Subterms
The floor creaks, the music turns ominous and an uneasy quiet sets in. Then BAM! It’s the classic jump scare. This staple of horror movies, when done well, is instantly memorable. With Times film writers, filmmakers and stars weighing in, we ranked the 25 jump scares that still get us every time. WARNINGThis article contains […] More
Crombie was perhaps best known for playing “Crazy” Joe Davola on the hit television sitcom.Peter Crombie, the actor who was probably best known for playing the role of “Crazy” Joe Davola on five episodes of the hit television sitcom “Seinfeld,” died on Wednesday in a health care facility in Palm Springs, Calif. He was 71.Crombie had been recovering from unspecified surgery, said his ex-wife, Nadine Kijner, who confirmed his death.In his role as Davola, Crombie played a temperamental character who stalks Jerry — a semi-fictionalized version of the comedian Jerry Seinfeld — and develops a deep hatred of him.Tall and lanky, Crombie’s character had a flat, borderline menacing affect and an unblinking 1,000-yard stare. In the series, he also stalked the tough New Yorker Elaine, in one case plastering a wall of his apartment with black-and-white surveillance photos of her.Aside from his part in “Seinfeld,” Crombie also had roles in the movies “Seven” (1995), “Rising Sun” (1993) and “Born on the Fourth of July” (1989), among other acting television and movie credits.Crombie was born on June 26, 1952, and grew up in a neighborhood outside of Chicago.His father was an art teacher, and his mother taught home economics, Ms. Kijner said. Crombie trained at the Yale School of Drama before moving to New York.Crombie and Kijner met in Boston in the late 1980s before marrying in 1991. Though they divorced after about six years of marriage, the two remained friends.“He was like a rock,” she said. “He was someone you could always call and lean on.”Kijner said Crombie is survived by a brother, Jim. She said Crombie stepped back from acting around 2000, and worked on his other passion, one of which was writing.The comedian Lewis Black commemorated Crombie on social media, calling him a “wonderful actor” and an “immensely talented writer.”“More importantly he was as sweet as he was intelligent and I am a better person for knowing him,” Mr. Black wrote.Larry Charles, a “Seinfeld” writer, also mourned Mr. Crombie.“His portrayal of Joe Davola managed to feel real and grounded and psychopathic and absurd and hilarious all at the same time,” Mr. Charles wrote on social media. “This was a juxtaposition I was always seeking on my Seinfeld episodes and reached a climax of sorts with ‘The Opera.’ Seinfeld was a sitcom that could make you uncomfortable and no guest actor walked that line better than Peter.” More
Erik Messerschmidt worked with the directors Michael Mann and David Fincher to create cohesive worlds that feel nothing alike.Michael Mann’s new drama “Ferrari,” about several important weeks in the life of the racecar driver and manufacturer Enzo Ferrari, is many things: biographical drama, thriller, period costume film, and also a story about business rivalries, domestic disputes and personal grief. Adam Driver plays the automotive magnate as a man divided between his obsessive pursuit of professional glory and his straining responsibilities as a husband and father. Accordingly Mann approaches these two worlds with different, even diametrically opposed styles. There are intense, breakneck racing sequences and dark, elegiac domestic scenes, and little in between.“There’s really two distinct aesthetic sensibilities in the film,” Erik Messerschmidt, the film’s director of photography, said in a recent interview. “Michael wanted the interpersonal drama parts of the film to be more classically made than the racing.”Messerschmidt said that for the heavier moments Mann “wanted to reference Italian Renaissance paintings,” with their pronounced shadows and dense compositions; the racing scenes, by contrast, made use of cutting-edge technology and contemporary techniques.Messerschmidt also served as the cinematographer on “The Killer,” David Fincher’s recent thriller about a hit man dealing with the fallout of a job gone wrong, now streaming on Netflix. Looking at the two films side by side reveals the marked contrasts in the directors’ approach.“Their use of the camera, in particular, is very different,” Messerschmidt said. “Michael is often looking for those spontaneous moments, and I think he’s a little more shoot-from-the-hip than David is. Whereas David is a very precise, methodical filmmaker — he’s one of a kind that way.”Here, Messerschmidt explains how the look of “Ferrari” was achieved on and off the track and how it compared with his work on “The Killer.”Vintage SpeedThe look of the opening montage was based on archival images of auto racing from when Ferrari was young.Neon“Ferrari” opens with a brisk montage of grainy black-and-white newsreel footage that shows Enzo in his youth racing for Alfa Romeo. Mann, who had been trying to make “Ferrari” since the early 2000s, spent a lot of time poring over archival footage of motor racing from this era, and he and the crew watched it often to help faithfully capture the look. While shooting an early racing sequence, Mann had the idea to open with Enzo himself on the track, to remind the audience that he used to be a racer.The scene is “a combination of actual archival footage and visual-effects compositions of Adam driving a period-correct racecar from the ’20s,” Messerschmidt explained. Driver had to actually get on the track: it’s not a sound stage or a green screen but footage of him that’s been rotoscoped, which accounts for why this shot looks so realistic.Paris was depicted with cool shadows and warm highlights in “The Killer.”NetflixBy contrast, Messerschmidt and Fincher spent a lot of time adjusting images for “The Killer” in postproduction to hone the look of key locations in Paris, the Dominican Republic and Chicago, which they wanted to differentiate aesthetically. “All of those places have a unique look, in terms of architecture, design and how the light falls,” the cinematographer said. Paris, for instance, was depicted with “this kind of split-tone color palette of cool shadows and warm highlights.”While each location had its own visual identity, Messerschmidt said he was conscious of “still keeping them within one cohesive world.”