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    ‘God Is a Bullet’ Review: Cult, but Not Classic

    A kidnapping cult regrets making off with a detective’s daughter in this wearyingly unsavory movie.I didn’t count the number of times a woman’s face is smashed — by a fist, a boot, a brick wall — in “God Is a Bullet,” Nick Cassavetes’s first feature in almost a decade. But the misogyny of the movie’s risibly sadistic villains is only one distasteful thread in this sleazy saga of rescue and revenge.Adapted by Cassavetes from Boston Teran’s 1999 novel of the same name, the plot centers on Bob Hightower (Nikolaj Coster-Waldau), a mild-mannered detective, as he searches for the child-trafficking cult that has murdered his ex-wife and abducted his daughter. Impassive behind a despairing mustache, Bob welcomes the foulmouthed assistance of Case (Maika Monroe), a battle-hardened cult escapee. Case possesses intimate knowledge of the gang’s degenerate leader, Cyrus (a crazy-eyed Karl Glusman), for whom she has sacrificed several teeth and most of her self-respect.The searchers don’t have much of a plan, drifting through the dim rooms and dusty outposts where Cyrus and his acolytes might be found. Jamie Foxx, inexplicably named The Ferryman, is around to provide Bob with tattoos and ammunition, and an almost unrecognizable January Jones appears briefly as a sneering drunk whose pertinence remains vague — at least to anyone as numbed by the film’s viciousness as I was.Coming in at an interminable 155 minutes, “God Is a Bullet” has a punishing implacability. The acting is workmanlike, the settings are often ugly and the special effects — especially a grisly stomach-stapling — can only be described as strenuously specific. For Cassavetes, this may be as far from “The Notebook” as he is ever likely to get.God Is a BulletNot rated. Running time: 2 hours 35 minutes. In theaters. More

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    ‘Revoir Paris’ Review: Recovering Fragments of Memory

    In Alice Winocour’s taut film, a woman survives a terrorist and tries to piece together what happened that day and how it changed her.When Mia, the heroine of the tense French drama “Revoir Paris,” thinks about the night her life changed, her face seems to drain of all feeling, almost as if she were emptying it out. Months earlier, she survived a terrorist attack, but now she can’t remember much of what happened that evening. All she retains are vivid fragments — an image of a birthday cake ablaze with candles, the steady pounding of torrential rain — that she can’t piece together. The past may be a foreign country, but for Mia it’s one that also now lies partly in ruin.“Revoir Paris” is about grief and pain and pushing through to the next day. More centrally, it is about how trauma changes memory, sometimes shattering and distorting it. That makes it about storytelling and the stories that we tell to, and about, ourselves, which means that it’s about identity. The assault shapes Mia’s life and has come to define her: She’s now a survivor. Yet the catastrophe remains out of reach. “Maybe you’re not ready to talk,” a well-meaning friend says, not understanding that without her memories, Mia can’t yet fully tell her story.The movie opens on a day seemingly like any other, although there’s a pronounced elegiac cast to the instrumental music and the piercing violin notes. For Mia — an emotionally vivid Virginie Efira — it begins with morning coffee for her and a bowl of food for her cat. Then she’s off to her day job as a translator, winding through the streets on her Triumph motorcycle. (Yes, she is independent; yes, the make is too on point.) Later, she has dinner with her lover, Vincent (Grégoire Colin), a surgeon who’s soon called back to work. She heads home alone, but when it starts pouring, she stops in another bistro to get out of the rain.What happened next is the question — an empirical fact that the writer-director Alice Winocour skillfully turns into a taut existential mystery, one in which Mia is both the victim and the lead investigator. Part of what gives the mystery its power and feeling is that there’s a good chance you know exactly what took place: On Nov. 13, 2015, Islamic State extremists initiated a series of coordinated terrorist attacks in Paris using guns and explosives. During the assault, 130 people were killed and hundreds more were wounded in locations across the city, including at the Bataclan concert hall. In interviews, Winocour has said that her brother was among the Bataclan concertgoers; he survived.“Revoir Paris” opens the morning of the attack, but soon after the assault ends, the story jumps forward several months. It resumes with Mia in a medical office, a doctor closely examining a jagged scar on her abdomen. She has been away from Paris and staying with her mother, an interlude that Winocour skips entirely. Instead, you follow Mia as she goes about her everyday life while beginning to reconstruct the night. As the past returns — in elliptical bursts and then in lengthier passages — Mia’s splintered memories gradually form a coherent whole, making her the author of a harrowing story within a story.Winocour’s approach is by turns discreet and direct. While Mia putters in her kitchen on the morning of the attack, for instance, she drops a wine glass on her floor, breaking it, an eerie foreshadowing of the shattered glass that will carpet the bistro floor hours later. Winocour largely avoids showing that night’s visceral horrors, abstaining from gruesome spectacle in favor of shocking pinpricks: the sound of a gasping scream, an image of a shoeless foot. Using all the tools at her disposal — narrative compression, sinewy camerawork, sharp editing, an ethereal score, stricken faces — Winocour powerfully conveys the unspeakable.As it develops, “Revoir Paris” becomes perilously overplotted. Mia connects with a group of survivors, including a teenager (Nastya Golubeva), whose parents died in the attack, as well as another unlucky restaurant patron (Benoît Magimel). The three share memories and sometimes more, forming an ad hoc support group as Mia sets out to find another survivor, Assane (Amadou Mbow), a search that takes her down unpersuasive byways. Yet even as Winocour piles on too many complications, she retains an appreciable astringency — call it a sense of emotional realism about what it means to actually survive — that keeps bathos at bay. Together with the superb Efira, she earns your tears honestly.Revoir ParisNot rated. In French, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 45 minutes. In theaters. More

