Anatomy of a Contender
The Making of ‘The Holdovers’: “Depressing Sh** Can Still Feel Cozy”
Since The Holdovers hit theaters, the word “cozy” has been at the center of a (good-natured) debate. Viewers and critics looked to the word as a descriptor for its setting (a prep school’s campus during Christmastime), its star (Paul Giamatti, spectacled, mustachioed and sporting corduroys and knits), its period (a nostalgia-clad 1970). Director Alexander Payne, […]
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![“Alexander [Payne] kept emphasizing, ‘You’re the only two people in this place, you’re the only ones here,’ ” says Paul Giamatti of this scene with Da’Vine Joy Randolph. “It felt really intimate.”](gif/lazyload-fallback.gif)
The Making of ‘American Fiction’: “Tragedy and Comedy at the Same Time, and Often the Same Day”
In late 2020, Cord Jefferson, a journalist turned TV writer, was in a state of creative dismay. He had just gone through a crushing professional disappointment: A big-budget series project he had spent months writing and developing for Apple TV — Scraper, based on his first career, as a writer and editor at Gawker Media — […]
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How Christopher Nolan Blew Up the Screen: The Making of ‘Oppenheimer’
Contrary to all those clearly erroneous fan rumors, Christopher Nolan obviously did not detonate an atomic bomb while making the historical epic Oppenheimer. To re-create the Trinity Test — the world’s first A-bomb explosion — he and his team fired off tons of TNT, set flame to gallons of gasoline, and burned up mountains of […]
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Framing the Horrors of the Holocaust Through a 21st Century Lens: Making of ‘The Zone of Interest’
How, given the weight of history, and the history of all the other films on the subject, can you make a new film about the Holocaust? That was the central challenge facing British writer-director Jonathan Glazer and the creative team behind A24’s The Zone of Interest. “When Jon and I started, back in 2014, to talk […]
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“A Story That Broke All of Our Hearts”: The Making of ‘Origin’
Many books have been called unfilmable, but in the case of Isabel Wilkerson’s 2020 best-seller Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents, that label would hardly be an exaggeration. To start, it’s a nearly 500-page nonfiction dissertation with a heady, ambitious thesis about the foundations of social hierarchies across human history. As such, it pulls in […]
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The Making of ‘Barbie’: Margot Robbie Says the Film’s Last Line Is “The Hill I Was Ready to Die On”
In the beginning — 1959, to be exact — there was Barbie. Neither formless nor vapid, she came to the toy-playing masses with high heels and high breasts, an apparition of mock adulthood. Her creator, Ruth Handler, gave her the grown-up persona she noticed little girls transferred onto baby dolls, and a name that would […]
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The Making of ‘Maestro’: Bradley Cooper Studied Conducting for Six Years to Portray Leonard Bernstein
It’s one thing to screen your feature directorial debut for Steven Spielberg. It’s another thing to screen your feature directorial debut for Steven Spielberg as part of a job interview. But that’s where Bradley Cooper found himself in 2018, when he was attached to star as famed composer-conductor Leonard Bernstein. It was in the spring of […]
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“Every Day I Was Like, ‘What Am I Doing?’”: The Making of ‘Poor Things’
In a scene early in the movie Poor Things, Emma Stone gleefully flings some kippers across a dining table at Ramy Youssef’s face. It’s a weird and important moment, one in which Stone is establishing her character as a childlike Victorian woman, someone oblivious to social mores and free of shame. Stone and her director, […]
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“I Felt an Atonement”: The Making of ‘Killers of the Flower Moon’
Martin Scorsese had already been working on Killers of the Flower Moon for a few years when he had a startling revelation. He and screenwriter Eric Roth were adapting David Grann’s 2017 nonfiction book about a series of murders of Osage people in Oklahoma in the early 1920s with the intention that Leonardo DiCaprio would […]
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Making of ‘Past Lives’: How Celine Song’s Unusual Exercises Helped Her Cast and Crew Deliver a Lived-In Drama
To achieve the hyper-naturalistic, lived-in connections among her trio of characters in Past Lives, writer-director Celine Song put both her cast and crew through a number of unusual exercises. For Greta Lee and Teo Yoo, who play childhood soulmates Nora and Hae Sung, that meant not being allowed to physically touch until the very moment […]
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Villain or Victim, Why Top Actors Jumped to Guest-Star in ‘Poker Face’
Poker Face pulled off many things in its debut season. With its murder-mystery-of-the-week plot in a new spin on the detective genre, the Natasha Lyonne-starring Peacock series from Rian Johnson revived the concept of procedural television for streaming, saw Benjamin Bratt turn a catchy Blues Traveler song into a poetic monologue and recruited Star Wars […]
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How ‘Daisy Jones & The Six’ Became a Real (Fake) Band
Daisy Jones & The Six star Sam Claflin arrived at his final audition to play fictional 1970s rock star Billy Dunne without, by his own admission, the strongest grasp on the type of musician he was expected to embody. His future showrunners had already taken a shine to the dimpled British actor, as had music […]
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