“As soon as I started to learn about people like Oonagh Guinness and how she lived, and Gloria Vanderbilt and Lee Radziwill… they were bucking the tradition of their aristocratic upbringing, which would have been, you know, heirlooms and antiques. No, they didn't want any of that. They wanted to be part of the modern world. They wanted to hang out with artists. They wanted to be bohemian and they expressed that, I feel like, in their personal surroundings.”

Hedda, an adaptation of the Henrik Ibsen play Hedda Gabler, stars Tessa Thompson in the title role, with Nina Hoss, Imogen Poots, Tom Bateman, and Nicholas Pinnock in supporting roles. The film is all set in one location, Hedda’s majestic estate. Its look and feel are essential to reinforcing Hedda as a boundary pusher, and creating the transportive quality of the film. 

“We achieved that through just the layering that we did. We had this Italianate house that was built and cobbled together. They kept building it and building it, building it over decades, adding and adding so you have this house from the 1800s and then we put modern art in it, and then we brought in a lot of art deco silhouettes to furnishings, because that still feels so contemporary,” says Brown. 

“Because of all the layers that we have, it kind of makes it feel timeless. A lot of people have come up to me and said they wanted to know what country the house was in… and then they want to know what year it was set in. We wanted it to kind of feel timeless and transcend any specific year.”

Taking Liberties With Hedda

DaCosta took some liberties from the play, by moving the time period from the late 19th century and gender switching the role of Eilert in the play to Eileen in the film. Those liberties were important considerations for Brown and set decorator Stella Fox.

“I think for me, choosing the furniture and the pieces had more to do with the shapes and the proportions of the pieces. The shapes of the deco pieces and the shapes of ’50s pieces kind of mirror that very elegant, very shapely, just very sexy pieces of furniture. 

"And I think that when we were looking in auction houses we imported a lot of furniture from all over Europe antiques markets. It was more about just finding the perfect shape. But it just didn't matter to me and to Cara, whether it was, you know, ’20s, ’30s, ’40s, ’50s, even ’60s. Like, there were some mid-century pieces that obviously would have been created after them. But it really, it didn't matter, because they had that freedom of slight wildness, I think, to them,” says Fox.

“We did a whole kind of board displaying leopard print, for example, and like it was so on trend in the ’50s… and (Nia) let us put leopard print carpet in the back hallway, and also a taxidermy jaguar on the staircase, just because,” says Fox. “I remember the first time we showed Nia the leopard print carpet. She literally laughed in our face. She was like, ‘Ladies, what are you doing?’ And then, OK, OK, I got it. I got it.”

How did ideas of gender, especially in this time period, influence the set decoration and production design?

“I really think it was just another example about how boundary pushing this person is, and how bold we could be with the furnishing, I think, and the production design, because she's clearly somebody who is not afraid... I really don't know how we would have made this film, or how special this film would have felt without that gender swap,” says Brown.

Hedda’s outward and inner lives are constantly at odds in the film, but the house does offer clues to who she might really be. 

“I feel like she is grasping at anything she can, and so maybe the house is a bit of a creative outlet where she can express herself. Even though she finds that unfulfilling,” says Brown.

“I was gonna say it's for her. It was the drama… It's the show of it, the pomp of it,” says Fox.

Hedda is now streaming on Prime Video.

Main image: Tessa Thompson in Hedda. Prime Video.

The new comedy, set in 1984, gets laughs from the embarrassments and frustrations that come from being a human — especially a teenage human — but not from the typical punchlines of modern-day movies set in the '80s, like campy callbacks or inside jokes about what we know now but didn't know then.

The film is playing Friday at Dances With Films New York, and it's a perfect fit for Dances With Films, a festival that specializes in well-made films that can be hard to pin down: The festival famously doesn't care about celebrity or industry connections.

And yetThe Legend of Juan Jose Mundo director and co-writer Michael Walker has them anyway. His credits include directing the 2000 Jeff Daniels mystery Chasing Sleep and the 2012 Parker Posey comedy Price Check, as well as the 2022 Dances With Films winner Paint.

And while his three leads aren't big stars yet, all feel poised to be. Anna Mirodin has what should be a breakout role as Julie Gornick, an inexperienced high school student surprised to learn that her family will be hosting a male exchange student from Spain. Alexandro Byrd is fantastic as that student, Juan Jose, who can't help but attract seemingly every girl in school. And Cobra Kai actress Hannah Kepple is very funny as Julie's bolder best friend, Suzanne.

The Legend of Juan Jose Mundo benefits from the fact that Walker was exactly the same age as his characters in 1984. His co-writer, actress Susan Gomes — the two are married — drew on her own experiences to make the film. We sent them a few questions ahead of Dances With Films New York, and Walker answered them with Gomes at his side, with both contributing to his answers.

The Legend of Juan Jose Mundo Director Michael Walker on 80s Movies and His Breakout Gen Z Cast

MovieMaker: It’s very cool to see a teen movie set in 1984 that feels like it could have been made in 1984. But it has the perspective of a grown up with years of distance. I see that you were almost exactly the same age as your teenage characters in 1984 — how much did you tap into your memories?

Michael Walker: The film is based on Susan’s high school experiences growing up in White Plains, New York, and, even though I had a different high school experience, I grew up in the 80s. We spoke with a lot of her friends from growing up and a lot of the stories are in the movie.  The main story about a inexperienced girl who hosted a Spanish exchange student was based on a true story of Susan’s best friend back then.

But it’s also filled with a lot of little stories, like the Spanish teacher trying to improve the kids’ accents with a Cheech and Chong-like accent, that actually happened that were really funny and we wanted to put them in the film.

It was a lot of memories like that, but, like you said, it’s also done with the perspective of being older, so it was fun to remember what it was like to be young at that time.  Trying to remember how important a lot of dumb teenage shit can be to you when you’re that age — that feeling of being in love and obsessed, like, "I’m going to die if I don’t get with that person!” without even knowing what that means. The drama of everything, how everybody knows everybody’s business.  We also tried to keep the adults out of it.

MovieMaker: This reminded me of Savage Steve Holland crossed with Whit Stillman - I love them both but couldn’t imagine much overlap until this. And of course John Hughes is the king of '80s movies. What were your reference points, besides memory?

Michael Walker: Obviously we grew up on those movies. The biggest influence of the John Hughes movies was that he took his characters and their problems seriously.  Fast Times at Ridgemont High was a huge movie for us — it has a real female perspective and emotion and is funny as shit.  

We watched and rewatched a lot of '80s movies while writing and preparing for this, especially all the teen ones.  A lot of them are better than you think they’re going to be, like actually well-made movies.  And a lot are really bad. And then, just '80s movies in general, because our generation grew up seeing movies and we all had the same cultural references.  

MovieMaker: I don’t know if this is intentional, but you kind of flip an amusing subplot from Better Off Dead - a smart, cool, attractive French girl named Monique is trapped as an exchange student with the awful host Ricky. In your film, the exchange student is the very charismatic Juan, and host Julie feels unwanted. Were you thinking about Better Off Dead? Were there other movies you wanted to play with or subvert?

Michael Walker: We watched Better Off Dead after we wrote it but before we shot it.  I had forgotten what it was about, but it was still really funny. I didn’t want to make a broad comedy like that. I thought our plot was maybe closer to 16 Candles.  I just wanted to make it real. I just thought about a lot of '80s movies - I thought about An Officer and a Gentleman a lot.  Go figure.

MovieMaker: How did you recreate 1984 so accurately at what I assume was a tight budget? (It looks great, but most indies have tight budgets.) I was especially impressed with your version of 1984 Manhattan. 

Michael Walker: I think what makes it seem more accurate is that we tried to put a lot what it was like to live in the '80s into the script. Waiting for pictures at the Fotomat, letter writing, pay phones, phone cords. One of our pet peeves about other period movies (and TV) is that they spend all this money on these elaborate sets and create these incredible productions, and then everyone talks like they were born yesterday.  

We talked different back then. We used words we don’t use anymore. We didn’t swear as much. We weren’t snarky and ironic.  We spent a lot of time trying to get the dialogue to sound like it did then.

Kristy Tully, our DP,  tried to shoot it like an '80s film. She lit the film with lights from the '80s — and blew a few fuses in the process. We threw in '80s-style shots when we could — wetting down streets at night, or throwing some color in smoke. Our production designer, Annie Simeone, recreated porn theater Times Square 1984 outside a beautiful theater in Downtown Syracuse.  

Our movie takes place in the early '80’s, which is before the '80s really became what the '80s were remembered for, so we were careful not to just step into the cliches of “The '80s.” 

MovieMaker: One thing I loved is that the film doesn’t tone anything down — teen drinking, teens having sex lives, people saying very uncool things. It isn’t egregious or played for shock value, it’s just accurate. Were you ever tempted to sugarcoat things?

Michael Walker: We were trying to stay as accurate as we could. I don’t think you can make a movie about the '80s without some of those things, and I didn’t want to make a big deal about them either.  But we definitely thought a lot about whether or not to have the characters say and do certain things. Both Susan and I have Gen Z daughters and know that for this generation, anti-gay slurs/language is not tolerated, but in the '80s, those words were used constantly in polite conversation.  

Girls today have a different view of relationships than girls did then. We decided to keep it all in because it was real.  Nobody seems to be offended because they get it was a different time. 

MovieMaker: How hard was it to finance this? The soundtrack alone seems quite costly.

Michael Walker: It took a lot of time to find songs that we could afford that we wanted. These are pretty mainstream kids and they listened to mainstream music, which is expensive! Then again, I was surprised by some of the amazing music we did get: Rockit! Adam Ant! ABC! I had to write a few personal letters basically begging, “Dear Howard Jones…”  Our music supervisor, Peter Davis, was very patient with us and found us some great stuff.

MovieMaker: What are your distribution hopes/plans? This is such a cool and unusual film in that it’s extremely well-made but also tells a very small story - it’s not trying to save the world. It’s more like a very poignant and honest time capsule.

Michael Walker: I think you’re exactly right!  I wanted this to be a jewel box of a movie.  Distribution has always been the toughest part of making movies, and it’s never been tougher, especially for a film like this.  I know people connect with this film when they see it, but getting their attention to see it is hard.  Even in the festival world things are celebrity-driven, or issue-driven, so to be appreciated by a festival like DWF means a lot.  

MovieMaker: How did you find your awesome cast?

Michael Walker: We had the amazing Barden/Schnee casting our film.  Paul Schnee really loved the script.  We wanted to find new actors.  Our cast will be stars in the future, but they won’t get there without films like this.  We were lucky in that our finance wasn’t attached to us finding stars. Everything is so celebrity-driven, it’s really another thing that makes this film special.  

Anna Mirodin, who plays Julie, is in an amazing play, The Disappear,  in New York right now. Alexandro Byrd is a lead in the new Disney Descendants movie coming out in July.  So they are already on their way.

Also, we were really lucky shooting in Syracuse and having access to some of the theater students at Syracuse University. They really came through.  

The Legend of Juan Jose Mundo plays Friday night at 7 p.m. at Dances With Films New York.

Main image: Anna Mirodin and Alexandro Byrd in The Legend of Juan Jose Mundo. Pango Films.

Bah's escape from Gambia — and what happened next — is the subject of the new documentary Unbowed, by Mae Gammino and David Helfer Wells. It recounts how Bah started a new life in Rhode Island, and founded the Refugee Dream Center, a nonprofit dedicated to helping refugees find jobs, education, employment and housing — as well as a sense of community.

The film, which airs Friday on Rhode Island's Ocean State Media/RI PBS and will also be available on the station's site, follows Bah through a crucial year, and arrives at a perilous time for refugees and all immigrants to the United States.

Gammino, who previously produced the documentary Being Thunder, came to filmmaking after owning a manufacturing business and then becoming a photographer — skills that proved essential to making Unbowed. She realized Bah's story should be a film, and enlisted Wells, a photojournalist and filmmaker who had helped her when she was starting out in photography.

One of the biggest challenges they faced was just getting time with the very busy Bah — who in addition to his careers as an activist and journalist, earned a doctoral degree in neuropsychology in 2020, and ran for Congress in 2022.

We asked Bah, Gammino and Wells about authoritarianism, parallels between Gambia and the United States, and how sharing Google calendar access made Unbowed possible.

MovieMaker: Omar Bah became a journalist by walking into the office of a small newspaper in his native Gambia and offering to work there. Contrary to popular belief, high-stakes journalism is a skill with rules and best practices that most people can't just do, just walking in off the street. What are the remarkable qualities that enabled Omar to have an impact despite having no experience?

Omar Bah: At the time of walking into the offices of The Independent Newspaper, my only qualification was passion and vision for a free Gambia devoid of corruption, repression, and human rights abuses; a Gambia where everyone had a voice. I grew up in a small rural village. At the time, there was no running water, electricity, or school. I was one of the very few children who had access to education and had to walk long distances to get to the nearest school.

I am from a collectivist, extended family system where my father had three wives and about 20 children. My mother alone had eight children. Because my mother is the first wife, I am the second child for both my mother and father. This position in terms of child seniority comes with a huge responsibility. My older brother was battling with an epilepsy condition. By default, as a child, I had to step in to act as the first child.

As a result, I helped my mother with babysitting, pounding grains and wheat, running errands, fetching water, and almost every hard labor I could do. My mother was being subjected to domestic violence. I deeply sympathized with her and would cry along with her, and support her at every moment of distress. As a woman who was married as a young teenager, my mother went through untold suffering.

This experience imbued in me a strong sense of advocacy, a sense of justice. I did not want to see other young women like my mother marry in their teens rather than be in school. I did not want to see young women like my mother experience domestic violence and extreme levels of hard labor.

This orientation took me to an undergraduate pre-law program because I wanted to be a lawyer to advocate for those who were experiencing struggles similar to those of my mother. Once I started these studies, and realized that the maximum I could study was two years for lack of a complete law program in the country, I devised a means to continue my advocacy and promotion voices of the people, and justice. This led me to walk into that newspaper office in the year 2000. 

Mae Gammino: I believe it was the conditions of Omar’s upbringing that shaped his need to help others have meaningful lives. Omar is highly perceptive, especially with understanding how systems work, any system. This, coupled with his superior intelligence, boundless energy, curiosity, empathy and equanimity, helps him devise strategies to achieve goals successfully.

And — two traits that don’t receive enough credit as important to success — Omar is sincere and earnest. So it’s no surprise to me that he had the self-confidence to walk into an editor’s office, as an inexperienced young person, and pitch himself for a reporting job, and then harness grit to learn how to do it to excel. He recounts this story in the film, and it’s one of my favorite scenes.

David Helfer Wells: I can’t speak for Omar, but I will point out that I did a somewhat similar thing to what he did when I started as a photo journalist four decades ago. I had the technical skills as a photographer, but I certainly needed to learn the basics of journalism, because I didn’t actually study those in college. I learned those things on the job at a small newspaper in Southern California, where I got my start.

I quickly realized that my primary strengths, which I think Omar also had, were curiosity, empathy, lots of energy, a willingness to listen to people, and a desire to share what I learned in that process. As I got to know Omar, I saw all of those things in him, so it wasn’t a surprise that he had succeeded as a journalist.

MovieMaker: Do you see parallels between what Omar dealt with in Gambia and what's happening in the United States now?

Mae Gammino: Omar can speak to this in a more informed way because he lived under a brutal and repressive dictatorship for about 22 years, and now has lived in the U.S. for 18 years, which included Trump’s first presidency. That said, I see a parallel in that we have a president, administration, and congressional majority that support the Unitary Executive Theory, which is being used with countervailing measures minimally present. Unless one feels protests and lawsuits have been effective, they’re pretty much continuing unimpeded. It’s mind-boggling. 

Omar Bah: I see parallels between what I dealt with in The Gambia and what is happening currently in the United States, although differently. Back home, in The Gambia, I was arrested and tortured by government forces on several occasions. I still have torture marks, and I still peel dead skin from one of the deep wounds I got from such tortures.

Media houses were firebombed, forcibly shut down and several journalists including myself eventually fled the country into exile. It is slightly different in the U.S. as one can argue about a hostile media environment where journalists have been disparaged and disrespected by members of the presidency. However, they still continue to separate freely and the extremes have not been realized yet. However, the signs are all there for a deterioration into a chaotic situation. 

David Helfer Wells: I certainly see parallels between what’s going on in this country and the anti-democratic political culture that Omar came of age in, and then that he eventually reported on the inequities of. 

MovieMaker: How did you all first meet?

Mae Gammino: I met Omar first in 2016 at a Refugee Policy conference in Providence — David was working overseas and could not attend. Trump’s language about immigrants and refugees was gaining significant press coverage. I wanted to learn more about refugee policy and what I could do in Rhode Island to help our local refugee community, though not as a journalist, as a private citizen.

Omar was a panelist, and his words were captivating. I was interested to know more about him, his wife, and the organization they had recently created, the Refugee Dream Center. I pitched David on the idea to do some sort of project about Omar, and then arranged for us to connect with him and his wife at their office. After this meeting, we discussed making a small profile piece that would involve a handful of shoots, but as we spent more time with them we realized a deeper story existed.

We filmed the majority of the footage over one year and then made a small profile piece for Omar to use on his website. We had intended to cut a longer film too, but other projects and work commitments put this plan on hold. However, we kept in touch with Omar and over the years filmed more, including some very recent footage after Trump was elected. Strangely enough, it the downtime of Covid that provided us time to revisit footage and make a plan to finish the film.

David Helfer Wells: I met him early in the development of the organization that he now runs, the Refugee Dream Center.  We initially were thinking of doing a short film/profile on him, but as we got to know him and learned about his life in the Gambia, the new life he was building in the U.S., and then when we met his family, we realized there was a much deeper and richer story there.

Omar Bah, Subject of Unbowed, on the American Dream

MovieMaker: As an immigrant who saw the United States as a place of refuge — and as the founder of the Refugee Dream Center — how does Omar feel about the recent ICE actions and the state of the U.S.?

Omar Bah: It has been 18 years since I arrived in the U.S., and still cannot fully believe that I am actually deserving and/or really that special to be given such a special opportunity. Imagine being a torture survivor, wallowing in distress in the stress of another country, Ghana, and then, out of all the countries of the world, and out of the millions of refugees displaced across the world, I was among few that got the once in a lifetime opportunity to be resettled in the U.S.

I have been particularly grateful for that. I am also particularly grateful for the opportunity for my children to be born in the U.S.A. That is why I started the Refugee Dream Center. To continue my lifelong passion and vision of advocacy and social justice, but also to imbue the sense of the American Dream of hard work and success on fellow refugees, hence the name of the center.

I believe this is my special way of expressing gratitude to the country, but also ensuring I contribute to the continued economic and social growth of our society. Thus, it pains me to see how ICE and our government has been scapegoating immigrants and treating them in a very dehumanizing way. 

Mae Gammino: Personally, I find their actions appalling and inhuman. I believe this administration’s objective is to control by promulgating fear and intimidation. 

David Helfer Wells: As someone who is now married to an immigrant, I find the entire anti-immigrant/anti-refugee political posture of the Trump administration to be appalling.

MovieMaker: What was your biggest challenge in making Unbowed? How did you overcome it?

Mae Gammino: This was my first go at making a documentary — David had made a few shorts before this experience. Personally, I was figuring it out as we went along. It was later in the editing process that I really understood and appreciated which of my inclinations, during production, had been correct and those which had not.

That said, the biggest challenge was getting time with Omar (I say this with true affection). He’s always in motion and does more in one day than most folks accomplish in a week. After becoming frustrated with trying to figure out how to get Omar to commit to filming, not because he was reluctant, he was just too busy to help us organize things, I realized that other than the product I was making — a film — my prior business experience had given me transferable skills to handle situations like this. Before becoming a photojournalist and filmmaker I owned a manufacturing company for  20 years.

I adjusted my thinking and reached out to his assistant to suggest I be added to his Google calendar, and presto — I was able to see his entire schedule months in advance. This allowed me to target specific events, and helped us have a complete picture of his activity, personal and business. Once the burden of having him help us schedule things was removed, it was easy to arrange what we wanted to film.

It was also the game-changer for us and Omar, especially because the more time we spent together he was increasingly less formal and began to notify us of things we might want to film.

The other impediment, which we could not completely overcome, was that David and I we making this film in our spare time, which meant we could not film as often as we needed and wanted. However, with these challenges met, the wonderful result for us and Omar was the warmly received international premiere in Nigeria last month. Their media celebrated it as story of triumph over repression and violence through an African’s magnanimity towards his fellow refugees prominently featured in an uplifting documentary. 

David Helfer Wells: We were able to film the situations we needed. In hindsight, we should've filmed even more of his life, because when it came to editing, we still came up short on B-Roll and on showing all the interesting aspects of his life.

MovieMaker: During Omar's 2022 run for Congress, he pledged not to attack or disparage any other candidates. How is that approach working for him? Does he remain committed to it? 

Omar Bah: I stayed through to my pledge, as I saw politics differently. Actually, my campaign slogan was to "Defend The Dream," and thus, my only objective was to contribute civically and socially to the augmentation of the lives of the people in my district and the country at large.

Thus, I was not interested in the disparaging tactics of the many political actors. I remained positive in my campaign. Despite not winning, I felt like participating in such a large political platform was a way of further expressing gratitude to the country, but also promoting equal opportunities for everyone who sees this country as a beacon of hope for all.

I do not see politics as a career, and thus, such a run was not meant to be a lifetime of candidacy. I am, however, glad I did pave the way for others and proved that anyone can be anything in this country. 

MovieMaker: Finally, Mae and David, can you detail how you became filmmakers?

Mae Gammino: I made a career change a little over a decade ago, from manufacturing business-owner to photojournalist, and film producer/director more recently. I’ve shot assignments as varied as a U.S. Joint Military Humanitarian Aid Mission in Indonesia to stills photography for a film in Utah, as well as assignments for local and national newspapers and magazines. My training involved some adult ed evening photography courses at RISD — I have no formal training in film and producing.