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    ‘Rock & Roll Man’ Review: An Alan Freed Biography

    A bio-show about the radio D.J. Alan Freed, one of rock music’s early popularizers, dutifully plays the hits.The musical “Rock & Roll Man” starts with an attention-grabbing gambit: It is 1965, and J. Edgar Hoover is prosecuting the D.J. and promoter Alan Freed, then at death’s door. Hoover has accused Freed of destroying “the American way of life by inventing the genre of music which you named rock and roll.”A good clue that the scene takes place not in reality but in the mind of the ailing Freed (Constantine Maroulis, from “Rock of Ages” and “Jekyll & Hyde”) is that he is defended by Little Richard (Rodrick Covington) — who is quick to point out that his client did not actually invent rock.What Freed did do was play R&B singles on the radio shows he hosted in Cleveland and then New York, introducing so-called race records to white audiences. He then marketed the music as “rock and roll.”The bulk of this bio-show, which opened on Wednesday at New World Stages, consists of a flashback that unfurls infinitely more conventionally than the prologue.In the early 1950s, Freed discovers new sounds at a record store run by Leo Mintz (Joe Pantoliano), and he immediately falls in love with the raucous music bringing white and Black teenagers together. His growing success as a D.J. takes him to New York, where he starts associating with Morris Levy (Pantoliano again), the shady record label and nightclub owner.Gary Kupper, Larry Marshak and Rose Caiola’s book dutifully strings together a parade of hits by the likes of LaVern Baker (Valisia LeKae), Jerry Lee Lewis (Dominique Scott), Chuck Berry and Screamin’ Jay Hawkins (both played by Matthew S. Morgan). But Randal Myler’s production never generates early rock’s chaotic, often suggestive energy. Freed may have imagined the trial, but it reflects a time when rock was seen as an attack on the sexual and racial order; the show, however, make it hard to understand why Freed and the artists he championed were seen as a threat to American values.Freed was an interesting fellow, and his life was plenty rock ’n’ roll. Unfortunately, the show mostly skims over the fact that in addition to hobnobbing with Levy — they both eventually went down for payola — Freed overindulged in booze and women. The storytelling is especially haphazard when dealing with his family life.Even worse is that since Freed himself did not sing, Maroulis — a former “American Idol” contestant who is the rare musical-theater performer able to convincingly rock — doesn’t get to do any of the hits and is instead stuck performing perfunctory originals written by Kupper. He gets to let loose a little on the title number, at the very end of the show, but by then it’s too little and way too late.Rock & Roll ManAt New World Stages, Manhattan; newworldstages.com. Running time: 2 hours. More

