“Society of the Snow” chronicles the crash of Uruguayan Air Force Flight 571 that went down in the heart of the Andes in 1972, killing 16 passengers and leaving the other 29 to band together and survive under harsh conditions.

“We were trusted with this story to tell that was a true story that happened to these people, that happened to their friends,” Oscar-winning composer Michael Giacchino said. “I like to say I put myself in the character and how would they feel? That’s OK if it’s Captain Kirk or Spider-Man. In this film in particular, it was a very uncomfortable question to ask yourself on a daily basis.”

Bayona and his team knew the plane crash would be central to the story, but bringing that to life necessitated a meticulous handle on the entire sequence that leaned on sound effects over score.

“We were scared of playing a lot of music in that moment,” the “A Monster Calls” director explained. “We didn’t want to make the audience feel like we were pushing them. You can get to the end of the film and the audience is so exhausted that they don’t feel anymore.”

“The engine was very, very high pitched and penetrating,” sound designer and supervising sound editor Oriol Tarragó said of the chilling sounds that populate the sequence.

When putting it all together, Bayona said he drew inspiration from Alfred Hitchcock, specifically the shower scene in “Psycho.”

“It’s kind of like a suspense scene. There’s a long sense of anticipation, but at the very end, the survivors will tell you the worst moment is once we finally crashed against the snow and all the seats crushed like an accordion,” he said. “Suspense is all about the anticipation and then the shock.”

Bayona and Giacchino became friends over a decade ago, and through that time Bayona would show Giacchino his films to get the composer and director’s feedback. Giacchino, whose composing work ranges from “Up” to “Spider-Man: Homecoming” to Bayona’s “Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom,” wrote the first piece of music for “Society of the Snow” the day after he saw the movie.

“I loved the movie so much I just immediately got right into it,” the composer said. “The next morning, after he left my house, I woke up and I wrote a piece of music and I sent it to him I was like, ‘Here, throw this into the cut.’”

That piece is music is still in the film nearly unchanged, and Giacchino sparked to the restraint of the music in the film that allowed the emotion of the characters – and their friendship – to shine through.

“The most important thing was to create that real friendship,” Bayona said of the film. “That bond that was created in the mountain, that society, that is what the film is about.”

“Society of the Snow” has been selected by Spain as its official entry for the Best International Film category at the Oscars. The film is in select theaters on Dec. 22 and on Netflix on Jan. 4, 2024.

The post ‘Society of the Snow’ Director J.A. Bayona and His Team of Artisans on Their Unique Approach to Telling the Emotional Story | How I Did It appeared first on TheWrap.

“One of the biggest challenges with this film, as with any music-based film, is trying to make the transitions from production dialogue to ADR dialogue to the characters singing in a studio, seem as though they’re natural,” said re-recording mixer Paul Massey in the latest episode of TheWrap’s How I Did It, presented by Warner Bros.

“As a re-recording mixer I’m joining the project quite late,” Massey said. “We have a mixture of so many different varieties of song: gospel, jazz, some of the big band numbers. The brass section must have had a hoot recording this cause you don’t get to play that that often.”

“Our movie oscillates between the crazy, ostentatious, rambunctious madness, but the heart of the film lives in all its intimate moments,” said director Blitz Bazawule.

For Bazawule, he wanted to create an established reason for why the characters are singing in this version, and that started with the very first shot. “One thing that’s gonna set this musical apart is that our music is gonna have a source,” he said. “Our first shot, when you hear those horses hooves and they start to build a cadence, you hear the girls clap, you hear the banjo, and then you hear [composer Kris Bowers] come in with that ‘whoa!’….the audience goes, ‘I buy that. It started somewhere.'”

“You don’t feel like you’re stopping a dialogue scene and starting a music scene,” said Poll.

Kris Bowers is no stranger to working with unique musical stylings, whether it’s rearranging classical compositions with “Chevalier” or creating a naturalistic story for this film. In the case of a dramatic scene like Celie (Fantasia Barrino) and Shug Avery (Taraji P. Henson) celebrating the color purple, the score had to complement, not overpower. “It’s a quiet conversation,” he said. “It’s a very simple conversation. The score should be intimate and personal. We recorded it with close mics and a slightly smaller ensemble.”

“When it’s quiet, that’s the hard work,” said Bazawule. “When it’s expansive and people are flying all over the place … no problems, because we can always make up for the error.” But there was absolutely no room for that with the scene of Shug and Celie. “Everything came down to that scene,” he said. “It’s about identifying the rare elements and the rare birds, honoring those rare things parallel to Celie’s life. Celie was the rare bird. She was the one no one paid attention to. She was that purple flower.”

“The Color Purple” opens in theaters on Dec. 25.