“I didn’t want it to feel like a ransom note of color palettes,” he joked.Racing AlongTo get close to the racers, the “Ferrari” camera team followed at actual speed.NeonThe second half of “Ferrari” focuses on his efforts to win the 1957 Mille Miglia, a wildly competitive race that covers almost 1,000 miles on public roads. To capture its blistering intensity, Mann got extremely close to the vehicles, as in this shot of two cars speeding neck and neck on a winding mountain overpass. The camera team, Messerschmidt said, was following just behind in a Porsche Cayenne. “We were driving these cars at the actual speeds,” Messerschmidt said. “Michael was not interested in faking it or undercranking the camera.”As in this shot, many of the driving scenes have a rawness that emphasizes just how fast and dangerous the racing is. The style, Messerschmidt said, “has a very vérité feel to it,” which adds to the sensation of raw power. “These cars are visceral, they are loud, and the engines shake, and the suspension is stiff. That was something we wanted to show from very beginning.”Night DriveThe headlights were the only source of light for this scene.NeonPart of the Mille Miglia race takes place on an open stretch of road in the dead of night. The only sources of light are the cars’ headlights, which illuminate the rain-slick road and reflect off one another. Shooting this sequence without conventional movie lighting, Messerschmidt said, was a matter of necessity, because there was no obvious place to put up lights. “I had a lot of anxiety about that scene,” he said. “I didn’t really know what I was going to do.”Eventually, he said, he “decided to roll the dice and just do it with the headlights.”Nighttime lighting was also a factor for Messerschmidt in “The Killer.”Netflix“The Killer” makes striking use of nighttime as well, in part because the movie is about a man who “lives and lurks in the shadows,” Messerschmidt said. “We wanted to work in this murky world. It felt like an appropriate thing to lean into that in the film.”Up Close and PersonalThe cinematographer used a “skater scope” to get extremely close to Driver.NeonWhen “Ferrari” is not on the track, the camera has a tendency to probe the characters closely, sometimes getting right up in their faces. In this sequence on the factory grounds, the lens gets so near Enzo that his features become almost a blur. “When Michael really wants to get the audience into a character and bring you close, he will put you literally close to the actor,” Messerschmidt said.To achieve this “very odd point of view,” Messerschmidt employed a “skater scope,” which extends the lens about 10 inches from the body of the camera. That extension “means we can get very close to the actor without the Steadicam itself hitting the actor’s knees,” he explained.Fincher also wants to use the camera to understand his characters in “The Killer,” but “the camera has no personality in the way that Michael’s camera does,” Messerschmidt explained. “Ferrari” has “a very subjective camera,” while Fincher “is working with a conversation between subjectivity and objectivity.” The camera “reinforces” the unnamed executioner played by Michael Fassbender.The camera is far less subjective in “The Killer,” with meticulously composed shots.NetflixThis is clear in the many precise frames and symmetrical compositions — an aesthetic that mirrors the hit man’s meticulousness. “When the killer is in control and confident, the camera is extremely confident, in terms of how we operate it and how the shots cut together,” Messerschmidt said. “When the killer loses control and starts to fall apart, the camera falls apart as well.”Memories at SunsetThe flashbacks called to mind a Terrence Malick film.NeonA centerpiece of “Ferrari” takes place at an opera, where Enzo has an intense emotional reaction. Mourning the loss of his son, he thinks back to their time together, as the film cuts to brief, gauzy flashbacks, including this one, in which the two are playing in a field. The camera is very low to the ground, and the sun is just setting over the horizon; the delicate style is reminiscent of the work of Terrence Malick.“I think I get now maybe how Malick works,” Messerschmidt said. For this flashback, he and Mann started “working with the actors and the camera, improvising a bit,” he said, adding that they just happened to catch this interaction. “It was very spur of the moment. It wasn’t previsualized.”Small and AgileA camera the size of a Rubik’s Cube was affixed to the car.NeonAt times during the racing sequences in “Ferrari,” the camera is fixed to the body of the car itself, stuck alongside as the vehicle zooms at extraordinary speeds. In this shot, we see the bold Ferrari logo against a whooshing blur of grass and road. Because they were sticking a camera onto a car that was pushing its technical limits, “we had to be very conscious of weight distribution and aerodynamics,” Messerschmidt said. Their choice for these shots was a Red Komodo camera, “which is about the size of a Rubik’s Cube.” As Messerschmidt noted, “This would have been a very challenging film to make with a large, cumbersome motion picture camera.” More
