#Star Wars Insider has couple more design crew interviews

[clonewarsarchives]

Any resources for texturing in the clone wars style?

sorry, I don't have a helpful answer >.<

Now, do you mean 1) How do they add/render textures in the show? or 2) How can one achieve a similar ‘texture’ as a fanartist?, 3) examples of textures used in the show, or do you mean something else?

Furthermore, what kind of texture are you referring to? fabrics, nature, materials, hair and skin or the brushstroke art style, for example? I am not an artist myself so I can’t answer anything about how to draw those in the Clone Wars style, and the few sources explaining the show’s process, of which most focus on the first three seasons, don’t go too deep in the technical aspect. My go-to guy is Joel Aron, CG Lighting and Effects Supervisor. He explained stuff like snow (1.15), lava (2.03), fire (2.05), water (3.01-02), mist (3.12) in the featurettes.

For fabrics, they usually have a swatch of pattern, then repeat and overlay it on the costume. The "repeat and overlay" seems like a pretty common cheat, since that’s how they do it for the lava on Mustafar and the Nal Hutta landscape. Hair and skin is something I barely remember hearing, so nothing to add there yet.

In Dave Filoin's words, he "have texture artists who literally paint every single character right down to their eyeball, because [he] wanted that human touch on everything". In The Art of Star Wars: The Clone Wars (2009), there’s this passage about finding the show’s “painterly” style:

While the studios struggled to streamline the technical elements of the production, Winder and Filoni hired Andrew Harris, who had worked on the Matrix trilogy and Cars (2006), as CG supervisor to help set up the pipeline as well as hone the look of the show. "The biggest challenge was how to accomplish the interesting and illustrative look that Dave had imagined for the show," Harris says. "Fortunately, Dave and I shared a similar sense for what the show needed to look like. He wanted something richer, warmer, and ultimately more hand-touched and gritty. He wanted a Ralph McQuarrie painting."

Realizing that "painterly" look took a long time, during which Filoni experimented by actually painting on the characters to simulate a textured style. "Looking at Ralph's paintings, you have this whole vocabulary of strokes and gobs of paint that define shapes and tex-tures," Filoni says. "I started doing these chalky and oily textures on the characters to see how that looked and also how we were going to deal with shadow and color."

Filoni wanted a hand-brushed paint job over everything and urged the artists to stop gunning for photographic realism and opt instead for artistic interpretation. "I needed them to stop thinking about what photographic wood or leather looks like and just paint wood or paint leather." Texture artists Tim Brock and Steve Ly latched onto that idea and applied the painterly approach to character models with astonishing results.

While the faux paint jobs looked good on paper, capturing them on actual frames of animation was another story. But, like many great discoveries, the key breakthrough was found by accident while the team was looking at a render of a droid.

"The render looked like a small toy of a super battle droid," says Filoni. "It looked like a great toy, but that was not the way I wanted to go." Harris took the render home and returned with a very simple solution. "I turned off the specular highlights and focused heavily on allowing the hand-painted textures to be seen," remembers Harris. "Oddly, the things that we chose not to use in the show are some of the things that you normally rely on computers to provide quickly and easily."

Harris's solution was the final key ingredient in the development of the show—the team decided that, from that moment forward, there would be no reflections or highlights on the models. "We don't care if something plastic reflects light or that the surface of wood reflects it a little less," recalls Filoni. "We just wanted the painted texture to be the end-all. That was how the show was going to work."

[letterboxd]

The Other Bill and Ted.

As No Man of God hits theaters and VOD following its Tribeca premiere in June, director Amber Sealey talks to Dominic Corry about her Ted Bundy two-hander and answers our Life in Film questions.

Amber Sealey has been very acknowledging of the fact that her new film is one of many to center around the horrific crimes of serial rapist and murderer Ted Bundy. As she outlined in her Tribeca Q&A with Letterboxd, one way she intended No Man of God to stick out from the pack was through the use of consciously silent background characters who represent Bundy’s voiceless victims.

The structure and source of the film also help distinguish it from other Ted Bundy movies: No Man of God is based on the recordings of FBI agent Bill Hagmaier (played in the film by Elijah Wood), who was tasked with interviewing an incarcerated Bundy in the years leading up to his execution, in order to help determine whether or not he was criminally insane, which could’ve helped to remove Bundy from death row.

With many of Bundy’s victims never officially attributed to the killer, Hagmaier also sought to draw confessions, and something resembling remorse, out of Bundy, to help bring closure to those victims’ families. As detailed in the film, much of which was taken directly from transcripts of the interviews, Bundy and Hagmaier’s relationship was complicated, and the intimacy that develops between them informs No Man of God in often uncomfortable ways.

Luke Kirby and Elijah Wood in a scene from ‘No Man of God’.

