Mekado Murphy

The film’s director, Jon Favreau, worked with effects company MPC Film, which also helped bring the animals of the filmmaker’s previous movie, “The Jungle Book” (2016), to photorealistic life. But unlike “The Jungle Book,” there are no humans to draw away the eye. All of “The Lion King” was digitally created, save one shot that the filmmakers refused to divulge. And the focus was on making the animals as familiar-looking as they would be in nature.

For reference, the filmmakers visited Disney’s Animal Kingdom in Orlando, Florida, where the animal-science department let them observe and record some creatures. But it was essential to see the lions in the wild, so the creative team traveled to Kenya to observe and take some photos — actually more than 12 terabytes worth of images. With this visual information, the animators at MPC Film (a division of Technicolor) began sculpting.

Here is a closer look at how little Simba became a lifelike standout on the big screen.

The Face

In determining some of the looks and mannerisms for young Simba, the visual effects supervisor, Adam Valdez, focused on a couple of cubs he saw at the Maasai Mara game reserve in Kenya. “They had a certain character about them,” he said in a phone interview, “a certain plucky energy.” After bringing images of these cubs back to the studio, Valdez asked himself, “How is this character going to be appealing without looking too cartoony and how am I going to make it relatable?”

He and his team focused on the particulars of a lion’s face, which is longer than that of other cats. An emphasis was put on the animal’s majestic prow, that noble line from the top of its forehead to the tip of its nose. But it was also important to offer ways for audiences to connect this version of Simba to the one in the 1994 original. They did that by giving him a little bit of roughed-up hair on top and also by making his eyes a little rounder and more open than a lion’s would normally be.

The Fur

Once one of the most prohibitive challenges of digital animation, fur has come a long way. And yet, it is still incredibly difficult to get right. “These craftspeople spend a lot of time managing the millions of hairs that are on these characters and making sure that it moves with the correct physics,” Valdez said.

Artists build fur by creating what are called “guide hairs,” setting parameters for how thin or how smooth they should be. Then special software uses the information from those guide hairs to duplicate them and make them grow around the animal’s body.

They also lay a digital pattern on the skin. “The pattern might tell the hair that it should be scraggly, or another layer of the pattern could tell every hair that grows from that piece of skin to be more stuck together with its neighbors,” Valdez said.

As for the shades and patterns of Simba’s hair (like the spots on his belly), Valdez said that’s also a result of software that tells each hair what color it should be: white, tan, black. “If you place it all right, you end up with what looks like a lion.”

The Movement

Creating a character with appeal is one piece of the puzzle. Getting it to function in a way that feels right is another. Valdez said that he and his team first thought that since a lion cub like Simba was already so cute and warm, it would be easy to create his movement. But it turned out that cute little lions are laborious to light correctly yet still fit well into the environment.

And playful scenes with young Simba and Nala, when they engage in big actions like running and tussling, meant a lot of animation for their tiny legs. “Sometimes they would look a bit awkward,” Valdez said. The animators figured out ways around this by sometimes putting plants in front of the camera to block certain moments of action.

And then there’s the talking. “You have a challenge anytime you have a mouth form that doesn’t mimic a human mouth,” Valdez said. They didn’t want to end up in the uncanny valley when it came to how the characters spoke.

He said there were a couple of choices. Simba and the others could mumble because they don’t have the maws for articulated human speech. But that makes it difficult for audiences to understand them. Or their motions could be simplified, which is what the filmmakers settled on: When the animals speak, there’s enough movement to believe that words are being formed without it looking too distracting.

“It just so happens that lions have little markings around their eyes and mouths where if you go too big, it starts looking really cartoony, and it looks like their faces are made out of rubber,” Valdez said. “It’s a pretty delicate tricky balance, these things.”

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/23/movies/simba-lion-king-technology.html" id="78a38fac-f4a0-3374-a530-2e542b146495">The New York Times</a>.

While young Simba was working on his roar in the new “Lion King,” his designers and animators were laboring over a good deal more. All the hairs on the cub’s body, the detailed color patterns of his fur and the movement of his little legs through the savanna were the efforts of a Pride Rock-size army of visual effects artists.

How They Made Little Simba Look So Lifelike in 'The Lion King'

To shoot a scene on a vibrant avenue in the period drama “Roma,” the filmmakers constructed from scratch an immense replica of part of a Mexico City street (and the shops that line it) in an empty lot amid warehouses. They brought in period vehicles, including a streetcar, and built working storefronts, transforming a cracked concrete slab overrun with weeds into a vibrant intersection.

That’s one way to recapture your childhood.

“Roma,” up for 10 Academy Awards at the Feb. 24 ceremony, is writer-director Alfonso Cuarón’s semi-autobiographical recollection of his early-1970s life in the Mexico City neighborhood of the title. To say that Cuarón cared about details when capturing that world is an understatement. With a reported budget of $15 million, the film also includes an elaborate restaging of a student protest, the communal dousing of a large forest fire and a challenging ocean rescue.

In the street scene, the nanny, Cleo (Yalitza Aparicio), chases after one of her charges on the way to the movies and comes upon the intersection of Baja California and Insurgentes avenues. Cuarón wanted to shoot at the actual crossing, but when he returned to the neighborhood all these years later, he saw it had changed significantly.

For one, there’s a major bus stop in the middle of Insurgentes where streetcars once ran. For another, the movie theater that plays a key role in the film had been demolished, replaced by a shopping center. And many of the businesses were no longer the same.

Cuarón explored the option of substituting a similar-looking street in a smaller city for Insurgentes. But while there were locations with more period buildings, none carried the same big-city heft.

“It had a certain cosmopolitanism that I couldn’t find in any other place,” he said in a phone interview.