Michael Fassbender stars as a loquaciously dull hit man in David Fincher’s latest film about bloody exploits.David Fincher can’t get enough of that murderous stuff — his filmography bleedeth over with miscreants (“Alien 3”), home invaders (“Panic Room”) and multiple maniacs (“Seven,” “Zodiac,” “The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo,” “Gone Girl”). During one of his periodic breaks from painting the big screen red, Fincher served as a producer and director on the Netflix show “Mindhunter,” another of his visually impeccable, morgue-cold creep-outs. This one was about F.B.I. agents profiling serial killers like Edmund Kemper, a ghoul whose silkily insinuating manner resonated more deeply than the show, which ended after two seasons.“Mindhunter” was easier to admire than to love, which is habitually true of Fincher’s work and was certainly true of his last movie, “Mank,” an Old Hollywood exhumation about powerful people who kill dreams and souls. In Hobbesian terms, life in a Fincher film tends to be solitary and poor, nasty and brutish, if not necessarily short. That’s the case again in his most recent movie, “The Killer,” about a nameless hit man — played by Michael Fassbender — a chatty loner first seen waiting for a victim to show up. In time, the mark appears, the Killer shoots but misses, and spends the remainder of the story trying to clean up the mess.“The Killer” is based on a French comic book with the same title written by Alexis Nolent (who goes by Matz) and illustrated by Luc Jacamon. The protagonist is an outwardly ordinary-looking hit man who’s as physically unassuming as he is inevitably nihilistic: Other people are awful, the world is hopeless, “we’re living on a pile of corpses,” etc. He quotes Christ and Kazantzakis, pals around with kindred villains, regularly has sex with balloon-breasted ladies but also spends a lot of time alone, which means the comic panels overflow with his loathing and insipid thoughts. What makes him ostensibly interesting isn’t his job or body count; what’s intriguing, at least before your eyes finally glaze over, is that he’s dull.The idea of an anti-Bond type with an illegal license to kill is, yes, an idea, one that flickers weakly on the page amid a mass of genre clichés. What’s most distinctive about the comic is the contrast between its protagonist and Jacamon’s cinematic illustrations, with their rich hues, canted angles and interplay between realism and expressionism. You keep reading only to keep looking. Fincher’s visual approach in the movie is relatively muted by contrast. He bathes the screen with sulfurous yellow, throws in a few showy shots — an unblinking eye seen through a gun scope — and, as he likes to do, goes dark and then darker, as in one extended fight sequence that’s so dimly lit it sometimes hovers on the threshold of visibility.Written by Andrew Kevin Walker (“Seven”), the movie ditches a lot of the comic’s gasbag observations, shaves the plot to the bone, folds in some pop-culture yuks (the Killer uses sitcom aliases) and takes a jab at WeWork. Fassbender’s character still prattles on a lot, mostly in voice-over, both when he’s on the job and off, but much of what he says is repetitive and on occasion near-affirmational. “Forbid empathy,” he murmurs. “Trust no one.” On occasion, he sounds as if he’s trying to convince himself or just settle his mind so he can focus on the violent task at hand; at other times, he sounds as if he’s dispensing avuncular advice to students of slaughter: “This is what it takes if you want to succeed.”One problem with the movie is that without the Killer’s anti-humanist rants, his historical references and political entanglements, there isn’t much left other than Fincher’s virtuosity, Fassbender’s tamped-down charisma and the thorny pleasures of watching evil people commit evil with great finesse. What this Killer has are a lover (Sophie Charlotte), who’s merely a plot contrivance, a luxe beachfront house and a storage unit kitted out with the tools of his trade (guns, passports). What he doesn’t have is much of a personality or a code, a way of being that complicates the violence, as in the films of Jean-Pierre Melville and his admirers. So what is the Killer? Mostly, it seems, he is a way for Fincher to kill time.After the first job in the movie goes bad, the Killer finds that he’s now a target, which adds a bit of tension and mystery as he dodges threats amid the bang-bangs — the gunfire is more polyrhythmic than the metronomic editing — and the splashy entrances and exits from the other generic types: the Lawyer (Charles Parnell), the Client (Arliss Howard), the Expert (Tilda Swinton), the Brute (Sala Baker). Throughout, Fassbender holds the center with his lissome, controlled physicality and near-unmodulated voice. The character is boring and so is this movie, but like the supremely skilled Fincher, who can’t help but make images that hold your gaze even as your mind wanders, Fassbender does keep you watching.The KillerRated R for ultraviolence. Running time: 1 hour 58 minutes. Watch on Netflix. More