Wood (also a producer on the film) and Luke Kirby turn in career-high work as Hagmaier and Bundy, respectively, while Sealey textures the film with some of the most emotive stock-footage montage sequences this side of The Parallax View. Among positive reactions to the film, Claira Curtis, in a four-star review, writes: “Perhaps one of the most successful elements lies in Amber Sealey’s uncentering of the ‘genius’ moniker that has followed Bundy through his years of infamy.” On the pairing of Wood and Kirby in the leading roles, Connor Ashdown-Ford notes that “the chemistry between them both is so authentic it’s darn right unsettling”.

Unsettling is right. Late in the film, Sealey depicts a real-life TV interview that took place between Bundy and evangelical preacher/​author/​psychologist James Dobson (played by stalwart character actor Christian Clemonson), who uses Bundy to forward his anti-pornography agenda. Throughout this scene, the camera lingers on a young female member of the TV crew (played by an uncredited Hannah Jessup) as she silently reacts to being in Bundy’s presence. Emblematic of Sealey’s aforementioned philosophy in constructing the film, it’s a moment that appears to be having an impact on audiences, as detailed in Nolan Barth’s review: “She might have one of my favorite performances of this year? She shows us fascination, guilt, disgust and fear in like only 30 seconds of screen time. Give her an Oscar. Please.”

In an awkward incident that represents a perhaps unanticipated effect of there being so many contemporaneous movies with the same subject matter, director Joe Berlinger (Metallica: Some Kind of Monster, the Paradise Lost trilogy), who recently directed both the Zac Efron-starring scripted Ted Bundy biopic Extremely Wicked, Shockingly Evil and Vile and the documentary Conversations with a Killer: The Ted Bundy Tapes, sent an email to Sealey ahead of No Man of God’s Tribeca premiere about remarks she had made while discussing how her film differentiated itself from the existing Ted Bundy movies. He felt she had accused him of glorifying Bundy. After Sealey took the exchange public, she explained to Variety that she had never singled out Berlinger’s films in any of her remarks.

In a conversation with Letterboxd, Sealey delves into her approach to No Man of God, and talks about some of her filmic inspirations.

‘No Man of God’ director Amber Sealey.

There is really effective and creepy use of stock-footage montages in this film. Sometimes you see that sort of thing at the beginning of a film, but it’s interesting that you keep going back to them after using them in the opening credits. What was the thinking in using those montages and how did you select the footage? Amber Sealey: The thinking for those was a couple things: One, we don’t leave the prison, and I wanted [the audience] to know a little bit what’s going on outside, in terms of the cultural zeitgeist, like what’s the tone of the time? What movies are popular? What books are popular? What are people wearing? I wanted to have there be a kind of cultural touchstone outside of the prison, but at the same time I wanted it to represent potentially a little bit of what was going on inside Bill’s mind. So the story of the montages as they go on, it gets a little bit more fucked up, for lack of a better word, for Bill, inside of his head.

We were originally going to shoot the crowd scenes [of protesters outside the prison] and recreate them and then because of Covid restrictions, we couldn’t do that anymore. So then I knew we were going to be using archival footage for the crowd, and I didn’t want the archival crowd footage to suddenly jump out as being so different from the rest of our film. We’re shooting on an ARRI camera, [so it’s] not going to look like a Hi-8 from the 1980s. I needed to incorporate this look, this ’80s grainy look into the rest of the movie so that it feels like it’s part and parcel of the film, part of the storytelling.

We got [the footage] in different ways. I have an old friend that I’ve known since I was like, two, he lived next door to me, and my cousin, they both had video cameras in the ’80s and would film everything. So some of that footage is old family footage of their family or friends. There’s a couple shots in there of my neighbors when I was growing up. Then some of it, we did a lot of research on [stock-imagery services] Getty and Pond5, just finding archival footage that we could use that really told the story that we wanted to tell with the montages. It was a lengthy process finding all of that footage for sure.

What was Bill Hagmaier’s involvement in the film? Bill is an executive producer on the film, so he was very involved. The transcripts of those conversations between Bill and Ted, we got from Bill. Bill gave us so much great stuff to work with—the newer FBI files that he was allowed to share with us and the recordings, and when the script was originally written it was written based off of those recordings, and the writer originally spoke to Bill and then when I came on board, I talked to him and then I changed the script, even more from conversations I had with him. He was just a resource.

Almost every [character] you see on screen, those are real people, and he hooked us up with a lot of those real people. I spoke with the prison guards and the wardens and all of that. Then he was just a resource in terms of like, I would ask him, “what color were your shoes?” “Did you carry this kind of briefcase or that kind of briefcase?” Because it was important to me that all that production-design stuff was really authentic. I liked to know, like, “what were your haircuts like then, Bill?” So he was available to talk about the emotional side of things, and then the real just humdrum kind of things. He’s just a lovely guy, he’s really supportive of me and of the film and he just wanted to be accessible as much as he could and he was. He’s a very humble, generous person.

