Director Series: Kay Cannon on Modernizing Cinderella and Dealing with the Pandemic
For many years, Kay Cannon was best known as a writer/producer on Tina Fey’s NBC show 30 Rock, followed by a stint on New Girl, or as the screenwriter of the Pitch Perfect movies. In 2018, she went behind the camera to direct the raunchy comedy, Blockers, and that’s all it took for her to... »
Director Series: The Flight Attendant‘s Emmy-Nominated Director Susanna Fogel
One of the biggest surprises on the television/streaming horizon over the past few months was The Flight Attendant. Starring and produced by Kaley Cuoco, it’s quirky, smart, imaginative, daring, violent, funny and at times thrilling, with top-notched (and Emmy-nominated) production values and a superlative performance by Cuoco in her first post-Big Bang Theory outing.... »
Film Spotlight: The Filmmakers Behind the Killer Action-Thriller The Protégé
When her mentor is attacked, elite British assassin Anna (Maggie Q) returns to her childhood home in Da Nang to avenge him. But her mission is complicated by Rembrandt (Michael Keaton), a rival killer, in the Lionsgate release, The Protégé, opening in theaters on August 20. Samuel L. Jackson and Robert Patrick also star.... »
Director Series: Coda’s Siân Heder on Making This Year’s Crowd-Pleasing Sundance Hit
When Siân Heder’s Coda (an acronym for Child of Deaf Adults) premiered at this year’s virtual Sundance Film Festival, it took the venerable festival by storm, really blowing away everyone who saw it due to its originality and creative vision. When the awards were announced, Coda unsurprisingly ended up taking home not only the... »
Don’t Breathe 2‘s Rodo Sayagues & Fede Alvarez on Making a Horror Sequel During a Pandemic
In 2016, director Fede Alvarez, who had previously worked with original director Sam Raimi to reinvent Evil Dead, directed an original R-rated horror movie called Don’t Breathe, about a group of young Detroit criminals who sneak into the home of a blind man (Stephen Lang) with the intentions to steal a fortune of money,... »
Film Spotlight: Settlers Director Wyatt Rockefeller on Putting Life on Mars
Director Wyatt Rockefeller makes his feature film directorial debut with Settlers, a sci-fi thriller that was recently released by IFC Midnight after playing at this year’s Tribeca Film Festival. Despite being science fiction and actually taking place on a terraformed Mars, it’s a quieter character drama that stars Brooklyn Prince (The Florida Project) as... »
Director Kate Herron Reveals Secrets of the Loki Universe (Spoilers Ahead!!)
Creator Michael Waldron has surpassed expectations with Loki, the 3rd original Marvel Studios series on Disney +. The series picks up after Loki (Tom Hiddleston) mysteriously disappears with the Tesseract in 2012 during his engagement with the Avengers. He crashes in the Gobi Desert, Mongolia where he is tracked by the Minutemen (AKA variant... »
Carlos López Estrada: From Blindspotting to Summertime with Some Disney Animation in Between
Three years ago, Carlos López Estrada’s feature directorial debut, Blindspotting, opened the 2018 Sundance Film Festival, showcasing the talents of Hamilton’s Daveed Diggs and his collaborator Rafael Casal, in a film dealing with the gentrification and police discrimination that had plagued their hometown of Oakland, California. Two years later, Estrada would be back at... »
Film Showcase: First Date Co-Director Manuel Crosby Explains the DIY Approach to His Action-Comedy
When you watch Manuel Crosby and Darren Knapp’s debut film, First Date, you know you’re in for something special. While it has the indie DIY spirit that has led to some great filmmakers like Tarantino, Soderbergh, Robert Rodriguez, and many more, it also shows off the true spirit of collaboration when people making a... »
Director Series: Chris McKay Transitions to Full-Sized Living Actors for The Tomorrow War
Director Chris McKay cut his teeth in animation, spending the second half of the ‘00s, as editor, co-producer and co-director, doing stop-animation series for the Cartoon Network’s “Adult Swim” brand that culminated in the highly-popular Robot Chicken. In 2017, McKay directed The Lego Batman Movie, released by Warner Bros. Pictures, which was a much... »