Posted on September 12, 2016 at 8:00 am
I really enjoyed this conversation between two of Pixar’s best and most distinctive voice talents, Ellen DeGeneres (Dory) and Tom Hanks (Woody). It’s fun and has some real insight into what goes into those performances.
Posted on August 30, 2016 at 3:23 pm
Keegan DeWitt is a versatile and sought-after composer who has worked on a remarkably wide range of television and film projects. Keegan DeWitt is a versatile and accomplished composer, who has strengthened many stories across film and television. This October, his music will heighten the drama of HBO’s highly anticipated series, “Divorce,” starring Sarah Jessica Parker, Thomas Haden Church, and Molly Shannon. He wrote the scores for eight Sundance Film Festival selections including the current release “Morris From America,” starring Craig Robinson. I was very glad to get a chance to talk to him.
Music is a very important part of the storyline of “Morris in America,” with key scenes including rap and electronic music. How do you approach that?
It’s easy because Chad Hartigan and I have been friends since we were teenagers. I work with some really interesting people but it is great to be able to work with a close friend, especially because Chad and I grew up talking about movies and getting excited about movies. So the process of making a movie with somebody you went through that with is that much more rewarding. And this was one especially cool. One day Chad has this idea of, “Let’s figure out a way to make an international co-production in Germany with Americans and Germans,” so I was like “Okay,” and next thing I know, me and him are riding bikes across the park in Berlin to go to the production office and score the movie which was so great.
And then musically, it’s a tough double-edged sword in that when we sat down, we had to make so that when people watch it they will have no idea this is a score. We really wanted it to feel like the hip-hop stuff was totally authentic, real hip-hop. And the EDM with exactly the same. And so on and so forth.
And then when the score stuff happened, it just was like breathing in the film and it all felt really organic and at no point did you notice it. That’s an especially tough gamble when it is such a music-centered film and there is a ton of music in there.
It was a fun project in that I had to roll up my sleeves and go, “Okay, how do I do each of these types of music?” It was also hard because there are racial implications in it as well, just like Chad as the writer and director creating this narrative. I felt this huge spotlight on myself to not be just a white person imitating hip-hop.o for me I was really encouraged when I sat down to write like that when he’s 14. But I clued into what first got me really excited about hip-hop when I was a teenager which was the melodic stuff like De La Soul and Del the Funky Homosapien and people like that. The hip-hop that the character Morris creates is sort of goofy, like a goofier hip-hop that somebody who is coming from a slightly more naïve innocent place like Morris could get into. And so for me that was my little slot in the door. I was like, “Ah, I got it.” I could sneak in with this because this is authentic in my experience and I also think it could be authentic to Morris’ experience.
And we also thought that it was an important thing to choose hip-hop that was somewhat fun so that we weren’t trying to comment on or make things seem gritty. The thing that I thought was so rare about the script is actually like it’s just so thick with love and curiosity and all those things. And it’s like Chad said, “If you want that really gritty dark person, go see every other movie about what it’s like to be a bad teenager.” I think that’s really true. And I am always drawn to what somebody wants to do something that’s like very pop. And so I was excited to be able to do that on this as well. And then on that note also to make the electronic music feel scary too. We tried to make it really loud and aggressive so that when he’s walking up to that club on that night you feel that rock in his stomach that you would feel if you were stepping up and could just hear the pounding music from inside.
So, now that you’re working on the new “Divorce” television series, how is it different to approach a TV series versus a movie?
I was lucky on “Divorce” because it’s HBO so it super creative and artistic to begin with. And also with this show, because everyone loves Sarah Jessica Parker and Sharon Horgan the creator, there is just a reverence for them in the work they do that there is a lot of space and a lot of grace for the creative process. When I got there they pretty much shot two-thirds of everything and we really got to spend like three months just being creative.
I don’t think it’s often on a TV series that we are a month into postproduction and it feels like hanging out on a Saturday evening. We are all just talking about music and I would play them little things and they would get excited and be like, Oh, what’s the name of that type of drum?” Yeah, the Bodhrán, okay. Bodhrán, let’s go crazy on that and experiment with that. So we did like a whole week of crazy Bodhrán music and then did crazy flute music because that show is really like in the 70’s and Jethro Tull and stuff like that.
I’ve been really lucky in that way. I’ve done other stuff where you jump in and you are just creating music and you are like, “I hope that makes sense.” But with this, we really did get to begin almost as if it was a movie and go through each episode and really choose to be adventurous. I was just really lucky, especially for a relatively younger composer, to be able to be in a room that’s got that many talented people. It was an opinionated room for sure and it was a competitive kind of “Can I meet these expectations?” But that’s always exciting as long as the people are really intelligent and excited as they were.