Aleksa Palladino plays civil-rights attorney Carolyn Lieberman to Luke Kirby’s Ted Bundy.

What films did you watch, or cite as reference points in preparation for No Man of God? Literally hundreds and hundreds of movies. When I’m looking for my creative look, I just watched so many films, and a lot of old films. I’d have to go back and look at my look book to tell you all of them but I pull images from the weirdest places. But once I get past figuring out the creative look of the film, I don’t then like to watch the movies a lot because I try to really make it its own thing and I worry too much that I’ll be copycatting other artists and I want to try [to] avoid that.

What’s your favorite true-crime movie? Oh god, what was the one about the guy who like, went to the bathroom and confessed, accidentally? He forgot his mic was on? Do you remember that one?

The Jinx? Yeah. Even though it’s a documentary, I’m going to go with that.

What’s your favorite big-screen serial-killer performance? It has to be Luke Kirby. Luke Kirby as Bundy.

What was the first horror film you saw? My dad had me watch Cat People when I was nine. Does that count?

The Val Lewton one? The ’80s one.

Oh, the Paul Schrader one? Yes! The Paul Schrader one.

Nastassja Kinski in Paul Schrader’s ‘Cat People’ (1982).

When you were nine years old? Yeah. I also watched Blue Velvet when I was nine. Oh wow, thank you Dad.

What’s the most disturbing film you’ve ever seen? Most disturbing, hmm… Kids.

What film made you want to become a filmmaker? It was Michael Winterbottom’s Nine Songs. My first film was a reaction to that movie. I’m a huge Winterbottom fan. That’s a great movie, but also it advertises itself as being a real relationship and real sex and I watched it and I was like, well that’s not like any… it was like two models, you know? Their sex scenes were like a perfume ad and I was like, well that’s not what real sex looks like for real people. I made my first feature after that.

What’s your go-to comfort movie? Oh, so many, let’s think. The Proposal. I love Trainwreck. I really like rom-coms, like if I’m sick or something, I’ll watch rom-coms. Roman Holiday, stuff like that.

What’s a classic that you couldn’t get into or that you think is overrated? Umm. Star Wars. I’m trying to think, there’s something else that I just don’t like… everyone loves that singing movie. What’s that singing movie that when Moonlight won the Oscar, it got announced?

La La Land. Yeah. I was not into that.

What filmmaker living or dead do you envy/admire the most? Yorgos Lanthimos. Or Phoebe Waller-Bridge.

If you were forced to remake a classic movie, what would you remake? Grease.

Who would be in the cast of your Grease remake? Oh I don't even know but it would be much darker. It would still be a musical and still be funny, but much darker.

I would like to see that movie. I would too.

Related content

Diego’s list of films featuring the FBI

Boris1980’s list of films about serial killers

Follow Dominic on Letterboxd

‘No Man of God’ is in theaters and on VOD from August 27, 2021.

[bigyack-com]