And the idea of using computer-generated images to turn that shopping center back into a movie theater was not a popular one. The director said that his film needed a certain level of physicality that came from characters operating in real, not digitally constructed, environments. “Gravity,” this is not.

“I didn’t want to just illustrate the location, I wanted it to permeate the whole essence of time and space,” Cuarón said.

In other words, grab a hammer and a nail.

Cuarón worked with his production designer, Eugenio Caballero, to research the look of the avenue in the early ‘70s, viewing old photographs and matching them with the director’s memories. After they decided how much ground to cover in the shots, Caballero drew up a plan based on the actual measurements of the intersection. Then the goal was to find a space to match those requirements.

The area they needed was larger than most studio backlots could provide, so they had to get creative. They considered the parking lot of Aztec Stadium, but it was too small.

“The location crew stopped looking from the ground and instead started looking at satellite photographs of the city,” Cuarón said.

They found a spot in a collection of warehouses used by the Secretariat of Public Education. It included a giant empty lot covered in cracked concrete overgrown with weeds. Caballero and his team transformed it by building rails and cables for a streetcar, and adding sidewalks and shops alongside them.

But Cuarón didn’t just want facades. He wanted to be able to enter and populate these spaces with extras. So a shop like a travel agency would serve to show the class divide in this part of the city as well. (It should be noted that in the finished film, computer imagery filled out the far end of the street and the building tops.)

As Cleo approaches the intersection, the screen fills with the energy of pedestrians and traffic, the evening city lights shimmer and the entire frame projects a tone of heightened wonder. Cuarón wanted to capture his recollections as a child crossing at this spot.

“I had a very good sense of the feel of this,” he said, “the excitement I felt arriving at that big avenue on the way to the movies, coming from the more sheltered streets of my neighborhood.”

After the shoot, the entire set was demolished. Now, that warehouse parking has never looked nicer.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/14/movies/roma-sets.html" id="8d906d78-2e6b-38d3-a105-4ffed47320e6">The New York Times</a>.

How 'Roma' Turned an Empty Lot Into a Bustling Avenue

They paved a parking lot and put up paradise.

A major departure from the Michael Bay-directed “Transformer” movies, this prequel has a lot of moments with an animated feel and a central character that has a different, more sensitive expressiveness than he’s shown before. That was the aim of the film’s director, Travis Knight, who has built his career on animation as the chief executive of the Oregon stop-motion studio Laika and the director of its lyrical film “Kubo and the Two Strings.”

“I’m a child of the ’80s,” Knight said in a phone interview, “and I wanted to try to rekindle that childhood sense of intrigue, wonder and discovery I felt when I found Transformers for the first time.”

Yes, there are still robot fights on the planet Cybertron, along with climactic action sequences with the fate of the world on the line. But in “Bumblebee,” Knight, with screenwriter Christina Hodson, is aiming to tell a more personal, character-driven story of the sort that distinguishes his work at Laika. The film’s positive reviews have celebrated that shift. In The New York Times, Glenn Kenny wrote that it is “cleverly plotted, neatly allusive and has dialogue you can envision real people and, um, real Transformers speaking.”

The emotional center is the relationship between Steinfeld’s character, Charlie, and Bumblebee, whom she discovers after acquiring him, in Volkswagen Beetle form, from her uncle’s scrapyard.

Knight had a template of Bumblebee from the previous movies but was set on going a different way with him here. Since this was a prequel, he wanted to hark back to the ’80s design of the original Transformers cartoon. So he opted for a simpler look, one that focused more on the character’s emotional core than on his mechanical bells and whistles.

“When I first started talking to my designers about how I wanted Bumblebee to be very expressive, they started adding more and more detail to the face,” he said. “And when I saw the first pass of that, I was like, no, you guys are going in the wrong direction. It’s not about adding more detail, it’s about stripping detail away and making the detail that remains meaningful.”

Because Bumblebee isn’t able to speak (his voice box was removed by a Decepticon), Knight saw the eyes as the place where the character could be the most revealing. So they are larger and brighter and tell more of a story on their own than in the Michael Bay films. (Think Brad Bird’s animated fable “The Iron Giant” with a little “E.T.” mixed in.)

The mechanics of the character were streamlined as well, rounding his edges more and reducing the parts to fewer, but still transformable, segments.

“Instead of the upper arm being made out of 50 small pieces, it might be made out of three large panels supported by small parts,” said the visual effects supervisor, Jason Smith, of Industrial Light and Magic. He has worked on four “Transformers” films, beginning with the 2007 installment.

Did this simplification of the design make it easier for the artists? Not exactly.

“It’s not much of a savings in terms of effort,” Smith said. “Because when you replace these multiple pieces with a large panel, you have to make that panel really read as something physical and real.” So more effort is put into how the paint and the metal look and what it takes to make Bumblebee feel like he’s moving in more emotional ways.

In working through how he would shoot the film, particularly those tender moments between Charlie and Bumblebee, Knight felt that the best way to explain his vision to the crew was through storyboards. Rather than using designers who storyboard live-action films, he called on artists from Laika to help with his visualizations. “They know my approach and philosophy,” he said, mentioning that the storyboards he wanted didn’t show only camera placement but also aspects of the emotional performance.

To storyboard the moment in the garage when Charlie discovers her car is actually Bumblebee, Knight used artist Emanuela Cozzi. “The scene is more or less the heart and soul of the movie,” he said. “And it’s mostly done through facial expressions, gestures and body language.”

For lighter moments that involve sight gags and a more comedic performance from Bumblebee, Knight employed Julián Nariño, who drew storyboards for the coming stop-motion Laika comedy “Missing Link.” One of those moments is a beach scene in which Charlie teaches Bumblebee, with mixed results, how to hide from people who may do him harm.