The thing that I know that SJ fought for and resonated with me was that it’s really important that as an adult so often things can be super dark or super sad and then in the same moment totally farcical. We had to figure out ways to mix extreme happiness with awkwardness or extreme sadness with moments of real tenderness or even silliness. And so I tried to make sure that I represented all ends of the spectrum and even if I would stay on the silly side of the spectrum, there was a real humility and a real intelligence to it and then it if was sad, it still felt a little bit like off kilter, a little bit ridiculous.
Thomas Haden Church is so good in the show. He’s so funny and has such heart. One minute he’s sabotaging Jessica Parker’s life but in the other minute he’s like this dad whose family is falling apart and he’s desperately trying to keep it together. So as soon as I walked into it I knew this is an intelligent project and I really had to make sure that I continued to meet that in terms of not giving them a cue that included all of the moods and emotions.
Do you compose on the piano? Or a computer keyboard?
My main instrument is piano to compose on but this was a crazy experience in that one day we were talking about me maybe going into the project and then the next week I was flying of the New York and literally composing in the post-production office. I was just trying to be a ninja with the computer as much as I could. So there are lots of saxophones and organic things that I try to really add some humanity. And every night I would walk to the subway and be calling a bunch of people that I know all over the United States to be like, “Hey, can you send me a voice memo of you playing this theme on the saxophone but sort of make a long?” And every morning I would be getting email dispatches from players around the United States that I would then bring in and chop up and have to work on the slide to get things together.
I always say I could divide it and these two camps; the people who are great with computer and the people who are purest with real instruments. And I’m always fascinated by what if you send me a really crappy recording of your saxophone where so it feels really gritty and interesting and breathy and then I’m going to take it to the computer, re-pitch notes of it, cut it in half, slow it down, put it in double time and then once I do that with five different instruments at once it’s this really cool mix of both of those things.
I always try and remember a limitation is not a limitation. It’s like a gift, it’s a creative gift. So this thing was like how do I compose music that I have to audition in high-pressure circumstances with like 15 minute turnaround times in a production office in Greenpoint on a laptop? It’s time to treat this like it’s a scrapbook and I’ve got a bunch of scissors and paste.
Then we sit down with Sharon and SJ and everyone. It was this challenge of one group wanted a lot of the Bodhrán because it was chaotic and interesting and crazy and the other one was flute music and I was sort of jokingly at one point, “Do you realize that when you mix Irish drums with flutes you’ve got ‘Braveheart.’ I turned the flute into a saxophone because it’s got a little bit more comedy but also when used right that sound can be very emotional. So I tried to kind of leverage all of those things together and take it one notch off of what makes sense.
Posted on August 29, 2016 at 3:45 pm
“It’s kind of funny,” Glass told me, “because Jon Favreau, Bill Pope, Rob Legato, me, everyone working on the movie, all of us come from the same philosophy where more practical is better. You know we talked about CG movies, movies that were mostly done on the computer and the shortcomings or the strengths, what works and what doesn’t work, and then it’s kind of ironic because we’re making a movie that’s 98 percent computer generated. But I think that is actually good that we all had this healthy skepticism of the technology. Rob Legato is a master of the technology and so is Andy Jones the animator and Adam Valdez and Dan Lemmon. So really what we needed on this movie was kind of that spirit of doing things practically but yet we knew that a lot of it wasn’t going to be practical. But having said that there was a lot of practical stuff but it was all snippets and slices of sets and a prop sometimes like a cow bell would be real, like the stuff around Mowgli inside King Louie’s Temple next to him is real. We had some real fruit on the ground. We threw real fruit out of a fruit launcher when he throws the fruit down on the ground. But there’s some CG. You don’t know where the line begins or ends and that was kind of our intention. Jon wanted to blur the line between reality and what we create in the computer. We wanted to be fooled ourselves.”
In a non CG film you can see the footage immediately after it has been filmed. But because of all the effects, the crew would not see what the scenes looked like for months. “It wasn’t like the next day you would see the finished shot; it was an iterated thing. So our challenge was to see if we could fool one another and there were times when we were fooled, and sometimes it would be the reverse, sometime Jon would be like, ‘Oh that is so fake’, but it would be real. I would say, ‘No that’s actually my set.’ He would be like, ‘Oh, that’s the fakest part’ and I’d be ‘Oh no.’ It felt sometimes like it was backwards. There were literally times I was designing sets after we had already shot the scene physically and edited it then I would design the set; it was very odd.”
Ultimately the real and virtual worlds were so integrated that it was hard to tell where the line was. “Basically anything Mowgli is touching is mostly real. If his feet are touching it or his hands are touching it, but not always. The animals aren’t real, some trees are definitely not but a lot of the plants and the things he’s walking through are, and even the grass he is walking through when he is talking to Bagheera. We built a little strip of grass like 4 feet wide for him to walk through. Technically it served the purpose of giving him interaction. If you have to animate everything that the kid is touching and everything it would have made his task even more daunting than it already was. And if you do end up replacing stuff it’s a great lighting reference and physical interaction reference for the animator so that they can copy that when they are doing the rest of it so that it behaves in the same way or looks the same.”