The World Wants More Danish TV Than Denmark Can Handle

COPENHAGEN — Merete Mortensen, the founder of a successful television production company here, is used to having her pick of the industry’s top talent in Denmark. But when she was trying to hire a new developer this year to help her create new shows, her first and even second choice turned her down.She sweet-talked them with everything she could think of — a larger salary, a longer contract, beers — but with no luck.“It’s been crazy this year in Denmark,” said Ms. Mortensen. “We’ve been having bidding wars over the best people.”Netflix, Amazon Prime and their ever-growing number of competitors have dramatically reordered television, creating a boom in TV shows as well as jobs for actors, directors, producers and writers. A lot of that content is being developed far from the usual hubs in Hollywood, New York and London, as the streaming services mine international productions from countries including France, Japan and Brazil.Perhaps nowhere is that expansion more evident than in Denmark, where thanks to years of rising demand, there are many more critically-praised series and movies being made than ever before. But what there isn’t, in this country of just 5.6 million people, is enough skilled professionals to produce them all.Help-wanted ads are popping up all over industry Facebook groups. Certain shows have had to postpone production by six months, or indefinitely, said Claus Ladegaard, the director of the government-sponsored Danish Film Institute, which helps fund many productions here. There’s a two-year wait for skilled line producers, who oversee productions, Mr. Ladegaard said, noting there is also a shortage of scriptwriters, cinematographers and directors.Both TV2, a public station, and the film institute recently called on the Danish Film School — the country’s only training center of its kind — to double its enrollment to meet the demand. Currently, only 42 students are admitted every two years.A decade ago, there might be two or three television series in production in Denmark at any time, Mr. Ladegaard said. Now there are close to 20. That’s in addition to 20 to 25 films being shot, a number that has remained steady, but exacerbates the labor shortfall because they draw from the same talent pool. The country’s theater producers, who tend to book actors far in advance, are also suffering.Stine Meldgaard, a television producer, said her staff frequently must coordinate with other shows over their actors’ increasingly complicated schedules. “They’ll call another production and say, ‘We need him here until 2 p.m., but we can get him over to you after that,’” Ms. Meldgaard said during an interview on Thursday at Hvidovre Hospital outside Copenhagen, where her show about a con artist couple, “Pros and Cons,” was shooting in an examining room. “Luckily,” she added, “we’re very cooperative in Denmark.”Long known for generous social welfare benefits, minimalist furniture design and Lego, Denmark was until recently just a pixel in the television world. About a dozen years ago, Danish broadcasters began ramping up their investments in high-quality TV dramas. Shows like “The Killing” and “The Bridge” helped establish the popular genre known as ‘Nordic noir,” which features brutal crimes set in bleak landscapes, and builds narratives around complicated, often tormented protagonists who contradict the region’s reputation for contented, well-behaved citizens.Denmark is in demand for other genres, too. One of the most popular Danish shows of the last decade was a political drama, “Borgen,” a fictional series about the country’s first female prime minister struggling to balance the demands of family and consensus politics. The Danish programs became huge hits at home and abroad and “broke the subtitle barrier for TV,” said Hanne Palmquist, the vice president of original programming for HBO Nordic. The shows also sparked a broader interest in Scandinavian productions, including Sweden’s “Wallander” and Norway’s “Lillehammer.”“The Killing” and “The Bridge” earned English-language remakes in the United States, and many of the Danish projects in development today are being produced for American companies. On Dec. 3, HBO Nordic announced that its first Danish production, a young adult drama called “Kamikaze,” will begin shooting next year.Netflix premiered its first Danish series, “The Rain,” in 2017. A sci-fi tale that follows a band of young survivors after a virus wipes out most of Scandinavia, the show is currently shooting its third and final season. The first season was “one of Netflix’s most successful non-English series to date,” said Tesha Crawford, Netflix’s director of international original series. Yet it never would have been made, the show’s producer and co-creator Christian Potalivo said, had it not been for the streaming platform. “We knew that no big broadcaster in Denmark would have touched it,” he said. “Budget-wise and target audience-wise, it was out. We put it in a drawer until Netflix came along.”The Nordic streaming service Viaplay, which airs “Pros and Cons,” is even thinking of launching an all-Nordic platform in the United States and Britain. Anders Jensen, the chief executive of Viaplay’s parent company, Nordic Entertainment Group, said that today “the likelihood of a Nordic service finding an audience is much stronger.” While all this global interest might be putting strain on production companies, it has been a boon for those working in the industry, especially people starting out. Mads Mengel, who graduated from the Danish Film School this summer, found high-profile work right away, directing a new series for DR, Denmark’s largest broadcaster. “You always hear, ‘Yeah, you want to be a film director, good luck with that,’” he said. “So it was way beyond what I expected, to find a job in one and a half months.”As a producer of reality and documentary shows, Ms. Mortensen’s company, Heartland, tends to hire graduates of the journalism school, rather than the film school. But they, too, are in high demand. “You have people right out of school, with no experience, getting jobs that pay 40,000 krone ($6,000) a month,” she said.Besides pushing the film school to increase enrollment, the Danish Film Institute is also collaborating on an initiative that, if it is approved, will require broadcasters and streaming services to pay Danish production companies to cover the costs of including trainees on all their feature films and TV shows, so people new to the industry can learn as they work.Unlike other European countries, Denmark does not offer tax incentives to production companies. The Danish film and television industry does, however, have idiosyncrasies that serve it well. Professional relationships formed at film school tend to last throughout a producer or director’s career, and a strong subsidy system helps launch new filmmakers. Fluid boundaries between media mean that directors and screenwriters can bring the same degree of artistry to television as they do to film. “Even back in the 1990s,” said Ms. Palmquist of HBO, “it wasn’t shameful for a film director to do television.”Most important to the success of these Danish exports, industry insiders agreed, is the local talent for storytelling. “We are very good at telling stories about people and relationships,” said Louise Vesth, a producer of “A Taste of Hunger,” a new Danish film that faced difficulties hiring crew, despite having a prominent director and a starring role for Nikolaj Coster-Waldau, who played Jaime Lannister in “Game of Thrones.” “It goes all the way back to Nordic mythology,” Ms. Vesth said. “We’re very good at telling big stories about small problems.” The “feeding frenzy,” as Ms. Palmquist described it, has led some to worry that by attempting to meet the demands of a global audience, Danish films and shows will sacrifice the things that made them great in the first place. A reputation for complex narratives is one of them. So is faithfulness to a sense of place and national character, as seen in the post-apocalyptic but still recognizable Copenhagen of “The Rain,” and in the wry underdog spirit of “Pros and Cons.”“It’s extremely important to write the story that is based on your own locally-based existence,” said Adam Price, the Danish writer and creator of “Borgen.”“If you aim for too big an audience,” he said, “you might find yourself with no audience at all.” Read the full article

[biofunmy]

The World Wants More Danish TV Than Denmark Can Handle

COPENHAGEN — Merete Mortensen, the founder of a successful television production company here, is used to having her pick of the industry’s top talent in Denmark. But when she was trying to hire a new developer this year to help her create new shows, her first and even second choice turned her down.

