London. Bill Nighy delivers one of his very best performances as an ordinary man leading a mundane life — a veteran civil servant caught up in a […]

Cinematographer Robert Richardson on Shooting Emancipation and Forming a Brotherly Bond With Director Antoine Fuqua

January 13, 2023 Robin Milling Comments Off

On Jan. 1, 1863, the new year got off to an auspicious start thanks to President Abraham Lincoln, who declared all slaves free with the Emancipation Proclamation. The impetus for the decree was to allow slaves in the South to join the fight in the Civil War. In Louisiana alone, 350,000 enslaved people were faced with the decision to remain in bondage and wait for Union forces to free them, […]

Babylon’s Makeup and Hair Design Department Heads on the Grotesque Glamour of Damien Chazelle’s Sweaty Hollywood Epic

January 4, 2023 Robin Milling Comments Off

The origins of cinema can be traced back to the 1800s with Thomas Edison‘s invention of the kinetoscope, which allowed one person at a time to view a moving picture. Audiences grew and so did filmmaking technology with the introduction of the “silent” movie in the 1920s, back when stars like Clara Bow first graced the silver screen. Bow was the rare performer to successfully make the transition to “talkies” […]

The Fabelmans Costume Designer Mark Bridges on Taking Inspiration From Steven Spielberg’s Home Movies to Honor the Director’s Family Memories

January 4, 2023 Robin Milling Comments Off

In The Fabelmans, Director Steven Spielberg invites the audience to find out what shaped him, warts and all, into the famous filmmaker he is today. We meet his surrogate family, including his mother Mitzi (Michelle Williams) and his father Burt (Paul Dano), as well as his grandparents and sisters, and we see them all through a very personal lens as Spielberg’s own stand-in character, Sammy Fabelman (newcomer Gabriel LaBelle), endeavors […]

The Hip Hop Nutcracker Choreographer Jennifer Weber on Adding Modern Dance Moves to Tchaikovsky’s Classic Ballet

December 26, 2022 Robin Milling Comments Off

Around this time of year, young ballerinas are lacing up their pointe shoes, poised and prepared to dance The Nutcracker. The classic ballet, which is over three centuries old, premiered on Dec. 6, 1892, by order of Czar Alexander III in St. Petersburg Russia. Based on Alexandre Dumas‘ adaptation of E.T.A. Hoffmann’s The Nutcracker and the Mouse King, it was originally choreographed by Marius Petipa and Lev Ivanov with a […]

Awards

Avatar: The Way of Water Production Designers Ben Procter and Dylan Cole on Expanding the World of Pandora With Oceanic Landscapes & New Weapons

December 20, 2022 Robin Milling Comments Off

Creating the world of Avatar: The Way of Water was no doubt a formidable task. In fact, it required two Production Designers to fulfill the herculean vision of Director James Cameron, who began working on the sequel 13 years ago before the first film even hit theaters. Avatar featured never-before-seen characters created by transforming motion capture into performance capture, set against the brilliant colors and majesty of Pandora. The Way of Water […]

American Gigolo Set Decorator Dorit Hurst on Drawing Inspiration From a Character’s Backstory and Working With Jon Bernthal

October 26, 2022 Robin Milling Comments Off

In 1980, the film American Gigolo made its debut in cinemas featuring a young actor named Richard Gere in the title role of Julian, a male escort who set wealthy women’s hearts aflutter. Four decades later, Showtime has reimagined the steamy story for the small screen as an eight-episode original starring Jon Bernthal. The series finds Julian newly sprung from a 15-year stretch in prison after being wrongfully convicted of […]

Five Days at Memorial Production Designer Matthew Davies on Recreating the Hospital and Hurricane Katrina’s Wrath

September 22, 2022 Robin Milling Comments Off

On Aug. 23, 2005, the unimaginable watery wrath of Hurricane Katrina engulfed and devastated New Orleans. Five Days At Memorial, which is now streaming in full on Apple TV+, is the incredible true story of how caregivers handled the deterioration of their hospital and the chaos that ensued while trying to care for the sick under extreme circumstances and prevent further harm. Once a safe haven for housing residents during […]

Surface Composer Ólafur Arnalds on Writing Full Classical Pieces Vs. Scoring a TV Soundtrack

September 15, 2022 Robin Milling Comments Off

Ólafur Arnalds is one of Iceland’s foremost musicians and composers, but when he set out to write film and television scores, he hadn’t anticipated the fundamental difference between his career as a recording artist, writing songs for full-length albums, and breaking into the world of the two-minute song cue. Rather than get frustrated, Arnalds was excited to shift gears and learn a new set of musical parameters. His hard work […]

Surface Writer/Creator/EP Veronica West on How She Took Her “Unapologetically Feminine” Thriller From Script to Screen

August 26, 2022 Robin Milling Comments Off

What we see on the surface isn’t always what it appears to be, and the new Apple TV+ thriller Surface explores that very concept. The limited series stars Gugu Mbatha-Raw as a San Francisco socialite who starts to experience bouts of memory loss due to a traumatic head injury that she’s told is the result of a suicide attempt, the details of which remain fuzzy. As she attempts to put […]