Glass was very impressed with Neel Sethi, the young actor who played Mowgli, and how natural he was even when he had to imagine how it would all look. “A lot of the stuff he did do completely with nothing but blue and he did a great job. I think even well-seasoned actors have more trouble. A kid is pretending and he’s cool with it. He was talking to the puppets and it worked.”
Glass had been to India and other jungles before. “And we did have a team that went out and took at least 80,000 photographs of India. We had research that were on for many, many months; we just researched everything that we could. We used the Internet, we used books, we called consulates, we talked to directors who were shooting. There was the “Monkey Kingdom” movie that was shot in Sri Lanka and India. We talked to them about monkeys, how they behave and what kind of places they lived and they showed us their footage. We discovered the pangolin, the weird-looking scaly animal that’s highly endangered and I said, ‘Oh let’s put that in the movie.’ We took some liberties but we really tried to keep everything as something that could be realistically found in India. Now obviously we have exaggerated sizes, and we created a world that was more like the composite of India because the kid really couldn’t walk from a really jungle area to a really desert-y area overnight like that. In reality that would take months and weeks. And we looked at the Disney ’67 movie and we had to incorporate the feeling much of that film, too. It’s more colorful, with more flowers, more whimsy and I had to bring that into the real rendering of the plants and things. We tried to find the balance of where it starts to looked too weird, where it looked good. So it was all just a lot of experimentation and a lot of research.”
Posted on August 22, 2016 at 2:28 pm
I loved the 80’s-throwback Netflix series “Stranger Things,” created by twin brothers Matt and Ross Duffer. And it made me think about the many other siblings working together to make movies.
The Russo brothers Joe and Anthony Russo directed the last two “Captain America” movies and are going to direct the next Avengers film. They also worked on one of my favorite television series, “Happy Endings,” and on cult favorite “Arrested Development.”
Lana Wachowski and Lilly Wachowski are known for their striking visuals and mind-bending storylines in “The Matrix” trilogy, “Cloud Atlas,” and the underrated “Speed Racer,” and “Jupiter Ascending.”
Joel and Ethan Coen are known for critically acclaimed for films like “Fargo,” “Inside Llewyn Davis,” “True Grit,” “No Country for Old Men,” “Barton Fink,” and “Raising Arizona.”
Mark and Jay Duplass began with “mumblecore” indies like “The Puffy Chair” and “Jeff Who Lives at Home.” They both act, write, and direct. Jay appears in “Transparent” and Mark in “Togetherness.”
As Team Todd, producers Suzanne and Jennifer Todd are behind the franchise powerhouse “Austin Powers” and critic darling indies like “Celeste and Jesse Forever.”
Jenniphr and Greer Goodman worked together on “The Tao of Steve,” Jenniphr directing and Greer co-writing and starring. Their sister Dana also has a small role. I love that movie, and I hope to see more of their work some day soon.
Posted on August 18, 2016 at 1:21 pm
It takes a lot of courage to re-make a film that holds the record (tied with “Titanic” and “Lord of the Rings”) for the most Oscars, but producer Roma Downey has more than updated movie-making technology to bring to “Ben-Hur.” After the success of their previous Biblical epics “The Bible” and “A.D.” they wanted to tell a story from the era with another perspective. The 1870 Lew Wallace novel Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ is adjacent to the story of Jesus, and that gave them the chance to tell non-Biblical story about a personal journey with exciting adventures and profound inspiration.
In an interview Downey spoke about what led them to the project and what they hope people will learn from it — and about how many cameras were used to create the thrillingly dynamic chariot race scene.
How do you begin to think about topping one of the most famous scenes in movie history, the 1959 “Ben-Hur” chariot race?
It is the most breathtaking scene in the film, there’s no question about that. You will inhale when those chariots come out of the starting gate. Eight chariots, 32 horses come charging down that track and chances are you won’t exhale until one of them crosses the finish line. It is really amazing. Timur Bekmambetov, our director, did an incredible job. He studied at NASCAR, he looked at Formula 1. He figured out all these different and exciting places he can place a small camera, in the wheels of the chariot, between the ears of the horses, on the armor of the riders. He even put a GoPro in an old soccer ball in the middle of the track so the chariots rode over the top of it. And then when he cuts all these things together from all these different angles, it builds the most exciting sequence that you’re going to see on screen this summer.
And how did you select Jack Huston for the role that Charlton Heston made so iconic? Tell me about the cast.