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    Oscars’ Best Picture Hopefuls Must Spend More Time in Theaters

    To be eligible for the academy’s top prize, films will need to have an initial theatrical run of a week in one of six U.S. cities, and then expand to other cities across the country.In a move designed to signal Hollywood’s commitment to the moviegoing experience, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences said on Wednesday that it would require an expanded theatrical release for films seeking to be eligible for a best picture nomination.The new eligibility rule is sure to affect how Netflix and other streaming services release films they consider to be Oscar worthy. And it could be an impediment to smaller distributors that lack the means to release films in cities across the United States.Oscar-oriented films have struggled mightily at the box office in recent years, making some people wonder if the importance of big screens has been forever altered by the streaming era. In 2022, “CODA” from Apple TV+ was the first film from a streaming service to win the best picture Oscar.To be eligible for a best picture nomination, films are already required to have an initial qualifying run in theaters, defined as a one-week release in one of six U.S. cities (New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Atlanta, San Francisco or Miami). Beginning in 2024, those films will also need a theatrical presence for another seven days (either consecutive or nonconsecutive) in 10 of the top 50 U.S. markets, no later than 45 days after its initial release. Two of the 10 markets in the expanded release can be outside the United States if they are among the top 15 international theatrical markets.The move, voted on by the academy’s board of governors at its most recent meeting, is a clear attempt to prevent streaming companies like Netflix, which prefer to release films on their services with as little theatrical presence as possible, from eroding the moviegoing experience.“It is our hope that this expanded theatrical footprint will increase the visibility of films worldwide and encourage audiences to experience our art form in a theatrical setting,” the academy’s chief executive, Bill Kramer, and president, Janet Yang, said in a statement. “Based on many conversations with industry partners, we feel that this evolution benefits film artists and movie lovers alike.”For films released late in the year, the distributors must submit their plans for the expanded release. Those plans must be completed no later than Jan. 24, 2025, for the 2024 films.Netflix said the eligibility requirements would not have a significant effect on its release strategy. It noted that “All Quiet on the Western Front,” which was nominated for best picture this year, was released in 35 theaters in 20 cities, including New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco and Toronto. More

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    A Britney Spears Jukebox Musical Hopes for #SeeBritney Energy