And to help create a greater connection on the set between Charlie and Bumblebee, the props and special effects teams built part of a practical Bumblebee: head, chest and upper arms. “The paint was detailed, the eyes would light up,” Smith said. “It was a really faithful copy of Bumblebee at full size.” He said it was useful for all departments, but particularly for visual effects, because it could show computer animators how much light should be reflecting off the chrome, the shade of yellow the robot should be in a particular room, and so on.

All of these details were in an effort to create a Transformer that felt fresh onscreen. “I know I have exacting standards,” Knight said. “But we all had to work together to make this robot as expressive as it could be.”

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/11/movies/bumblebee-transformers-travis-knight.html" id="c27055db-8719-3b5e-ae7d-7d969dfcf068">The New York Times</a>.

One scene in the new Transformers movie “Bumblebee” finds the title character alone in a house. His teen caregiver (Hailee Steinfeld) has been hiding him in the garage, but he finds his way out, touching everything he shouldn’t and, because he’s giant and metal, causing a lot of inadvertent destruction. This bumbling, charming moment plays out as it might in a classic animated comedy, not in a high-stakes action movie.

'Bumblebee' Through the Eyes of an Animator

This is the second consecutive year the Austin, Texas, festival will open with a high-profile horror movie. “A Quiet Place” did the honors last year, before moving on to a worldwide theatrical gross of $340 million and joining this year’s Oscar conversation. The festival, which runs March 8-16, will announce its feature lineup Jan. 16. “Us” opens nationwide March 15.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/08/movies/us-jordan-peele-sxsw.html" id="22b65a79-a5aa-36c6-a0d2-4eed24c67096">The New York Times</a>.

The South by Southwest Film Festival has chosen one of this spring’s most anticipated movies for its opening night: Jordan Peele’s new horror thriller, “Us.” The director’s follow-up to his Oscar-winning 2017 hit “Get Out” follows a family (headed by “Black Panther” veterans Lupita Nyong’o and Winston Duke) terrorized by what seem to be evil doppelgängers of themselves. The film’s trailer, which debuted Christmas Day, has been discussed and analyzed by fans on social media for clues to the pl...

Jordan Peele's 'Us' Will Open South by Southwest 2019

Welcome to my coaster-nerd world. I spend a lot of my summer on some of the wildest roller coasters around the country. While indulging in the thrills (hands up, always), I’m also taking these rides very seriously, thinking about the quality of the engineering and scrutinizing the mechanics of each rise and fall. But I did ultimately give in to the hyperbolic wonders of “Wonder Park.” In dreaming up attractions like the Sky Flinger — spheres with riders that are sent sailing through the air — June, the film’s young lead, displayed the outsize creativity of the best inventors. I admired that, and I could relate. June had her Wonderland. I had my Fun World.

When I was 10, I laid out detailed plans for a theme park and built an entire narrative around it in a notebook that filled up over the years. There were a series of crude ride sketches and a map. Fun World was founded by the pioneering, conveniently named genius H.G. Fun. He divided his park into gloriously themed sections, like Car Land (well before Disney’s Cars Land, thank you), Up Down and Around Land and, yes, Coaster Land. There were 90 rides in all, as well as a giant Fun World Globe and a Fun Dome. But the coasters were what mattered most to H.G.

And so it was with me. Growing up in Oklahoma in the ‘80s, I had a good life, surrounded by family and close friends, but I longed to be somewhere bigger, like the places I was seeing in the movies I consumed. Roller coasters gave me the first taste of that wider world.

During visits to the state fair with my family, I discovered my penchant for thrill-seeking in carnival attractions like the Scrambler and the Tilt-a-Whirl. But the fair was missing the majesty of larger-than-life roller coasters. We seemingly had to travel to another country for those: Texas. Each summer, we would drive three hours to Fort Worth to see my cousins and go to Six Flags Over Texas together.

On the highway as we approached the park, one of the most beautiful, most terrifying sights came into view: a steel beast called the Shock Wave. It had not one, but two loops, back to back! I avoided it at all costs. I feared I’d faint after the first loop, leaving my limp, unconscious body gliding through the second. And yet, I was obsessed with it.

Another fearful obsession was the Runaway Mine Train, a coaster with a track that seemed endless and disappeared through the woods. It was even more frightening than the Shock Wave because I couldn’t see the dastardly places it might be going. There were rumors it went underwater. Underwater! It sounded like something a maniac would dream up. But one time, waiting outside the ride, one of my sisters put the pressure on me to ride it. She convinced me, assured me, that it didn’t, couldn’t possibly, go underwater. I finally relented. Lo and behold, the very last part of the ride went through a makeshift saloon and plunged down into an underwater tunnel. I’d never known such deception.

But I’d also never known such excitement. It was a true rush, the moment that solidified my coaster love. I became braver and more willing to give bigger rides a try. I met the Shock Wave head-on, and made it through both loops with my consciousness intact. Theme parks became the place where I, and my imagination, could run wild.

Just as momentous was our epic family trip to Los Angeles. After a three-day Greyhound bus ride that was an adventure in itself, we headed to Six Flags Magic Mountain. Pulling into the parking lot, I faced Colossus, a giant white wooden coaster that was bigger than any I’d seen. (Using many of its original materials, it has now been converted into a wood-steel hybrid called Twisted Colossus, my favorite coaster.)

That trip also brought me in touch with the glamour of Hollywood, entertainment having long been a way that I bonded with my family. Thanks to packed trips to the drive-in and Saturday afternoons spent watching movie marathons on cable, we became steeped in pop culture. In Los Angeles, we were pros at spotting the most minor of celebrities on the street or at the beach — a backup dancer from the TV version of “Fame,” that one guy in that Michael Keaton movie. My entertainment passions and my amusement passions were merging in one magical city, and I didn’t want to leave.