Movies are full of glamorous hit men. For “The Killer,” the director put his star in a bucket hat: “The $3,000 suit seems like it’s played out.”It’s been 24 years since David Fincher brought one of his movies to the Venice Film Festival, and the last time, things didn’t go so well.“I came here with a little film called ‘Fight Club’” in 1999, he told me during an interview on the Lido this week. “We were fairly run out of town for being fascists.” Even before the premiere of that controversial Brad Pitt flick, the director could sense trouble. “I looked down and the youngest person in our row was Giorgio Armani,” Fincher said. “I was like, ‘I’m not sure the guest list is the right guest list for this.’”So what makes lofty Venice the right place to premiere “The Killer,” Fincher’s new thriller and his first film since the Oscar-winning Hollywood drama “Mank”?“Nothing,” cracked Fincher. “Venice seems like it’s very highbrow — important movies about important subjects — and then there’s our skeevy little movie.”Still, Fincher has always enjoyed toying with people’s expectations. He does it even within the world of “The Killer,” which premiered in Venice on Sunday and stars Fassbender as a hired gun who has to improvise after a fatal assignment goes awry.Based on a French graphic novel and adapted by Andrew Kevin Walker (“Seven”), the film at first feels like a high-end take on the usual genre tropes: There’s the assassin with no name, the innocent woman in the way and the methodical list of revenge targets to be pursued. But then our protagonist’s constant patter of narration starts to show cracks, as the Killer often thinks one thing and does another. By the end, you’ll wonder if we know this guy at all, or whether he’s ever really known himself.And then there’s what he’s wearing. Though Hollywood would have us believe that assassins always look impossibly chic and well-tailored, Fincher puts his protagonist in Skechers, a zip-up fleece and a bucket hat.“He’s totally dorky!” the director said. “We were never intending for it to look glamorous.”Inspiration struck when Fincher flipped through reference photos and landed on a German tourist snapped wearing those nondescript items on the streets of Paris. “I was like, ‘All of this stuff could be purchased in an airport,’” said Fincher, who sent the photo to his costume designer, Cate Adams. “I said, ‘This is what he needs to be, a guy who can get off a plane and buy a whole wardrobe on his way from the gate to the rental car.’”Fincher found no complaints from his leading man, who wasn’t in Venice because of the SAG-AFTRA strike: “Michael’s cool. He was not freaked out about having to look a little dorky.” And that aesthetic extends even to the Killer’s escape from a botched job, which takes place not via high-speed car chase but with a zippy little motor scooter, though Fincher considered taking that sequence in an even dweebier direction. “At one point, we even debated the Razor scooter,” he said, nixing that only because it wouldn’t perform well during a stair stunt.So though the Killer remains a mystery to himself, at least one thing can be said for sure of this indifferently dressed man: He ain’t exactly John Wick.“The $3,000 suit seems like it’s played out,” Fincher said. Still, he was surprised to find someone wearing his protagonist’s silly headwear in another recent assassin movie: “It’s funny because when Pitt told me he had selected a bucket hat for ‘Bullet Train,’ I was like, ‘OK, dude, you’re stepping into our sandbox.’”Though Fincher has a skill for image-making that extends back to the music videos he directed for the likes of Madonna, with “The Killer,” he was more interested in dismantling that sort of cinematic iconography. Instead of a glamorous lair, Fassbender’s character keeps his weapons in a mundane storage locker, and instead of using high-tech gadgets to break into targets’ homes, he orders key-duplication tools off Amazon.“I was like, ‘I want James Bond by way of Home Depot,’” Fincher said. “By the end of this, you should be like, who’s the guy in the rental car line with you, and why is he wearing that outdated hat? You ignore the German tourist at your peril.”And while the movies would have us believe that the world is full of clever, high-flying assassins, Fincher sought to ground his character’s tunnel vision in a more mundane reality. “I love the idea of a Charles Bronson character who’s maybe misdiagnosed adult autistic,” he said. “And before 2023, I’m not sure anybody would have gone, ‘Oh, that makes sense.’”So if the Killer’s fashion choices or inner motivations sometimes stump you, just know that’s by design.“He seems to have a hard time reading the room,” Fincher said. “And any room that he goes into, eventually, he’s the only guy in it.” More
Day 1 brought challenges but not “Challengers,” the film that had been scheduled to open this usually starry event until it was delayed by the strikes.The sky in Venice wept on Wednesday, for there were no pictures to be taken of Zendaya in couture clambering from a speedboat.No? Too much? Well, it’s hard not to sound melodramatic at a film festival where the movies are big but the mood swings are even bigger. Let me clear my throat, take a swig of this Aperol spritz, and start again …The 80th edition of the Venice Film Festival kicked off on this rainy Wednesday with several big-name auteurs in attendance but few of the stars that this event has come to count on. With dual strikes by the writers and actors guilds forcing a Hollywood shutdown, and the actors forbidden from promoting studio films during the labor action, Venice will inaugurate a fall film season that is still in significant flux.The