Over the years I gained exposure to the film industry as the staff festival photographer for the Provincetown International Film Festival and attending Sundance. I’d always had a desire to make documentaries but did not believe I could without attending film school. However, being around filmmakers at these festivals was the needed catalyst, and they became my film school though meeting filmmakers, attending panel talks, and simply being inspired and motivated by what I’d been exposed to. I even met the director of my first documentary, Being Thunder, on a shuttle at Sundance. 

I also can’t dismiss the importance of having had a full career before this as a manufacturing business-owner. It provided a perspective about business and practical skills one needs in any industry. 

I also was fortunate to find David. He was my mentor when I first started as a stills photographer, and through the years we’ve collaborated on commercial jobs and helped each other on some of our respective projects.

Even though I came into this business late in life, it’s not been an impediment, many of my initial film opportunities came from Get X and Millennial filmmakers. And, to date, I’ve been able to complete two films of my own, both of which I am very proud because they’ve introduced two remarkable Rhode Islanders to many people across the country and world. 

David Helfer Wells: I’m an award-winning visual storyteller based in Providence, Rhode Island, and my path to filmmaking grew naturally out of a lifelong commitment to visual journalism and human-centered storytelling. I began my career as a photojournalist, spending decades reporting deeply researched photo essays for publications such as National Geographic, Life, Time, Newsweek, Fortune, and The New York Times Sunday Magazine.

One of the most formative moments of my career was a Pulitzer Prize–nominated photo-essay on the pesticide poisoning of California farm workers for The Philadelphia Inquirer. That work, and many projects like it, shaped my belief that images can bear witness, demand accountability, and illuminate lives too often pushed into the margins.

Over time, still photography no longer felt sufficient to capture the complexity, silence, motion, and emotional rhythms of the stories I was encountering. I turned to documentary filmmaking as an extension of my visual practice, drawn to the way light, shadow, stillness, and movement could deepen narratives. My films champion intercultural storytelling and explore urgent social issues through an immersive cinematic language.

Unbowed airs Friday on Ocean State Media/RI PBS and will also be available on the station's site.

Main image: Omar Bah in a scene from Unbowed.

Editor Evan Schiff got hired on Frankenstein by putting himself out there: Though he hoped his representatives and his resume would be enough to capture the attention of writer-director Guillermo del Toro, Schiff also DM'd the director directly to tell him how much it would mean to him to edit his monster epic.

Del Toro remembered Schiff from his work as an assistant editor on the director's 2006 film Pan's Labyrinth and his 2008 Hellboy 2: The Golden Army. Since working on those hits, Schiff had also become a high-profile editor of films including Nobody, Birds of Prey, The Marvels, John Wick: Chapter 2, and John Wick: Chapter 3 — Parabellum.

"I think everybody is looking to help everybody else rise up the ladder, but if they don't know what you want, they can't help you do that," he says in our interview about hand-crafting the Oscar contender, which you can watch here or above.

After his extensive experience with action movies, Schiff was eager to work on an "epic drama — and a Guillermo del Toro movie on top of it."

While many editors shape a film after shooting, Schiff had a significant hand in Frankenstein even on the set. Del Toro likes to show his cast and crew scenes from the film very soon after he shoots them, which meant Schiff would routinely start editing the past days' footage four hours before the crew call, and del Toro would arrive after two hours to look over his edits.

"And we would spend those two hours, usually from like six to 8 a.m., refining the cut and getting into the state where it's actually pretty solid," Schiff recalls.

About three months into shooting, del Toro invited the entire cast and crew to start looking at edited footage each morning.

"The next day, there were like six people outside my office door at 6 a.m., and it was great," Schiff recalls. "And that lasted for like the whole next month."

Because Schiff edited so much on the Toronto and Scotland sets of the film, the film was fairly far along in the editing by the time it finished shooting. He edited on Avid Media Composer software, and praised his first assistant editor, Brit DeLillo, as "a genius."

Evan Schiff on Understanding Every Department on a Film

As the Syracuse native recounts on his website, EvanSchiff.com, he started interning at Stan Winston Studio (now Legacy EFX) at the age of 16. He later attended USC's film production program, where he developed his love for editing. Then he worked in VFX and became an assistant editor, which led to his work as an editor.

Understanding other departments helps him be a better team player.

"Working with sound crews and script supervisors and talking with DPs and things like that is all very informative to me as I start editing, because it allows me to not only have knowledgeable conversations with those department heads when I need something from them, but also to keep an eye out for things that they're sending my way that may need a little bit of love from me, in order to make them the best that they can possibly be," he says.

Early in his career, he learned a lesson from reading interviews with another of Syracuse's favorite sons, Tom Cruise. The actor talked about how when he first started working on film sets, he would talk to everyone about what they did, in order to better understand the entirety of filmmaking.

In 2011, Schiff worked on Cruise's film Mission: Impossible — Ghost Protocol, and was dispatched on a secret late-night mission to Pittsburgh, as part of a team showing Cruise edits from the film.

"So that was pretty fun," Schiff laughs.

Frankenstein Editor Evan Schiff on the Limits of AI

Last year, as del Toro accepted the Vanguard Tribute for Frankenstein at the Gotham Awards, the director famously quipped, “F--- AI.” He noted: “I’d like to tell the rest of our extraordinary cast and our crew that the artistry of all of them shines on every single frame of this film that was willfully made by humans, for humans."

That's certainly true of Schiff's work. While he says AI might be capable to some elements of editing, it isn't capable of heart or the complexities of understanding what a filmmaker — or an audience — wants and needs.

"So much of my job is managing the politics of what goes on in my room, managing multiple interested parties, people who have conflicting notes," he says. "This is not Guillermo, but sometimes you get a director that doesn't know what they want, and you've got to kind of interpret the note behind the note. Or they just come in like, 'Something feels wrong here, but I don't know what it is.' And I don't think that artificial intelligence is that intuitive. It's also trained on past problems and past scenarios, and that, by definition, prevents it from coming up with something new."

Frankenstein is now streaming on Netflix.

Main image: Evan Schiff while editing Frankenstein. Courtesy of Evan Schiff and Netflix.

“In my twenties I didn’t understand the concept of gut and instinct because I hadn’t had enough life experience yet,” says the star of Kristen Stewart’s directorial debut, The Chronology of Water.

Poots also believes actors face a false pressure to take jobs they think will lead to bigger and better roles in the future. But she says one thing she’s learned as an actor is that the only thing you really control is what projects you agree to do. 

“I work predominantly in independent film and that was always my dream,” she explains. 

One of her favorite parts of indie filmmaking is the element of risk.

“The cool thing about independent cinema is when you’re working with someone like Kristen and these other wonderful directors, you don’t know if it’s going to work or not but we all feel the same bone and dust. Our intentions are the same,” she continues. “You hope this is a long road and there are all of these pressures to ejaculate yourself, for lack of a better term, around the world and it’s very easy to let that happen when you’re younger, even if you feel something is not for you.”

If other actors have another approach, that’s fine with her. 

“You should go out and have fun and earn money, and take care of yourself and the people you love,” she says. “I just can’t do shit. I’d rather find another way to make money than do that.”

Imogen Poots on Her Emotional Investment in The Chronology of Water

Poots has played plenty of great roles — one of her most acclaimed films was for Jeremy Saulnier’s 2015 horror film Green Room — but is on a career high thanks to roles in Nia DaCosta’s new Hedda and The Chronology of Water.

Based on Lidia Yuknavitch’s 2011 memoir of the same name, The Chronology of Water is a story of trauma, healing, survival, pain, sexuality, queerness and art. Anything but chronological, the film is a scrapbook of raw emotions, and a story Poots has long wanted to tell.

She was attached to the film for roughly two-and-a-half years before Stewart was able to bring all of the pieces together to create the project she wanted to make, without concessions. 

Poots said she appreciated her director’s journey from acting in a massive franchise like the Twilight saga to making a very personal film, largely about interior emotions.

“To be seen by someone in this way and be given the chance means so much that I get emotional and it’s ineffable to talk about,” Poots says. “I’m very proud of this movie, and I’m very proud of Kristen, and it feels separate from other things I’ve done because of that emotional investment and love for the person I made it with.”

One of the greatest acting challenges is that she delivers most of her performance in silence. 

“You shouldn’t ever really play tone or images. It’s more like capturing the life of a person. I wasn’t thinking about fragments other than maybe abstract shots,” Poots says. “One of my favorite things about Lydia is that she can write and she’s thinking all the time. There is this idea that an introvert is not thinking at all, but of course an introvert is often thinking the whole time. You can mistake silence for not thinking, which in this day and age is a real problem.”

Audience members have been approaching her after screenings to share their own stories. Poots says Stewart was adamant that the character in the film isn’t Lidia the real person, but a fusion of that person, Stewart and Poots who is meant to reflect every woman. 

“It’s incredible to see those reactions happen but it’s also nice because there is nothing about this movie that feels indulgent,” Poots says. “We made this and people are having reactions to it in their bodies and finding release from it. When you go to the movies and spend your money, you want to see something that does something and matters to you. That this does that meant a lot. That’s cinema.”

Imogen Poots on Her Training to Play Lidia Yuknavitch

Shot on film by cinematographer Corey Waters, The Chronology of Water presents fragmented images and sounds, juxtaposed with memories and present-day reality. Poots’ character, Lidia, emerges in bits and pieces.

“One of the things that makes Kristen such a great filmmaker is she’s thinking about the edit,” says Poots. “It’s quite old-school; a lot of ‘70s directors were like that.”

To embody Lidia for the intense six-week shoot, Poots carved out a swimmer’s back through extensive training in New York City pools. She got a hernia, but feels grateful for the opportunity. 

She also read everything she could by Yuknavitch, and by the authors who influenced her. And she corresponded with the writer, though they didn’t meet before filming. 

“Her writing reads in quite a beatnik fashion, with a lack of punctuation,” Poots explains. “It was amazing to see she was telling the same story again and again. Like most writers are, she’s sort of orbiting the same themes, and she’s on a quest.”

Poots appreciates that the film puts audiences in sometimes uncomfortable positions, and asks questions, rather than recreating Lidia’s journey in a “tame and clinical” fashion. 

“It’s important these indie, independent films get made,” she adds. “It’s cool to give people a chance to be excited again and have the kinds of films we had growing up. Audiences are far more intelligent and imaginative than the current industry believes them to be.”

The Chronology of Water is now in theaters, from The Forge.

Main image: Imogen Poots trained to develop a swimmer’s back for The Chronology of Water. The Forge.

Blake Slatkin started performing Ed Sheeran and John Mayer songs on his guitar as a 10-year-old. Now he's in the Oscar conversation for "Drive," a song he recorded with Sheeran and Mayer for the soundtrack of Apple's Brad Pitt racing drama F1.

His advice for people who want to be musicians for a living?

"Just be a fan. Be the biggest fan of music, be a lover of music, and work harder than anyone," he says in an interview you can see above or watch here.

"The best advice I was ever given was by my mentor, and he said, 'You have to think of your career like a snowball, and you just keep packing on and packing on and packing on. And eventually it's big enough that it just has to roll down the hill.'"

That mentor was record producer Benny Blanco, for whom Slatkin worked as an intern before becoming one of music's most successful producers himself. He didn't play Blanco his music for four years, because he wanted to make sure it was good enough.

'Drive' Producer Blake Slatkin on What a Record Producer Does

Slatkin, who grew up in Los Angeles, started out as a fan himself — with aspirations to be more.

"I just wanted to be a rock star. And honestly, it was Ed and John and their music, who made me pick up a guitar in the first place. They both inspired me, and I used to cover their songs, and I learned guitar by copying them. ... I used to play on stage and sell tickets to my friends, my teachers and stuff, and do little gigs around town.

"And then when I found out what a producer was, and I found out that there are people making all of my favorite music that I didn't even know about, and they were behind the scenes, and they could, like, switch genres and do this for years and years — the second I even found out what that was, it was like, 'That's what I'm gonna do.' There's never anything else I wanted to do."

Being a producer has worked out very well for him.

Slatkin's collaborators have included Justin Bieber, Lizzo, Lil NAS X, Gracie Abrams, Omer Fedi, 24kGldn, The Kid Laroi and many more. He won a Record of the Year Grammy for Lizzo’s About Damn Time.

For "Drive," Slatkin assembled and played in a supergroup for the song that also included Dave Grohl on drums, Pino Palladino on bass and Rami Jaffee on keys.

Slatkin says the role of a record producer is simply "to make sure that the best song possible happens, by any means necessary to get there — whether that's by assembling the right group of people, whether that's doing it yourself, whether that's being a therapist to an artist and having a conversation so meaningful that they end up writing a perfect song all themselves."

He adds: "It's completely different with every artist I work with. And that's why I love my job, is because no day is the same," he adds.

Blake Slatkin on Making 'Drive' for F1

Making Drive started with just getting Sheeran and Mayer, longtime friends, into a room together. Their first efforts were pretty similar to what ended up on the record.

"Ed said, 'John, give me a rock riff.' The first thing John played on guitar was that riff," says Slatkin. "Then the first thing Ed sang into the little scratch microphone was the verse, and then he went into the hook, and and that's the demo that we came away with, with just the melodies and some scratch lyrics. Later, Ed and I finished the lyrics. John and I worked on the production."

The song closes out F1, and it's a clean, exhilarating anthem that feels like a wave of release and a fresh start, packed with promise and adrenaline. You can listen to it here.

"I try the hardest to make it sound like we don't try hard," Slatkin says. "That's the biggest thing — making it seem like it's like a magic trick.... making it seem so effortless and like everything just happens when you want it to. But getting to that point is hard. It's work."

Main image: Blake Slatkin. MovieMaker.

“It’s just one of those raw performance pieces I was craving at the time,” he says. “So I really jumped on it, terrified.”

The idea of working with director Gus Van Sant was serendipitous and a “no-brainer,” as Skarsgård had been a fan for years. Tackling the true story of Tony Kiritsis was something else though — the actor wasn’t sure he had it in him. 

In 1977, Kiritsis entered the offices of Meridian Mortgage Company in Indianapolis and took president Richard Hall hostage for 63 hours. He used a sawed-off shotgun that was wired to Hall’s neck, a device dubbed a dead man’s wire. 

Skarsgård was concerned he couldn’t play Kiritsis honestly because he physically looks nothing like him.

“The real guy was in his mid-40s and a foot shorter than me, but Gus wanted me and when I spoke with him about it, the script was great and the story was insane,” says Skarsgård, 35. “I used the real Tony as a spirit guide for the performance and I had so much fun on it.”

For the physical transformation, a wig and moustache helped. Skarsgård felt like Kiritsis was a guy who carried a lot on his shoulders, so he also played him as tense and rigid, and a little hunched over — “from carrying all of that weight.”

The actor also dug into the footage and recordings of Kiritsis available at the time for inspiration, noting that Austin Kolodney’s script included links to the situations he was recreating. Skarsgård also read Richard Hall’s memoir about the kidnapping and watched a documentary on the subject.

Skarsgård initially got so into the role that his performance felt too close to reality. Eventually, Van Sant convinced him to take a more character-driven approach.

“He told me to stop trying to do an impersonation of the real guy,” Skarsgård says. “So I let go and drew on his speech patterns and rage. The real guy had a tendency to get so angry, and then apologize right afterwards. He was so angry, but also kind of funny. There was something endearing about it. At one point I had 17 pages of dialogue, of ranting, in one day.”

In real life, Kiritsis was upset over a $130,000 mortgage he took out with Meridian. He accused the company of sabotaging him once it realized the property was worth more. So he took Hall, played in the film by Dacre Montgomery (Stranger Things), hostage and forced him to walk through the streets until he commandeered a police car and forced Hall to drive to his apartment. He then demanded an apology, $5 million and a promise of no prosecution in exchange for Hall’s safe release.

The film follows those tense events, which means Skarsgård and Montgomery spent a lot of time together on set in Louisville, Kentucky, which stands in for Indianapolis.

Skarsgård says it was his co-star’s idea to lay out blueprints for the dead man’s wire in a pivotal opening scene, which set the tone for the film. They shot it on one of the first days of the 19-day shoot, with two handheld cameras. Van Sant gave them the freedom to improvise and allow moments to happen.

“Dacre and I are both high-energy, opinionated actors and we come with a lot of ideas,” Skarsgård says. “I sometimes describe Gus as this Buddhist, Zen-like energy in general, but also with his approach to filmmaking. He kind of watches and observes, and let me and Dacre yell out ideas until we ran out of steam. Then he gently shaped it in a way, while also letting the film shape itself.”

Skarsgård says there were plenty of spontaneous moments, including in a telephone call scene between him, Montgomery and Al Pacino, who plays Richard Hall’s father, M.L. Hall. The scene wasn’t in the original script, and came at Pacino’s suggestion. 

Skarsgård applauds Van Sant for allowing Dead Man’s Wire to become what it is, rather than forcing a vision on it. 

“Whenever moments like that happened we just worked off them, and a lot of the funny lines or off-beat moments are improv,” he adds. “They just happened when we were shooting in character and came up spontaneously. It’s lovely when that happens and when you can access it, because you can surprise yourself and find these little gems that you could never really plan for.”

He likens the concept of Dead Man’s Wire to one of his favorite ‘70s films, Mikey and Nicky, in which two long-time friends spend the night running from a mob boss.  

“The whole movie is improv between Peter Falk and John Cassavetes,” he says.

Bill Skarsgård on the Challenges of Dead Man's Wire

One of the challenges the Dead Man’s Wire team faced early on was the design of the titular contraption. Initially the wire was softer, so that it would be more comfortable around Montgomery’s neck. But the device kept falling off in the middle of scenes, so the film had to switch to something stiffer.

“A lot of the scenes are so long that you just don’t ever want to interrupt them,” Skarsgård explains. “And when you do interrupt them, you want to reset and do the whole thing again.”

The film is a tense 105-minute character study of an event that presaged the modern 24-hour news cycle. It takes place during a time of political unrest, economic anxiety and media disillusionment. So there are plenty of current-day parallels. 

“To me it felt very current, more current now than if we made the movie 10 years ago,” Skarsgård says. “There’s also this feeling of the little guy getting oppressed by a system and not having a fighting chance. Today, interest rates and skyrocketing costs of living are out of control when we have more billionaires than ever. There’s a lot of anger and it can be directed in any way.”

Dead Man’s Wire also touches on the idea of fame and getting your voice heard, particularly in a world that pre-dates social media. To spread his message at the time, Kiritsis made phone calls to Indianapolis radio star Fred Heckman. In the film, he’s been replaced by Fred Temple, who is played by Colman Domingo. Kiritsis’ phone interviews allowed him to tell his side of the story and turned the incident into a national event. At one point, Kiritsis gave a conference in front of live broadcasters that even interrupted an ABC feed of John Wayne presenting an award.

“I’m sure this story had an effect on the media landscape in some regard,” Skarsgård says. “If you look at the real footage of the press conference, you can see how excited Tony is that this show is all about him and for him. Here’s a guy who never had a voice, has had a tough life, has worked hard his entire life and never gotten a break from it. He feels betrayed and chewed up by the system. This is the moment for him to get that break and climb out of his social class.”

Skarsgård by no means endorses the actions Kiritsis took, but he certainly understands the rage the man must have felt. 

He believes audiences will also connect with it — which differentiates the role from some of the monsters he’s played in the past.

“I definitely don’t consider Tony a monster; he’s very human to me,” Skarsgård says. “I tend to try and make the monsters I play a bit human as well, or find something I can anchor them in so they’re not a one-dimensional villain. But when you’re playing someone like Tony, you feel some sort of affection for them.”

He adds that Kiritsis is a sad character who was a victim of his own circumstances, and who on top of that probably had mental health issues. 

“I spoke with Gus a lot about it, and Tony was absolutely no monster. And I hope when people see this movie, they don’t consider him that.”

Dead Man’s Wire launches a busy year for Skarsgård. Aside from just returning as Pennywise for HBO’s IT: Welcome to Derry, he stars in 2026’s The Death of Robin Hood alongside Hugh Jackman and Jodie Comer, Emperor with Sophie Cookson and Adrien Brody, and Peter Berg’s The Mosquito Bowl, based on the Buzz Bissinger book about a historic football game.   

Luckily, Skarsgård is feeling energized. 

“I came out of this film with more energy than I had going into it,” Skarsgård says. “Having to stay sharp and learn those lines and having fun on a difficult shoot feeds my energy. I wrapped Dead Man’s Wire excited and inspired and creatively fulfilled.”

Dead Man’s Wire arrives in theaters Friday from Row K Entertainment.

Main image: Bill Skarsgård as Tony Kiritsis and Dacre Montgomery as Richard Hall in Dead Man’s Wire. Row K Entertainment.

The Age of Disclosure director Dan Farah doesn't just contend that aliens are real. His film makes a fascinating case that the U.S. government has been covering them up for eight decades, in hopes of reverse-engineering their technology for the betterment of humanity — or at least the U.S. government.

Raise a theory about what might have really happened outside Roswell, New Mexico, in 1947, and Farah is happy to tell you.

"A couple of the intelligence officials I interviewed went on the record talking about the details of the crash that happened at Roswell, and how the technology — the recovered elements of the craft and the non-human bodies that were found at the crash site — were brought to Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Ohio, where at the time, the Army Air Corps had their their best reverse engineers," says Farah, whose film has broken Prime Video records and is taken seriously enough in political circles to have screened last month for members of Congress.

Dan Farah has a calm, unflappable affect, perhaps because he is well aware of the skepticism that comes with any serious investigation of UAPs — aka Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena, and previously best known as UFOs.

He says he approached The Age of Disclosure as cautiously as possible, and makes a point, in interviews, of relying on what his interview subjects have told him, rather than sharing his own theories. You can watch our full interview with him here or above.