So back in Oklahoma, I started building the world, Fun World, I wanted to live in. My rides were far from practical. Why have a log flume with one big drop when you could build it on multilevel terrain and have three giant splashes? Or how about the ultimate indoor coaster, with the kinds of spirals, inversions and 90-degree straight-down dives that would put Space Mountain to shame? OK, there would be no Fun World without Disneyland and Six Flags as inspirations. (Also a shout-out to Wally World, the fictional park from one of my favorite movies as a kid, “National Lampoon’s Vacation,” which was partly filmed at Magic Mountain.) But I wanted to create something that would match up.

That notebook started filling up with showbiz inventions, too, including a movie star I named Edrall Casceese. He made blockbuster comedies, mind-blowing sci-fi spectacles, musicals, you name it. And there was a pop star, Jayson. All of his songs were chart-toppers; I even recorded them on a cassette. Years later, indie movies would be of great interest to me, but as a kid, I craved hits.

As I got older, the characters and the park stayed in my head. By high school, my interest in movies had only grown, and I wanted to learn more about how they operated. The interest in roller coasters also expanded, leading me to more parks in many more places over the years.

My first move after leaving Oklahoma in my early 20s was to Dallas, a mere 20-minute drive from Six Flags Over Texas, where the Shock Wave and the Runaway Mine Train first prepared me for something bigger. I would eventually make my way, not to Los Angeles but to the opposite coast, covering the movies and occasionally cataloging my roller coaster experiences.

In my theme park travels, I’ve seen some of the wacky propositions from those youthful drawings (like a raft ride that requires an elevator to get the raft to the top, or coasters with straight-down dives) become technological realities. As with June and her Wonderland, having the courage to dream big, and even a bit outrageously, has led to some surprising places.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/15/movies/wonder-park-amusement-parks.html" id="ee8963c2-d087-33b5-a428-095082f7227d">The New York Times</a>.

As I was watching the new animated film “Wonder Park,” about a young girl’s imagined amusement park come to life, I wasn’t buying the physics of a roller coaster. “The hills are way too high and steep,” I thought, “the curves too sharp.” And for a moment, it was lost on me that I was analyzing something carrying a giant blue talking bear.

That Time I Built My Own 'Wonder Park'

With “They Shall Not Grow Old,” Jackson has applied new technology to century-old World War I footage to create a vivid, you-are-there feeling that puts real faces front and center and allows us to hear their stories in their own words.

The documentary, which will screen nationwide Monday and again Dec. 27, concentrates on the experiences of British soldiers as revealed in footage from the archives of the Imperial War Museum. Jackson and his team have digitally restored the footage, adjusted its frame rate, colorized it and converted it to 3D. They chose not to add a host or title cards. Instead, veterans of the war “narrate” — that is, the filmmakers culled their commentary from hundreds of hours of BBC interviews recorded in the 1960s and ‘70s.

The result is a transformation that is nothing less than visually astonishing.

“The clarity was such that these soldiers on the film came alive,” Jackson said in a phone interview describing the restoration process. “Their humanity just jumped out at you. This footage has been around for 100 years and these men had been buried behind a fog of damage, a mask of grain and jerkiness and sped-up film. Once restored, it’s the human aspect that you gain the most.”

The film came about through a partnership between the Imperial War Museum and 14-18 Now, a cultural program that commissioned artists to create work for the centennial of World War I (1914-1918). They approached Jackson about contributing a film to the project.

“We discovered that Peter Jackson has a huge knowledge, expertise and passion for the First World War,” said Jenny Waldman, the director of 14-18 Now. Jackson’s grandfather was a professional soldier in the British army before the war began, and served in the conflict for its duration.

The centennial project gave Jackson the freedom to make a film as he saw fit, but had two requirements: that he use only the footage from their archive and that he do it in an original way.

Jackson was given 100 hours of footage of varying levels of quality. “It was sometimes a duplicate of a duplicate of a duplicate,” he said.

Much of this material, of soldiers in training and then in the trenches, was shot for propaganda newsreels that would play in theaters between other movies. “It’s interesting to think that this footage could have been put between a cartoon and a Charlie Chaplin film, and accompanied by organ music,” said Jean Cannon, a curator of a 2014 World War I exhibition at the University of Texas at Austin. “So in some ways the war gets on the scale of entertainment.”

In fact, the first feature-length documentary to depict combat, “The Battle of the Somme,” was released midwar, in 1916, and drew nearly 20 million moviegoers.

For Jackson’s documentary, rather than sift through the archival footage to decide which scenes to use, he opted to restore all 100 hours first (working on that daunting three-year task with a New Zealand company, Park Road Post Production). Decades of scratches, dust and splotches were cleaned up, and the now-pristine material was donated back to the war museum.

There were other technological adjustments as well. Jackson’s goal was to reconnect audiences with the soldiers in a way even more intimate than “The Battle of the Somme” did. The footage had a herky-jerky feel because it had been shot on hand-cranked cameras that produced images at a much slower frame rate than modern audiences are used to. Jackson’s team retimed the footage, speeding up the frame rate, adding extra frames digitally and smoothing out the movement.

Then Jackson turned to the company Stereo D to colorize the film’s centerpiece clips. This required the help of a historian who could identify the military details, down to what colors uniform buttons should be. Additionally, Jackson’s team traveled to some of the battle sites to pin down color references.

The film begins with basic training footage, in black and white, building to the moment when the soldiers go to the Western Front. That is when the movie transitions into startling color.

Was Jackson going for a dramatic, “Wizard of Oz"-style effect? Well, not exactly.