The post ‘The Color Purple’ Filmmaking Team on the Delicate Balance of Musical Sequences and Dramatic Scenes | How I Did It appeared first on TheWrap.

Lipa cowrote the disco-tinged song “Dance the Night” alongside Caroline Ailin, Mark Ronson and Andrew Wyatt, which plays during Barbie’s (Margot Robbie) best night ever … before she asks if anyone else questions their mortality. The song sets the tone for a big high point in Barbie’s life before she goes on a journey that shows her what it truly means to be human.

“It’s very different when you’re writing to picture,” Lipa said in the latest episode of TheWrap’s How I Did It, presented by Warner Bros. The “New Rules” singer had no previous experience writing a song for a movie in this manner.

Collaborator Ronson told her to liken it to crafting a professional score for the movie as they wrote the song while watching footage from the dance number.

“We were really leading and leaning into [the] visual to help us combine the two,” she said. The focus became on writing a song that was both nostalgic yet modern. “I felt there had to be a lot of synergy,” she said. The songwriting team would have “intense brainstorming sessions,” according to Lipa, with Post-It notes and whiteboards covered in ideas.

“I felt really [like] such a core part of the team,” she said. Working on the song with Ronson and Wyatt was a full-circle moment of friends getting together. The two worked with Lipa on her first song, 2018’s Grammy-winning “Electricity.” Gerwig herself was influenced heavily by disco, a genre Lipa has long celebrated.  

Initially, Lipa wrote a totally different iteration of the song, one less focused on the best night of Barbie’s life and instead emphasizing the chaos of her impending existential crisis that comes to dominate the rest of the movie. “Once the visuals came in, it kinda became very apparent that it needed to be a little bit lighter lyrically,” she admitted.

Gerwig’s feature has been celebrated for its incisive look at women, and Lipa explained that the song definitely respects that element of the story.

“That moment says so much about women in general,” she said. “When things don’t go right, [women] make things seem like everything’s fine and roll with the punches. You just kinda go, ‘Oh, don’t worry about it. I probably just said something silly.'”

‘Barbie’ is available on Blu-ray and digital and will be streaming on Max on Friday.

The post Dua Lipa Approached Writing ‘Dance the Night’ as If She Was Scoring the Scene | How I Did It appeared first on TheWrap.

The epic drama charts the true story of a series of murders of Osage in 1920s Oklahoma, but while the production set up shop in Oklahoma where the murders actually took place, “invisible” visual effects were still crucial to the film’s storytelling — to the point that the film is one of 20 on the Oscars shortlist for Best Visual Effects.

“Visual effects is just a tool that is dependent on the way the filmmaker uses that tool to tell the story,” visual effects supervisor Pablo Helman said of his approach to working with Scorsese in the latest episode of TheWrap’s How I Did It, presented by Apple TV+. The two developed a relationship on “Silence” and Scorsese’s cutting-edge “The Irishman,” and for “Killers of the Flower Moon,” Helman’s work was essential to a number of aspects of the story – namely the sickness that envelops various characters as they’re poisoned.

“A big part of the story is that these four or five characters were getting poisoned,” Helman explained. “We did some research in terms of what it means to be poisoned. We had to also manage the sickness of those characters and without that, you actually don’t have that story.”

Indeed, in the How I Did It video you can see that the characters’ weight and color were altered in post-production to further reflect their sickness in a subtle collaboration with the film’s makeup team.

Other invisible visual effects included adding a hat to a character that wasn’t wearing one (“Nobody understood who he was because in three or four scenes before he was wearing a hat, so Marty says, ‘Do you think you can put him in a hat?’”), filling the landscape with oil rigs and cows, and even changing the page of the book that DiCaprio’s character is seen reading.

“In the movie, there’s a scene in which Ernest takes look at the history of the Osage. We shot the scene with him paging through the book, but we didn’t have the right pictures. After we shot the scene, we worked with Mary Ann Bauer, who is the archivist, so we had to replace those pictures that he was referring to.”

The visual effects team was also called in for the final shot of the film.

“The last shot film has a lot of symbolism, there’s a certain perfection about the round thing according to Marty,” he said. “We start on the drum and the camera pulls up 200 feet and then we reveal these people dancing around the drum. So I was going to have to put people together from different takes just to make it about 400 or 500 people. We also needed to clean up the environment and I documented the Osage people so that we can build them in CG if we need to. And all that was part of storytelling.”

The post ‘Invisible’ Visual Effects in ‘Killers of the Flower Moon’ Were Vital to the Film’s Storytelling | How I Did It appeared first on TheWrap.

“The period of 1933 Los Angeles was just such a great opportunity for production design and to show off this world,” producer designer Keith P. Cunnigham said in TheWrap’s latest installment of How I Did It, presented by HBO. “I love research, so that was easy,” costume designer Catherine Adair said of her experience on the second season of the show.