first day was meant to be turbocharged by the presence of Zendaya, who turned heads here two years ago in a series of stunning dresses while publicizing the first installment of “Dune.” But the shutdown cost Venice the new film she stars in, Luca Guadagnino’s “Challengers,” in which she plays a tennis pro who has to make a romantic choice between two best friends, played by Josh O’Connor and Mike Faist (the cheeky marketing materials tease that on at least one night, she chooses both).Without its lead available to support the film, MGM delayed the release of “Challengers” to spring 2024 and yanked it from the Venice lineup. Taking its place as the festival’s opening-night film was “Comandante,” a World War II film told from the point of view of Italian submariners. While it’s well-shot and full of suspenseful battle sequences, “Comandante” features exactly zero tennis hotties contemplating a threesome, which may hinder its ultimate appeal with a Venice audience that was promised starry romantic high jinks.Though the festival’s artistic director, Alberto Barbera, admitted at a news conference on Wednesday that the likes of Emma Stone (“Poor Things”) and Bradley Cooper (“Maestro”) will not be attending Venice because of the strike, other actors who hail from more independent productions have managed to secure guild waivers, including “Ferrari” star Adam Driver, “Memory” lead Jessica Chastain, and the cast of Sofia Coppola’s “Priscilla.” They’re expected to show up on the Lido this week alongside a posse of high-powered directors that includes David Fincher (“The Killer”), Ava DuVernay (“Origin”) and Richard Linklater (“Hit Man”).Still, the strikes loom large. At Barbera’s news conference, the jury president, the filmmaker Damien Chazelle (“La La Land”), dressed for maximum solidarity, donning a “Writers Guild on Strike!” shirt and a similar button on the lapel of his sport coat. He noted that as of Wednesday, the writers had been on strike for 121 days, with the actors joining them for the last 48 days, and he called on studios to compensate those artists fairly.“I think there’s a basic idea that each work of art has value unto itself, that it’s not just a piece of content, to use Hollywood’s favorite word right now,” Chazelle told reporters, adding that that idea “has been eroded quite a bit over the past 10 years. There’s many issues on the table with the strikes, but to me, that’s the core issue.”Chazelle was joined by the directors Martin McDonagh and Laura Poitras, who both wore shirts supporting the Writers Guild. They are part of a jury that includes the filmmakers Jane Campion and Mia Hansen-Love, among others.“I’m not sure I entirely deserve this spot, but I will do my best to live up to it,” Chazelle said. “I thank Mr. Barbera for his foolishness in letting me try it out.”Though Chazelle has been to Venice a few times before, to debut “La La Land” and his follow-up, “First Man,” he said he still found the place quite surreal. “That fact that you take a boat to a screening, it’s silly,” Chazelle said. “Cinema, to me, is a waking dream and that, to me, is Venice.”See what I said about melodrama? When you’re in Venice, where even the paint peels in the most picturesque way, you just can’t help yourself from indulging. That’s how your columnist felt last night in the rain, mulling over two of the worst disasters to hit Italy in quite some time: St. Mark’s Square was flooded, and there was no Zendaya. But at least the sun will come out tomorrow here, as will the new films by Michael Mann and Wes Anderson. More
New films from David Fincher, Sofia Coppola, Ava DuVernay and Michael Mann will make up for the absence of stars kept away by the Hollywood strikes.A year ago, the Venice Film Festival had enough star power to put even celebrity-worshiping Cannes on notice. Highlights were quickly beamed all over the world, including the notorious “Don’t Worry Darling” kickoff that fueled endless speculation about the film’s director, Olivia Wilde, and her stars Florence Pugh and Harry Styles; the news conference where an unexpectedly sagacious Timothée Chalamet predicted imminent societal collapse; and the tearful Brendan Fraser comeback that began on the Lido and culminated in his best actor Oscar win.But without all of those celebrities, can Venice still go viral?The 80th edition of the festival, which begins on Wednesday, will be significantly affected by continuing strikes by the Screen Actors Guild (or SAG-AFTRA) and the Writers Guild of America, since the actors’ union has instructed its members not to do press for any studio movies until the strike against those companies is resolved. That puts Venice in a bind, as it’s regarded as one of the best places for Hollywood to unveil starry awards-season titles. Few major actors will even be permitted to attend this year.The actors’ strike has already cost Venice its original opening-night film, Luca Guadagnino’s sexy tennis romance, “Challengers,” since MGM delayed it from September to spring in the hopes that its lead, Zendaya, will be allowed to promote it several months from now when the strikes might be resolved. (A low-profile Italian film is opening instead.) And I’ve heard of a few more starry fall films that were earmarked for Venice but opted for the Telluride Film Festival instead, since that event is less driven by the photo ops and news conferences that are no longer feasible in Italy.Despite some of those trims, the Venice lineup is still enticing, with an auteur-heavy list featuring directors nearly as famous as their leads. And Venice has proved