“It was all to do with the budget,” he said. Originally the documentary was to be about a half-hour long. “The budget we had was to colorize about 30 to 40 minutes of film.” But as he and his team listened to the interviews, what the veterans said about training provided much-needed context, and the filmmakers did not want their movie to “jump straight into the trenches.” Still, the budget was not flexible. So they settled on a feature-length movie with restored black-and-white footage bookending the dramatic, full-color highlights.

Stereo D also worked on converting the film to 3D for a more immersive effect, a sense of being on the battlefield. And Park Road enhanced the experience with sound editing to rival that of “The Lord of the Rings.” But explosions, gunshots and tank engines are not as surprising as the moments when the soldiers speak.

“We got some forensic lip readers, who, before this, I had no idea actually existed,” Jackson said. These experts, who often work with law enforcement to help determine the words of people in security camera video, reviewed the archival footage to reconstruct, as nearly as possible, what the soldiers were saying.

Voice performers were hired to stand in for the soldiers, but Jackson’s team, mindful that regiments were drawn from different regions of Britain, made sure the actors came from those areas and had accurate accents. In a similar vein, military historians provided ideas for what off-camera officers’ commands might have been, and that information made its way into the film as well.

Even with all of these moving parts, and with footage that could have told a dozen different war stories, Jackson tried to keep his film specific.

“I didn’t want to do a little bit of everything,” he said. “I just wanted to focus on one topic and do it properly: the experience of an average soldier infantryman on the Western Front.”

“They Shall Not Grow Old” is playing Dec. 17 and Dec. 27 at theaters around the country. Go to fathomevents.com for more information.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/16/movies/peter-jackson-war-movie.html" id="77666ef5-d090-3b60-a64d-8c3f85418d64">The New York Times</a>.

As the director of elaborate fantasy epics like the “Lord of the Rings” and “Hobbit” trilogies, Peter Jackson has become known for meticulous attention to detail. Now he has put the same amount of care into making a documentary.

How Peter Jackson Made WWI Footage Seem Astonishingly New

That’s pretty much all you need to know about the “John Wick” movies — Chapter 3 opened Friday — to get them. Keanu Reeves’ ridiculously skilled assassin is a man of few words but infinite moves. The first film, which showed that Reeves had plenty of action skills post-”Matrix,” became a surprise hit and built a legion of fans for action sequences that have grown in technical complexity over three films. In an interview at The Times, director Chad Stahelski spoke about five scenes from the movies and what it took to pull them off.

1. John Wick vs. Ms. Perkins

In the first film, John is resting at the Continental, the hotel meant to be neutral ground for assassins and off-limits to business (killing business). That doesn’t stop Ms. Perkins (Adrianne Palicki), who is fine with trying to take John out while in his pajamas.

The fight, while intense, also shows how the filmmakers are open to humor. “I thought I’d let myself in,” Perkins says as she shoots up the hotel room.

“Thinking about the scene, we asked, what’s the most vulnerable you can make John Wick?” Stahelski said. “So we decided we’ll have him in bed.”

When Stahelski spoke to Reeves about it, he said the actor suggested that John be in his boxers. “I said, no one looks cool in boxers. But he insisted. He thought it would be best for the character.”

“We reminded Keanu that if he’s going to wear boxer shorts and a T-shirt in this fight scene, there’s no elbow pads, no kneepads. She’s going to be in a leather jacket so she can pad up all she wants. We called it the theater of pain. How bad can we beat up the lead character to make you feel empathy for him?”

2. The Car Fight

Near the end of the first film, John Wick uses his car as a weapon to take down bad guys. Stahelski said that he and that movie’s other filmmaker, David Leitch, had planned to make this an elaborate chase at the Brooklyn Navy Yard. But then budget realities set in.

“We were doing our calculations and we were 10 cars short of doing the sequence we wanted,” he said.

They opted for something smaller, assembling this scene with their stunt coordinator, Darrin Prescott. “Rather than kung fu, we did car fu, keeping Keanu in the car and whatever comes at him, he hits.”

Reeves does some of his own driving in the scene. He took a stunt driving course with Jeremy Fry, who taught him tricks like executing a sliding drift with one hand while shooting out of the window.

3. John Wick vs. Cassian

“John Wick 2” (2017) takes him to Rome to do a job for an Italian crime lord. That job involves murdering the crime lord’s sister, Gianna. But Gianna’s bodyguard, Cassian (played by Common), wants to stop that from happening. He tracks down John for this intense fight on city streets and down a few flights of stairs.

In casting Cassian, Stahelski said, “we wanted someone who exuded cool without ever having to try, look great in a suit and could not just physically hold up to John Wick, but match him in couth and class.”

Stahelski continued, “We put Common through firearm training and martial arts training. For three months he just lived the life of a stunt performer.”

The filmmakers wanted the two to have an epic fight through Rome. “I like close-quarters stuff, having it all in one tight frame where it’s all messy,” Stahelski said of the fight.

The spare nature of the clash, on a Rome street amid parked cars, was inspired by John Woo films like “Hard Boiled” and “The Killer.”

One moment has the two rolling down a staircase to another level of the street. Stahelski said he came across those stairs on a walk through the city to scout locations. He used the stunt doubles Jackson Spidell and Daniel Graham, who were game to take a stair roll. Hoping to avoid shooting the scene multiple times, they completed all the levels of the fall without a break. Stahelski said he left in some of the audio of the men pumping each other up as they complete each part of the stunt.

4. The Library Fight

Yes, an action scene in a library is as outrageous, and inspired, as you might think. Stahelski said that he liked juxtapositions in fight choreography. He didn’t want to pit Reeves against a similarly sized opponent all the time.

“I love the New York Public Library and wanted to do an action scene in the stacks,” he said. “So it’s very tight, and Keanu can just get shoulder to shoulder. But the idea was to find the largest individual we could fit within that and have a fight-in-the-phone-booth kind of feel.” Enter Boban Marjanovic, the 7-foot-3 NBA player who dwarfs Reeves (and just about everyone else).

