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    Watch Jeffrey Wright Give a Rousing Speech in ‘Asteroid City’

    Wes Anderson narrates a scene from his film.In “Anatomy of a Scene,” we ask directors to reveal the secrets that go into making key scenes in their movies. See new episodes in the series on Fridays. You can also watch our collection of more than 150 videos on YouTube and subscribe to our YouTube channel.On the page, the speech a military general delivers in the film “Asteroid City” might look a little loopy. On the screen, delivered with verve by the actor Jeffrey Wright, it reaches even greater heights of both oddity and emotion.“I wanted to write something that, in a way, only Jeffrey could do,” said Wes Anderson, the film’s director and screenwriter, during an interview in New York. He wanted to tell a story of the generations of this character’s family.“Jeffrey turns it into more like a poem,” he said. “But it’s a poem that is delivered with a sort of ferocity.”The speech is executed in one take, with the camera dollying side to side as well as forward and backward, to capture all of Wright’s beats. Anderson said it was achieved with a complicated setup using “a crazy set of dolly tracks, sideways dolly tracks with a with a section of track that glides on the top of the three tracks,” a rig conceived by Anderson’s key grip, Sanjay Sami.Read the “Asteroid City” review.Sign up for the Movies Update newsletter and get a roundup of reviews, news, Critics’ Picks and more. More

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    Watch Robert Pattinson Take Flight in ‘The Batman’

    The director Matt Reeves narrates a sequence in which Batman flees the police from a rooftop using his batsuit.In “Anatomy of a Scene,” we ask directors to reveal the secrets that go into making key scenes in their movies. See new episodes in the series on Fridays. You can also watch our collection of more than 150 videos on YouTube and subscribe to our YouTube channel.In this scene from “The Batman,” a superhero flies, but it’s mostly by the seat of his pants.Batman (Robert Pattinson) has found himself in an interrogation room after an altercation he was present for turned deadly.Lt. James Gordon (Jeffrey Wright), who has developed a partnership and trust with Batman, secretly helps him flee the scene. But in Matt Reeves’s take on the series, the Caped Crusader doesn’t have a smooth handle on his tech.In his narration, Reeves said that he wanted to present a less polished version of Batman than we’ve seen before.“Rob as Batman is never really in control,” Reeves said. “He’s just barely making it.”Reeves went in this direction with the character to humanize him a bit and make him more relatable. When Batman reaches the ledge in the scene, he’s actually afraid of how high up he is.For the flight tech, Reeves found inspiration in wingsuits, a webbed jumpsuit used in extreme sports like skydiving and BASE jumping to experience more airtime. Some of the shots of the sequence are patterned after YouTube videos Reeves watched of wingsuit moments in all their harrowing, will-they-survive-or-not wonder. And strategic camera placement makes it feel like the audience is taking that harrowing, blundering journey right along with the Batman.Read the “Batman” review.Read an interview with Matt Reeves.Learn more about the ending of “The Batman.”Sign up for the Movies Update newsletter and get a roundup of reviews, news, Critics’ Picks and more. More