"I set off to make a serious, sober, credible documentary and stay away from sensationalism. I didn't want to do anything that was sensational," he says. "I've consumed every documentary, I've read every book on this topic. But I always wished that someone would make a very serious, credible documentary about this that only interviewed people who have direct knowledge of it, as a result of working for the US government."

Farah became interested in the idea of non-intelligent extraterrestrial life when he was growing up on Steven Spielberg films like Close Encounters of the Third Kind and E.T. and watching TV shows like The X Files. He eventually became a film producer, and got to work with Spielberg on 2018's Ready Player One. While watching the master work, he began to think about someday directing his own film. And he remembered his idea about making a serious UAP documentary.

"I came to conclusion that if I was ever going to direct something like this, it should be this documentary that I wish existed, and I would go try to create the documentary that I personally wanted to watch," he says. The mission for me was to bring about the most credible, serious, non-sensational doc, that that only interviewed very credible people who have knowledge as a result of working for the U.S. government."

The Age of Disclosure isn't your typical basic-cable UFO doc with cheesy re-enactments and silhouetted talking heads speaking in scrambled voices. It includes 34 on-the-record interview with clearly identifiable current and former government officials including high-ranking members of the military and intelligence communities, and several elected officials.

The most recognizable is arguably Marco Rubio, the Republican Florida senator who was the vice chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee when Farah interviewed him. He was subsequently chosen as Secretary of State and acting National Security Advisor for the second Trump Administration.

In the doc, he speaks bluntly about the need to understand UAP technology before the U.S.'s rivals do, as a matter of national security: "If their approach to it is driven by science and a desire to match what they think is ours, we'll wake up one day and realize, 'I don't know how they got there, but they got there ahead of us, and now we're screwed,'" Rubio says in the film.

The Age of Disclosure also includes interviews with a bipartisan list of lawmakers, among them Democratic Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand of New York, Democratic Rep. André Carson of Indiana, and Republican Sen. Mike Rounds of South Dakota, all of whom call for greater transparency around UAPs. 

The White House and State Department did not immediately respond to requests for comment on The Age of Disclosure.

The Age of Disclosure and the 'Tic Tac' UAP

Among the mysteries the U.S. needs to understand, Farah contends, is the one surrounding the so-called "Tic Tac" UFO seen from the U.S.S. Nimitz off the coast of San Diego on November 14, 2004.

The film features a retired U.S. Navy fighter pilot, Cmdr. David Fravor, who says he was among those on board the Nimitz, a nuclear aircraft carrier, on strange day.

"I was the most senior person in the squadron flying. I had launched off Nimitz to do an air defense exercise off the coast of San Diego, California, and I ended up chasing a UAP known as the Tic Tac UAP. It was about 40 feet long, and just sitting there in space. You could kind of see it start to accelerate, and as it gets in front of us, it's gone. This thing was doing 32,000 miles an hour. So obviously that technology is not [from] the United States."

Similar accounts have come out before, including a 2017 New York Times report that quoted Fravor, and this PBS NewsHour interview with Navy Lt. Cmdr. Alex Dietrich, who is also featured in The Age of Disclosure.

"We describe it as looking like a Tic Tac," Dietrich told PBS. "It looks like the little breath mint in larger scale, but white, oblong, no apparent flight control surfaces, no apparent visible means of propulsion. And it was maneuvering in a way that we didn't recognize, that we couldn't classify, we couldn't identify."

A 2021 report from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence detailed 18 incidents in which "observers reported unusual UAP movement patterns or flight characteristics."

"Some UAP appeared to remain stationary in winds aloft, move against the wind, maneuver abruptly, or move at considerable speed, without discernable means of propulsion," the report says.

It concluded that "UAP clearly pose a safety of flight issue and may pose a challenge to U.S. national security."

The Age of Disclosure also features an interview with retired Air Force Col. James Cobb, a former vice director of operations for NORAD, the North American Aerospace Defense Command, who recounts an incident in which multiple pilots tried unsuccessfully to intercept a mysterious craft: "We were unable to maintain air sovereignty over North America," he says.

The film suggests that UAPs are monitoring our nuclear capabilities. Farah is ambivalent about where their origin may be: His interview subjects examine the possibility that they come from outer space, that they reside deep in the ocean, or that they may be from another dimensional.

"They talk about the possibility of them being extraterrestrial, and they talk about the possibility of being interdimensional. They talk about the possibility of them having been here all along with us, and of them being from here. A number of intelligence officials also make the point of saying it could be all of the above," Farah says.

Why Are There No Clear Photographs of UFOs?

One of the main reasons so many people are so skeptical of UFOs or UAPs is that no one has taken a clear photo of one. At a time when everyone has a phone in their pocket, you would think someone would manage to get a clear shot of an alien spacecraft.

But The Age of Disclosure has an explanation for why that isn't so.

Deep in the film, astrophysicist Eric Davis and electrical engineer and parapsychologist Harold Puthoff lay out the case that UAPs may operate within "warp bubbles," powered by intense amounts of energy." Davis theorizes that there would be "a different property of space time inside the bubble than on the outside of the bubble," which could explain some of the unusual movements of UAPs.

"It'd be like riding space time in the same way that a surfer would ride a wave in the ocean," Puthoff says. "Time is moving differently for people inside the bubble versus people outside the bubble. Whoever's inside the craft would feel like they're just cruising along. They wouldn't be feeling the effects of what looks like speeds and accelerations that would turn a human being into pudding. This one breakthrough can be the key to interstellar travel."

He adds: "We'd also have low observability, because the bubble acts as a barrier between two space time environments. ... This is why radar would have difficulty tracking a craft, because the signal from the radar would be distorted by the energy field."

The Age of Disclosure is now available on Prime Video.

Main image: Video of the 2004 U.S.S. Nimitz "Tic Tac" incident, released by the Defense Department's Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program.

The Age of Disclosure director Dan Farah says he could feel Marco Rubio 's intensity as the current Secretary of State, who was a senator at the time, told him the dangers posed by UAPs.

Rubio was then the vice chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, and was one of many politicians on both sides of the aisle who Farah interviewed about UAPs — Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena — which were once better known as UFOs.

"I'm sitting three feet away from him doing the interview, and I felt it — I felt how unbelievably seriously concerned he was," says Farah.

The film contends that the U.S. has had extraterrestrial technology in its possession since at least the 1947 Roswell incident, and that rivals like Russia and China possess such technology as well. Farah interviewed high-ranking officials who contend that the U.S. and its enemies are in a secret race to reverse-engineer the technology, with the fate of humanity hanging in the balance.

In the film, Rubio discusses, on-camera, the possibility that one of the U.S.'s rivals will crack UAP technology before the United States does.

"If their approach to it is driven by science and a desire to match what they think is ours, we'll wake up one day and realize, 'I don't know how they got there, but they got there ahead of us, and now we're screwed,'" Rubio says.

The film, which has broken Prime Video records, features Farah's interviews with pilots, members of the military and intelligence communities, and prominent lawmakers on both sides of the aisle about the mysteries surrounding UAPs. It has been viewed by members of Congress, and Farah believes President Trump is aware of it, as well.

"I think that the film sets the stage for a sitting president to comfortably step to the microphone and tell the world we're not alone in the universe — which, in my opinion, would be the biggest moment in the history of humanity, and hands down, the biggest moment a leader could ever have," Farah says. (You can watch our full interview here or above.)

The White House did not respond to a request for comment.

The film has gotten as much attention as it has because of Farah's understated approach — it consists mostly of interviews, eschewing cheesy re-enactments or any of the other tools of basic-cable UFO docs. The film makes the case that the effort to conceal UAPs has historically included attempts to dismiss and discredit anyone who takes UAPs seriously.

"I interviewed 34 very high-level military, government and intelligence officials who collectively break their silence to reveal that there's been an 80-year cover-up of the existence of non-human, intelligent life. And on top of that, they reveal that elements of the U.S. government are deeply involved in a secret, high stakes Cold War race with adversarial nations like China and Russia to reverse engineer technology of non-human origin. And as extraordinary as all that sounds, the people I interviewed are incredibly credible," he tells MovieMaker.

"I set off to make a serious, sober, credible documentary and stay away from sensationalism," he adds.

Democrats and Republicans Agree on UAPs, Says Age of Disclosure Director Dan Farah

Farah notes that Democrats and Republicans don't tend to agree on anything, but that many are united in a belief that we need more transparency about what the government knows about UAPs.

Besides Rubio, the film also features interviews with Democratic Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand of New York, Democratic Rep. André Carson of Indiana, and Republican Sen. Mike Rounds of South Dakota, all of whom call for greater transparency around UAPs. And the film features archival footage of U.S. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez calling for more openness.

At one point in The Age of Disclosure, Rubio compares the possibility of UAP technology being reverse-engineered to the surprises of Pearl Harbor and the 9/11 attacks.

"Some of the biggest strategic blunders in human history — the foundation of those blunders were a lack of imagination, the belief that an adversary or whoever could not do something because it had never been done before," Rubio says. "The U.S. thought it was safe for those ships in Pearl Harbor because we didn't think that the Japanese could get there, much less have torpedoes that could... hit these ships, until they did.

"We never thought in our wildest dreams that terrorists would strike us in the homeland by training for a year to become pilots and then hijacking commercial aircraft and crashing them into buildings, and they did. The thing that always keeps me up at night — something in the human psyche that says I don't have time or energy to sort of prepare for the unforeseen or what I've never seen done before — and that leads to strategic surprise, and sometimes strategic surprises that change the course of human history."

Rubio left the Senate to join the second Trump Administration as Secretary of State, and was subsequently named acting National Security Advisor. Farah believes he became "extremely informed" about UAPs while vice chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee.

"If you're the vice chairman or the chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, you're essentially aware of every piece of significant classified information," Farah says. "All the intelligence agencies within the intelligence community report to the Senate Intelligence Committee and make them aware of the most important matters at a classified level, right? And there's some stuff that only goes to the vice chairman or the chairman, so Rubio became extremely informed of the reality of this situation, and felt like it was important to make the public aware of the base facts that he was able to lawfully share in the film."

Farah adds: "Now he's in a very different position. Now he's the National Security Advisor, and presumably has been made aware of a lot more information on this, and his words now have a completely different, you know, global impact. And so think it's safe for everyone to assume that he has a different set of circumstances now — he has to be much less open with what he talks about, and and there are bigger repercussions. So we also have to assume that he's much more aware of the current reality of the situation."

The Age of Disclosure is now available on Amazon Prime.

Main image: U.S. Rep André D. Carson, then Sen. Marco Rubio, Sen. Mike Rounds, Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand. Photo by Photo by Vincent Wrenn / Farah Films.

The film follows former nuns, including Gloria Branciani, Mirjim Kovac and Klara (a pseudonym), as they break their silence about alleged abuse by artist and Father Marko Rupnik and the institution that protected him. Branciani, who appeared during the world premiere this past fall at the Toronto International Film Festival, received a four-minute standing ovation following the screening. 

Luciano knew she wanted to make this film after reading a story by former Women Church World magazine editor Lucetta Scaraffia about clergy abuse. The Italian filmmaker spent years in the Catholic school system and had an eye-opening moment about how deeply the culture was shaped by deference to the Vatican. 

“I was struck by the fact that all these women couldn’t have their voice heard in any way,” she tells MovieMaker. “It wasn’t the idea of sexual abuse, but the idea of being trapped in something, and it becomes an island with very, very tall walls of silence.”

She says when she first met Branciani, she felt the purity of this woman who wanted to have a meaningful life and serve God and the poor. Finding her and other former nuns to open up posed a challenge, though, and she reached out as far as Mexico, Spain and the United States. She spent a long time researching and developing the project first, but she knew the effort would be worth it. 

“I knew if I wasn’t able to find someone to share this incredible story in the first person that this would never be addressed,” she says. “This will never be known. And then when I met Gloria, I recognized her urge to not only tell the truth but to find her voice. She had been dismissed for so long.”

How Lorena Luciano Built Trust to Make Nuns vs The Vatican

Earning the trust of these women also took time, and at first, Luciano left her camera off when speaking with subjects and waited until they were comfortable appearing onscreen. She went into this not knowing if that would ever happen, and was ready to adjust in editing.

In the end, Luciano feels she and Branciani met at the right moment in their lives and she was able to use that relationship to craft an intimate and authentic project. The story was always meant to be a feature film rather than a series, despite Luciano winning an Emmy for her 2019 HBO film, It Will be Chaos. At the Emmys, Luciano also met Mariska Hargitay, who agreed this was an important story and boarded as an executive producer.

“Mariska and executive producer Trish Adlesic were both collaborators and they saw our women as real fighters with a lot of light,” Luciano explains. “Instead of sitting in the darkness, we wanted to bring light, not only to the crimes and the abuse they suffered, but for their future selves. As empowered women who finally found their voice.”

Visually, the filmmaker thought carefully about subtext. Nuns vs The Vatican focuses heavily on hands, a detail reminiscent of prayer but meant to remind viewers that, when words are ignored, people rely on their hands to communicate. 

“They are a tool to say there is always a sign of someone trying to say something,” she says. “It’s up to us to look at the details and signals so that we are alert and we do not dismiss an incredible truth that is maybe not said out loud because of the conditions in place.”

Nuns vs The Vatican and the Power of Sisterhood

The biggest strength of Nuns vs The Vatican lies in its themes of sisterhood. It was important to Luciano that her subjects confront old wounds and speak their truths, but it was equally critical to find joy and resilience in shared rituals, like cooking, picking flowers or laughing and being together. 

“Not even abuse could take that away from them,” she says. “That’s true beauty, because it comes from the light they have.”

Getting to that light was a tough process made possible by the nearly all-women executive producing team. Luciano’s husband, Filippo Piscopo, served as producer, and she says he was essential in negotiating access to certain subjects and institutions, although access was more about being in or out of closed circles rather than gender. 

That lack of access yields powerful moments in the film, particularly in one scene when a local reporter tries to engage Rupnik at the airport to get his side of the story. The decision to include that moment in the film was to highlight silence without diminishing the women’s voices.

“Silence becomes a very dangerous instrument or tool in their hands,” Luciano says. “Gloria herself wrote Rupnik to talk to him and he never wrote back or engaged. It was very important to show that the effort was made.”

The result is an intimate story about women coming together, finding their voices, and fighting for agency within a centuries-old institution. It’s as much a story of strength as it is a story of community and resilience. What it doesn’t have is a firm ending, given that Rupnik is currently facing a Vatican tribunal after 20 women alleged sexual, spiritual or psychological abuse dating as far back as the 1990s.   

For now, there is some solace in the fact that Rupnik’s mosaics (art allegedly inspired by this abuse), have been removed from the Vatican and the tribunal is happening. For a while, these women didn’t know if it ever would. 

“Through this feature form I wanted to give each character time to become, in a way, universal for what they represent to the viewer,” says Luciano. “Of course, we’re open to doing something with the developments since we’re expecting developments to come.”

Nuns vs The Vatican is now playing on the film festival circuit after premiering at the Toronto International Film Festival.

Main image: Nuns vs The Vatican, courtesy of TIFF.

And maybe important to the kids who will see it, as well.

“There’s that adage about 10,000 hours of experience,” Fuller says, “and I definitely had that under my belt as a showrunner. You’re the director of directors. I am heavily involved in the design and style of a show. As someone who loves aesthetics and finds great emotion in them, that background gave me the ability to communicate all the things we were trying to achieve.”

Fuller had a simple pitch for Dust Bunny: “A little girl hires a hitman to kill the monster under her bed.” 

The family horror film bursts with as much color as gunfire in a giddy genre mash-up of action and monsters. 

The bunny of the title is a beast under the bed of young Aurora (Sophie Sloan). When it eats her foster parents, she seeks protection from her neighbor, Resident 5B (Mads Mikkelsen). Along their fairy-tale journey, they face off against assassins, the Queen of Killers (played by Sigourney Weaver), and Dust Bunny.

To Aurora, emotions can be as scary as monsters and as thrilling as action. She fights through everything — much like Weaver’s famous heroine in the Alien films, Ripley.

“I talked with Sigourney about how characters like Ripley or Geneviève Bujold in Coma were the women I grew up admiring as symbols of righteousness and goodness,” Fuller says. “As a queer person, they were my heroes. Sigourney said, ‘It’s funny you found power in Ripley; I see her as someone who didn’t have power and had to find it.’ 

“I told her, ‘That’s why she matters so much, not just to queer kids, but to anyone who feels marginalized or powerless. To look at Ellen Ripley and say, ‘If she can survive, I have a chance.’

“That’s such an important message in Aurora: Despite being a little girl, she kept rescuing herself again and again until someone came to help. I hope people who need that encouragement will find something in Aurora they can relate to and be inspired by.”

Bryan Fuller on Reuniting With Mads Mikkelsen for Dust Bunny

The project is a reunion between Fuller and his Hannibal star, Mads Mikkelsen, who plays both an anti-hero and surrogate father. The actor’s stoicism and jumpsuits pop as brightly as the candy-colored action. 

“Mads is a huge Bruce Lee fan, and I wanted him in a yellow tracksuit, fighting with nunchucks,” Fuller says. “It’s pure wish-fulfillment for him. When Mads came in for his fitting, he said, ‘I’ve been trying to figure out who this guy is, who would wear all these clothes, and I finally had to give up and trust you.’”

Dust Bunny was originally planned as an episode of the 2020 reboot of Steven Spielberg’s Amazing Stories, but the series was canceled. The original show debuted in 1985 and was an early production by Amblin Entertainment, the company Spielberg co-founded.

“There was something about the Amblin brand of high-concept, emotional storytelling,” Fuller says, “that gave you an adventure, that gave you young people in danger, that excited me growing up. Seeing those films was appointment viewing, in a way we’ve kind of lost in the cineplex.”

When Fuller was writing Dust Bunny, his playlist included composers Alexandre Desplat, Jerry Goldsmith, and the man behind the Bride of Frankenstein score, Franz Waxman. In the vein of the classic Universal Monsters, Fuller wanted to see the humanity in his big and furry titular creature. 

“I found Universal Monsters so insightful about the human condition and monstrosities,” Fuller says. “Often, we remember the snapshots of those films and usually the monstrous poses, but they are three-dimensional characters with yearning and pain and being marginalized. I find them deeply relatable.”

Fuller is no stranger to writing outsiders concealing their true nature, from Ned talking to the dead in Pushing Daisies or Mikkelsen’s version of Dr. Lecter in Hannibal. 

Fuller and his cinematographer, Nicole Hirsch Whitaker, talked often about the “flavors” of color they brought to the film’s palette. They wanted an aesthetic both savory and sweet. 

“Our movie was mango chicken, not something purely savory like Hannibal or purely sweet like Pushing Daisies,” Fuller says. “We drew inspiration from French cinema. I’m a big fan of French maximalism.” 

Bryan Fuller on POV

Fuller says among the films they discussed were The Umbrellas of Cherbourg, The City of Lost Children and La Femme Nikita, because all had such strong points of view.

To express Aurora’s perspective, Fuller and Whitaker toyed with ARRI lenses, and detuned anamorphics to dial up the anxiety and isolation. 

“We were going through lenses that we pulled, and Nicole removed the matte board at one point,” Fuller said, “and we had this wonderful 3:1 aspect ratio. We looked at the frame and thought, ‘Is there any reason we shouldn’t shoot this in 3:1?’ Because looking at the frame and looking at the model that we had on the other side of the camera, it created a psychological space that captured Aurora’s plight.” 

From Aurora’s perspective, ceilings are tall and hallways are long. Her apartment building is funky and timeless, with its gated elevator, warm colors, and painted snakes along the stairwell. 

The film took advantage of the historic locations in its shooting location, Budapest.

“Location scout Marci Bálint showed us the refurbished Hungarian Treasury Building,” Fuller says. “We debated: Should we choose something more traditional, something that felt specifically European? Not that the apartment building we landed on didn’t feel European in that sort of Beaux-Arts, Art Deco extravagance. Once we settled on that location, it informed the look of this film.”

Outside the apartment, the world is an animal kingdom. Production designer Jeremy Reed packed Aurora’s apartment and other locations, including a shark-infected restaurant in Chinatown, with vibrancy and symbolism. 

“There’s a Chinese zodiac through-line running through many of the characters — snakes, chickens, dragons, pandas,” Fuller explains. The production even considered shooting scenes at a European zoo, but Fuller and his crew felt that the conditions for the animals were inadequate, and that didn’t sit well with them. 

The director, accustomed to television’s hustle and bustle, relished exploring character and story with his department heads like never before. 

“With showrunning, you’re constantly looking ahead,” Fuller says. “As soon as you finish shooting, you’re prepping the next one while still filming, so you rarely live in the moment. Directing let me have a more intimate experience — to live with the actors and department heads, to build meaningful relationships — rather than flying at 30,000 feet as a showrunner, clearing the road ahead.”

Trust was essential to Dust Bunny. Fuller says Sheila Atim, who plays an action-ready social service worker, epitomized the communal atmosphere he seeks. 

“Sheila often stood right next to the stunt performers,” Fuller recalls. “She called out before another take: ‘Bryan, I think the stunt guy’s hurt. I don’t think he can do another one.’ She noticed things I couldn’t see from behind the camera. People looking out for each other, reinforcing that let’s-put-on-a-show energy you hear about in old Judy-and-Mickey stories from classic Hollywood.”

Dust Bunny is now in theaters, from Roadside Attractions.

Main image: Sophie Sloane, Mads Mikkelsen and Sigourney Weaver in Dust Bunny. Roadside Attractions

She played collegiate soccer at Yale University, then represented the Phillipines, where her father was born, in the 2023 FIFA Women’s World Cup. “Maybe It’s Just the Rain” explores the crucial moment for her, her teammates, her family, and the Philippines, which was making its debut in a major FIFA competition. 