That research steered Cunnigham and Adair’s approach to the series. “Whether it was a car that Keith had seen or whether it was somebody who had come back from the first World War who as missing a limb, there were very specific pieces that Keith and I had found and we pitched to the showrunners that we wanted to make sure we saw,” Adair said.

Their research took them into gambling casinos on ships all along the coast, and the ship seen the show was used to help establish the second season.

“The challenge was to find a location that was big enough to feel like a casino that would have existed on one of these ships, which will be at least 400 feet long. We knew that was a great way to establish the show and introduce this color palette,” Cunnigham said.

The design team also had to work with the post-production team to ensure that whatever color desaturation would be done wouldn’t affect their choices.

“We took paint swatches and color palettes and I did whole boards of fabric and we put them in front of the camera, and then we went to post to find out how much they were going to desaturate in Season 2 so that we knew where to pull the color up and where to leave it alone,” Adair explained.

For the courtroom where many of the season’s most tense scenes take place, the design team created their own murals to line the walls “looking at the two different sides of society, the upper class and the lower class that were struggling,” Cunnigham said.

“From the costume point of view, I knew what colors we didn’t want to use so that when we place extras in the courtroom, hopefully the tapestry of color that you get there really does echo what you did in the murals,” Adair said.

And when it came to dressing Matthew Rhys’ Perry Mason, Adair wanted his wardrobe to reflect the more professional nature of the character in Season 2.

“Everything that Perry wore in Season 1, other than his casual clothes and his leather jacket, he got all that clothing from the morgue,” Adair said. “Finding a balance of making him some new clothes that didn’t look brand new, but that Della had insisted that he looked a little bit more professional. And the gift Matthew gave me is his physical way of being once he inhabits a role is so specific and so good.”

But Cunnigham and Adai both concluded that the crux of their work came from the scripts. “The writers were gave us such a palette and world to be invested in. I mean, what an opportunity. Every script was just a gift,” Cunningham said.

The post ‘Perry Mason’ Season 2 Production and Costume Designers Crafted 1930s LA Noir for the HBO Series | How I Did It appeared first on TheWrap.

“May December” stars Julianne Moore and Charles Melton are a couple grappling with their tabloid-covered past when an actress, played by Natalie Portman, shows up to research a role.

“It doesn’t redeem either of these women, they’re always in this tension,” Haynes said of the film’s approach to the central relationships in TheWrap’s How I Did It presented by Netflix. The director said he wanted to drill down the way the two women at the center of the story are mirroring each other through the use of mirrors and direct address, in which characters speak directly to the camera.

“Direct address is used in different ways in movies. I couldn’t think of a lot of examples of it being used this way where the actor just looks into the camera as their reflection in a mirror and you don’t have to necessarily establish that there’s a mirror, you just let the performance tell you that,” he said.

Haynes worked for the first time with Blauvelt when his regular cinematographer Ed Lachman fell and broke his femur. Blauvelt, whose credits include 2020’s stunning “Emma.” and 2016’s “Certain Women,” jumped at the chance to work with Haynes. “My answer is like, you don’t even have to give me credit,” he joked.

The mirror theme came to a head during a crucial scene in which Portman and Moore’s characters are watching one of Moore’s daughters try on a dress.

“The scene itself is shocking and funny, but it’s also very cruel and I see that as a show of force,” screenwriter Samy Burch said.

“Every woman that I know understands that scene and has been there,” Haynes added. “Yes, she’s playing games with power and marking her territory around Elizabeth, but it’s a modeling thing about femininity and how it gets passed on from mothers to daughters. I wanted to try to let that all play out in the mirrors that the two women are speaking into and starting to observe each other through.”

Haynes said his initial idea for the shot was much simpler, but it evolved from there. The performers are surrounded by mirrors and the camera had to be positioned just right so it wouldn’t catch any errant reflections of the set or crew. It was one of the most complicated scenes in the entire shoot and Blauvelt said it was a true team effort to nail it.

“It’s not exclusive to me, or even the departments, it’s like a collective that goes all the way back to the genius of the writing, and the characters, and Julianne Moore and Natalie Portman and Elizabeth Yu,” the cinematographer said. “When that happens, and all the pistons are firing and you know that we got there from everybody really understanding the intent and building something like that, it’s the best feeling you can have as a filmmaker.”

Haynes said the entire filmmaking team came together to make the shot possible.

“It was a really special time,” Haynes said. “We felt like, ‘Damn we are working as a team so well.’ It just took everybody hands-on sharing that process.”

“May December” is now playing in select theaters and will be streaming on Netflix on Dec. 1.