She sweet-talked them with everything she could think of — a larger salary, a longer contract, beers — but with no luck.

“It’s been crazy this year in Denmark,” said Ms. Mortensen. “We’ve been having bidding wars over the best people.”

Netflix, Amazon Prime and their ever-growing number of competitors have dramatically reordered television, creating a boom in TV shows as well as jobs for actors, directors, producers and writers. A lot of that content is being developed far from the usual hubs in Hollywood, New York and London, as the streaming services mine international productions from countries including France, Japan and Brazil.

Perhaps nowhere is that expansion more evident than in Denmark, where thanks to years of rising demand, there are many more critically-praised series and movies being made than ever before. But what there isn’t, in this country of just 5.6 million people, is enough skilled professionals to produce them all.

Help-wanted ads are popping up all over industry Facebook groups. Certain shows have had to postpone production by six months, or indefinitely, said Claus Ladegaard, the director of the government-sponsored Danish Film Institute, which helps fund many productions here. There’s a two-year wait for skilled line producers, who oversee productions, Mr. Ladegaard said, noting there is also a shortage of scriptwriters, cinematographers and directors.

Both TV2, a public station, and the film institute recently called on the Danish Film School — the country’s only training center of its kind — to double its enrollment to meet the demand. Currently, only 42 students are admitted every two years.

A decade ago, there might be two or three television series in production in Denmark at any time, Mr. Ladegaard said. Now there are close to 20. That’s in addition to 20 to 25 films being shot, a number that has remained steady, but exacerbates the labor shortfall because they draw from the same talent pool. The country’s theater producers, who tend to book actors far in advance, are also suffering.

Stine Meldgaard, a television producer, said her staff frequently must coordinate with other shows over their actors’ increasingly complicated schedules.

“They’ll call another production and say, ‘We need him here until 2 p.m., but we can get him over to you after that,’” Ms. Meldgaard said during an interview on Thursday at Hvidovre Hospital outside Copenhagen, where her show about a con artist couple, “Pros and Cons,” was shooting in an examining room.

“Luckily,” she added, “we’re very cooperative in Denmark.”

Long known for generous social welfare benefits, minimalist furniture design and Lego, Denmark was until recently just a pixel in the television world.

About a dozen years ago, Danish broadcasters began ramping up their investments in high-quality TV dramas. Shows like “The Killing” and “The Bridge” helped establish the popular genre known as ‘Nordic noir,” which features brutal crimes set in bleak landscapes, and builds narratives around complicated, often tormented protagonists who contradict the region’s reputation for contented, well-behaved citizens.

Denmark is in demand for other genres, too. One of the most popular Danish shows of the last decade was a political drama, “Borgen,” a fictional series about the country’s first female prime minister struggling to balance the demands of family and consensus politics.

The Danish programs became huge hits at home and abroad and “broke the subtitle barrier for TV,” said Hanne Palmquist, the vice president of original programming for HBO Nordic. The shows also sparked a broader interest in Scandinavian productions, including Sweden’s “Wallander” and Norway’s “Lilyhammer.”

“The Killing” and “The Bridge” earned English-language remakes in the United States, and many of the Danish projects in development today are being produced for American companies. On Dec. 3, HBO Nordic announced that its first Danish production, a young adult drama called “Kamikaze,” will begin shooting next year.

Netflix premiered its first Danish series, “The Rain,” in 2017. A sci-fi tale that follows a band of young survivors after a virus wipes out most of Scandinavia, the show is currently shooting its third and final season.

The first season was “one of Netflix’s most successful non-English series to date,” said Tesha Crawford, Netflix’s director of international original series. Yet it never would have been made, the show’s producer and co-creator Christian Potalivo said, had it not been for the streaming platform. “We knew that no big broadcaster in Denmark would have touched it,” he said. “Budget-wise and target audience-wise, it was out. We put it in a drawer until Netflix came along.”

The Nordic streaming service Viaplay, which airs “Pros and Cons,” is even thinking of launching an all-Nordic platform in the United States and Britain. Anders Jensen, the chief executive of Viaplay’s parent company, Nordic Entertainment Group, said that today “the likelihood of a Nordic service finding an audience is much stronger.”