before that it can adapt to unfavorable limitations: Amid the pandemic in August 2020, the festival opted for a smaller, partly open-air edition that still went on to premiere the eventual winner of the best picture Oscar, “Nomadland.”Emma Stone, left, and Mark Ruffalo in “Poor Things,” from Yorgos Lanthimos. Atsushi Nishijima/Searchlight Pictures, via Associated PressThis year’s program includes two films about assassins-for-hire: David Fincher’s new thriller, “The Killer,” stars Michael Fassbender, while Richard Linklater’s “Hit Man” features the “Top Gun: Maverick” breakout Glen Powell, who also served as a co-writer. I’m curious about the off-kilter comedy “Poor Things,” directed by Yorgos Lanthimos (“The Favourite”) and starring Emma Stone as a sexually curious Frankenstein’s monster. Ditto “Maestro,” Bradley Cooper’s second directorial effort, after “A Star Is Born.” He’s cast himself as the composer Leonard Bernstein, opposite Carey Mulligan as Bernstein’s wife, Felicia, and his decision to wear a prosthetic nose has already set off controversy.Baz Luhrmann’s “Elvis” was a big hit last year, but what will that story look like through Sofia Coppola’s lens? The “Lost in Translation” and “Marie Antoinette” director puts her spotlight on Elvis Presley’s wife with “Priscilla,” featuring Cailee Spaeny as teen bride Priscilla Presley and the “Euphoria” star Jacob Elordi as the singer. Ava DuVernay has adapted the Isabel Wilkerson book “Caste” for her new film, “Origin,” which stars the Oscar nominee Aunjanue Ellis in an examination of racism and systemic oppression. And though Michael Mann has secured a guild exemption that would allow the cast of “Ferrari” to promote it in Venice, I’m curious whether his new film’s press-shy lead, Adam Driver (as the racer-turned-car-magnate Enzo Ferrari), is willing to do a full-blown media blitz for the movie, which the hot indie studio Neon is releasing in theaters on Christmas Day.Two years after the release of his Oscar-winning breakthrough “Drive My Car,” the director Ryusuke Hamaguchi returns to the festival circuit with “Evil Does Not Exist,” which originated as a dialogue-free short and became a feature-length film about ecological collapse. And two months after releasing his feature-length “Asteroid City,” the director Wes Anderson is opting for something shorter with “The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar,” a 37-minute Roald Dahl adaptation for Netflix.Harmony Korine premiered his biggest film, “Spring Breakers,” at Venice back in 2012, and he’ll return with the mysterious “Aggro Dr1ft,” which stars the rapper Travis Scott and was shot solely using infrared photography. He’s not the only director taking chances: Pablo Larraín, the director of “Jackie” and “Spencer,” has set the divas aside for a moment to make “El Conde,” a black-and-white supernatural fable that reimagines the Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet as a bloodsucking vampire.And then there are the chances that Venice itself is taking when it comes to three auteurs: It is premiering “Dogman” from Luc Besson, who was accused of sexual assault but cleared by prosecutors; “The Palace” from Roman Polanski, who was convicted of unlawful sex with a minor but fled before he could be sentenced; and “Coup de Chance” from Woody Allen, who has denied sexual abuse accusations by Dylan Farrow, his adopted daughter.Venice will also serve as an elegy of sorts for the director William Friedkin, who died earlier this month and whose final film, the naval drama “The Caine Mutiny Court-Martial,” will premiere posthumously on the Lido. Adapted by Friedkin from the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel by Herman Wouk, it stars Jake Lacy and Kiefer Sutherland. More
The director made his first animated short for the new season of this Netflix anthology. “It was an incredibly freeing, eye-opening, mind-expanding way to interface with a story,” he said.Before David Fincher became an A-list director and multiple Oscar and Emmy nominee — lauded for of-the-moment films like “Fight Club” and “The Social Network” and the TV series “House of Cards” and “Mindhunter” — he was one of the co-founders of the production company Propaganda Films. Propaganda was known for its visually dazzling TV commercials and music videos, and Fincher honed his craft in dozens of miniature movies made in myriad styles.Yet until recently, he had never directed animation, even though he loves the medium so much that he signed on a few years ago to be an executive producer of the Netflix anthology animation series “Love, Death + Robots,” which returns for its third season on Friday.“Love, Death + Robots” sprung from the ashes of a project Fincher had been developing with the “Deadpool” director Tim Miller since the late 2000s: a revival of “Heavy Metal,” the animated movie series inspired by the adults-only science-fiction and fantasy comics magazine. The first season of “Love, Death + Robots” debuted in 2019, featuring 18 episodes (ranging in length from 6 to 17 minutes) that adapted short stories by genre favorites like Peter F. Hamilton, John Scalzi and Joe Lansdale. An eight-episode second season followed in 2021.Fincher, left, directed the short under Covid protocols. “I didn’t quite realize how much I communicate through my face,” he said.NetflixDespite his involvement, Fincher never made a short of his own until Season 3, when he and the screenwriter Andrew Kevin Walker (who wrote Fincher’s crime thriller “Seven”) tackled a tale by the British science-fiction author Neal Asher called “Bad Travelling.” Set on the high seas on a distant planet, the story follows a merchant ship as it is tormented by a giant, intelligent crab that manipulates the crew members and then eliminates them one by one. Fincher described the short as “like a David Lean movie crossed with ‘Ten Little Indians.’”