    “Once Upon a One More Time” is bringing hits like “Toxic” and “Circus” to Broadway. Will Spears’s fiercely protective base embrace it?The book writer for “Once Upon a One More Time,” the Britney Spears jukebox musical opening on Broadway Thursday night, often returns to a memory from five years ago, when Spears sat in a Manhattan theater a few rows in front of him and watched an early reading of the show.“I was just watching her and it was like, ‘Is she going to like this?’” the writer, Jon Hartmere, said recently, recalling his relief whenever he saw Spears clap along or smile as one of her songs came on. “It was pure delight.”A campy fairy-tale spoof that sidesteps the bio-musical formula to focus on a cast of disillusioned Disney princesses and storybook protagonists, “Once Upon a One More Time” is the latest in a long line of jukebox musicals that have plumbed the catalogs of acts including Frankie Valli and the Four Seasons, Michael Jackson, Tina Turner and the Temptations in pursuit of box office gold.The musical offers Spears-themed merchandise.Ye Fan for The New York TimesWith a track list stacked with hits such as “Stronger,” “Toxic” and “Circus,” the show has the potential for boffo success, but it also faces unique challenges. Originally conceived when Spears was under a conservatorship that gave her father vast control over her life, the production has assured fans that the show was fully authorized by the pop star herself after she was freed from the arrangement. But it is unclear how much her fiercely loyal fan base — whose activism helped fuel the unraveling of the conservatorship — will embrace it. It would likely only take one spirited comment from Spears, a 41-year-old star with a reputation for unfiltered and unpredictable social media posts, to win or lose that audience.Fans inside and outside the production have been keeping a close eye on Spears’s famously active Instagram account to see if she opines on the show (she hasn’t, yet). And cast and crew members have sought assurances internally that the production’s profits are benefiting Spears herself, rather than her former managers or her father, James P. Spears, who was named her conservator amid concerns about her mental health and went on to exercise control over her personal life and finances for more than a decade, even as she continued to perform.“As artists, we just want her to be able to make her own decisions and to live her life the way she hoped to,” said Keone Madrid, who directed and choreographed the show with his creative partner and wife, Mari Madrid. “We all yearn to honor her work.”Hunter Arnold, one of the show’s lead producers, said Spears signed the contract herself after the conservatorship was terminated and that no one else in Spears’s camp currently has a deal to receive profits.The outfit Taylor McKenzie wore to the musical was inspired by the one that Spears wore in the “Baby One More Time” video.Ye Fan for The New York TimesA representative for Spears did not make her available for an interview but confirmed the timing of the most recent deal and added that the singer had provided notes in response to videos of the Madrids’ choreography.The opening comes at a time when Spears’s life has continued to be the subject of gossip items. Since the legal arrangement was terminated, Spears has announced her marriage to Sam Asghari, something she had said she was not able to do under the conservatorship, and briefly returned to the music industry, releasing a track with Elton John. The legal battle over winding down the conservatorship has continued in Los Angeles, where her lawyers have lodged objections to some of the accounting during the conservatorship years.Within the production, the desire to please Spears has sometimes meant seizing on the dribs and drabs of information that they get from representatives of a reclusive megastar.Britney likes fairy tales? The show is based in a world where Cinderella, Snow White and Rapunzel are friends. Britney loves butterflies? The production made props of the insects and made the show’s branding into what looks like butterfly-shaped rainbow floodlights, which theatergoers can pose with outside the theater. (“That might be an example of where we had tried to lean in too hard,” Hartmere said of the show’s monthlong tryout in Washington, D.C., noting that the show had gotten rid of a “butterfly vortex” for the Broadway production.)”Once Upon a One More Time” invites fans to pose for shareable pictures. “The spirit of it has always been serving her desires,” Arnold said.Because of revelations around how Spears’s father and former management company benefited financially from the