“With my national team, I’ve played in stadiums of 60,000 people,” she told MovieMaker. “You feel like an ant under a magnifying glass, and big, simultaneously. You find ways to tune out the noise and remember that you’re still playing the same game within the same four lines that you have your entire life.”

She aspires to think of soccer — which people outside the U.S. more commonly call football — as a live performance. 

“In the same vein as live theatre, you train to perform at a specific event – a tournament, a match – which unravels over a set period, and then it’s over. No-redos, no going back,” she says. “I enjoy translating that approach to filmmaking, where, in a medium where you quite literally can go back and re-do, or go for another take. I always try to preserve that sense of immediacy and presence. 

“With your team, you go through many iterations of planning and preparing, but once the shot is moving, it takes on a life of its own. It’s in motion and it's unstoppable, and acknowledgement of that is sometimes where the best work lives.”

The film just played DOC NYC, one of the most prestigious documentary film festivals, and continues a filmmaking career that also includes her directorial debut, 2022’s “Lahi.” We talked with Bonta about starting as a filmmaker, her political family, and the curious role of french fries in “Maybe It’s Just the Rain.”

'Maybe It's Just the Rain' Director Reina Bonta on Capturing Memories

MovieMaker: Can you talk about how you became a filmmaker and made this film? I understand you were already on a filmmaking path before the World Cup.

Reina Bonta: There was always a camera floating around my house, even from a young age. My father was a neurotic home video dad – so every single birthday party and school play called for his trusty Hi-8 video camera to capture it all. When I had too much energy to be in the house, my parents would send me out into the backyard with a camera to film and burn it off. For that reason, I think I’ve loved the tactility of cameras and making films since I was three years old. 

However, when I went to Yale, I was set on studying Cognitive Science, and on one day working in the neuroscience field. It wasn’t until I took a film class my sophomore year that turned everything on its head, or perhaps, right-side up, and I realized that my goal in neuroscience, of understanding the underpinnings of the human condition, was something I could better accomplish through making films. 

I ended up pivoting entirely, and studying filmmaking at Yale, where I graduated with a B.A. in Film and Media Studies with distinction. And I’ve been balancing my two lifelong loves – filmmaking and playing football – ever since.

MovieMaker: “Maybe It’s Just the Rain” is such an evocative title — why did you choose it?

Reina Bonta: No spoilers here, but voice-over narration is a prominent tool that I use in “Maybe It’s Just the Rain.” A lot of those words have quite a poetic, ethereal feel to them. I wanted a title that both reflected that, as well as spoke to a very common experience in intergenerational AAPI families. 

I’ve had moments with my Lola where she reveals a heavy or traumatic memory to me of her growing up as a child of war in the Philippines, and with a casual swiftness, writes it off almost immediately after: “Oh, but it wasn’t that bad.” “I don’t know why I shared that.” “Maybe it’s just the rain.” 

The film, an unfolding of memories, is an ironic reclaiming of that sentiment, posing a reality where we can share our familial histories with one another, openly and unabashedly.

MovieMaker: I can't imagine the pressure of playing in the World Cup, in front of a stadium and global audience, where everyone cheers every success and scrutinizes every mistake. How do you deal with that pressure? And does it make filmmaking seem less stressful by comparison?

Reina Bonta: With my national team, I’ve played in stadiums of 60,000 people. You feel like an ant under a magnifying glass, and big, simultaneously. You find ways to tune out the noise and remember that you’re still playing the same game within the same four lines that you have your entire life. 

I like to think of playing football as a live performance. In the same vein as live theatre, you train to perform at a specific event – a tournament, a match – which unravels over a set period, and then it’s over. No-redos, no going back. 

I enjoy translating that approach to filmmaking, where, in a medium where you quite literally can go back and re-do, or go for another take. I always try to preserve that sense of immediacy and presence. 

With your team, you go through many iterations of planning and preparing, but once the shot is moving, it takes on a life of its own. It’s in motion and it's unstoppable, and acknowledgement of that is sometimes where the best work lives.

MovieMaker: How did you go about this logistically? Were you the only one filming, for example, during post-game celebrations? Or did you have a crew? Did you have a crew at the games, or were you able to access existing footage, given how extensively covered the games are?

Reina Bonta: In truth, I never had any real intention of making a documentary about my team’s debut at the World Cup. As a filmmaker, and perhaps because I picked up the neurotic home video gene from my dad, I brought a small handycam that I had recently bought at a flea market in Chile when my team was training there for a few weeks, to the World Cup. 

My intention was to capture meaningful moments, but I had assumed they would likely sit on a forgotten hard drive thereafter. When I was flicking through my footage after the tournament had ended, I felt inspired – and suddenly became very awake to how important this moment was for women’s football, for the Philippines, and for our ancestors – and decided to create a short film out of the material. 

The heart of “Maybe It’s Just the Rain” is that very handycam footage, and I worked closely with FIFA to fill in the match footage gaps, as well as threaded in decades-old home archival material, to create a real tapestry of different textures and eras fused together in the short.

MovieMaker: I was struck by all the McDonald's fries at the post-game party — does everyone just like fries? Are the players not able to eat McDonald's during the competition? 

Reina Bonta: There is naturally a lot of physical preparation that goes into playing at the World Cup. It’s the biggest stage that exists in football. And as a professional athlete, you constantly follow a strict training regimen, staying disciplined in a lot of different areas, to stay at the top of your game. But after our World Cup journey ended – and this memory will always be a tender one – we made a team trip to McDonald’s. Who knew loads of warm french fries and salty chicken nuggets would be the thing that consoled us and helped bring us back down to earth. 

In the film, I also find it heartwarming the way that fries are framed as a symbol of girlhood. Yes, we are elite athletes. But we also eat junk food and sing ballads and jump on our beds in our pajamas. 

MovieMaker: Do you ultimately want to stay in the sports documentary space? Obviously this doc is about more than sports.

Reina Bonta: I have a soft spot in my heart for sport documentaries. I’ve spent much of my life within the world of elite athletics, and while I’ve watched countless films about women in sports, I’ve rarely seen ones that are made by female athletes themselves. There’s a gap between experience and observation, and I’ve found purpose in closing that distance. 

As a professional footballer, I’m drawn to stories that reflect the complexity of athletes. I find that athletes are often framed as one-dimensional figures of discipline or triumph, and I’m far more interested in the soft underbelly, in exploring the fourth, fifth, and sixth dimensions of athletes that we rarely get to see. I like to approach sport as a framework, where the “A plot” isn’t necessarily the competition, but rather the athlete and human behind it.

Right now, I’m developing several projects in the sports documentary space. But beyond nonfiction, I’m also working on my first narrative feature film, and all my work is grounded in that philosophy.

MovieMaker: Your dad is the Attorney General of California — a job previously held, of course, by Kamala Harris. Did you ever want to go into law or politics?

Politics have always been a strong presence in my household. Beyond my father serving as California’s Attorney General and my mother in the State Assembly, both of my grandmothers are lifelong activists and respected community elders. I’ve always been inspired by that legacy and excited to explore my own political voice through the powerful lens of film, a passion that’s been echoed and encouraged by my family, which means the world to me.

MovieMaker: As you've gone on your festival journey, have any experiences really stood out? Any moments, for example, when you felt like the audience really got it?

“Maybe It’s Just the Rain” has had an incredible journey on the film festival circuit: nineteen film festivals and counting around the world. Each stop has been inspiring and memorable. At Cannes, where the film was part of the Marché du Film, I had the surreal experience of nearly tripping over Naomi Campbell and stumbling on the red carpet, the kind of humbling, heart-racing moment that reminded me how lucky I was to be there. 

Then there was our screening at the Los Angeles Asian Pacific Film Festival, where my entire family filled the theater and my Lola glowed, and became the star of the night.

Most recently, I’m particularly honored to have “Maybe It’s Just the Rain” included in DOC NYC’s prestigious Short List, recognizing us as a strong contender for the Academy Awards and other awards season honors. It’s a milestone that feels both exhilarating and grounding, as well as a validation of the deeply personal story at the core of the film.

Beyond the festival circuit, the film’s impact campaign has become one of the most meaningful chapters of its life. I’m currently organizing a football clinic in the Philippines for young, under-resourced girls, which is an extension of the film’s spirit and an opportunity to give back to the community that inspired it.

It’s been profoundly gratifying to watch “Maybe It’s Just the Rain” take on a life of its own, and I can only hope it continues to ripple outward. 

“In this film, we didn’t go forward with technology,” Sayeed explains. “We went back to where I felt was a sweet spot in technology. We shot film, and we also set for ourselves very specific parameters.”

His only two references, he says, were cinematographers Sven Nykvist and Gordon Willis — “in very specific periods in their careers.”

Sayeed focused on the decade of Nykvist’s work that included Ingmar Bergman’s The Silence and Persona and ended with Nykvist winning the best cinematography Oscar for the Swedish director’s 1972 Cries and Whispers. And Sayeed focused on Willis’ work from 1977 to 1988, a period that included the Woody Allen comedies Annie Hall, Manhattan and Zelig.

“What Luca wanted to do was put some restraints around the technology that we used, so it only functioned inside of that time. And I feel that was an amazing and incredible exercise for us to do,” Sayeed says. “We only used lighting units from that time, we only used lenses from that time, and film cameras within that timespan as well.”

The result is a very modern drama starring Julia Roberts, Andrew Garfield and Ayo Edebiri that looks and feels analog. 

“I’m not sure the technology is going in an interesting direction,” Sayeed says, “because digital is just an emulation. It’s not an organic process, it’s code. I’m more interested in the organic than I am in code.” 

Malik Hassan Sayeed on Working With Spike Lee and New York City

Sayeed, who was born and raised in New York City, was the cinematographer for Spike Lee’s ’90s films Clockers, Girl 6 and He Got Game. He also shot Hype Williams’ 1998 Belly and videos for music icons including Nas, 2Pac, Jay-Z, Lauryn Hill, and Beyoncé.

He is known for keeping an eye out for cinematic images on location in his endlessly photogenic hometown. But After the Hunt was shot mostly on stages, forcing Sayeed to adapt.

“I’m a New York-based, foundational location cinematographer,” he says. “We do not shoot on the stage. I think I’ve never shot on a stage in New York.” 

But constructed sets offer more control, which Sayeed says is why Guadagnino decided to shoot for five weeks on stages and backlots at Shepperton Studios, near London. 

“I think he was kind of slightly burnt out on the exercise of shooting locations,” Sayeed says.

Environmental control comes at the expense of happy accidents born from natural conditions. Which made Sayeed even more determined to evoke spontaneity. 

“We are basically hunters of that magic. This is what we look for, we find, and search out in physical reality,” he explains. “A light bounces off a window across the street; it’s doing something interesting and coming in this way. We’re constantly looking for that. In this context, you don’t have that, so you have to almost manufacture it.

“We’re trying to manufacture the happy accident,” he continues, “and this is what me and my gaffer are constantly doing with lighting. We’re looking for the thing that the light happens to be doing that it wasn’t intended to do.” 

After the Hunt follows Roberts as a Yale philosophy professor entangled in a campus scandal when a close colleague (Garfield) is accused of sexually assaulting her own pupil (Edebiri). 

Sayeed recalls catching a glimpse of a happy accident while pre-lighting one of the film’s most dramatic scenes, in which Garfield’s character crashes Roberts’ classroom to confront her.

“I saw it as we were moving around — the side of the light was producing the best quality of light,” he explains. “So we took a bunch of the lights that would do that and just used the side of the lights to light the scene, as opposed to directly lighting the scene.”

The classroom scene was one of the few shot on location, using Cambridge University as a stand-in for Yale. The bulk of the production demanded Sayeed work with green and blue screens, requiring frame-by-frame VFX compositing in post-production to seamlessly blend the action in the foreground with the environment in the background, which was shot separately in New Haven, Connecticut.

“Some scenes were shot inside that were supposed to be outside, but we made it look like it was outside,” he says. “It was a lot of that kind of work on this, so it was a different kind of project for me.”

So different, in fact, that Sayeed was uncertain about how it would all come together in the end. 

“I wasn’t sure that we were going to land the plane based on all of that effects work,” he says. But he credits the “phenomenal” post-production team for piloting the film to a very satisfying completion. 

After the Hunt and the Search for Silver Linings

For Sayeed, cinematography is about searching and receiving. He’s constantly looking for a glimmer or a shimmer that will inspire his next move behind the camera — a practice that has prepared him to embrace hardship on and off set.

“I’m a silver-lining hunter,” he says. “I am searching for the silver lining at this point. I’m embracing it. Because this is what we’re constantly looking for and looking to receive. So, if we embrace it, that means we have to embrace the hardship that comes with the silver lining.”

Sayeed recently worked with Guadagnino on the upcoming Artificial, in which Garfield will play Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI and one of the key figures in the artificial intelligence boom.

Despite promises that AI will automate our lives in ways we never imagined, many — including some who work in the field — believe it may also be a source of great human hardship in the coming years. They fear lost jobs and incomes, an increasing wealth gap, and the loss of artistry, as well as the potential environmental threat of data centers sucking up water to cool hardware. 

For all the concerns that the dystopian Terminator 2: Judgement Day and The Matrix may soon look like documentaries, Sayeed believes AI competition will compel humans to make art that only humans can. 

“I feel like it’s an opportunity for humans to not accept mediocrity. We have to be greater. We have to privilege human greatness, because a computer can copy mediocrity, but it can’t really copy human greatness,” he says.

“This is an opportunity for us to privilege that, and put that at the fore, and stop accepting things that are not the greatest that we can do. 

“And to me, that would be a silver lining for us in this moment, that we push it, and we’re forced to push it because of what we think AI is going to do to us, and how it’s going to harm us. I think we’re greater than that. We’re way greater than that at our best.” 

After the Hunt is now in theaters, from Amazon MGM Studios.

But what they all have in common is her empathy for outsiders. 

“All of my films have to do with people who are on the fringes of society,” says DaCosta. “People on the fringes feel as though they don’t have the authority to fully live.”

Hedda, based on Ibsen’s 1891 play Hedda Gabler, stars Tessa Thompson — who also starred in Little Woods and appeared in Marvels— as a woman who feels trapped in her loveless marriage. 

Over an intense night on a centuries-old estate, her desire for control and power leads her to manipulate those around her. The film is a study of the self-sabotage that can occur when one internalizes societal boundaries. 

“Being a minority, I think that is something that we all wrestle with. But even culturally, in terms of class, there are parts of society that we’re told we’re not allowed to access,” says DaCosta. “Or there are goals and dreams for ourselves that we’re sometimes told we shouldn’t achieve. I think if we buy into those things, we do limit ourselves.”

Jumping from genre to genre, and across visual styles, DaCosta rejects limits. For Hedda, she closed herself off from more than a century of stage and screen adaptations, even stepping away from Ibsen’s original text after her first draft to ensure her film would stand on its own.

“I wanted to make sure that with the changes that I made, the movie could live as it was meant to live,” she says. Only then did she “re-invite the original text back into the process,” negotiating a dialogue between her vision and Ibsen’s.

One of her most radical changes was reshaping the film’s central rivalry by turning Hedda’s nemesis, Ejlert Lövborg, into a woman named Eileen, played by Tár actress Nina Hoss.

“I think making Lövborg into a woman shows yet another hard, scary path that Hedda could have taken. She’s smart enough to, but didn’t,” DaCosta explains. “You have another woman who’s choosing a hard path. There are so many paths to freedom that are open to her, but they’re hard and scary. I think having Lövborg be a woman brought that to the fore.”

The process of shedding expectation around a story to rebuild it anew is one of DaCosta’s signature moves. 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple is a sequel to Danny Boyle’s 2002 apocalyptic 28 Days Later, a story of the rage virus and its survivors, and arrives in January. It follows 2007’s 28 Weeks Later, directed by Juan Carlos Fresnadillo, who co-wrote the screenplay, and Boyle’s own sequel, 28 Years Later, which arrived this past summer. Like 28 Years Later, The Bone Temple is written by original 28 Days Later writer Alex Garland. 

DaCosta approached Garland’s script with bold ideas about the aesthetics of her film.

Boyle’s original 28 Days Later was filmed primarily with a consumer-grade digital camcorder, and 28 Years Later was shot on cameras that included an iPhone 15 Max. DaCosta filmed The Bone Temple on the Arri Alexa 35, a top-tier digital cinema camera, eschewing Boyle’s gritty, handheld aesthetic to create a sequel that is visually and philosophically its own.

“Danny Boyle is a one-of-a-kind, brilliant, creative man, and trying to make something in his image is impossible, but also wasn’t interesting to me as a director,” she says. “And I have no curiosity about shooting on cell phones.”

She adds: “The gift of Alex Garland’s Bone Temple script is that no filmmaker would make it the same way.”

Nia DaCosta on Her Hedda Contributors

DaCosta’s interest in the arts was ingrained early by her mother Charmaine DaCosta, who may be best known for her work with the reggae group Worl-A-Girl. Charmaine DaCosta combined artistry and pragmatism, once telling her daughter: “You want to be an artist, I support that. But know you will be poor. Like, you will really struggle for money. But the money will come.” 

DaCosta accepted her mother’s advice as she pursued degrees at NYU and London’s Royal Central School of Speech and Drama. She learned “to keep creating and not ask for permission,” committing not only to her own growth but to pulling her peers up alongside her. 

“Your peers are so important to your growth and development,” she notes. “You hold hands as you come up together.” 

One of those peers is Thompson, a foundational part of DaCosta’s creative world.  

“I love her so much. She’s one of my closest friends. She’s like a sister to me,” DaCosta says. “We both really love what we do. So when we’re not talking about personal things, we’re also helping each other out with our careers. I like to call myself her shadow manager. I’m definitely invested in how she does.”  

She has a similar bond with Hedda  and The Bone Temple cinematographer Sean Bobbitt, who has worked on films including Hunger and Judas and the Black Messiah. Their relationship began when DaCosta was a young production assistant, shuttling him to a lens house in New Jersey. Instead of making small talk, she peppered him with questions about lenses and framing. Her eagerness left an impression.

More than a decade later, she sought him out to shoot The Marvels, valuing not only his experience but his humility.

“He is incredibly honest. He’s clear. He has no ego,” DaCosta says. “He’s so creative and approaches his work from a place of character and drama.”  

Their sets become places of discovery, defined by curiosity. “In every job together, there’s this endless curiosity around how we can shape an image. It doesn’t have to be extreme. It can be something small, but impactful for the story,” DaCosta says.  

Nia DaCosta Wants 'Bad Behavior' in Movies

Her films preserve jagged edges and the messiness of humanity rather than sanitizing or simplifying characters. That approach allows room for strangeness, subversion, and growth.

“I’m so drawn to people who are complicated and weird and left-of-center,” DaCosta says, explaining that the familiar tropes of a “strong” or “elegant” Black woman feel stifling. 

“Those are boring tropes. They’re so static and one-dimensional that they can do more harm than good. So yeah, in my corner of cinema, I want bad behavior.”

She is drawn to horror, she says, in part because of how well it can hold contradictions. 

In her version of Candyman, for example, artist Anthony McCoy (Yahya Abdul-Mateen II) is unwillingly pulled into the Candyman legend when William Burke (Coleman Domingo) seeks to use him as a tool of vengeance against racist violence. 

But DaCosta can also find complexity in a comic-book movie: In The Marvels, Carol Danvers (Brie Larson) wields such immense power that she can’t remain in any one world for long. Her near-limitless strength isolates her, forcing a kind of cosmic solitude.

“I think about characters like that a lot to help me avoid limiting myself,” she says.

Hedda is now in theaters and on Prime Video, from Amazon MGM Studios. 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple arrives in theaters January 16 from Sony Pictures Releasing. 

Main image: Nia DaCosta photo by Meg Young. Background, clockwise from left: Hedda, Prime; The Marvels, Marvel Studios; Candyman; Universal Pictures; 28 Years Later: The Bone Garden, Sony Pictures Releasing.

“I think you should be scared to present stuff because that means that you're doing something original and different,” she tells MovieMaker. “Hopefully we see more things that are different and creative minds can just really go for it.”

The animated hit, which Kang co-directed with Wish Dragon veteran Chris Appelhans, is Netflix’s most popular film in the company’s history, with more than 325 million views. That’s just one of the records it has broken: Its two-day theatrical sing-along release this past August gave Netflix their first top box office position ever, breakout single “Golden” spent weeks atop the Billboard charts. 

The musical action comedy from Netflix and Sony Animation follows the K-pop group Huntr/x, which consists of Rumi, Mira, and Zoey, who moonlight as demon hunters. The film balances anime-influenced art with unforgettable songs and silly jokes, like Mira and Zoey chanting "couch couch couch" in anticipation of some much-needed rest post-tour. It’s all held together by the girls’ friendship, even through hard times.

“There was always that desire to show a different kind of female superhero that's silly and not afraid to look stupid,” Kang says.

Kang, who has worked as a storyboard artist on Over the Hedge and Shrek Forever After, and as head of story on The Lego Ninjago Movie, was inspired by Korean mythology and a long-braided character named Rumi. When she brought the idea to Sony Pictures Animation, producer Aron Warner paired her with director Appelhans, who immediately saw the potential. They co-wrote the screenplay with Danya Jiminez and Hannah McMechan. 

We spoke with Kang and Appelhan about meeting for the first time, seamless voices, and being “fueled by fear.”  

Maggie Kang and Chris Appelhans on Their KPop Demon Hunters Collaboration

Moviemaker: Maggie, since this all started with your character Rumi, how did you land on the idea of KPop Demon Hunters?

Maggie Kang: There was always that desire to show a different kind of female superhero that's silly and not afraid to look stupid and likes to eat and was just always trying to be funny. That's kind of who I am. I just wanted to see that female character and that was the tone I wanted for all the girls. 