“Bad Travelling” was made via motion-capture, a computer-aided style of animation in which actors perform on a set and their facial expressions and gestures are mapped directly onto their animated characters. Fincher worked closely with Miller (who co-founded Blur Studio, the special effects and animation company that produced “Bad Travelling”) and Jennifer Yuh Nelson, an artist and filmmaker (“Kung Fu Panda 2”), who is the supervising director for “Love, Death + Robots.”In a video interview last week, Fincher discussed the challenges and pleasures of making “Bad Travelling” and the series as a whole, and how he carried his detail-oriented directorial approach to this new medium. These are edited excerpts from the conversation.Including this volume’s episodes, there have now been three Neal Asher stories adapted for “Love, Death + Robots.” What is it about Asher that suits this show?Well, “Bad Travelling” was part of our original pitch to do this. We’ve had these giant four-foot by six-foot blown-up copies of really beautiful production art sitting around in the conference room for, good God, 12 years or something. Finally, somebody had to make it. That honor fell to me.Neal is a favorite of Tim’s, and Tim does most of our curation. He has a list of, like, 350 short stories he’s always wanted to see animated. Neal was one of the first examples that Tim brought up to me of the kind of stuff that’s available out there, to say, “OK, I think this is sustainable.”“Bad Travelling” was made with motion-capture, a computer-aided style of animation in which actors’ facial expressions and gestures are mapped onto their characters. NetflixThat’s an instructive way to think about this series: not just as an anthology of adult animation but also as an anthology of science-fiction stories of varying lengths and approaches.It’s a very difficult thing to write a short story. It’s an art in and of itself to, in the broadest of brushstrokes, bring a reader into an already populated world, make us understand as much as we need to know about the geopolitics or whatever, and then get on with it. It’s what I’ve done making television commercials. That’s a great sandbox to do something with one idea for 30 seconds or two ideas for 60 seconds. I’ve done music videos, which is like a mélange of ideas that should hopefully hang together in some abstract way over 3 to 4 minutes.The most difficult thing is to acknowledge the integers. When you have 19 minutes, it’s a very different thing than when you have 22 minutes. You have to force yourself with this material to be terse.Does your job as a director change, depending on what you’re making?I think any card-carrying member of the D.G.A. knows the acknowledged formula: You want to come into every scene as late as possible, get out as soon as possible and make your point. That can be applied to a lot of different kinds of directing. You can bore people at 30 seconds. I’ve done that. You can thrill people at 2 hours and 45 minutes, and you can bore people at 2 hours and 45 minutes. I’ve done both of those.I don’t see any of this stuff as slumming. I don’t think of directing television commercials or directing television episodes as a lesser form of directing. And to be honest, that has made my shows like “House of Cards” and “Mindhunter” slightly more expensive than the normal for television programing. Most people think of television as, you know, 7 to 10 days of shooting, to produce an hourlong episode. I’ve yet to be able to do it in that time frame. I’m a slow learner, I admit it.What did you learn from directing animation?When I’m setting up to do a master, I’m thinking in terms of, “If this is going to be an over-the shoulder shot, I either have to get this person away from the door frame, or I have to tell the key grip to go get a chain saw.” But in [computer-generated imagery], that kind of stuff doesn’t enter into it. The space is entirely plastic. It was an incredibly freeing, eye-opening, mind-expanding way to interface with a story because so much of live-action storytelling is enduring or working around practical things.Of course, when you can change anything at a later date, you also have to ask yourself, “How far am I going to kick this can?” You can open up these files and go, “I want the chin to do this, and I want the ears here.” You can modify all this stuff ad infinitum. For somebody who likes to polish as much as I do, at some point they just have to pull it from your cold, dead hands.Early production art for the short “felt ‘Thief of Baghdad’-adjacent,” Fincher said. “I felt the world itself needed to be a little less phantasmagoric and a little more ‘Deadliest Catch.’”NetflixWith motion capture, is part of your job as a director also to convince the actors that they’re really on a ship, in fear for their lives?Even though you have people in skintight Lycra with Ping-Pong balls hanging off them, you still have to say things like, “OK, in this scene it is the sunset of the third day.” I was working with people from all different kinds of performance-based acting — we had musicians, we had singers. It was an interesting group. And they had no issue being in a leotard, going: “OK, so then I’m fighting the giant crab over here. How big is it? Like two Range Rovers side by side? Where are the