conservatorship, the musical’s financial structure has been a central point of scrutiny for some fans.Initially, production papers from late 2019 listed a company called Shiloh Standing, Inc., which was started by Spears’s father shortly after the creation of the conservatorship, as being entitled to 7.5 percent of the production’s net profits, according to documents filed with New York State’s attorney general’s office. Larry Rudolph, Spears’s former manager, was also slated to receive funds, including a $30,000 executive producer fee, plus $1,500 per week.The show’s creators have tried to cater to the wishes of Spears and her fandom.Ye Fan for The New York TimesBut plans for a short run in Chicago in 2020, followed by a Broadway transfer, were scuttled by the pandemic, the show was put on hold and, in that time, Spears’s world was transformed. Leslie Papa, a spokeswoman for the show, said that Spears’s contract was negotiated and signed in 2022, after the termination of the conservatorship, and provides all compensation directly to her.Arnold said Spears has a stake in the show’s royalties through music licensing proceeds, in addition to an underlying rights deal, which he said was carved out in recognition of her role in popularizing the music, even if other lyricists and music producers own much of the rights to the songs. He declined to specify the exact payment structure for Spears, and it is not included in government filings thus far.According to a copy of a 2022 budget for the Broadway musical that was shared with The New York Times by someone who was not authorized to discuss the production, the advance payment for the underlying rights deal associated with the show was $80,000. Arnold noted that with successful Broadway shows, royalties often quickly outpace initial advances.Several high school seniors from Pennsylvania came to see the show. Ye Fan for The New York TimesSo far some of the biggest social media accounts associated with the movement to end the conservatorship, known as #FreeBritney, have said little about the musical, especially in contrast to the fan excitement around the Elton John collaboration.But many of the ticket holders at previews at the Marquis Theater are quick to label themselves as devoted Britney fans, and they react with delight at the show’s many knowing references to the pop star, which include a snippet of the original choreography from “Oops! … I Did It Again” that tends to make the audience erupt. Because they spent their early teenage years internalizing Spears’s dancing on MTV, the Madrids, who are known for their narrative choreography and staccato isolations, consider themselves “natural extensions of her and her work.”“Her music has always been around in my life in one way or another,” Mari Madrid said.Those references are like a running inside joke that most of the audience seems to understand. The crowd doesn’t hear the word “Britney” through the entire show — it’s only at the end that the speakers blast the pop star’s most famous opening line: “It’s Britney, bitch.” None of the show’s official merchandise carries Spears’s image, but one fast-selling tote bag proclaims, “It’s Broadway, bitch.”Stoyanka Damyanova, who is visiting from Bulgaria, was there seeing the musical for the third time.Ye Fan for The New York TimesNelson Saavedra Jr., the owner of the #FreeBritney page on Reddit, has opted to support the show and has attended two preview performances already, noting that any direct assessment from Spears would influence his own thinking on it.“Britney signed the deal after she was free so let’s just move on and take that at face value,” Saavedra said. “Of course, that would change tomorrow if she said, ‘Please don’t go see this play.’”Audience members can be forgiven for thinking that the musical’s central theme — a cohort of famed damsels in distress taking control of their own lives — is some grand metaphor for Spears’s release from the conservatorship, but Hartmere said the parallels are just coincidence.“It’s this story about women learning what they can and should have out of life,” Hartmere said. “That’s always been the story from the get-go.”For Hartmere, returning to that memory of Spears watching that early performance also engenders some anxiety: What if she ends up disappointed that some songs did not make the final cut? The show’s creators could not figure out how to make the risqué lyrics from her 2016 track “Clumsy” fit for children, so the song was removed.Right now, the creators can only wait to see if Spears decides to attend a performance — which, they acknowledge, is anyone’s best guess.Michael Paulson and Liz Day contributed reporting. More