Because they couldn’t find a stunt double for someone this size, the filmmakers needed Marjanovic to do his own stunts. The team spent two weeks training him for the performance.

At one point Marjanovic must kick John Wick in the chest. He performed the scene with Jackson Spidell, but was afraid of kicking even a stunt double with the force of a Size 20 shoe. So a cautious Marjanovic did a mild kick at first. Then the filmmakers assured him it would be fine to kick at full force. “When he does, you can actually see the stunt double go out of frame,” Stahelski said.

5. The Dog Fight

In “Chapter 3,” John finds himself in Morocco meeting Sofia (Halle Berry), with whom he has a history. He asks for her help, and that turns into a fight against bad guys in which Sofia’s two dogs attack alongside her and John.

To pull that off, five Belgian Malinois had to undergo extensive training, Stahelski said, that treated their attacks like playtime. They would go after green canvas straps on the stunt performers.

The scene was performed by a small group of stuntmen who all became comfortable with the dogs. Those men were used over and over again in the scene, playing multiple guys who are killed.

On most sets, the trainers would be just off camera shouting commands. But because Stahelski was doing wide shots and long takes, trainers couldn’t get close enough to speak to the dogs. So he had Berry herself be the one to give the commands. She spent a couple of hours a day in preproduction learning how to train dogs for this complicated sequence.

This article originally appeared in <a id="8193f934-46d4-3fd6-acd5-3317082917e0" href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/19/movies/john-wick-action-scenes.html">The New York Times</a>.

Inside the five best 'John Wick' action scenes

They killed his dog. They stole his car.

Since this is a scene in the new “Pet Sematary” movie, everything.

Death echoed throughout Stephen King’s 1983 novel and his adapted screenplay for the 1989 film. The latest iteration, now in theaters, follows a similar dreaded path, but the story has been revised to give audiences a fresh shock.

Here’s what’s familiar. The Creeds are still the focus, having just moved from Boston with their children, Gage and Ellie, and cute cat in search of a quieter life in Maine. There’s still the ominous, dead-raising burial ground in the woods that will upend those hopes. Semi trucks speeding by still foreshadow doom. The death of the family cat still pushes the film into creepy places, and the death of a child still instigates the movie’s horrifying final act.

But here’s what’s different. Unlike the novel and the 1989 film, in which Gage, chasing a kite, is struck down by a semi, this time it’s Ellie’s death that fans may find jolting.

The tragedy occurs at Ellie’s 9th birthday party. It’s already not a cheery affair, because she’s missing her cat, Church. But her spirits are lifted when she sees (an undead version of) Church and goes into the street after him. Gage follows her. Their father, Louis (Jason Clarke), runs to grab Gage as a truck bears down. The truck swerves and its chassis detaches, sliding down the street, striking and killing Ellie.

This shocking departure was at the heart of the plot when the remake was first pitched to Paramount by Matt Greenberg, a writer credited with the screen story. (The screenplay, incorporating Greenberg’s ideas, was written by Jeff Buhler.) In an interview, Greenberg said the reasons for the changes were “personal, textual and cinematic.”

On a personal level, Greenberg, who has three daughters, said he was drawn to the relationship between Louis and Ellie and the discussions they have about death. “I’d had a lot of those conversations with my daughters after pets died,” he said. “It’s something that really stayed with me.”

Looking closely at the text, Greenberg said, he saw “Pet Sematary” as the novelist’s “King Lear” and pointed specifically to Lear’s loss of his daughter Cordelia. Greenberg wanted to emphasize the heavy pain of that here.

And cinematically, Greenberg said, killing Ellie (played by Jeté Laurence), not the toddler Gage, would make for more menacing horror once she’s resurrected in her not-quite-living body and wreaks havoc: “I was thinking, an evil 2-year-old, yeah, that can be scary. But an older, more fully formed child makes it a more credible threat.”

So how did King feel about this change? One of the film’s producers, Lorenzo di Bonaventura, worked with the author on the 2007 screen adaptation of the short story “1408.” In an interview, di Bonaventura said that when his team gave King the script, “we all held our breath about the Ellie decision. But his answer back was simple and reassuring. He said: ‘Oh, I see why you made that decision. That’s a good decision.’”

King confirmed that in an email. “I thought the change was OK,” he wrote, adding: “Both versions — the old one, where Gage dies, and the new one, where Ellie dies — result in the same chain of events. I don’t necessarily think one version of the story is better, but I’m sure the directors found it easier to work with a girl zombie than with a toddler zombie.”

Filmmakers Kevin Kölsch and Dennis Widmyer were ready to go to dark places, having directed a creep-out movie-business horror satire called “Starry Eyes.” They amped up the gore and scare factor in some “Pet Sematary” scenes, but for the birthday party sequence, they chose to go in a different direction. The moment of impact isn’t shown, and the aftermath is relatively bloodless.

“We didn’t want it to be too graphic because we didn’t want blood or gore taking away from the emotion of the scene,” Kölsch said in a Skype interview.

Widmyer said building the suspense and surprise of the moment was akin to a magic trick, “a combination of sleight of hand and dread.” By presenting one perilous situation in Gage running for the street, and averting that tragedy only to create another, the filmmakers said they were aiming to emphasize the fatefulness of death in the material.

“The idea,” Widmyer said, “is that no matter how hard you might have tried to stop this from happening, it was meant to happen.”

This article originally appeared in <a id="558d6f4f-4f04-4383-85ac-5abd57de7b1e" href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/07/movies/pet-sematary-stephen-king.html">The New York Times</a>.