While all this global interest might be putting strain on production companies, it has been a boon for those working in the industry, especially people starting out. Mads Mengel, who graduated from the Danish Film School this summer, found high-profile work right away, directing a new series for DR, Denmark’s largest broadcaster. “You always hear, ‘Yeah, you want to be a film director, good luck with that,’” he said. “So it was way beyond what I expected, to find a job in one and a half months.”

As a producer of reality and documentary shows, Ms. Mortensen’s company, Heartland, tends to hire graduates of the journalism school, rather than the film school. But they, too, are in high demand. “You have people right out of school, with no experience, getting jobs that pay 40,000 krone ($6,000) a month,” she said.

Besides pushing the film school to increase enrollment, the Danish Film Institute is also collaborating on an initiative that, if it is approved, will require broadcasters and streaming services to pay Danish production companies to cover the costs of including trainees on all their feature films and TV shows, so people new to the industry can learn as they work.

Unlike other European countries, Denmark does not offer tax incentives to production companies. The Danish film and television industry does, however, have idiosyncrasies that serve it well. Professional relationships formed at film school tend to last throughout a producer or director’s career, and a strong subsidy system helps launch new filmmakers. Fluid boundaries between media mean that directors and screenwriters can bring the same degree of artistry to television as they do to film. “Even back in the 1990s,” said Ms. Palmquist of HBO, “it wasn’t shameful for a film director to do television.”

Most important to the success of these Danish exports, industry insiders agreed, is the local talent for storytelling.

“We are very good at telling stories about people and relationships,” said Louise Vesth, a producer of “A Taste of Hunger,” a new Danish film that faced difficulties hiring crew, despite having a prominent director and a starring role for Nikolaj Coster-Waldau, who played Jaime Lannister in “Game of Thrones.”

“It goes all the way back to Nordic mythology,” Ms. Vesth said. “We’re very good at telling big stories about small problems.”

The “feeding frenzy,” as Ms. Palmquist described it, has led some to worry that by attempting to meet the demands of a global audience, Danish films and shows will sacrifice the things that made them great in the first place.

A reputation for complex narratives is one of them. So is faithfulness to a sense of place and national character, as seen in the post-apocalyptic but still recognizable Copenhagen of “The Rain,” and in the wry underdog spirit of “Pros and Cons.”

“It’s extremely important to write the story that is based on your own locally-based existence,” said Adam Price, the Danish writer and creator of “Borgen.”

“If you aim for too big an audience,” he said, “you might find yourself with no audience at all.”

Sahred From Source link Arts

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[letterboxd]

The Package.

As the bonkers genre thrill-ride Shadow in the Cloud blasts into the new year, writer and director Roseanne Liang unpacks her love of Terminator 2, watching Chloë Grace Moretz’s face for hours, and the life lesson she learned from Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon’s Cheng Pei-Pei.

Roseanne Liang’s TIFF Midnight Madness winner Shadow in the Cloud landed with a blast of fresh genre energy on VOD platforms on New Year’s Day. It’s A-class action in a B-grade body, cramming plenty into its taut 83 minutes, including: a top-secret package, a freakish gremlin, a hostile bunch of Air Force dudes, outrageous stunts, dogfights and a fake wartime PSA that feels remarkably real.

Throughout, the camera is focused mostly on one face—Chloë Grace Moretz’s, playing British flight officer Maude Garrett—as she tackles all of the above from a claustrophobic ball turret hanging under a B-17 Flying Fortress, on a classified mission over the Pacific Ocean during World War II.

While the film’s tonal swings are confusing to some, schlock enthusiasts and genre lovers on Letterboxd have embraced the film’s intentionally outlandish sensibility, which “makes excellent use of its genre mash to create an unpredictable, guilty pleasure,” says Mirza. Fajar writes that “it felt like the people involved in this project knew how ridiculous it is and gave a hundred and ten percent to make it work. Someday, it will become a cult classic.” Mawbey agrees: “It really goes off the rails in all the best ways during the final third, and the last couple of shots are just perfect.”

Chloë Grace Moretz and her top-secret package in ‘Shadow in the Cloud’.

To most of the world, Liang is a so-called “emerging” director, when in fact, the mother-of-two, born in New Zealand to Chinese parents, has been at this game for the past two decades. She has helmed a documentary and a romantic drama, both based on her own marriage; a 2008 short called Take 3, which preceded Hollywood’s current conversation about representation and harassment; and Do No Harm, the splatter-tastic 2017 short in which her technical chops and fluid feel for action were on full display, and, as recorded in multiple Letterboxd reviews, established her as one to watch.