He is just a really hot up-and-coming actor, and this role of Judah Ben-Hur is certain to be a star-making role for him. I’m sure it will make him a household name. He has all the qualities that we were looking for, an actor who could be princely, who could play the young Prince Judah at the start of the movie. And he played so well the physical; he is athletic. The chariot race isn’t just all stunt doubles and body doubles, this guy was really at the reins of these horses, he was really out there courageously coming down that track, riding that chariot. And he also has a beautiful vulnerability. Remember it’s a character who is confined with his heart set on revenge but because of an encounter with Jesus his heart softens and opens even into a desire to be reconciled even into forgiveness. We needed an actor who could display vulnerability for that broken period of life. So I think that you will agree that his performance is just amazing. And of course we also have Toby Kebbell who plays Messala, the adopted brother. Their on-screen chemistry is amazing. And last but not least the great Morgan Freeman playing the role of Ilderrim and the Brazilian superstar Rodrigo Santoro, who plays the role of Jesus for us, a very important role in this film, differing from the 1959 version that really had more of a sense of Jesus, we never really got to meet Jesus the man, we never got to see his face, we never really got to hear his message. In our film we made certain that Jesus was an important character and you get to see him interact with people, you get to see how he engages with the characters and you get to see how he transforms particularly the heart of our leading character Ben-Hur.
I’ve done a lot of research about all the various versions of this story going back to the book published in 1870. Was your first exposure the Charlton Heston movie?
Yes, it was. I have very vivid memories of curling up with my family every Easter in our little home in Northern Ireland watching Ben-Hur. I have the loveliest memories of that movie but you know the truth is it was fifty-five years ago. The world that we live in has changed since then and our expectations of what we hope to see on screen have changed since then, cinema has changed and editing styles are faster. It was a very long idea with an intermission in the middle of it and I don’t know if the audience really would be willing to sit that long for a movie anymore. And also I think the acting style has changed. We now expect a more naturalistic acting style. And of course what we are able to achieve through special effects has transformed amazingly in the last 50 years. We have kids at home, Mark and I, and when we told them that we were going to be on the producing team of Ben-Hur they actually responded, “Ben who?” indicating to us that there is a whole new generation that actually doesn’t know the story, hasn’t seen it, haven’t even heard of it and so we believe it’s a whole new audience who will be excited to see this great story back on the big screen.
What was it like to tell another Biblical era story from the perspective of a fictional character whose story only touches briefly on Jesus?
“The Bible” and “The Son of God” were 100% focused on the Bible or Jesus or the apostles. We loved making this movie which follows Lew Wallace’s story because of the way that he used Jesus as a smaller part of a bigger story. In the same way this movie will appeal to a very widespread large audience because in the end it’s an entertaining fun big action adventure movie. Woven through it however, is this beautiful story of an encounter with Jesus which changes everything and so I think we have been very faithful to the spirit and the intentions of Lew Wallace.
As the producer, you have to worry about everything. What worried you the most?
We talked about the chariot race and you can only imagine what a logistically complicated project that was. It takes a village to make a movie and thank God on “Ben-Hur” the village was populated with the very best in business, the best horse trainers, the best stunt men, the best camera men, the best special effects team, an amazing director, cinematographer and so on, an incredible group. But I know that the one thing that weighed heavily on our hearts in the shooting of that sequence was safety, first and foremost, that there would be no injury to people and no injury to horses. And so we were very relieved when after two months of principal and second unit photography that sequence finally wrapped.
A scene that was also incredibly moving and extraordinary to recreate was the crucifixion scene. As producers it is our third crucifixion scene in our three years that we’ve got to do that with the Bible series of course which then became “Son of God” and then again with “A.D. The Bible Continues,” so Rodrigo Santoro was the third Jesus that we have cast in a picture and when we hung him from a cross it was the third time that we had re-created the scene. It is a somber set as it always is. Even though it’s a movie you can’t help but being moved by the violent nature of the method of murder and the intensity of just that scene and knowing that Jesus offered himself willingly is incredibly humbling.
It was an extremely cold morning, which presented its own set of challenges for Rodrigo, especially, who had to strip off. The rest of us had the luxury of warm coats and gloves, but he had to be stripped off and be hung from a cross for a long time. We filmed the entire sequence. We know that Jesus said seven things from the cross, so we actually filmed all of that. We weren’t sure what would end up in the movie but the words that Judah needed to hear, the most important things that he needed to hear was on forgiveness: “Father forgive them for they know not what they do.” It’s in that moment that Judah realizes that he could lay down his hate, that he could set down his anger. His heart is opened and he realizes the only way forward is to forgive and that ultimately is a message of the movie. That vengeance doesn’t work, that it will just leave you empty, it doesn’t to get you anywhere and as Jesus said the only way forward is love and forgiveness.