eyes? The eyes are on stalks?” You’re attempting to impart this thing that’s totally ridiculous.But honestly, none of that was as difficult for me as being in the middle of Covid and wearing glasses with goggles and a mask and visor. I didn’t quite realize how much I communicate through my face — a lot of director-actor relationships aren’t about giving a line reading but through the way that you interact and the nonverbal cues. The pandemic gear got in the way of all that.How much input did you have on the visual design? Was there any illustrator or director you were looking to for inspiration?Tim and Blur had been working on the story for a long time, and they had a lot of production art that felt “Thief of Baghdad”-adjacent. I felt the world itself needed to be a little less phantasmagoric and a little more “Deadliest Catch.” My whole thing was I wanted the people to be at risk of being washed off the deck at any moment. They’re either going to get chewed apart by these blunt-nosed sharks, or they’re going to be dismembered by these pincers of these giant crustaceans.It must be easier to rip characters apart and spill their guts when you’re working in animation.Yes, and on the water! Like Jim Cameron and Kevin Costner will tell you, there are such things as forces of nature. If you ever do a story that takes place on the high seas, do it in C.G., because you’re not going to be chasing the sun, and you won’t be worried about people being crushed between boats or drowning. And you’ll never be waiting around for the wave machine.Is there anyone you’d like to bring into the fold if you get to make a Season 4?There are a lot, but look, this show takes a while. This episode I did took, like, 18 months. We originally started off wanting to do this with Ridley Scott, Jim Cameron, Zack Snyder, Gore Verbinski. So many friends of mine I went to and asked, “Would you want to do something like this?,” and they were like, “Yes!” But the reality is that the only way this show is affordable is if the people who are making it don’t mind losing the money they could be making doing something else.Are we hoping that the world embraces this show on a heretofore unseen level, making it a no-brainer to increase the subsidy for it? Yeah, that would be great. Until that happens, it’s hard to get the director of “Avatar” or the director of “Pirates of the Caribbean” to drop everything they’re doing and come and play with us. More
Last month, viewers noticed that the ending of the 1999 film had been replaced with a pro-government message. Now the ending is back, and the message is gone.Some viewers who watched “Fight Club” on a popular Chinese streaming platform last month noticed that its violent, dystopian ending had been cut, and replaced with a message promoting law and order.Now the original ending is back on the platform — and the pro-government message is gone. The only parts still missing from the Chinese version of the 1999 cult classic appear to be nude sex scenes.The changes, which drew international attention, were spotted in recent weeks by people watching the film on a streaming platform owned by Tencent, a giant Chinese entertainment company.Tencent has now restored 11 of the 12 minutes that were previously cut, The Hollywood Reporter said in an article this week. The New York Times confirmed that about one minute remains missing, mostly consisting of sex scenes involving the characters played by Brad Pitt and Helena Bonham Carter. “Fight Club” is not the first foreign movie in which the version made for the Chinese mainland audience differs from the original. The Chinese version of the 2018 Queen biopic “Bohemian Rhapsody,” for example, cut references to the singer Freddie Mercury’s sexuality.Still, it’s unusual for foreign movies in China to include the pro-government written codas; those are typically reserved for Chinese-language films. It is also rare for people who censor movies for the Chinese market to undo their own handiwork.It was not immediately clear on Tuesday why, or precisely when, the original ending of “Fight Club” was restored on Tencent — nor why the ending had been altered in the first place.Kenny Ng, a film professor at Hong Kong Baptist University, said in an interview that he believed the changes to the ending last month were a result of self-censorship by Tencent. But he said it was also possible that the film’s Chinese distributor made the changes.Tencent declined to comment. A spokeswoman for the film’s Chinese distributor, Pacific Audio and Video, said that the company was not involved in editing the Tencent version of the film and had merely applied for clearance to have it released in China.New Regency, the Los Angeles-based company that produced “Fight Club,” did not immediately respond to requests for comment.The rules governing what movies released in mainland China may or may not include have grown more stringent over the last few years.In the past, the rules were set by a division of China’s State Council, the State Administration of Press, Publication, Radio, Film and Television. But since 2017, censorship has been governed by a comparatively stricter rule, the Film Industry Promotion Law, which gives the authorities more latitude to define perceived offenses.The law says that films shown in China may not include anything that jeopardizes the country’s unity, sovereignty, public order or “social ethics.” Also banned is anything that disrupts social stability, propagates superstition or defames cultural traditions.Five Movies to Watch This WinterCard 1 of 51. “The Power of the Dog”: More