Do No Harm scored Liang valuable Hollywood representation, whereupon producer Brian Kavanaugh-Jones brought Shadow in the Cloud to her, thinking she might connect with the material. “It did connect with me on a level that is very personal,” Liang tells me. “As a woman of color, as a mother who juggles a lot.” She says Kavanaugh-Jones then went through the process of removing original writer Max Landis from the project. “He felt that Max was not a good fit for this project, or for how we like to run things. We like to be respectful and courteous and kind to each other…”

In several interviews, Liang has said she’s comfortable with film lovers choosing not to watch Shadow in the Cloud based on Landis’s early involvement. What she’s not comfortable with is her own contribution—and that of her cast and crew—being erased. While WGA rules have his name attached firmly to the project, the credit belies the reality: his thin script, reportedly stretched out to 70 pages by using a larger-than-usual font, was expanded and deepened by Liang and her collaborators.

Writer-director Roseanne Liang. / Photo by Dean O’Gorman

That team includes editor Tom Eagles, Oscar nominated for Jojo Rabbit, actor Nick Robinson (the titular Simon in Love, Simon) and Beulah Koale, a star of the Hawaii Five-Oh series. The opening newsreel was created by award-winning New Zealand animation studio Mukpuddy, after a small test audience got weirded out by the sight of a gremlin in a war film, despite well-documented WWI and WWII gremlin mythology. It’s an unnecessary but happy addition. The cartoon style was inspired by Private Snafu, a series of WWII educational cartoons scripted by none other than Dr. Seuss and directed by Looney Tunes legend Chuck Jones.

But the film ultimately hangs on Chloë Grace Moretz, who overcame cabin fever to drive home an adrenaline rush of screen craft, in which the very limits of what’s humanly possible in mid-air are tested (in ways, it must be said, that wouldn’t be questioned if it were Tom Cruise in the role). Liang would often send directions to Moretz’s ball turret via text, while her cast members delivered live dialogue from an off-set shipping container rigged with microphones. “I just never got sick of Chloë’s face and I’ve watched her hundreds, if not thousands of times. You feel her, you are her, she just engages you in a way that a huge fighting scene might not, if it’s not designed well. Giant empty spectacle is less interesting than one person in one spot, sometimes.”

Ambitious and nerdy about film in equal measure, it’s clear there’s much more to come from Liang, and I’m interested in what her most valuable lesson has been so far. Turns out, it’s a great story involving Chinese veteran Cheng Pei-Pei (Come Drink With Me’s Golden Swallow, and Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon’s Jade Fox), whose film training includes a tradition of remaining on set throughout filming.

Roseanne Liang on the set of ‘Shadow in the Cloud’.

That meant that, during filming of Liang’s My Wedding and Other Secrets, Cheng would stay on set when she wasn’t required. “In New Zealand, trailers are a luxury,” Liang explains. “I said ‘Don’t you want to go to the trailer that we arranged for you?’ ‘No, I just want to sit and watch.’ ‘Why do you want to watch it, you’ve seen it hundreds of times!’ And she said ‘I learn something new every time’. To Pei-Pei, the secret of life is constant education and curiosity and learning. Movies are her work and her craft and her life, and she never gets bored. If I can be like her, that’s the life, right?”

Speaking of which, it’s time we put Liang through our Life in Film interrogation.

What’s the film that made you want to become a filmmaker? Terminator 2: Judgment Day is the movie that is at the top of the mountain that I’m climbing. To me it’s the perfect blend of spectacle, action design, smarts and heart. It poses the theory that if a robot can learn the value of humanity then maybe there’s hope for the ships that are us. That’s perennial, and possibly even more pertinent today. It holds a very special place in my heart, along with Aliens, Mad Max: Fury Road, Die Hard, La Femme Nikita and Léon: The Professional.

What’s your earliest memory of watching a film? I have a cassette tape that my dad made for my grandma in 1981 (he’d send tapes back to his mother in Hong Kong). I was three years old and he had just taken us to see The Empire Strikes Back in the cinema. And he can’t talk to my grandma because I’m just going on and on about R2-D2. I will not shut up about R2-D2 and he’s like, “Yes, yes I’m trying to talk to your grandmother,” and I’m like, “But Dad! Dad! R2-D2!” So it’s actually an archive, but it’s become my memory.

What’s the most romantic film you’ve ever seen? Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. It’s not the sexiest, but it’s the most romantic. That last scene, those last words where she goes “But you’re gonna be like this forever and I’m gonna be like this forever…” and he just goes “okay”. That to me is one of the most romantic scenes I’ve ever seen. It is a perfect movie.

And the scariest? If it’s a horror movie, the most scared I’ve been is The Ring. I was watching it on a VHS and I was lying on a beanbag on the floor and I was paralyzed with fear. I couldn’t move, because I felt that if I moved she’d see me! Also, American Psycho just came to me this year. I caught the twentieth anniversary of that movie, which is a terrifying film, and again, possibly more relevant now than when it was made. The scariest film that’s not a horror is Joker. It scared me how much I liked it. When I came out of the movie, I was like, “I’m scared because I kind of love it, but it’s horrible. It’s so irresponsible. I don’t wanna like this movie but goddamn, I feel it.” Like, I wanted to go on the streets and rage. In a way we’re all the Joker, we’re all the Batman. That duality, that yin and yang, is inside everyone of us. It’s universal.