With Rumi, I think specifically we really loved the idea of our movie about demons, inner demons, and her inner demon. Being a literal demon felt like a fun way to play the main character and have her be this kind of burdened person, but also finding silliness in her so that she's not a total drag, because that could be really annoying for a main character. That "couch, couch, couch" scene served a lot of purposes, but one of the things was like, “Okay, let's see. We may be a little silly before we get to know what her huge emotional turmoil is.” 

Moviemaker: Chris, how did you get on board and what did the co-director partnership look like between you and Maggie? 

Chris Appelhans: I came right off of finishing Wish Dragon and was really tired. I was like, “Yeah, I'm going to take a nice long break and not do anything.” And then Aron Warner, who originally brought this project to Sony with Maggie, was like, “Oh, you should hear about this thing. It's right up your alley.” Then I met Maggie. I was playing it cool on the surface, but within 10 minutes I'm like, “Okay, this idea is amazing — this person has good taste.” 

On a personal level, I've been trying to figure out a good excuse to make a movie about music that wasn't a conventional musical, and I just never had an idea that clicked. So this was an awesome opportunity to see what was possible by taking the pop music form and trying to tell stories with it without losing the cool part, which is what happens so often. 

It was a great mashup of stuff that we both liked and I felt like the partnership was so easy. We pretty much saw the same movie in our heads. I think there are things that you want in a partnership that is a shared vision. But also there's stuff that Maggie could bring to the girls' relationships, to the comedy, to the range that I could never do. 

Maggie Kang: I think it got to a point where one of us would be away and we'd be confident enough knowing that the other person wanted the same thing. We would make decisions for both of us. 

Chris Appelhans: Even the writing, we would pass the Final Draft files back and forth and once somebody does a pass. It always felt like that whatever was missing from the scene, the other person would have an angle on. 

Moviemaker: When the film was first announced, it was part of Sony Animation's more mature slate. Was there an earlier juncture where it was darker before it became more family oriented?

Maggie Kang: Yeah, it was, and this was even before Chris came on. It was never really my want to make a movie that was very dark and very adult, I guess kind of like Blue Eye Samurai. That's such a cool show. But me, I'm always going to be stupid, funny, and I'm sure that there is a movie that does both of that, but it wasn't really the thing that I wanted to do. So I think where we landed tonally is exactly the movie that I wanted to make really from the very beginning.

Moviemaker: Tell me about finding the perfect assembling of the singers and the voice talent corresponding to the girls. You have two voices for one character and everyone’s just seamless.

Maggie Kang: [Laughs] It wasn’t, like, planned.

Chris Appelhans: What helped is we took a long time to cast all the parts, voice and singing. As in animation, we worked so hard on writing the characters and temping their voices, and screening the movie three or four times. By the time we were casting voices, we really knew who these girls were inside and out. We could not only pick the right actor or singer, but communicate very clearly about what's happening inside of Rumi, Mira and Zoey. So that when Rei Ami or Audrey Nuna are performing the lyrics, they're as tuned in to who this person is and what their desires and insecurities are as Ji-young Yoo or May Hong would be doing the voices. 

Maggie Kang: I think even when we were writing the music, we knew who the characters were. And so even in their verse or the lyrics that they're singing, we wanted to infuse that personality in them. When it came time to cast the singers, we knew the type of vibe we needed for each of the characters. When we met them, it was like, “Oh my gosh, you are the characters!” We feel that way about the voice cast, but also about the vocal cast. It’s so crazy. 

Moviemaker: I've seen so many different artists saying, “I have not been able to touch my pen for months, and this movie brought it back.” How does it feel to know that? 

Maggie Kang: It's amazing that it sparked creativity in other artists. It's a hard time for original IP, and I think everybody wants that and obviously the audience does, too. So for the artists specifically, I would say it was hard making this movie.

It's pretty terrifying to put a new thing out there — even something like corn eyes or how stupid the girls are and how they eat on the plane. You're like, “We don't know if people are going to like this. It could be too much.” But we didn't want to dumb it or water it down. We wanted to present it the way that we wanted to do it. 

That’s scary at times. But I hope that we can see more projects and more movies that are just kind of fueled by fear, because that is true passion. I think you should be scared to present stuff because that means that you're doing something original and different. Hopefully we see more things that are different and creative minds can just really go for it.

Chris Appelhans: I think if you said we're going to make an animated movie about shame, I don't think that's like a real catchy pitch. We tried really hard to think about what that meant. It is a very personal story, even if it doesn't necessarily seem like it on the surface, if you see the title. And I think, to what Maggie said, original IP is personal. Inherently because somebody has to want it to exist so bad that they bring it into the world. 

I think hopefully this will crack the door for more and also give people that conviction to go out there and put all of themselves into a piece of work.

KPop Demon Hunters is now streaming on Netflix.

Main image: KPop Demon Hunters. Netflix.

The film, playing at the Micheaux Film Festival this weekend, depicts a mother who breaks into her ex's house to retrieve her son. Smith, out of love for both of his parents, refuses to point fingers or say which parent is right or wrong — both love their child, and do what they think is best. The film escalates with an unrelenting tension that keeps audiences deeply invested in the fates of the father, mother and son.

"The easy way to tell this story would have been to create heroes and villains: my dad the villain, my mom the hero. And there was indeed a draft of the script where that was the case, but that portrayal was not only uninteresting, it lacked nuance, complexity and truth," Smith tells MovieMaker.

"My goal with the story was never to simplify the characters or paint them as black and white, but it was always to create characters that were flawed, desperate and unwavering in their pursuit of what they considered  to be 'the right thing.'"

In addition to being a filmmaker known for unflinching storytelling, Smith is a film professor at the University of Texas at Austin, where he was also the inaugural Associate Dean for Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion in the Moody College of Communication. His films, which include the short "Katrina's Son," the feature Wolf and the documentary Juneteenth: Faith & Freedom, have played and won awards at more than 150 film festivals.

We talked with Ya'Ke Smith about gray areas, teaching the next genration of filmmakers, and the aspects of a film that can never be compromised.

Ya'Ke Smith on 'The Ohio, Texas Remix'

MovieMaker: How did you become a filmmaker?

Ya'Ke Smith: I was an artist before I was anything else. I sang in the choir. Played in the band. Acted in church and local plays. And watched tons of movies. The connective tissue between all of these mediums was my love for telling stories and my desire to use those stories to impact people in meaningful and long-lasting ways.

Although all of these artistic forms could arrest people and expand their world views in unique and interesting ways, film for me felt like the singular way to reach the most people because more people participate in the communal act of watching cinema than any other creative medium. To that end, I saw Boyz N The Hood when I was 11 years old and it totally blew my mind. It was a revelation — seeing a story about a community and individuals I recognized portrayed with such humanity, empathy, and depth.

Tre, Ricky and Doughboy were my friends, cousins and God brothers. John Singleton saw them in ways that other filmmakers hadn't. That was the moment I knew I would be a filmmaker, and was also the moment I set out to learn all I could about the craft. I made my first film when I was 15 and have been making films ever since.  

MovieMaker: Can you talk about the true story behind "The Ohio, Texas Remix"?

Ya'Ke Smith: The first memory I have of my dad is him coming to Texas to pick my sister and I up for what was to be a summer, but turned into two years. What I didn’t realize at the time — I was seven or eight — was that my parents were still married and that my mom and dad were in the middle of a bitter custody battle.
Because they were still married they both had parental rights, so no attorney would take my mom's case or help her fight to get us back.

One attorney in particular had some off the record advice for her: Drive to Ohio, kidnap your children, bring them back to Texas. And once she did that, he could begin divorce proceedings. Although my mom didn’t have to do it (we eventually ended up being sent back) this story is a reinterpretation of that period in my life.

The story always felt like it was torn from the headlines, and so I wanted to exhume the true story, but sprinkle in genre elements to really make the experience resonate with audiences. It’s tragic, funny, suspenseful and ultimately a love letter to both of my parents. 

MovieMaker: You do a beautiful job of making everyone in the film sympathetic — our allegiances shift a few times, but we ultimately end up wishing everyone could find a way through this painful situation. How did you make sure everyone’s perspective was reflected and respected?

Ya'ke Smith: As a child you’re only privy to the side of the story that you get from your parents, but as you become an adult yourself, your realize that truth is relative, that your parents aren’t perfect and that even at their worst times they did the best they knew how to do with what they had at any given season of their life.

Neither of my parents were “right” in this situation, and there’s a part of me deep down inside that feels like neither of them were “wrong.” My goal was to color between the lines and create not black and white characters, but characters that existed in the gray areas, because that’s where most of us exist; and most of the time, that’s where the truth exists. This gray, murky, messed up place is where the heart of human existence lies and it’s in this place that we must come to terms with whatever decisions we make. It was with this ethos that I rendered my characters. 

MovieMaker: How did you cast your excellent actors?

Ya'Ke Smith: I always tell my students that audiences can forgive many things, but bad acting and heartless storytelling are two of the things that they can’t contend with. When thinking about the casting for this film, I knew that I needed performers who could color between the lines and find the humanity in their characters without judgement or surface level analysis.

I’d directed both Veronika Bozeman, who plays Cheryl, and Sean Nelson, who plays Dante, on television shows before, and really enjoyed the experience of working with both of them. I called them up to see if they’d be willing to come to Texas for a few days and work on the film, and they both graciously agreed. 

The other actors are from Texas, some of whom I’d worked with before — like my wife, Mikala Gibson, who played the gun-toting best friend — while others were cast from local talent agencies and backstage. Each cast member brought something unique to the project, and the film wouldn’t be the same without their valuable contributions. 

MovieMaker: You also do a really good job of ratcheting up the tension. How did you and your team keep making this more and more intense?

Ya'Ke Smith: When I pitched the film to my creative collaborators, I said it was the love child of Set It Off and Kramer vs Kramer, two films that I appreciate for very different reasons. Although those two movies  couldn’t be more different, the thread that I kept pulling at when thinking through how I wanted to render the story of "The Ohio, Texas Remix" both visually and thematically, was the tension of desire versus reality.

In Set It Off, all the characters are looking for a better life, but their reality (and greed at times) keeps pulling them back into a world they so desperately want to escape. In Kramer vs Kramer, both parents selfishly want full custody of their son, but after battling it out in court, they realize that they may need to relinquish custody in order for their son to have a stable and uncomplicated life.

By harnessing the tension of both films and using them as my guiding light, I knew I had to find a way to marry the heist/thriller elements of Set It Off, and remix them in the family drama world of Kramer vs Kramer. In order to pull that off, my team and I talked a lot about how to keep the stakes constantly rising, yet grounded in reality.

One thing we decided is that the film’s visual language would not only put us in the emotional headspace of the main character, but that we would also use the camera as a tool of disorientation. We also discussed at length how critical it was that all the elements — visual and aural — kept the audience on the edge of their seats throughout the film, and how the pacing of the film should quite literally make us question everything we thought was true just moments before.

I have to give a lot of credit to the crew — mostly students by the way — for taking my vision and pushing it even further. 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8cHCoyJXwxA

MovieMaker: What’s the biggest obstacle you had to overcome or problem you had to solve to make this film?

Ya'Ke Smith: Time and budget constraints were a major challenge for us. We filmed the project in just 2.5 days, and our budget was only half of what we really needed to make it happen. This called for some inventive problem-solving, long hours, and a crew that was incredibly dedicated and hardworking. 

One story that highlights this is when I received a call on the second day of filming informing me that the young man responsible for watching over our location had to leave due to a family emergency. With $100,000 worth of equipment in the house, leaving it unsupervised wasn’t an option. Since I was across town handling other shoot-related issues, I called my producer, who was running on just a few hours of sleep, and asked him to rush over. He stepped up without hesitation. 

Then there was the situation with our craft services person, who had her car broken into and needed to leave to deal with it. While she was gone, the rest of us jumped in to make sure everyone had what they needed to keep going. Overnight shoots can be grueling, so we made sure to keep the caffeine flowing. Surprisingly, she returned because she really valued the camaraderie we had built on set.

Of course, there were some disagreements along the way, but we worked through those and truly came together as a team to bring the project to life. 

MovieMaker: Finally, you teach film at UT Austin — can you talk about how that’s helped you as a filmmaker? (I know this could be a book, apologies.) Has it been a drawback at all in terms of the time commitment of teaching?

Ya'Ke Smith: Teaching is both one of the most rewarding and demanding professions you can pursue. It not only consumes a significant amount of your time, but also requires immense energy to nurture the talents of emerging artists. But that challenge is also what makes it so fulfilling.

As I assist someone in figuring out their story problems, I often end up discovering things about my own work, too. Some of my students are incredibly sharp and have a natural talent for understanding story structure. When I share film cuts in class, their feedback often helps me break through creative blocks. The reciprocal nature of teaching in a creative field is like no other, because creativity is like an electrical current. As a professor I turn on the light, which in turn ignites the creative life force of my students.

Also, as I mentioned earlier, my students play an integral part in my creative work because they fill a lot of the crew roles in my films. So as challenging as it might be, being a professor is an occupation that has allowed me to create a steady catalogue of film work. 

"The Ohio, Texas Remix" plays Saturday at the Micheaux Film Festival in Los Angeles.

Main image: "The Ohio, Texas Remix." Courtesy of Ya'Ke Smith.

Albuquerque and Santa Fe have been known in recent years for drawing big investments from heavy-hitters like Netflix and NBCUniversal. But Arndt represents a scrappy, inventive DIY scene — he made "Breakups Suck" as part of his graduate project from the University of New Mexico.

"Breakups Suck" played the Santa Fe International Film Festival Saturday and plays again Tuesday. It follows a young man named Luca (Jack McLaughlin) who wants to breakup with his girlfriend, Ruby (Willow Glenn.) The problem is, she's a vampire, and tends to think in forever terms.

We talked with Arndt about the influences for his entertaining short, starting a film career in Albuquerque, and seeing every Godzilla movie.

Ben Arndt on Making 'Breakups Suck'

MovieMaker: The look of this is so cool and unique — you nod to Nosferatu, but the low-fi black and white also reminds me of Clerks. The mix of scary and slacker is really disorienting and fun, because you never know where the movie will go. How did you land on the look of the film?

Ben Arndt: The aesthetic of the film came from a couple of different places, one of them being A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night. The 2014 Iranian black-and-white vampire film was heavily influential on both the visuals of this film, and its approach to depicting vampires as mythological beings in urban and contemporary settings.

I also have a background in primarily black and white films — my previous work "The Box at the End of the World" was in black and white as well. It was shot by the same cinematographer as "Breakups Suck," Chance Holmes-Snowden. Something about black and white has always stuck with me as a filmmaker, and I find the lack of color often forces me to be more mindful of my framing and blocking. It also helps that Chance is incredibly talented at utilizing minimalist lighting to get amazing contrasting shots.

MovieMaker: I'm a sucker, no pun intended, for a splash of color in the midst of black and white. You very effectively include a single blood red envelope. How did you achieve that effect in 2025? I'm guessing differently than Spielberg did in Schindler's List?

Ben Arndt: The red coloring effect is thanks to my incredibly talented colleague Noah Tucker, who is a local colorist who specializes in post production. He used Davinci Resolve, which can actually track the motion of certain objects, and using a color wheel, can isolate certain shades. This process took a lot of trial and error, and often involved us framing out certain parts by hand. It was a labor of love for sure! I have a hunch it was likely a different process from Spielberg's.

MovieMaker: How do you like the Albuquerque film scene, and living in ABQ in general? Did you grow up with Breaking Bad, and did it influence your desire to work in film? 

Ben Arndt: I am a recent graduate from the University of New Mexico, and have been an ABQ local my whole life. While Albuquerque isn't always pretty on the outside, there is something about its people and culture that truly makes it stand out. While there is a large studio industry presence in this city, I'd argue there is an even larger indie filmmaker scene here.

So many people have untapped creative potential and energy who have a burning desire to create and express themselves. It results in several pockets of filmmakers who come together and pool resources to create art that you wouldn't find anywhere else. 

MovieMaker: What are you general influences?

Ben Arndt: My biggest general influence is definitely the Godzilla franchise. Every week growing up, my dad and I would bike to the local Hastings and we'd rent one of the Godzilla films to watch together (there are 38 films in total, god bless his patience).

The original Godzilla, also known as Gojira, always stood out to me because of how it was able to take a larger than life mythological character and concept, and interweave it into a heartfelt and emotional core. Bringings this back to Breakups Suck, It was important to try and ground the  mythological concept of vampires in something emotionally resonant, like a break-up. Some other directors that inspire me are Kiyoshi Kurosawa, Ryusuke Hamaguchi, and Denis Villenueve.

MovieMaker: How did you assemble your cast and crew?

Ben Arndt: My cast and team is made up of classmates and friends I've made while pursuing filmmaking. I try not to pick crew or cast based on portfolios or clout, but rather based on who I feel I have the most chemistry with and who pushes me as an artist. I love developing organic relationships and friendships with the people I work with because not only does it help us work together more seamlessly, but it also tends to make my sets more comfortable as well.

A quote that my dad told me once that stuck with me was: "Leadership isn't about always having the right ideas, but rather creating an environment in which the best ideas can be had." As for my principal cast, Jack Mclaughlin is a UNM-based actor whose work had gotten my attention in the past, and Willow Glenn was someone I had a history of collaborating with, whose talent consistently blew me away.

Both of my leads are so incredibly talented and from the moment I watched them seamlessly improve 10 different versions of the breakup in rehearsals, I knew I had found my Luca and Ruby. 

"Breakups Suck" screens in Albuquerque Sunday as part of the Santa Fe International Film Festival, one of our 50 Film Festivals Worth the Entry Fee. You can read more of our festival coverage here.

Main image: Willow Glenn in "Breakups Suck." Courtesy of the film.

The film, making its world premiere this weekend at the Santa Fe International Film Festival, features the renowned cellist playing "Amazing Grace" as buffalo storm majestically across the Blackfeet Nation, the federally recognized tribal land bordering Glacier National Park in Montana.

For a few brief moments you're transported by images and music, to a timeless, dreamlike place. But the film's purpose isn't just to transport you: "Blackfoot Buffalo Yo Yo Ma" was commissioned by Indigenous Led, a Native-led nonprofit that has worked for years to try to restore buffalo to their ancestral homelands.

"For around 150 years, buffalo haven’t existed on this land, nearly driven to extinction by genocide and the colonization of Turtle Island, also known as the United States of America," says Hunter Robert Baker, who co-directed the film with Elias Gallegos.

We talked to Baker about the film's mission, creating a cinematic dream, and the stunning moment Yo-Yo Ma touches a buffalo.

MovieMaker: Can you talk about how Yo-Yo Ma came to be involved in this project?

Hunter Robert Baker: Yo-Yo Ma has been an advocate of this restoration effort for years, wanting to honor the power of relationship with these sacred buffalo relatives, called “iinnii” in the Blackfoot language.

In May, Yo-Yo Ma traveled to Blackfeet Nation to add his artistry to the chorus that calls to the sacred buffalo relatives. Yo-Yo performed “Amazing Grace,” a medley that provides hope and unity during divided times.

The film culminates in three parts - IINNIIWA: The Blackfeet Buffalo Story, Act I, Act II, and Act III. Act II is a documentary that will premiere in New York City and in Montana on Blackfeet Nation. Santa Fe audiences will see Act I during Santa Fe International Film Festival.

MovieMaker: How did you and the other filmmakers get involved?

Hunter Robert Baker: We were honored to have Chris Eyre [Smoke Signals, Dark Winds] as our Executive Producer, serving a crucial role for the film. He had a vision of these sacred relatives on their journey back home. In a dream moment, Yo-Yo shows a sign of respect and honor by touching forehead to forehead, a connection that unites heart and soul. This scene is meant to evoke a time when people and animals lived in close relation with one another.

My dual role as cinematographer allowed me to observe, respect, and honor these iinnii buffalo. The collaboration between Elias and me meant a closer lens on the vital nature of this story. 

Hunter Robert Baker on 'Blackfeet Buffalo Yo-Yo Ma'

MovieMaker: The visuals in this film are so stunning — were all the buffalo real? Were any VFX used to capture so many of them running together?

Hunter Robert Baker: I can say with immense gratitude that all of the scenes of buffalo running through the landscape were filmed in-camera. This is a tremendous thanks to the Blackfeet Buffalo Program and fantastic wrangler team who raise and care for the Buffalo as they are guided towards their rewilding release. 

The Blackfeet Buffalo Program has been at the forefront of returning buffalo to the Blackfeet territory for more than two decades. In June 2023, the Program made history by returning 49 iinnii to their homelands at the base of Nínaiistáko, or Chief Mountain—a site sacred to all Blackfeet. The homecoming was a moment of fruition for the long-time partnerships between the Blackfoot Buffalo Program, Blackfeet Fish & Wildlife, Glacier and Waterton Lakes National Parks, and the Native-led nonprofit Indigenous Led.

MovieMaker: Is the scene when Yo-Yo Ma touches the buffalo real? How did you accomplish it?

Hunter Robert Baker: Yo-Yo Ma is a wonderful human radiating positivity in every direction. Of course, safety was a big concern for the shoot. As producers, we don’t encourage anyone to ever touch buffalo. They should always be observed and respected from a safe distance. This scene is a dream and meant to represent a time when people and animals lived in close relation with one another. The film does have some movie magic to capture this scene safely.

As we filmed Yo-Yo’s performance, it actually evoked a real reaction from the iinnii buffalo nearby and they made their way closer and closer to Yo-Yo. It shows that music has the power to unite.

MovieMaker: Can you detail the Santa Fe connection to the film?

Hunter Robert Baker: Chris, Elias and I are based in Santa Fe, New Mexico. We have a wonderful filmmaking community here that supports and respects Indigenous stories. I have been working in the Southwest for 13 years, spending extensive time on Navajo Nation. After a decade, I came to Santa Fe and discovered for myself the passionate community of art supporters. 

MovieMaker: Can you tell me a little more about Indigenous Led?