Horrors! 'Pet Sematary' tweaks a crucial plot point

It’s a young girl’s birthday in a small town. Family and friends have come to celebrate. What could possibly go wrong?

And yet, one of the most gasp-worthy moments was hearing tween actor Jacob Tremblay use the F-word in the first five minutes of “Good Boys.” It wouldn’t be the only time in this comedy about a wild day in the life of a few sixth-graders, and it was one of several breakout titles worth knowing about as the film portion of the festival comes to a close Saturday.

“If I’m being honest, I am shocked and appalled,” Tremblay joked during the post-screening Q&amp;A, and added referring to his director Gene Stupnitsky, “Gene told me this was going to be a PG-rated family movie. He lied.”

The movie was right at home at a festival that has turned into something of a testing ground for the hit potential of Hollywood comedies. The audience applauded the comic timing of Tremblay and his co-stars, Brady Noon and scene-stealing Keith L. Williams, and that positive reaction along with a recently released red-band trailer featuring one of the movie’s producers, Seth Rogen, has fueled social-media interest. “Good Boys” opens nationwide in August.

Another talker was Olivia Wilde’s directing debut, “Booksmart.” Much like “Good Boys,” it follows students on a wild day, but this one is female-focused. Beanie Feldstein and Kaitlyn Dever star as high school seniors who, on the last day of school, realize they may have studied too hard and partied too softly. They make up for that in one outrageous evening that includes drugged strawberries and a raucous graduation bash. The packed house at the Paramount theater especially appreciated the killer soundtrack and a high laugh-per-minute ratio.

Also winning over festivalgoers was “Long Shot,” a rom-com starring Rogen and Charlize Theron. The crowd was drawn to the combination of smart and slapstick humor, and was also roused by a Boyz II Men cameo. Then, after the screening, could it really happen? Or do dreams just fade away? The pop group did a little East Coast swing in a surprise performance.

The laughs had a mellower edge at the premiere of the Harmony Korine comedy “The Beach Bum,” starring Matthew McConaughey as Moondog, the pothead writer he may have been born to play. The crowd basked in the movie’s hazy glow, and McConaughey was a great sport, attending the after-party dressed in character. Critical reaction to the film was a little more mixed. Variety wrote, “The question here isn’t if McConaughey is having fun, but whether audiences will find his laid-back, ever-lit persona nearly as entertaining to watch.” And The Hollywood Reporter said that the film was “high on style, if not substance.”

Humor was also a thread through some of the festival’s darker films, including Jordan Peele’s “Us,” which opened SXSW and featured a measured number of laugh- and shriek-worthy sequences. Similarly, audiences winced and laughed during “The Art of Self-Defense,” starring Jesse Eisenberg in a deadpan role as an accountant who is brutally attacked by masked assailants. Taking classes at a dojo, he meets a sensei (Alessandro Nivola) with a tainted worldview. The comedy is pitch-black, but the crowd appreciated its sinister quirks.

Other funny journeys down twisted roads included “Porno,” a 1992-set film about conservative Christian teenagers working in a small-town movie theater. After discovering an old film hidden in the walls, they inadvertently unleash a sex demon that wreaks havoc. Keola Racela’s debut feature, with more than one instance of genital mutilation played for laughs, made festivalgoers squirm but got them talking as well.

“Villains,” directed by Dan Berk and Robert Olsen, put a fun twist on the home-invasion genre, with Bill Skarsgard and Maika Monroe as criminals on the lam. When their car runs out of gas, they pick the wrong home to break into, that of a couple (Jeffrey Donovan and Kyra Sedgwick) with a few skeletons in their closet and another secret in their basement.

And in keeping with the Boys/Boyz festival motif, there was “Boyz in the Wood,” a hallucinogenic comedy-survival tale from music video director Ninian Doff about teenagers in the Scottish Highlands who become more hunted than hunters. The site Film School Rejects described it as “'Hot Fuzz’ meets ‘Attack the Block.'” The movie was the subject of so much chatter that SXSW added an extra screening.

The festival wasn’t entirely lighthearted. Its two major jury awards went to much more serious-minded films. “Alice,” Josephine Mackerras' drama about a woman (Emilie Piponnier) who becomes a prostitute to support her child, won the narrative feature prize. And “For Sama,” which focuses on a young female Syrian filmmaker, Waad al-Kateab, who cataloged harrowing aspects of her life in Aleppo for five years, took the documentary feature award.

But the festival’s biggest and funniest standouts show its programming strengths, and reinforce the value of the theatrical experience, the opportunity to laugh, and sometimes cringe, with a large, responsive audience.

This article originally appeared in <a id="2e724d40-f814-4df2-a19b-f133b5d8fb5b" href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/15/movies/sxsw-film-festival.html">The New York Times</a>.

Breakout movies at SXSW you'll want to know about

AUSTIN, Texas — Surprises abounded at this year’s South by Southwest film festival, with movies featuring depraved demons, devilish doppelgängers and sadistic senseis all doing despicable things.

<h1>AUSTIN, Texas — Oscar-winning actress Charlize Theron traveled to South by Southwest over the weekend for the premiere of her new romantic comedy, “Long Shot,” in which she stars as a presidential candidate opposite Seth Rogen as her speechwriter. The film opens nationwide May 3.</h1>

We asked readers if they had any questions for her during the festival, and I selected a handful to ask Theron on Saturday at the Four Seasons. She spoke about how “Monster” (2003) made her more empathetic, how her physical transformation for “Tully” took a toll and how she’s still waiting for a part in a Marvel movie. Here are edited excerpts from her responses.

Q: Your performance in “Monster” was an absolute tour de force. It felt to me as if you did much more than study Aileen Wuornos. It seemed as if you were able to connect with her psyche in some way. Can you talk about your connection to this role a bit more? — Deb, Wilmington, Delaware

A: I think the more you embed yourself in the information you have access to, the more alive things become underneath your skin.