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    Popcast (Deluxe): Pharrell Williams at Louis Vuitton and Gunna’s New LP

    Subscribe to Popcast!Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Stitcher | Amazon MusicThis week’s episode of Popcast (Deluxe), the weekly culture roundup show on YouTube hosted by Jon Caramanica and Joe Coscarelli, includes segments on:The story behind Pharrell Williams’s ascension to the men’s creative director chair at Louis Vuitton following the death of Virgil Abloh, and the role of global celebrity in high fashionA Paris cultural report, including recent French rap and the exhibits at Musée d’OrsayInspired by a viewer question, a conversation about hip-hop’s lack of Billboard chart penetration this yearGunna’s new LP, which has a chance of reaching the top spot on the Billboard album chartA new song from Certified Trapper and an old song by Big Pokey, who died on SundaySnack of the weekConnect With Popcast. Become a part of the Popcast community: Join the show’s Facebook group and Discord channel. We want to hear from you! Tune in, and tell us what you think at popcast@nytimes.com. More

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    Wes Anderson’s Secret Weapon: The Camera Moves of Sanjay Sami

    Sami brings ingenious design, a D.I.Y. spirit and pure athletic ability to the job of key grip — pushing and pulling heavy camera rigs with exacting precision.Wes Anderson’s intricate films are known for their jewel box sets, vibrant costumes and starry ensemble casts. But there’s another element that gives his movies their distinctive look and feel, and it comes in the form of a 52-year-old grip.Sanjay Sami, a native of Mumbai, India, got his start on Bollywood movies and has been working with Anderson since 2006, mostly as a dolly grip. It’s a rough job, pushing and pulling a camera mounted on a dolly — a setup weighing up to 900 pounds — along hundreds of feet of track built for a scene, and Sami has engineered, invented and refined it into an art form.On a typical movie, a dolly might move the camera left to right or back and forth. In the Wesiverse, it goes in all those directions — and sometimes up and down, too — in a single tracking shot, allowing, Anderson said, for unbroken expression. “It means the actors can stay in real time, and you can create something that really exists, in front of the camera.”Equal parts ingenious designer, D.I.Y. repair guru, rail engineer, cineaste and athlete, Sami is, according to many cast and crew members, Anderson’s secret weapon.“He can masterfully execute the most intricate camera moves I’ve ever seen,” said Adrien Brody, a frequent Anderson star, who called Sami “exacting and relentless and extremely devoted.”Last year, on “The French Dispatch,” Sami executed the most complicated shot of his career, a 70-second walk-and-talk through an unusually active police station, performed as a monologue by Jeffrey Wright, with the dolly speeding up and slowing down to keep pace with his clipped delivery.Sami moving the camera so it follows, from left, Jason Schwartzman, Jake Ryan and Tom Hanks for an “Asteroid City” shot.via Focus FeaturesThis year, Sami topped that with a scene in “Asteroid City,” Anderson’s latest, in which Brody moves through a long theater space in an exquisitely detailed choreography of sets, props, walls, actors, dialogue and camera, which “has to come off of a set of tracks and then be loaded seamlessly onto another set of tracks and hit numerous precise marks at very specific timings,” Brody noted.Another complex moment came early on in “Asteroid City,” filmed in Spain and set in an eerie, midcentury Southwestern landscape. Wright, playing a general, gives a speech to a young group of astronomers and junior scientists, as the camera moves back and forth and side to side (almost a star pattern) on a triple-layered track, setting the scene and building a sense of Wright’s character.The director Wes Anderson narrates a sequence from his film, featuring Jeffrey Wright.Focus Features“There’s a lot of responsibility, because we are the viewer’s eyes,” Sami said, in a video interview from his home in Mumbai. “We’re moving the emotion and the story, more than just moving the camera.”Anderson sends Sami scripts early on in his projects, and then the animatics — rough animations that convey the long tracking shots the filmmaker likes. “He’s the one who points out, ‘This is tricky,’” Anderson said. “He’ll express the physics of it to me.”And then Sami bends the usual laws of cinema, inventing a new rig or ordering an unheard-of amount of track, where other filmmakers might resort to green screens or other visual effects. “The thing I love is, with Sanjay, we essentially are using the same equipment that we might have used on a movie 75 years ago,” Anderson said, “but we’re arranging it in a way that it hasn’t been arranged before.”In a scene in “The French Dispatch,” for example, Owen Wilson’s character arrives riding a bicycle, and the camera tracking him has to quickly start and stop at the same rate that he does — one of Anderson’s visual signatures. “But we’re accelerating a huge amount of weight from a standstill on one grip’s power, as opposed to a light bicycle that he’s already at speed with,” Sami said. So he concocted a system involving a bungee cord anchored to a truck that could spring the camera up to the right velocity instantly.