Hunter Robert Baker: Indigenous Led is a native-led nonprofit organization whose work is focused on science, youth and the rematriation of buffalo on Indigenous lands. Their work is extensive across the country. They support and believe art and film have the unique ability to unite, heal, and evoke a conversation around meaningful change.

The best part of this project was really learning about the youth of Blackfeet Nation. For around 150 years, buffalo have been gone from these lands. Multiple generations grew up, lived and passed on without ever seeing their sacred iinnii relatives, an animal that is directly tied to their Blackfoot language and origin story. Now, thanks to these wonderful organizations, the youth are growing up with buffalo around them, on their lands, and in their ceremonies. The return of buffalo is giving the youth a way to connect with their origin story, their Blackfoot language, and their ancestry. This effort begins a process of healing generations of destruction and looks toward a brighter future.

"Blackfeet Buffalo Yo-Yo Ma" plays Sunday at the Santa Fe International Film Festival, one of our 50 Film Festivals Worth the Entry Fee. You can read more of our festival coverage here.

All photos courtesy of the film.

The Australian-born Oliphant has mercilessly and incisively caricatured every president since Lyndon B. Johnson in a career that spanned 60 years and included winning the Pulitzer Prize in 1966. After working for The Washington Star, he began syndicating his work to a vast audience through Universal Press Syndicate, finally retiring in 2015 — though Oliphant, now 90, has still managed a few astute mockeries of President Trump since then.

The film goes back several centuries to track the history of political cartoons — when they were lithographs and engravings – and makes the case that they were the first memes. It also explains why they're endangered as print media loses influence, and the Trump Administration moves with a heavy hand to silence critics.

A Savage Art makes the case that cartoonists are often the most effective and direct critics of politicians, which often makes them targets for censorship. Everyone from presidents to religious leaders and their many defenders took issue with Oliphant's cartoons as he bludgeoned hypocrisy in all forms, by the left and right alike.

The film plays Saturday at the Santa Fe International Festival, and marks a strikingly detailed and thoughtful debut by Banowsky, who until now has had a wide range of high-level roles in the film business that fueled his desire to direct. We talked with him about meeting Oliphant, calling out corruption, and why AI can never replace a great pen-and-ink drawing.

Director Bill Banowsky on Making A Savage Art: The Life & Cartoons of Pat Oliphant

MovieMaker: Pat Oliphant, like you, is a longtime Santa Fe resident. Is that how you came to meet him? 

Bill Banowsky:  My wife Susan Banowsky and I moved to Santa Fe from Austin 10 years ago.  Our first Christmas Eve in Santa Fe was a beautiful snowy evening, and we went around the neighborhood with some new Santa Fe friends to various houses that were hosting parties. The first place we landed was the Oliphant home.  

For years the Oliphants had had a big Christmas Eve party every year. We walked into the house. It was full of music and people and fun. I looked to my right and saw this guy sitting in the corner with white hair wearing a white puffy jacket and a red scarf. It was David Byrne. Then I saw Terry and Jo Harvey Allen. And the Ambassador to the U.S. from Australia. There were so many interesting people in that house that evening. We lived just around the corner from the Oliphants and became fast friends. 

MovieMaker: Were you a fan of his work before? What draws you to it?

Bill Banowsky: I had heard of Pat Oliphant, but was not well aware of his work.  I knew he was a celebrated, Pulitzer Prize-winning cartoonist, but I didn’t fully appreciate his career until I started interviewing him for this film, which we began in the summer of 2018, seven years ago.

MovieMaker: You're a film producer, founded Magnolia Pictures, served as CEO of Landmark Theaters, launched Violet Crown Cinemas, and have been general counsel to multiple media companies. But this is your first time directing. How did your past experiences help you as a director?

Bill Banowksy: My experiences helped me understand what to look for in a documentary film that could potentially appeal to a theatrical audience. I’ve seen what had worked and what had not. And I’ve dabbled in documentary filmmaking in the past 20 years. Fifteen years ago I served as Executive Producer for an Alex Gibney film called Casino Jack and the United States of Money. I had gotten to know Alex when we worked together releasing his film Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room.

I pitched him on a story about Tom DeLay, this pre-MAGA corrupt congressman from Texas.  He liked the idea.  At that time he had become interested in what was going on with a DeLay adjacent character, the super lobbyist Jack Abramoff, another corrupt guy in politics. Alex and I decided to make that film. My role was to help Alex raise the money. I really had no hand at all in making it.

Then, a few years later, while living in Austin, I became interested in another story about political corruption involving Gov. Rick Perry of Texas and his efforts, working with conservative think tanks and the like, to transform the two elite public research universities in Texas, the University of Texas and Texas A&M, into something that looked more like trade schools.  Their goals were to get control of these places by firing university presidents and stacking the boards of regents.  

That led to me hiring a director to help me make a documentary about the systemic defunding of public higher education.  That film is called Starving the Beast: We covered six elite public research universities across the country. James Carville was a star of our film, as he was very focused on what was going on with the defunding of public higher education in Louisiana.  

The film was prophetic, I think, when you look at what is going on now with the attacks on higher education by the Trump administration. I was the Producer of the film and was very involved in making it, conducting interviews, raising the money, helping create the storyline. That experience inspired me to want to make my own film, a film that I had complete editorial control of.

MovieMaker: What did you learn from directing that you didn't know about film from your past experience?

Bill Banowsky: They say documentary film making is all about the editing. I think that’s largely true.  We had four different editors work on this film over the seven years we spent making it.  The last editor was Michael Linn, an incredibly talented filmmaker and editor I had met through a mutual friend, Chris Eyre.  

Michael and I spent a week in Chris’s house in Santa Fe while Chris was away working on Dark Winds.  I then spent another week living with Michael and his family in South Dakota, spending all day and much of the night in the editing room with Michael. That’s when the final film started to come into focus. I loved working with Michael.  He is a superb editor who listened to what I wanted to see on screen, and he made it happen. Learning deeply about the process of editing is what I most appreciate about the experience of making this film.

That, and working with my producing partner Paul O’Bryan, my longest friend in the world.  We grew up together in L.A. in the 70’s. Paul is an accomplished editor and filmmaker who has worked in the film industry his entire career. This film doesn’t happen without Paul coming on board three years ago.

MovieMaker: The film focuses on pressures on political cartoonists to tone down their political criticisms. How do you think those compare to the pressures today on late-night hosts, including Stephen Colbert and Jimmy Kimmel?

Bill Banowsky: We didn’t intend to take seven years to make the film, but it’s actually a good thing that we did. The timing for this film is right now. A Savage Art speaks to the importance of satire and free speech and journalism, things that are directly under attack today in our current MAGA experience, more so than ever in our lifetime. Nixon had an enemies list, but he didn’t act on it the way that Trump does.

Two-time Putlizer Prize-winning cartoonist Ann Telnaes was with The Washington Post when we interviewed her for the film; she is no longer there. She quit when her editors refused to publish a cartoon she made making fun of Jeff Bezos  — bending the knee (and delivering the cash) to Trump.

Pulitzer Prize-winning cartoonist Adam Zygllis, also in our film, is currently dealing with death threats against him and his family on account of a cartoon he published after the Texas floods making fun of the MAGA Republicans. That cartoon drew ugly comments from the White House, which led to the death threats. As we point out in the film, this work can be dangerous.

MovieMaker: A Savage Art makes the intriguing point that political cartoons were the first memes. How do you think AI videos that mock political opponents, like those often posted by President Trump, fit into that history? Are they continuing the tradition of political cartoons, or breaking from it?

Bill Banowksy: Maureen Dowd, who is magnificent in our film, recently lamented about the rise of memes amid the decline of editorial cartooning. Maureen’s point was that memes cannot replace political cartoons. I could not agree more. Memes are not art. I could go online this morning and buy a meme-maker program and publish a meme this afternoon.  I could not create a political cartoon.  

Memes and AI generations are not art, nor are they original works.  Political cartoons are original works of art, combined with satire.  Memes are other people’s work combined with satire. A meme is half a political cartoon.

MovieMaker: What does Pat Oliphant think of the film?

Bill Banowsky:  You would need to ask him that question. He is an amazingly funny and smart guy.  I recently asked him if he liked the film and he said "it’s for s---.”  And then a sly grin came over his face.  I think he likes it, but who knows.

A Savage Art: The Life & Cartoons of Pat Oliphant plays Saturday at the Santa Fe International Film Festival, one of our 50 Film Festivals Worth the Entry Fee. You can read more of our festival coverage here.

"I thought of the parallels between trying to reach out to other species, and the times in our lives when our families can feel completely alien to us," he tells MovieMaker. "I believe each person contains a universe of their own emotions, thoughts, and experiences, and finding someone who understands us can at times feel like trying to find life on other worlds."

The comedy stars Chloe Bennet (Interior Chinatown) as Minnie, a journalist seeking access to Area 51, and Phil Dunster (Ted Lasso) as Rex, her cousin and a punk-rock guitarist fresh from rehab. Jennifer Beals also stars.

Hello Out There takes advantage of a vast range of New Mexico locations, which makes its screening Friday at the Santa Fe International Film Festival a kind of homecoming.

We talked with Blum — who has worked on Broadway, film, TV and video games — about why aliens are so much in the zeitgeist, and shooting a story where so much depends on the actors.

Otis Blum on Hello Out There

MovieMaker: What message did you want to convey with the film? Why include the alien aspect?

Otis Blum: I wanted to explore the idea of connection. Is it possible to connect with other beings, and if so how? During the depths of the pandemic, I noticed an uptick in stories about aliens in traditional publications like The New York Times, New Yorker, and The Economist. It made sense to me — at a time when we were and still are desperate for connection, of course we would look up and wonder if something was looking back.

MovieMaker: You're based in Los Angeles — how did you find filming in New Mexico? What drew you there, and where did you shoot specifically?

Otis Blum: I love New Mexico so much. I've been visiting the state since I was a child, and I have family that lives out there. I wrote this script with the purpose of telling a story in New Mexico and highlighting the beauty and wonderful peculiarity of this enchanting state. Filming in New Mexico was wonderful.

With all the production that happens in the states, there are many talented and experienced crew people that were vital to the making of this film. We were able to shoot on location in Roswell, White Sands National Park, Albuquerque, and Santa Fe, with the unique look and feel of each place elevating the look and feel of the movie.

MovieMaker: At one point your characters are at the gates of Area 51 — are those the real gates of Area 51? I thought it was impossible to get that close, so I was very intrigued.

Otis Blum: I'm glad you were intrigued! Those are not the real gates of Area 51. We studied lots of photographs and a producer visited the location, getting as close as legally possible, so we worked hard to authentically recreate it. That scene was shot at a private airport outside of Albuquerque. The real Area 51 is in Nevada, and I'm proud to say we shot every scene in New Mexico!

MovieMaker: How did you enlist your very good actors?

Otis Blum: I sent them the script and they wanted to be a part of it! When pitching to them I emphasized that the movie rests entirely on the performance of the actors. I admire each and everyone of them as naturalistic performers - Chloe, Phil, and Jennifer don't perform characters, they create real people. We started off by casting Minnie, and then finding the Rex that had the right chemistry.

Chloe and Phil had tremendous rapport from the very start. We did a lot of character work and rehearsal before we started shooting. In the process we discussed the themes of the story, and each actor had some form of personal connection to both their character and the larger story.

We couldn't find the right Judith for some time, and Jennifer Beals came on to the project a week or two before we started shooting, and I'm so grateful she did. I was so grateful to have such experienced talent on my first feature. 

MovieMaker: What was the biggest obstacle you faced in making this film, and how did you overcome it?

Otis Blum: There were two really big obstacles. One was the logistical headache of shooting in a lot of locations across the state. I have to thank my production team for playing jenga with schedules and transportation to make sure we got all the locations we needed.

The second obstacle was New Mexico weather. We shoot a lot of this movie outdoors, and New Mexico weather can be very fickle in the summer. ... I would wake up in the middle of night checking the weather app on my phone. We were incredibly fortunate that the weather never caused us to miss a day. We only had one thunderstorm delay. There were some brutally hot days, but we had a dedicated team who was watching out for our health and safety making sure we were hydrated, shaded, and safe.

Hello Out There plays Friday at the Santa Fe International Film Festival, one of our 50 Film Festivals Worth the Entry Fee. You can read more of our festival coverage here.

Main image: Hello Out There. Courtesy of the filmmakers.

Not only did it become the title of her feature directorial debut, but Singh stars in and produces the dramedy, which debuted at the Tribeca Film Festival and plays this weekend at the Santa Fe International Film Festival.

Pinch revolves around an aspiring travel blogger named Maitri (Singh) who travels with her mother and their neighbors to the annual Hindu festival Navratri. On the way, she is groped by a respected man in the community. Later, she gets retribution by pinching a woman in the crowd and blaming him. What follows is a darkly comedic story about the female experience, mother-daughter relationships, grief and trauma.

“My job is done,” Singh tells MovieMaker. “I was trying to tell the story I wanted to tell and people can take what they want from it. For some people it’s healing. For some, it enrages them. For me, life is absurd and I like to find the absurdity in it. You can have pain and joy co-exist and uncomfortable humor is my own way of dealing with trauma.”

Initially planned as a short, Pinch became a full feature after the film’s cinematographer and co-writer Adam Linzey hopped on board.

We talked with Singh at Tribeca in June about the importance of community in making the film, the power dynamics of assault, and balancing comedy with trauma. 

Uttera Singh on Balancing Comedy and Pain in Pinch

Amber Dowling: You wrote the script in English and then translated it to Hindi. Did you have difficulty with some of the nuances?

Uttera Singh: Those nuances don’t always translate and I found that out the hard way when I sent the first version to one of the actors I really wanted to play my mother’s friend. At first she refused to do it because she said it was bad. That it was really bad, because the Hindi didn’t flow. I was so hurt at first, but then I reread it and she was right. It needed two more passes to get the right flow and have it make sense. I had given up hope on her when she said she didn’t like the script, but when it was ready, I resent it and she agreed to do it. 

Amber Dowling: The movie seems to normalize healing from abuse and the collective trauma that women go through — was that the intention?

Uttera Singh: Yes, and one more thing was that I also wanted to talk about how we sometimes leave men out of the conversation. Men also go through abuse. Women come together and talk about it and heal together, but men don’t necessarily get that. This isn’t to diminish what women go through. That can still exist while including men in the conversation. I read this incredible book called Invisible Women, where Caroline Criado Perez talks about how assault isn’t a gender issue, it’s a power issue. That’s such a powerful statement. 

Amber Dowling: How did you want to treat the comedy of it all, given the dark subject matter?

Uttera Singh: I had to hold myself back and not treat the assault part in a funny way, because I wanted to be sure we were being sensitive and careful about treating that with care and realism. But the rest? I just see life as very absurd. I always got in trouble for laughing at the wrong moment. I lean more into that side of myself now and accept that it’s okay. 

Amber Dowling: The film has a budget of less than a million. How did you piece that financing together and make what you needed to happen?

Uttera Singh: The best thing that happened was I went back to my hometown in India and made it there. My whole community showed up, and there were privately raised funds, but also a lot of beg, borrow and steal. 

One of my favorite examples was that we needed a red refrigerator for the apartment. My cousin called a neighbor, who swapped fridges so that we could use hers for like a month. Other people lent us their living room furniture. It was just so sweet. It makes me emotional to think of where people were just showing up. This was made with a lot of community love. 

Amber Dowling: Did that community also factor in for the big crowd shot, where the title pinch happens?

Uttera Singh: Yes, that was extremely challenging and we only had the jib for two hours — that’s what we could afford. People traveled to bring all of the equipment up and that was something we only had for two hours. We were fighting the sun and we had 150 people from my parents’ villages who showed up. People were just standing there. It was hot but we needed the shot. At one point one woman held my hand and said, “It’s okay. Get your shot. We’re standing. We’re here.” I get so emotional, because that’s how the movie got made. By other people showing up. 

Amber Dowling: The music threads the narrative together in a really compelling way. What was your inspiration for it?

Uttera Singh: The one thing I kept telling my composer, Raashi Kulkarni, was that I wanted it to feel like an anxiety attack, like a panic attack. I wanted it to feel like Maitri’s heart. Even when I was writing this, I would put on really aggressive music with drums and percussion. Raashi did an incredible job. 

Amber Dowling: What other notable challenges did you face in making Pinch?

Uttera Singh: There were so many things, as with any indie film. We were just trying to take boulders up the hill, and we were like, “One more step. One more step.” Sadly, one of the big things that wasn’t a challenge but just a sad thing, is that Nitesh Pandey, who plays the assaulter, passed away a couple of months after the movie. So we never got to show him the film. Not that that’s the most important thing, but he was the nicest and so supportive of the movie. 

Pinch plays Saturday and Sunday at the Santa Fe International Film Festival, one of our 50 Film Festivals Worth the Entry Fee. You can read more of our festival coverage here.

Main image: Pinch, courtesy of Pinch. 

"Shelly's Leg" tells a story that sounds made up: In 1970, an eccentric young stripper named Shelly Baumann lost her leg in a freak parade canon accident, and used settlement money to open Shelly's Leg — one of the nation's first openly gay gathering places.

Watching "Shelly's Leg," by filmmaker Wes Hurley, you sometimes get the sense that this might all be a fun put-on — because the talking heads in his short documentary are so sweetly wide-eyed, the shots so beautifully composed, the footage as pretty as too-good-to-be-true AI.

But "Shelly's Leg" is totally true, And the people in it are very real. The film, now playing at the Santa Fe International Film Festival, has a striking beauty and out-of-time quality thanks to Hurley's clever approach to re-enactments. He enlisted modern-day actors in period garb to read interviews with real life collaborators and witnesses to Shelly's tale, then aged his footage to make it seem decades-old.

Hurley was born in Vladivostok, in the Soviet Union, and attended the University of Washington after immigrating to the U.S. with his mother. He has written, directed and produced dozens of award-winning shorts, three feature films and two seasons of Capitol Hill, a series he created for Huffington Post. His documentary short "Little Potato" won a Jury Prize at SXSW, and his autobiographical comedy Potato Dreams of America premiered at SXSW 2021 in the Narrative Feature Competition, then won Best Screenplay at Outfest that year.

We talked with Hurley about turning tragedy into fun, recruiting Kathleen Turner for "Shelly's Leg," and decidedly not using AI.

Shelly's Leg Director Wes Hurley on a Unique Approach to Documentary Re-Enactments

MovieMaker: How did you become a filmmaker?

Wes Hurley: I majored in painting and theater, but always knew I wanted to be a filmmaker.  I bought my first used camera after graduating from college and started by filming theater, music and burlesque live shows.  After getting to know a lot of Seattle performers and I began to cast them in short films and it grew from there.  I made my first two features guerilla-style with no crew but big very casts.  Over the years I've assembled a creative family of collaborators in Seattle that I always work with.

MovieMaker: How did you first learn of Shelly's Leg, and why did you want to tell this story? 

Wes Hurley: A few years ago I read the book Gay Seattle by professor Gary Atkins.  It's a local history book but it's written so well — it reads like a thriller. One of the stories in the book was about Shelly's Leg. I instantly knew I wanted to make a film about it after finishing my feature. As in my biographical feature Potato Dreams of America, I'm drawn to wild true stories that are stranger than fiction.  I love how tragedy and comedy can overlap in real life, just as in art. Shelly's Leg story is sad but also very funny and it's ultimately about what we choose to do with the cards we're dealt.

MovieMaker: I was sure at a certain point the film was all AI, and I even wondered if Shelly's Leg was a real place. (It is, of course.) The reason I thought it was AI is because the aged footage looked a little too good and pretty. Can you tell me about the historical re-enactment process you used?

Wes Hurley: I haven't heard anyone compare it to AI before, but I was definitely concerned that it would happen while making the film, considering that I worked so hard to make the footage seem authentically vintage and that is very rarely successful in films.  The conversations about AI were really starting to ramp up around that time and people were telling me about all the things that AI can already do. 

I find all of that extremely disturbing and it was important for me to specify that I'm not participating in that technology in any way, shape or form. In terms of making it look 70s, it was a really fun challenge. Not working with a big budget, it was about curating everything that goes on camera very very carefully — finding the right actors for the roles, finding little corners of the city that could pass for another era and working with our brilliant costume designer Ronald Leamon. 

I overlaid actual film grain over the final footage to get the right look, along with color correction and other effects. For sound, I worked with Paul Miller at Bad Animals to create scratchy older sounding recordings for all the interviews. I do all of my own color but I don't know how to do sound mixing. Paul really captured the quality I wanted in our mix. I think he did an amazing job.  

MovieMaker: I assumed other people must have thought this was AI as well, given your disclaimer at the end.  

Wes Hurley: An even bigger concern for me was that people wouldn't believe that it's a true story and that all the interviews are actual things real people said. So I put the disclaimer about all the interviews being verbatim, left by people most of whom are not around anymore. I'm heartened when people don't realize the interview footage was recreated. 

That aspect of the film was most exciting for me creatively but also stressful as I wasn't sure what audiences and festivals would make of it.  I called a few folks deep in the documentary world and explained my process, and they all told me I can still call the film a documentary even though the interviews themselves are re-enacted.  I've never seen it done before in a doc, though I'm sure I didn't invent it and there are other films like this out there.

MovieMaker: The voice I wish I'd heard more was Shelly's — I assume she never sat for a lengthy interview? 

Wes Hurley: Yes, sadly Shelly did not give any in-depth interviews. And she passed away before I learned of her story. I've read through a thousand pages of legal documents pertaining to her post-accident lawsuit — those had some of her testimony but nothing much of substance or interest there.  Except for the quote I use in the film where she wonders to her lawyers whether the whole cannon accident was a hallucination.  I thought it's so fitting for her entire life story and the story of her club and human condition in general.  I also thought it was very funny - her attorneys must have not liked it.

MovieMaker: How did you cast your amazing actors? 