They executed Aileen on the day I said yes to the film. Patty Jenkins, who wrote and directed, had been writing her letters, but we never had the chance to meet with her. But her friend [from] her childhood years in Detroit became the custodian of her letters from prison. She invited us to her house and said, “Look, you can have access to all of it. I’m not sending it to you and I’m not making copies. So Patty and I flew out to Flint, Michigan, and we spent three days in a guest bedroom, reading as many of Aileen’s letters as we possibly could to just try and understand her.

Q: Many actors mention how playing a role can sometimes impact their views on issues in the world. Have any of the roles you’ve played had that effect on you, and if so which one, and in what way? — Frank Komola, Bradford, Massachusetts

A: Yes, I never really truly understood the difference between empathy and sympathy until I played Aileen. Once I empathized with her, I could understand her actions a little bit more. And I think it’s sometimes a tricky thing to talk about, because we don’t want to ever justify this person’s actions. But I remember being done with that movie and walking through my life in this world, traveling, going to Africa, and just really understanding the power of empathy and how, I don’t think, we encourage it enough.

Q: You’ve demonstrated your action-movie cred in about a half-dozen films, but haven’t yet appeared in a Marvel or DC project. Hard to believe you haven’t been asked, so what’s the story? — Stu Freeman, Brooklyn

A: That’s a question for Marvel. I’ve met with those guys and we’ve had some conversations, but I’ve never been offered anything. I would totally be open to it. That genre is becoming really fascinating to me, and that kind of physical storytelling is something that I’m really enjoying. So get with it, Marvel!

Q: Is there any physical change you won’t make to play a role? — Lanie, San Antonio

A: There’s nothing so far that a director has asked of me that I’ve said no to. But for [the 2018 movie] “Tully,” I had gained all this weight and it was really, really hard in my 40s to lose it. I did a lot of damage to my body and I definitely went through a period of full frustration where I was like, I will never do that again. And then of course I know, if the right material came around, I would do it again in a heartbeat.

Q: The film industry seems to be making progress with more complex female acting roles (although there is still a lot to be done). But the industry still does not have nearly enough female directors. Why do you think it is so difficult for female directors to succeed?— Cristina Salazar, Baltimore

A: We’ve gone through a very long period where women weren’t supported in that job, and so now we’re in the recovery process. It’s great because of film festivals like South by Southwest and Sundance and Telluride. There are more platforms for filmmakers who haven’t had the opportunities in the last 20 or 30 years. And I also think the industry now understands the benefit. This stuff is not always generated by good thoughts and big hearts. The industry is realizing that there is something to be monetized here and that women are actually tapping into storytelling in a way that is really good for our business.

Q: You said in an interview that you were stalking the incredible director Lynne Ramsay. Is it working? — João Xará, Lisbon, Portugal

A: Not yet. I have to amp up my game a little bit more. We had a really nice period where she was in LA writing and not living far from me. We got to hang out a little bit. She has a little girl and our kids got together. She’s an absolutely lovely person and I’m such a fan of her work. But she moves by the beat of her own drum, and unless she’s going to be inspired by something, none of my stuff is flattering enough for her to change her process, which is what I admire most about her.

Q: How much credit do you give the directors for helping your performance shine?— Screed, New York

A: The majority of it. If I felt like I didn’t need that or benefit from that, I think I would just be directing my own stuff. There’s something really powerful about working with people, whether it’s your director or your cinematographer, your entire crew. I often imagine them all sitting at a table, and what they each bring in their own expertise that makes what I do so much better.

Q: Any interest in directing?— Padgman1, downstate Illinois

A: I feel like probably, but not right now. I have a passion for storytelling and exploring it in many different facets. I can literally see myself getting into production design. I just love all the tentacles of the process. So yeah, I can see it happening, but there’s nothing in the near future that I’m imagining.

This article originally appeared in <a id="0998dc93-61c2-493a-ba55-005948526a76" href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/12/movies/charlize-theron-long-shot-sxsw.html">The New York Times</a>.

Charlize Theron Answers Questions From Times Readers

We asked readers if they had any questions for her during the festival, and I selected a handful to ask Theron on Saturday at the Four Seasons.

Charlize Theron answers questions from Times readers

“What if I showed four episodes of ‘This Is Us’ in a row, with no explanation?” he asked. And he gave a shout-out to another film that brought him to the festival three years ago. “If you haven’t seen ‘Keanu,’ go see it. It’s a must-see.”

But back to “Us,” the follow-up to Peele’s Oscar-winning, culture-galvanizing “Get Out.” Expectations have been high for “Us” since the trailer dropped on Christmas Day and raised questions around the web. What’s up with the family that seems to be terrorized by their creepy doppelgängers? Why the scissors? How much does the 1995 Luniz track “I Got 5 on It” really factor in?

Now, the biggest question to arise after its first public screening is: Does “Us” live up to the hype? I won’t give away the plot, but based on the electrified reaction Friday night in the packed Paramount Theater, signs are pointing to yes.

SXSW moviegoers can be more enthusiastic than many; they’re eager for a great night out. And Peele seems to be particularly good at generating audience response. “Get Out” mixed humor and chills, and in “Us,” Peele’s comedy roots are even more apparent. At Friday’s screening, the crowd was laughing heartily one moment, screaming the next and cheering soon after.

But Peele wants to leave audiences wondering as well. During a Q&amp;A after the screening, he said, “My favorite thing is the idea that people will leave ready to have a conversation with whoever they’re with.” He continued, “I also wanted to design a film that’s very personal for every individual.”

Early critical responses have been positive, while grappling with the movie’s meaning.

Mekado Murphy

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