What is the film that slays you every time, leaving you in a heap of tears? This is a classic one, the opening sequence of Up. The first ten minutes of Up just destroy me every time. I also saw Soul a couple of days ago and I was with the whole family and I, just, if I wasn’t with the whole family I would have been ugly-sobbing. I had a real ache in my throat after the movie because I was trying to stop [myself] from sobbing.

Tell me your favorite coming-of-age film, the film that first gave you ‘teenage feelings’? Pump Up the Volume. Christian Slater! Off the back of Pump Up the Volume, I fancied myself as a prophet and wrote a theater piece called Lemmings. Obviously the main character was a person who could see through the façade, and everyone else was following norms. “No one understands me, I’m a prophet!” So clearly I have this shitty, Joker-style megalomaniac inside of me. It was the worst play, and I don’t know why my teachers agreed for us to do a staging of it!

Christian Slater and Samantha Mathis in ‘Pump Up the Volume’ (1990).

Is there a film that you and your family love to rewatch? We’ve tried to impose our taste on our children, but they’re too young. We showed them The Princess Bride—they didn’t get it. We literally showed our babies Star Wars in their cribs. That’s how obsessive Star Wars fans we were.

Name a director and/or writer that you deeply admire for their use of the artform. I have a slightly weird answer for this. Can I just give love to Every Frame a Painting by Tony Zhou and Taylor Ramos? They are my film school. I was thinking of my love of Edgar Wright, but then I thought of their video essay on Edgar Wright and how to film comedy, and his essay on Jackie Chan and the rhythm of action and then their essay on the Coen Brothers and Shot Reverse Shot. I must have watched that 30 times ahead of the TV show that I’m making now. I started out in editorial and Tony Zhou is an editor and he talks about when to make the cut: it’s an instinct, it’s a feeling, it’s a rhythm. I realized the one thing in common that I could mention about all the films I’ve loved is Every Frame a Painting. It’s their love of movies that comes bubbling out of every single essay that they made that I just wanna shout out at this part of my career.

Were there any crucial films that you turned to in your development for Shadow in the Cloud? Indiana Jones was something that Chloë brought up—she likes the spiffiness and the humor of Indiana Jones. Sarah Connor was our touchstone for the female character. For one-person-in-one-space type stories, I watched Locke quite a lot, to figure out how they shaped tension and story and [kept] us on the edge of our seats when it’s only one person in one space. In terms of superheroes, I came back to Aliens. Not Alien. Aliens. You know, there are two types of people in this world—people who prefer Alien over Aliens, and people who prefer Aliens over Alien. But actually I think I vacillate for different reasons.

Can there be a third type of person, who thinks they’re both great, but Alien³, just, no? Maybe that’s the best group to be in. We don’t need to fight about this, we can love both of them! I was having an argument with James Wan’s company about this, because there’s a rift inside the company of people who prefer Alien over Aliens.

Okay, program a triple feature with your film as one of the three. I don’t know. Ask Ant Timpson!

I’ll ask Ant Timpson. [We did, and he replied: “Well, one has to be the Twilight Zone episode with William Shatner: Nightmare at 20,000 Feet. And then either Life (2017) or Altitude (2010).”]

Thank you Ant! I used to go to his all-nighters as a university student. He is the king of programming things.

Jake Gyllenhaal in ‘Life’ (2017).

It’s strange that we never met at one of his events! Ant would make me dress up in strange outfits and do weird skits between films. (For those who don’t know, Timpson ran the Incredibly Strange Film Festival for many years—now part of the New Zealand International Film Festival—and still runs an annual 24-Hour Movie Marathon.) So what’s a film from those events that sticks in your head as the perfect genre experience with a crowd? It was a movie about a man protecting a woman who was the girlfriend of a mafia boss: A Bittersweet Life. Not only does it have one of the sexiest Korean actors, sorry, not to objectify, but also I actually screenshot a lot of that film for pitch documents. And, do you remember a crazy Japanese movie where someone’s sitting on the floor with a clear umbrella and a woman is lactating milk? Visitor Q by Takashi Miike. I remember just how fucking crazy that was.

Finally, what was the best film you saw in 2020? I haven’t seen Nomadland yet, so keep in mind that I haven’t seen all the films this year. I have three: The Invisible Man, which I thought was just amazing. I thought [writer-director] Leigh Whannell did such a great job. The Half of It by Alice Wu, a quiet movie that I simply just adored. And then the last movie I saw at the cinema was Promising Young Woman. The hype is real.

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‘Shadow in the Cloud’ is available in select theaters and on video on demand now.