Wes Hurley: I tried to find actors who look as much as their real counterparts as possible.  For guys that was trickier since these men in the film are all hippies and have longer hair and wigs look fake. The one exception was "Mike" — I could not find any images of him or any description. I ended up finding an actor that I really liked but he had a British accent. I decided, what the hell, this guy is great and so natural, and no one seems to remember this man sadly.  So in the movie he's British. I keep expecting someone to come up to me after a screening and ask why "Mike" is British.

MovieMaker: How did Kathleen Turner get involved?

Wes Hurley: I really wanted a recognizable voice that also served as a kind of unofficial spirit of Shelly.  When my producer Eliza Flug and I learned that Kathleen Turner was interested, it was one of the happiest days of my life. I grew up watching Kathleen, she's my favorite actress from that era and her voice brings so much specificity and character to the film. Working with her was a blast.  I have a feeling Shelly is thrilled about Kathleen narrating her story too, wherever she is now.

"Shelly's Leg" plays Thursday at the Santa Fe International Film Festival. one of our 50 Film Festivals Worth the Entry Fee. You can read more of our festival coverage here.

Main image: "Shelly's Leg," courtesy of Wes Hurley.

"A person who mediates emotionally messy conversations between people who can’t face each other? I’d hire one in a second," Anderson tells MovieMaker. "Maybe I need to start my own agency. The idea came from wondering what would happen if someone literally outsourced their most difficult relationship — the kind of conversation that feels impossible to have without a buffer."

The film, which plays Saturday at the Santa Fe International Film Festival, where Anderson will also take part in a post-screening Q&A, also stars Daniel Portman as Chris, the man who needs a mediator, and Mia Tomlinson as Olivia, his long-suffering sister.

Anderson is a British writer‑director who focuses on emotionally grounded, character‑driven films, including 2020's "My Time With Joe" and 2016's "Class 15." We talked with him about emotionally stilted characters, structure, and whether the mediator of "The Mediator" is who she seems to be.

MovieMaker: How did you become a filmmaker? 

Dean Leon Anderson: I’ve always loved films, but for a long time I had no idea how to actually become a filmmaker. It felt like this far-off, mysterious world, growing up in South London. Things really started when a friend received some funding from BBC Films to make a short, and I asked if I could help. I ended up assisting his producer and just absorbed everything I could on his set. That experience lit the fire. I went off and started writing my own scripts right after.

I didn’t have access to funding at first, so I cobbled things together — self-funding, borrowing kit, convincing friends and family to get involved. It was very DIY, but I learned a lot from doing it that way. After a few shorts, I started getting proper support for my work, and things grew from there. It’s been a gradual process, built on momentum and a lot of persistence.

MovieMaker: Can you talk about finding your excellent actors?

Dean Leon Anderson: I was lucky enough to work with Sharon Duncan-Brewster (Dune, Sex Education) on my previous short, "Class 15." I thought I’d written a solid script, but she brought so much depth to her character that it completely raised the bar for how I approached casting "The Mediator." The characters in this film are complex, and I knew I needed two strong leads who wouldn’t just play what was on the page, but would bring their own instincts and challenge the material in the best way.

I met casting director Zyrenka Cox through a BAFTA film scheme, and it was perfect timing. I’d originally pictured older actors in the roles, but her suggestions completely reshaped my thinking, in a good way. She put forward Daniel Portman [Game of Thrones], Mia Tomlinson [The Beast Must Die], and Cat White [Ten Percent], and I immediately saw the potential.

I already knew Daniel’s work, and after talking it through with Zyrenka, I knew he was right for Chris. I auditioned a few actors for Mary, but Cat stood out from the start. I’d seen Gina Bramhill in The Flatshare and was drawn to her subtlety, and Ian Burfield [EastEnders, The Selfish Giant] has a voice that instantly grounded his character. I was very lucky when they all came on board.

Dean Leon Anderson on the Untold Backstory of 'The Mediator'

MovieMaker: Why did you want to tell this story?

Dean Leon Anderson: After making "Class 15," which was set in a classroom during a parents' evening, I became really interested in creating stories within intimate, contained spaces. "Class 15" started off polite and civil, and gradually descended into chaos. With "The Mediator," I wanted to flip that structure — to start in a place of real hostility, with two people who are completely shut off emotionally from one another, and see if they could find a way to something more human.

I’m drawn to characters who are emotionally stuck, and to situations where communication has broken down. There’s something interesting in seeing what happens when you force people into a room, or even a phone call and they have no choice but to face what’s gone unsaid.

MovieMaker: Can you talk about your use of elegant cuts to black to show the passage of time? 

Dean Leon Anderson: Originally, the script had a chapter structure. Each shift in time came with a title and time of day, to mark how long the characters had been in the space together. I’d been inspired by Joachim Trier, whose films often play with structure in inventive ways. I wanted to experiment with something similar, especially since the story plays out over a 24-hour period.

But during post production, once we’d cleared all the graphics for color grading and I got the final graded files back, I realized the clean cuts to black were doing all the work I needed. Paired with the lighting changes and shifts in mood, it still clearly showed the passage of time — and actually gave the film a more restrained, mature feel. So I ended up using my instincts and keeping it simple. Sometimes less really is more.

MovieMaker: [Spoiler warning] Why does the mediator seem to develop such warm feelings for this surly man? To me, the film seems to leave open the question of whether she's actually a mediator, or if the sister has just enlisted her to try to break her brother from his cycle of self-pity.

Dean Leon Anderson: That’s such an interesting observation — and you’re not the first to float that theory! I’ve actually been asked a few times whether I’d consider expanding this world, and if I did, I think it would begin with Mary’s backstory.

She’s such a unique presence. To me, she’s like this quiet knight in shining armor, someone who steps into people’s emotional chaos to help clean it up. I even took her name from Mary Poppins, who famously arrives in the Banks’ lives to sort things out when everything else seems broken. But underneath Mary’s calm, there’s a lot of baggage.

I think part of why she connects with Chris is that, in staying longer than she probably intended, he ends up being one of the few people who actually listens to her. They’re very different people, with very different issues, but in that moment, there’s a kind of mutual recognition, two stuck people seeing something human in each other. I won’t say much more for those who haven’t seen the film yet, but I really like your take. That ambiguity is kind of the point.

MovieMaker: Finally, what's the biggest obstacle you faced in making this film, and how did you overcome it?

Dean Leon Anderson: The biggest obstacle was definitely the lack of external funding. "The Mediator" was entirely self‑funded, which limits what you can do, but it also sharpens your focus. With no script development schemes or external partners involved, every decision had to be intentional and achievable with the resources I had.

At the same time, I was in early‑stage development of my debut feature with the BFI Network, so "The Mediator" became a kind of creative reset, something I could fully own and make on my own terms in the middle of a much longer, more complex process.

Taking on multiple roles, writing, directing, producing, and editing was both freeing and exhausting. I did this because it was important to me that the film felt authentic and intimate, and that nothing got overworked or diluted. I surrounded myself with amazing and experienced collaborators I really trusted, and they made all the difference. Though it was a challenge, it reminded me of why I started making films in the first place: just telling stories in the purest way I can.

"The Mediator" screens Saturday at the Santa Fe International Film Festival, one of our 50 Film Festivals Worth the Entry Fee. You can read more of our festival coverage here.

Main image: Daniel Portman and Cat White in "The Mediator." Courtesy of Dean Leon Anderson.

"My home was gone, and my community was nearly burned to the ground. Picking up a camera so soon after the devastation was cathartic and healing — then, in the moment, and especially now as we share the film with fire survivors and neighboring communities," Goldblum tells MovieMaker.

A writer, director and producer, Goldblum is the founder of Conscious Contact Entertainment, a studio that focuses on telling story that create impact on a global scale. But when the Palisades Fire struck in January 2025, he was suddenly in the center of the story.

The Palisades Fire in the Santa Monica Mountains killed 12 people, and destroyed nearly 7,000 structures. It was one of several major fires that raged simultaneously in Southern California in January, including the Eaton Fire that killed 19 people and destroyed more than 9,000 buildings as it tore through communities including Altadena.

Goldblum hopes that watching Big Rock Burning, which plays Thursday at the Santa Fe International Film Festival and is now available on Vimeo, can help people take stock and think about what's next.

"We had our first screening at Malibu City Hall in late August and most of the sold-out crowd were residents who had lost their homes in either the Palisades Fire, Eaton Fire, or a previous one. To be able to give them a voice was a true honor and a privilege. The overwhelming response from everyone involved in the film was gratitude for me making this, but I should really be grateful for them for allowing me into their most intimate moments during such a vulnerable time," he says.

The film's executive producers include Ricki Lake, whose home was lost in the fires, and Mark Hamill and his wife Marilou, whose home survived.

We talked with Goldblum about making Big Rock Burning, the recovery process, and the interviews he didn't get.

MovieMaker: What was your personal experience with the fire? 

David Goldblum: I was in my home office and looked out the window and saw the fire cloud barreling toward my mountain community. I jumped in my car and raced off the mountain as the fire got closer and closer, leaving everything I owned behind. I think if I left my mountain an hour or two later I might not have survived. I went into action so quickly after the fires and I still haven't really grappled with the fact that so many of us literally battled or escaped the flames. It was surreal.

David Goldblum on the Roles of Mark Hamill, Ricki Lake and More in Making Big Rock Burning

MovieMaker: How did Mark Hamill and Ricki Lake get involved?

David Goldblum: One of our producers, James Costa, had worked with Ricki before. Ricki also lost her home in Malibu and when James sent her the film, she was immediately on board. Although she didn't live on Big Rock, this was Ricki's story too — her and her husband literally fought off the flames with everything they could.

I had reached out to Mark and his wonderful wife Marilou while I was filming and asked if they would be involved, knowing that having someone like Mark on the team would really give us credibility and visibility. Once they saw the film, they also came on board and offered their support. I can't thank all of them enough. 

MovieMaker: Many are under the general impression that insurance or the state and/or federal government will eventually help everyone rebuild. Is that the case?

David Goldblum: To date, there's been three permits given in Malibu since the fires. Three. Seven-hundred-and-twenty homes in Malibu were destroyed. That is not an OK ratio. Insurance companies are not helping the way they should either. 

MovieMaker: Who issues the permits?

David Goldblum: The City of Malibu. Our rebuild ambassador just quit as well.

MovieMaker: People in the film are very critical of Los Angeles mayor Karen Bass, accusing her of failing to adequately prepare for the fires; former mayoral candidate Rick Caruso, for hiring private firefighters to defend his shopping complex; and the Santa Monica Mountains Conservancy, accusing it of acquiring lots of land but not adequately clearing and otherwise maintaining it. Why did you choose not to interview them from the movie, so we could hear their side?

David Goldblum: My goal with Big Rock Burning was to make a film that was a love letter to my community. To do that I wanted to give a microphone to those who felt they didn't have a voice. Through that process, we did hear criticism aimed at various players in Los Angeles for not properly preparing for the fires — from the empty reservoir, lack of firefighter support, no water in the hydrants, budget cuts to the fire department, lack of land management and more. Not to mention we just found out the Palisades Fire was started by an arsonist. I did try to reach out to folks on the other side to get their points of view, but many were not interested in being in the film. 

MovieMaker: Any reaction to the news that a suspect was arrested in the Palisades fire?

David Goldblum: I'm grateful he was finally arrested. It's heartbreaking that somebody would do this intentionally to destroy a city. Hopefully it's the beginning of closure for all the communities that suffered losses in the Palisades Fire. 

Big Rock Burning plays Thursday at the Santa Fe International Film Festival, one of our 50 Film Festivals Worth the Entry Fee. You can read more of our festival coverage here.

Main image: Big Rock Burning. Courtesy of David Goldblum

In Good Fortune, which he wrote and directed in his feature debut, Ansari plays a struggling gig worker named Arj who sleeps in his car and does short-term gigs including food deliveries. Thanks to a "budget guardian angel" named Gabriel, played by Keanu Reeves, Arj ends up switching lives with Jeff, a wealthy tech bro played by Seth Rogen.

Keke Palmer, meanwhile, plays Elena, a woman Arj tries to romance, even if it distracts her from trying to unionize the hardware chain where she works.

"I went and did DoorDash and I talked to people that did that stuff," Ansari tells MovieMaker. "I I interviewed people who slept in their cars. I talked to a guy who tried to unionize his Home Depot to help me write Keke's character. And that stuff is your best friend, because you don't need to live the experience if you do the research, and do a version of living whatever you're trying to figure out."

Ansari said he was inspired by filmmakers like Darren Aronofsky, who did deep dives into wrestling and ballet before making The Wrestler and Black Swan.

Ansari wanted Good Fortune to ring true for people who've worked in the gig economy.

"You want someone who's dealt with this stuff not to watch it and roll their eyes, but instead to watch and go, 'Whoa. How'd they know that?" he says.

Good Fortune captures the dispiriting feeling of doing a good job with no recognition, and always feeling behind. What did Ansari learn on the job?

"Well, of course, everybody knows it's not fun," he says. "But it is a bit dystopian in terms of, you know, so much of your time you're not even getting paid. You're waiting for gigs and driving around town. You're losing money on gas. You have a car that's maybe a little bit older, and it's getting beat up doing all this driving all around L.A. and that's a cost, and you do a delivery and someone might not tip you at all. Or the order's not ready. There's so many things that are going wrong."

"It's also strange how people sometimes, [customers are ]like, 'Don't say anything, just ring the bell and leave.' It just seems kind of weird."

Aziz Ansari on the 'Dystopian' Aspects of the Gig Economy He Addresses in Good Fortune

But some elements are even darker, he says — like realizing that you may soon be replaced by a machine.

"There's now these little robots going around L.A. doing the same thing, and the even darker thing is, if you read up on this, these companies are watching how these drivers are driving, just so they can program it in to a self-driving car eventually," Ansari says.

Ansari's life, of course, is closer to that of Jeff, a wealthy entrepreneur who lives in the Hollywood Hills. Ansari, who recently moved to London, jokes: "I did all the Jeff research, yeah."

Did Ansari get any personal satisfaction from doing a tough delivery job?

"I did it for a couple hours, and I was like, this is hard, and I have so much more empathy for these people than I did, and I'm going to tip them even harder than I used to. And I think Seth said the same thing to me: So many of the conveniences in our lives are built on the hardships of other people. And I don't know what the answer is to that. It's but it's tough. It's a tough thing."

Good Fortune is in theaters Thursday, from Lionsgate.

Main image: Keanu Reeves as Gabriel, Seth Rogen as Jeff, and Aziz Ansari as Ari in Good Fortune. Photo by Eddy Chen, courtesy of Lionsgate.

He has a closer connection to the film than most. 

His father, Richard O’Brien, was writing the Rocky Horror stage musical around the time Linus was born. He was about a year old when it premiered onstage, under the name The Rocky Horror Show, at London’s Royal Court Theatre. And he saw it live for the first time in 1976, at about the age of four, at the King’s Road Theatre. 

“They let me control the lights around the proscenium,” Linus O’Brien recalls. 

His father had started writing the musical as a struggling artist who had come to London from New Zealand. Linus O’Brien was dimly aware of the family’s rising financial fortunes as they moved from a small flat to a bigger house, and began to travel quite a bit. The musical quickly expanded to Sydney, and Los Angeles, and soon all over the world, but hit a snag in New York City, where Broadway audiences regarded its raunchy operatics and B-movie throwbackery with suspicion. 

Another failure — initially — was the film version of The Rocky Horror Picture Show, directed by Jim Sharman, who helped adapt it for the screen.  It premiered almost 50 years ago, on September 26, 1975.

Though the early box office was bad, you probably know what happened next. 

The film quickly became an underground sensation, and has played continuously for the last half century all over the globe, often accompanied by “shadow cast” performances in which audience members act out the movie as it plays onscreen. 

The phenomenon began with screenings in Austin and New York City, where an audience member’s spontaneous eruption at Susan Sarandon’s character, Janet Weiss, during a storm — “Buy an umbrella, you cheap b----!” — quickly grew into a series of audience participation cues that evolved into the shadow-cast performances. 

“It’s the longest-running theatrical release in the history of cinema, and that’s 50 years,” Linus O’Brien says. “And second place is like one-and-a-half.”

An actor and DJ as well as filmmaker, Linus O’Brien makes his feature directorial debut with Strange Journey, a raucous, joyous documentary about the ups and downs of the ultimate cult classic. He interviews his father, who plays handyman Riff Raff in Rocky Horror, and pulls out his guitar in Strange Journey for glorious stripped-down versions of his beloved Rocky Horror songs. 

Other mesmerizing interview subjects include Sarandon; Sharman; Tim Curry, who made his film debut as the "sweet transvestite" Dr. Frank-N-Furter; Barry Bostwick, who played Janet’s straitlaced fiance, Brad; and Patricia Quinn, who played Magenta and brings down the house with a story about kissing castmate Meatloaf. 

Rocky Horror owes its success in large part to queer audiences, who embraced its exhortation to live truly to one’s self, epitomized by the song “Don’t Dream It, Be It.” They kept the film alive in all those midnight screenings, in small towns where Rocky Horror was sometimes the only light in the darkness.

“When the midnight screenings first happened, you would expect that maybe like Los Angeles, Chicago, and New York would have people who wanted to come see it. But it was the smaller cities around the Midwest where it actually had the most impact,” Linus O’Brien explains. 

“You know, 10 to 12% of the human race is LGBTQ. So you go into a city which has 20,000 people, you're gonna have 2,000 people who lean that way, or at least have those kinds of feelings, and they have nowhere else to go. And so Rocky provided a safe space in the community for people who felt marginalized and different.”

Why does he think it lasted so long? 

“It was never intended to have a message, to point you in a direction,” O’Brien says. “It was just meant to be fun. And I think that's one of the keys to the success of it — because if it had tried to preach, people would have gotten challenged, and people would have not liked that. And it didn't, and here it is, 50 years later.”

Strange Journey premiered at SXSW to begin a successful festival run, and arrives in theaters next week. We talked with Linus O'Brien at the Provincetown International Film Festival, where a queer and LGBTQ-friendly audience enjoyed a screening of Strange Journey one night, and Rocky Horror the next.

Like Rocky Horror, Strange Journey is an intoxicating film to watch with a crowd, dreaming and being. 

Linus O'Brien on Making Strange Journey: The Story of Rocky Horror

MovieMaker: What’s it like to grow up with Rocky Horror?

Linus O’Brien: People ask me this, but he's just my dad, and I didn’t you any different: “Oh yeah, this is his job, and this is what he does. He sings songs, you know.” I mean, as you get older, maybe it changes a little bit. Rocky just came in and out of our lives, with the anniversaries and the conventions and things like that, and when a new version of the stage play would come on, we’d go see that. But it was just always there in the background.

The deep appreciation of it probably happened for me while I was making the documentary. At the end of the SXSW screening, there was a man who came up to the stage after the Q&A, and he was shaking, and he said, “I just want to tell you I met my wife at Rocky Horror 32 years ago, and my wife wanted to tell you that if it wasn't for Rocky Horror, she wouldn't be alive today.” 

And that story is told over and over again. I can't think of another work of art, a film, a soundtrack, a stage play, a book that has tangibly saved the lives of, I would say, conservatively, tens of thousands of people. If I say hundreds of thousands, people will think I'm crazy, but it's a distinct possibility that that's the case, given that it's now three generations of people.

MovieMaker: Saved them by letting them know they're not alone?

Linus O’Brien: Exactly. But also giving them a place to go and meet other people just like them. And they don't necessarily even have to be gay or LGBTQ. They can just feel different and just not part of anything. 

I think one of the things that's really amazing about Rocky Horror is that society has an idea of what beauty and sexuality looks like. We always see it on magazines and commercials and TikTok and everything — you’re constantly bombarded with girls with giant boobs and butts and having to be skinny and guys with chiseled abs and jaws, right? So that's kind of the media perception of what beauty is. 

But everyone deserves to be a sexual being, right? And so if you're a little bit shorter, or a little bit bigger, or too skinny, or whatever, you're allowed to feel like that. It allows you that freedom. And the value of that is unquantifiable, really.

MovieMaker: The Rocky Horror Picture Show has grossed well over $100 million on a small budget. It’s cool that your dad had this kind of success making what must have seemed like the least commercial thing. He seems like he gets a lot of pleasure from just holding a guitar.

Linus O’Brien: That's his whole thing, really. He's never chased money. He's never chased roles. If Rocky hadn't been a success, I think he would have been a very successful actor, and would have focused on that a lot more. I think Rocky gave him the ability to say no to a lot of things. 

MovieMaker: I have a friend whose dad revered Bob Dylan, and as a result he hates Bob Dylan — he was always rebelling against this symbol of rebellion. How do you rebel when your dad created Rocky Horror?

Linus O’Brien: The only way I rebelled even slightly, was when I was about 13, maybe 12, someone gave me a tie, and I started wearing the tie with a T-shirt. And my dad was like, ‘Oh, no, take that tie off.’ And so then that made me want to wear the tie more, and it lasted about two weeks. But that was the only small rebellion that there was — almost wearing a tie. 

MovieMaker: This may sound sacrilegious, but I found your movie on a meta level to be as interesting to watch as Rocky Horror, because not only do you get scenes from Rocky Horror, but you also get the story behind it — and to see how well so many in the cast have aged. It's like being involved in this has kept people young, including your dad. 

Linus O’Brien: That's a very nice thing to say. Even if you take out my dad's personal journey, you have the fact that Rocky Horror was only meant to have a three-week run in a theater that held 60 people, and then the explosion of the stage show in London, the success at the Roxy in L.A., the failure at the Belasco Theater on Broadway, the failure of the movie when it first came out, and then the resurrection through the midnight screening – that alone is interesting. 

But we've peppered it with lots of lovely anecdotes, and at the end, it's a love letter to the fans. 