“I think what he likes about working with me is that I hate saying no to anything,” said Sami, who has also worked with Christopher Nolan. “No matter how crazy the demand is, I always want to find a solution. Maybe a crazy solution. That’s part of what makes my job really interesting.”“Sometimes the crazier the method, the happier he is,” he added of Anderson.Sami has worked on Anderson’s commercial projects and every live action film since “The Darjeeling Limited” (2007), when he impressed the filmmaker by devising a way to fit a dolly into the narrow old rail cars they used as a set: he mounted a hidden track on the train’s ceiling.To achieve Anderson’s vision, Sami must often run at full speed, weighted down with gear — a Steadicam, which he also operates, is over 60 pounds — spin around and come to an abrupt, dizzying halt. “It’s 10 or 12 hours of very, very physical work,” he said. “It’s not just endurance — you need a huge amount of strength to be able to stop and start those moves, or you’re going to hurt yourself.”So he has an exercise regimen of daily resistance training specifically for an Anderson flick. “I used to play rugby, and a lot of the rugby training crosses over,” he said.Before he got into movies, Sami was an industrial diver and underwater welder, working on oil rigs. He got his start in the film industry during a marine contractor strike, when a friend invited him onto a set. “I saw this traveling circus full of crazy people who come together briefly, make a movie. And then it’s another movie — same circus, different clowns,” he said. “I loved it.” (He also has a degree in political science — a fanciful enough background that he himself could be a Wes Anderson character: the Life Aquatic, and on the Rails, with Sanjay Sami.)Collaborating with Adam Stockhausen, Anderson’s production designer, and Robert Yeoman, the cinematographer, Sami — whose official title is key grip, the head of his department — has an unusual amount of input. “He’s sort of a producer for us,” Anderson said. “He helps us figure out how we’re going to get things done. And he’s a good manager of people. So his voice comes into the discussion in ways that have nothing to do with pushing a dolly.”Sometimes the simplest-seeming shots are also the most difficult to create. For a carousel scene in “The Grand Budapest Hotel,” using a real ride wouldn’t match Anderson’s slightly surreal concept. Instead, they built a circular track with a pie-shaped platform atop it, and more track atop that. It was capped by a skateboard-style dolly, for the carousel horse. Once it rolled into the frame and the actress Saoirse Ronan hopped on, two off-camera grips clamped it down. “And then we start pushing the whole pie-shaped wooden piece on the circular track,” Sami said. The moment lasts barely 40 seconds, but it “always stands out to me, because it was the beginning of some of the more complex things that we started doing.”Beyond the dense, staccato paragraphs and action Anderson’s scripts require of the big stars, a battalion of extras — not always trained actors; he likes to hire locals on location — must nail every tiny detail, like smoothing a mustache or blowing a smoke ring, at the exact right moment, in the right sequence, to cue each other and the camera. There are verbal, visual and motion cues, all marks to hit with strict precision. “Two inches is a mile to Wes,” Sami said. “He’ll notice if you’re off by three millimeters.” (Sami uses lasers to guide his positioning.)And they don’t just run these scenes a handful of times. “Sometimes, by the time everyone’s got their part of the choreography together, we’re on Take 25 or 27,” he said. “And when you start getting into those numbers, if the actors all get it right and you get it wrong, no one’s going to remember anything except the fact that you blew that good take.”Sami, Yeoman and Anderson on the set. “There’s a lot of responsibility, because we are the viewer’s eyes,” Sami said. “We’re moving the emotion and the story, more than just moving the camera.”via Focus FeaturesAnderson swore he didn’t intentionally challenge his grip to new heights with every project; it just happens. “But I do like to feel free to do whatever we might picture, and to know that Sanjay will find a way,” he said. On a forthcoming Netflix short, “The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar,” based on a Roald Dahl tale, Sami literally sent the camera soaring. “He built a track going up into the sky at an angle,” Anderson said. It leans like a ladder in midair, “and the camera is on another track with a jib arm and a dolly attached to the top of the jib.”For Sami, all the sweat, effort and dizzy spells are worth it when he sees the finished product onscreen. “I’ve done more than 80 feature films, and the ones I’m most proud of are the ones that we do with Wes,” he said, “because it’s just work that, for me, from a grip point of view, doesn’t exist outside of this world.” More

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    Pink Floyd, ‘The Wizard of Oz’ and Me

    Last October, when Roger Waters brought his “This Is Not a Drill” tour through Austin, Texas, he also took the time to record a nearly three-hour appearance on “The Joe Rogan Experience” podcast. These are typically rambling affairs, guided by the host’s idiosyncratic curiosities, and about halfway through, following a riff by Waters about nuclear […] More