I could watch again and again the parts about the midnight screenings and Sal Piro, the original fan club founder, and the original shadow cast members. When my dad talks about Dori Hartley — the Frank-N-Furter at the Eighth Street Playhouse in the shadow cast — and he talks about her sitting at the front of the stage, and there's a spotlight on her, and her silhouette on the screen, while the audiences are singing the refrains — I get chills every time I watch that. 

Because then you see, “Oh, it's just not some people acting out in front of the stage.” It becomes art at that point. It becomes something completely different. To be able to convey that to people, so they get a real sense of what's happening — I can watch it over and over again.

MovieMaker: Speaking of audience participation, there’s an amazing moment in this documentary where we realize that Rocky Horror is kind of Jack Black’s origin story, because he saw Meatloaf in Rocky Horror and related to him. And now you have Jack Black starring in A Minecraft Movie, which is another film where you have audiences participating and adding a layer by going wild during the “chicken jockey” scene. So it’s all kind of coming together. 

Linus O’Brien: Meatloaf played his dad in the Tenacious D movie in 2006. And Meatloaf said to him, “You know, the last time I sang on film was Rocky Horror, all that time ago.” So that was really cool for him, and it was really cool for me to hear as well.

I don't know too much about Minecraft, but it was very funny to hear it, given that for so long, audience participation has been, you know, solely Rocky Horror. 

Strange Journey: The Story of Rocky Horror arrives in theaters September 25.

Main image: Richard O’Brien, who wrote Rocky Horror and plays Riff Raff, in Linus O’Brien’s Strange Journey

Created by William J. MacDonald, Bruno Heller, and Hollywood heavyweight John Milius (Apocalypse Now, Conan the Barbarian), it was focused on the magnetic portrayal of Gaius Julius Caesar by Ciarán Hinds in Season 1. His performance captured both the mythic grandeur and human vulnerabilities of one of history’s most iconic figures through his rise and fall.

Rome also followed the ascent of Gaius Octavian, aka Augustus (portrayed by Max Pirkis and later by Simon Woods) and the journeys of two soldiers, Lucius Vorenus (Kevin McKidd) and Titus Pullo (Ray Stevenson), whose fates were intricately tied to the events reshaping their world.

The series arrived on August 28, 2005 at a pivotal moment in HBO’s history, between the landscape-changing successes of The Sopranos and Game of Thrones. Filmed primarily at Rome’s Cinecittà Studios, it stood out for its meticulous attention to detail and lavish production design. 

Though initially planned for five seasons, Rome was cut short after Season 2, in part because its production costs were so high relative to its ratings.

Two decades after the show’s debut, we spoke with Hinds about the challenges of embodying one of history’s most iconic figures, the series’ enduring legacy, and striking parallels between then and now. 

Ciarán Hinds on Playing Julius Caesar in Rome

When Ciarán Hinds was first offered the role of Julius Caesar on Rome, his immediate reaction, he says, was “Oh, s---, how the f--- do you do this?” 

Caesar wasn’t just one of history’s key figures, but also one who had been played by countless actors throughout Shakespearean and Hollywood history.Hinds, a seasoned actor with a deep respect for the craft, knew that to play Caesar, he would have to strip away the myths and find his core personality.

Hinds immersed himself in historical texts, including Tom Holland’s 2003 book Rubicon, which offered vivid detail about life in ancient Rome. 

“It’s not a dramatic reconstruction,” says Hinds. “It’s based on fact, but it’s very lively and the characters of other people were very well drawn.”

The series depicted Caesar as a man who, despite his immense power, was not invincible. In one pivotal scene, Caesar suffers a seizure, a moment that underscores his vulnerability. “It wasn’t just about showing him as a great leader,” Hinds explains. “He’s human like anyone else, but he has to hide it for fear of it being used against him.”

The seizure scene was a technical challenge as well as a dramatic one. Hinds worked closely with Nicholas Woodeson, who played Caesar’s loyal slave Posca, to ensure the moment felt authentic. “I had to let go completely, but Nick was there to guide me, to make sure the camera caught everything,” Hinds recalls. “It was a delicate balance, but it worked.”

The Kalends of February

Caesar’s assassination is one of the most famous events in history, and Rome approached it with a mix of historical accuracy and dramatic flair. The series deviated from tradition by setting Caesar’s death on the Kalends of February rather than the Ides of March, a decision that puzzled some viewers but allowed the show to subvert expectations. 

“We all know what’s coming,” Hinds says. “By changing the date, the writers kept us on our toes.”

Hinds recalls the moment Caesar realizes what’s happening: “He’s a military man, so when the first dagger comes out, he grabs the knife by the blade. There’s disbelief, a sense of ‘This can’t be happening, because I’m a deity.’” 

The death reflected Caesar’s hubris: He had grown so powerful that he could no longer see the threats around him.

Hinds returned for the first episode of Second 2 to play Caesar’s corpse — “some of my finest work,” he jokes. 

“Because of the effect that Caesar had on Rome, you had to present his dead body to the people,” Hinds adds. “I was just needed for two days to film other characters’ reactions and feelings.”

Even in death, Caesar loomed large over the second season, shaping the actions of Rome’s surviving characters like Mark Antony (James Purefoy), who came to power after Caesar. 

Consolidating Power

When cancellation became imminent, some of the show’s remaining plots were consolidated into the final episodes. Rome aired before the time when intense social media fandom could help a show’s chances of survival. 

“By the time people discovered it, it was too late,” Hinds says. “But it paved the way for shows like Game of Thrones, as one of Rome’s producers, Frank Doelger, set up that show as well.”

In the end, Hinds’ says Caesar’s line to Mark Antony in Season 1 sums up the series: “If we lose, it’s a crime. If we win, it isn’t.” 

Reminiscing about Rome, Hinds makes parallels between Caesar’s story and Donald Trump’s second presidential term, noting that both men used populism and legal maneuvering to consolidate power.

“It’s a complicated time for America. The parallels of using bribery and the Senate’s own laws against it surfaces from time to time, and that’s happened here. I can see that,” he says.

He recalls the English historian Lord Acton’s observation that power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.

“As far as I know, the American Constitution has set up a resolution so there’s checks and barriers and therefore it will never turn into an autocracy or a monarchy again,” says Hinds. “But it doesn’t seem that way right now.”

Rome is streaming on Max.

The reason Sweeney is mentally editing is that we’re talking in June, but this interview will come out with Twinless’ theatrical release in September, and he wants to make sure one of his answers won’t spoil any of the film’s many turns. 

Making Twinless was a similar exercise in both planning ahead and being in the moment. Sweeney is in almost every scene of the film, usually opposite co-star Dylan O’Brien — they play the pair who meet in the support group. 

Sweeney’s directing involved constant planning and visualization to balance the film’s sumptuous images and tight storytelling. Twinless breathes like a rom-com, but it’s more deftly plotted than many thrillers: If a character mentions something, you can almost be sure it will come back, often in a way that feels both heartbreaking and inevitable. 

From the characters’ first meeting, which establishes that Sweeney’s character, Dennis, is gay, and that O’Brien’s character, Roman, is not — Twinless hints at an array of possibilities about where things could go, in terms of plot, and also genre. 

That required a lot of editing in Sweeney’s head.

“Dylan and I have talked a lot about how I think one of the reasons he’s such a great actor is because he’s so present,” Sweeney explains. “And I, as a director and producer, spend a lot of time thinking ahead… anticipating problems and trying to come up with solutions before the problems happen, which can be really annoying and exhausting.”

Sweeney laughs, then adds: “So much of what I do as a writer and a director is communication. On one hand, art is subjective — you hand it over and it’s no longer yours, and it’s open for interpretation. But on the other hand, the more I can clarify my intention, the higher the yield rate of my intentions getting across. What I like about acting is it forces me to be present and be in the moment.”

Twinless Director James Sweeney on His First 'Little Shows'

Sweeney, who is 35, was born near Sacramento and moved several times as a child, including to North Carolina and Utah, because his father was in the Air Force. He grew up mostly in Eagle River, Alaska, a suburb of Anchorage, and his parents still live in Alaska.

He didn’t have a twin, but did have an older sister. The decade-long-gap in their ages contributed to his sense of independence. 

“I’m a military brat, so I had to start over several times,” he says. “Being an introvert and having to reset multiple times, I kind of created my own worlds to live in, with stuffed animals. My cousins and aunts and uncles can tell you stories about how I would put on little shows when I was a kid.”

He started doing regional theater in elementary school. “I think my first role was as a chair in Beauty and the Beast,” he laughs. “Which had lines, to be clear. I dressed in black and just pushed a chair around.”

He fell in love with TV before film— “because that’s what I had access to growing up in Alaska,” where he only had one movie theater close to home. Eventually a love of writing led him to film school at Chapman University, where he started off as a screenwriting major and then transferred into the acting program, which was interdisciplinary between the university’s theater and film programs.

At Chapman, he realized he wanted to direct. He also met his best friend, cinematographer Greg Cotten, who would go on to shoot both Sweeney’s debut, the 2019 film Straight Up, and Twinless. 

Sweeney was in his early 20s when he wrote the scripts for both Straight Up —  about a man who has previously dated men and tries dating a woman — and Twinless. 

“I guess I’m in a different place now than I was then. But I am interested in themes of identity, themes of permanence. I also love the romantic comedy genre. I’m interested in relationships,” Sweeney says. 

“Straight Up is sort of an exploration of how we do or do not have all of our needs met in one person — whether or not that’s pragmatic or attainable, especially in a modern landscape. I think the romantic comedy sort of sells the notion of one person to complete you. And I guess I, in some ways, try to dissect that through my work.”

Partners in Crime

Twinless also explores the idea of people completing each other — or falling short of each other’s expectations. While Straight Up relies heavily on Sweeney’s chemistry with the film’s female lead, played by Katie Findlay, Twinless is built around Sweeney’s dynamic with O’Brien.

O’Brien started out posting original videos to YouTube in his teens, which led to an acting career. He is best known for MTV’s Teen Wolf and the Maze Runner trilogy, and has recently taken on a series of bold, standout roles, including playing a young Dan Aykroyd in Saturday Night and a brutal pimp in Ponyboi.

Sweeney met him through the Twinless casting process.  

“It was during the pandemic, so we met over Zoom, but we shared the script with his team, and he read it and then watched my film, and it was just sort of, I guess, instantaneous,” says Sweeney. “I think he just really saw my voice. … I write pretty specifically, so when I feel somebody really gets it, I latch onto that. And I felt like he just has the versatility and instincts. 

“I was looking for a partner in crime, and I had heard that he had a really good reputation, on set, as a leader, as a co-star, and I just felt really good about how we would work together,” Sweeney continues. 

O’Brien signed on not just as the co-lead, but as an executive producer.

Sweeney’s attention to detail — and making the complex look elegant — is especially apparent in a house party scene in Twinless that takes a lovely, dynamic approach to the split screen.   

“There’s a visual grammar to the film that starts with the bifurcation of perspectives,” explains Sweeney. “So initially we’re seeing things through Roman’s point of view, then we shift to Dennis’. 

“So the split screen, for me, was sort of the merging of a shared point of view. It wasn’t in the initial first draft. It was an idea that came later and for me concretized the grammar I was trying to build.”

Twinless is now in theaters, from Roadside Attractions and Lionsgate.  

Starring a jittery Théodore Pellerin (Never Rarely Sometimes Always) and a radiant Archie Madekwe (Saltburn), Lurker is a pulsing exploration of the relationship between celebrity and viewer, an intriguing parasocial psychodrama with shades of All About Eve and Mean Girls.

Madekwe plays Oliver, a pop musician whose star is on the rise when he stumbles into the streetwear store where Pellerin’s Matty works. When Matty just happens to put on Oliver’s favorite song, their hypebeast meetcute seems like a sign, and Matty quickly works his way into the pop star’s inner circle of homies-turned-associates.

Lurker is a canny exploration of homosocial tensions in L.A.’s cutthroat music scene. Soundtracked by all-star producer Kenneth Blume, better known as Kenny Beats, it’s one of the slyest, most electrifying movies of the year.

Rounding out the cast are Zack Fox (Abbott Elementary), Havana Rose Liu (Bottoms), Wale Onayemi, Daniel Zolghadri (Eighth Grade), and Sunny Suljic (Mid90s).

Russell is a former music journalist who has since worked on two of the most acclaimed shows of the 2020s, Beef and The Bear. The season two episode he wrote for the latter, “Forks,” earned him a WGA award and was the episode that actor Ebon Moss-Bachrach (Fantastic Four) submitted to support his nomination, and eventual win, for a Best Supporting Actor Emmy. 

Russell wrote Lurker during the early days of Covid. It took a while to make the movie — Lurker almost went into production in 2021 but didn’t get off the ground until 2023.

“Théodore Pellerin was always attached.” Russell tells Movie Maker. “I was a little afraid of him aging out of the world.”

There were a few changes made to the script along the way. While some of them were due to constraints of production, they ended up enhancing the central themes of Russell’s original script. 

“Originally, I had more fashion shows, parties, scene-y things that filled out their day-to-day,” he says.

But as the locations consolidated, the movie became more about Oliver’s intimate world. It only helps raise the stakes. 

“It means a lot more to someone like Matthew to be sitting in Oliver’s bed than to be out in the world with him.” Russell says.

Many of Lurker’s funniest moments come courtesy of rapper and comedian Zack Fox (Abbott Elementary). 

“Zack and I are best friends.” Russell tells Movie Maker. “We’ve known each other for over ten years.”

Russell has directed some of Fox’s music videos, but, Russell explains, “at the time, he wasn’t really an actor. It would have been more of a jump for me to cast him because I knew that he could do something like this, but the role wasn’t originally written for him. And then somehow, once I was done with the script, I realized he was perfect for it.”

As with Pellerin, Fox’s age was an initial concern that actually became an asset. As a longtime music journalist, Russell has met plenty of variations of the characters he writes about in Lurker. “Fox’s character became the slightly older guy who’s weirdly still around — that’s a dynamic in itself,” Russell says.

Russell, who also directed videos for hip-hop group Brockhampton, wanted the cast to feel real to the L.A. music scene. “We just wanted the ensemble to be realistic. We didn’t want college brochure casting, we wanted it to feel like a hodge-podge L.A. group.”

One of those dynamics is that Matty and Jamie are two white outsiders who join Oliver’s tight-knit multiracial crew. While Russell was certainly aware of that tension, it wasn’t central to the script.

“The script was written for the parts to be open to anyone. It wasn’t racially specific,” Russell says. “This configuration worked in the case of this movie, but there could’ve been a version where Ollie and Matty were two white boys. I wanted to stay open to any casting as it came together — Ollie was originally written as an American, but once I started talking to Archie, it made sense if the character was British and a transplant to L.A.”

A major part of this configuration is Havana Rose Liu’s character, Shai. The only girl in the group, she takes her role as music manager seriously. Liu prepared for the role with similar diligence, and shadowed music managers to get into Shai’s mindset.

“I cast based on auditions, obviously, but also in how the actors talked about the role,” Russell explains. “The balance to find with Shai was how her opinion on Matty evolves as the movie progresses. She’s somewhat protective of him at first. She knows that he’s not totally naïve, but she also has sympathy for anyone who gets swept up in Oliver’s world. When Matty reveals more of himself, she realizes she was protecting the wrong side. Havana got that immediately.”

Alex Russell on Imposter Syndrome in Lurker

Russell was coy when asked if he thinks Matthew has real talent. Throughout Lurker, Matty struggles with accurate feelings of being an imposter— even as he fails to articulate exactly what his role is in Oliver’s crew. 

“I’d love to leave the question of Matty’s talents up to the audience. I do think the movie asks about the idea of faking it ‘til you make it. Because Matty is very disciplined; he figures out Premiere and then suddenly is shooting music videos.”

Though we don’t see social media in the film, we’re constantly hearing about Oliver’s posts and pictures from fans invested in the relationship between Oliver and Matty. That feedback is how Matty (and the audience) can measure how well he’s integrated into the crew. 

One might expect a cooler response from Russell about Matty’s seemingly compulsive need for attention, but he was forgiving. 

“He's passionate about impressing and maintaining proximity to Oliver. Oliver is the battery in Matty’s back that makes him figure out whatever skill he needs to develop.” Russell says. “I think so much of why anyone gets good at anything is the desire for attention.”

Given that Matty starts the movie in a trendy streetwear boutique on Melrose Avenue, fashion understandably plays a huge part in Lurker. “You’ll see designer sweatpants on the floor,” Russell points out. The actors’ style pedigrees also played a large part in how each character’s fashion was shaped.

“A lot of the actors also model or have some background interest in fashion, so they were able to imbue the characters with a little bit of their own style.”

Major storytelling happens in the costumes, which were expertly designed by Megan Gray — keep an eye out for an early, revealing glimpse of the fan t-shirts that line Matty’s closet. In keeping with Matty’s character, Gray built a wardrobe entirely thrifted in L.A. with garments from cool but accessible brands: Vans, Dickies, Stüssy, Levi’s, Lacoste, and Carhartt.

For Oliver, Gray looked to her longtime relationship with Loewe for several of the movie’s most emotive moments. (Madekwe has also worked extensively with the designer brand). Oliver sports a show-stopping sinkhole coat during a contentious album cover shoot, and a vibrant, Peter Pan-ish wool sweater when he expresses a desire to make his own family. 

Fans of Russell’s work on The Bear and Beef won’t be surprised that Lurker has a brief, but perfectly sculpted crash out. 

“It’s one of my favorite scenes in the movie.” Russell says. “It’s still funny to me. The music is so overpowering, it’s exactly how it feels in his head, even though the texts he’s sending are innocuous.”

As in many scenes in the movie, Russell relies on Pellerin’s subtle, but effective, expressions of desperation. “I didn’t have to talk to Theo that much about that scene. Any time there was a silent expression, he just would nail it. It was always perfect.”

Developing the scene was “an exercise in kinetic energy,” as Russell puts it. After multiple takes in the car, they did separate inserts of just the phone in the studio to get closer and closer to the screen. 

“How can we represent what it feels like when a texting bubble shows up?” Russell explains. “We just kept punching in closer and closer. We needed the texts to feel like an earthquake.”

No spoilers here, but the ending was a surprise even to Russell. 

“I knew that would be the last scene, but on the page, it was a lot longer. … But early in the edit, I realized it would be much better to end it sooner. If I’d known that was the plan, I wouldn’t have captured that moment right before we cut.

“Once I found the ending, I thought we had half the movie. An ending is 90% of a movie. It’s what makes it very different from television. You can get away with almost anything in the first half of a film and if the second half accelerates, well, people will forgive it.”

Lurker arrives in theaters August 22, from MUBI.

The film draws on fashion photography and French New Wave, among other influences, to tell a story of betrayal that also interrogates the process of image-making.

But when Smiling set out to add to the visual language of cinema with "kamikaze," he turned to an influence that some filmmakers look down on: internet meme culture.

"Kamikaze" stylishly tells a straightforward story — during a Coney Island fashion shoot, a model named Knives (Dominique Babineaux) finds herself caught between an egotistical social media star (Waylon Rose) and his domineering photographer girlfriend (Clementine Chalfant) as their relationship combusts.

At one point, a character comes to a realization that feels like a car exploding — so Smiling inserts a shot of one, like a meme, in the middle of the narrative. It's the riskiest and most experimental moment of the film, beautifully shot by Timothy S. Jensen.

It's also the moment that most lingers.

"If I'm going to critique image-making, I'm going to use all the tools of image-making in the critique of it," Smiling explains. "In a lot of the frames, the framing is a straight-up references to fashion photographers. And then the pacing of it, especially in the really quick montages, that's me replicating when you're on Instagram, and you're just like, flip, click, click, click, flip, click."

The film is skillfully structured and paced — never too fast or too slow — and Smiling credits that partly to his filmmaking sensibilities combining with an awareness of internet attention spans.

"I constantly just imagine, whenever someone's watching whatever I'm making, that their fingers are drifting up to their little 'Close Window' button," he says. "I'm like, 'OK, cool: You have X amount of seconds before they close it, so you need to do something in that time to just be like, Hey, hey, hey, hey, come back, come back, come back.'"

'Kamikaze' Director Ray Smiling on Advertising and Filmmaking

Growing up in Brooklyn, Smiling was a huge movie fan. But being a filmmaker, he says, "always seemed kind of like being an astronaut, where you're like, 'That's a cool job, but I don't know how one becomes an astronaut.'"

About a decade ago, he started working for the fun, artistic streetwear company Mishka, which bears the motto "wear your weird." When its video director left, Smiling says, he offered to take over.

"They're like, 'We won't pay you any more money. And I was like, don't care.' And they're like, 'We love that,'" he recalls.

That led to Smiling becoming an advertising creative. But when he got on sets for ad shoots, he quickly realized that he really wanted to direct.

"And it took me about eight years to make that happen," he says.

Skipping film school, he instead got paid to learn on the job. He quickly developed a bold, keep-up cinematic style. One of his influences was  filmmaker, music video director, and video artist Kahlil Joseph, whose work showed him that "you can kind of do whatever you want to do with editing. As long as it feels right, you can make things work," Smiling notes.

Smiling's win at Salute Your Shorts — one of our 50 Film Festivals Worth the Entry Fee — is the latest success in a career that is, like the car in "kamikaze," on fire.

In addition to his advertising work for clients including Adidas, Beats by Dre, Under Armour, and the NBA, he directed the TV show Khaki Is Not Leather and the short "Play This at MY Funeral," as well as another short he just completed. He's also just finished writing a feature.

He says that he's always thinking the same thing as he works:

"Am I boring someone? Am I boring someone? Am I boring someone?"

The respect for the audience's time helps him earn the moments when he asks viewers to slow down.

"When I say, 'Let's just look at the ocean for 30 seconds,' it's very intentional," he adds. "And I try to deploy that with with precision."

Main image: "kamikaze," directed by Ray Smiling