The post ‘May December’ Director Todd Haynes Breaks Down the Film’s Use of Mirrors to Reinforce Key Themes | How I Did It appeared first on TheWrap.

“I like to be challenged,” Emmy-nominated cinematographer Jon Joffin said in a new installment of TheWrap’s “How I Did It,” presented by Apple TV+. “They told me with Season 2 they wanted it to be grittier and more like ‘Chicago,’ ‘Cabaret,’ and they even threw in ‘Hair’ and ‘Godspell,’ so there were all these different looks mingling and it was very exciting.”

While the show’s first season paid tribute to the Golden Age musicals of the 1940s and 50s, the second season finds New York doctors Josh (Keegan-Michael Key) and Melissa (Cecily Strong) trying to return to Schmigadoon, only to discover Schmicago – a city that’s a loving tribute to the musicals of the ‘60s and ‘70s, particularly of the Bob Fosse variety.

To that end, Emmy-nominated choreographer Christopher Gattelli worked closely with Joffin on all of the season’s musical numbers.

“I feel like Fosse really upped the ante in terms of how he used the camera to film dance, so aside from just the choreography, it was also trying to replicate the different camera angles so it had that ’60s, ’70s feel as well,” Gattelli said. “It was such a great marriage of [Jon] understanding the style and really understanding how to heighten the dance the way they did in that period.”

The cinematography of the season was crafted as if the viewer were in the audience in the theater, so Joffin executed these challenging shots while capturing the musical numbers with multiple cameras.

“Everything is shot pretty much from one angle at a time as if you’re the audience in the theater, so I tried not to be too fancy with the shooting. We had four cameras, but we would keep them very close together and we would vary the sizes.”

Star Jane Krakoswki was especially keen on tackling “Chicago” for this season, and Gattelli said her musical number in the courtroom went incredibly smoothly.

“She’s like, ‘I’ve never done ‘Chicago’ and it’s my favorite show, that’s why I’m a performer,’” Gattelli recalled. “So this was also exciting for her because she got to fulfill a little dream. We knew it was ambitious, but Jane got everything the first time. It took longer to move the camera than it did to capture the footage because she was so on top of it.”

“Schmigadoon!” Season 2 is now streaming on Apple TV+.

The post The ‘Schmigadoon!’ Team Upped the Musical Number Ante in Every Way for Season 2 | How I Did It Presented by Apple TV+ appeared first on TheWrap.

“My biggest fear when I started working on this project was that Jeff could come off as a sympathetic character, which I know is not something that any of us wanted,” Emmy-nominated editor Stephanie Filo said in an installment of TheWrap’s of “How I Did It” sponsored by Netflix. “I think that also led to us dialing back in the edit as well. A conscious choice that I think all the editors on this project made was that we should really strip back how often we’re cutting and then really just live in these wider shots where you can just see the moment happening objectively and feel what was happening.”

“We held back quite a bit,” Emmy-nominated re-recording mixer Laura Wiest added. “Usually we would take this moment to do something really cool with sound and that just seemed inappropriate to do.” Wiest described a scene in which Dahmer’s neighbor hears him murdering someone through a vent, revealing that the sound team cut back on any graphic sound effects. “It doesn’t need to be in your face for this.”

The authenticity extended to Evan Peters’ transformation to play Jeffrey Dahmer. “Evan in no way shape or form looked like Dahmer,” Emmy-nominated head of makeup Gigi Williams said. “I put on a full five o’clock shadow with just tattoo color and red-ringed his eyes and shadowed him and gave him dark circles. By the time I was finished, he looked in the mirror and you could see him go, ‘OK I’m Dahmer.’ The transformation was amazing.”

That transformation extended to Dahmer’s alcoholism, and Peters’ look was dictated by how drunk his character was in a scene. “I’d go in in the morning and I’d say to Evan, ‘OK how drunk are you here? How debauched are you?,’” Williams said. “Then it was like, ‘OK so darker circles, more sweat, dirtier fingers.’”

The attention to detail seeped through every inch of “Dahmer,” including an authentic depiction of the supporting cast.

“I’ve watched so many documentaries because I wanted to understand the timeline, including their family members,” Emmy-nominated department head of hair Shay Sanford-Fong said. “We did constant boards from ‘70s, ‘80s, ‘90s and all different hair textures. Even his grandmother, there aren’t many photos of her. It was constantly watching, pausing, taking photos, printing those, putting those on to understand this is what the grandmother’s gonna look like.”

Through it all, the team kept a focus on the victims – especially when it came to editing the sequence involving the victim impact statements.

“There’s actual footage of this happening and that’s haunted me for 30 years,” Filo said. “When I knew I had to edit that scene in particular, I saved it to the end, it was like the final scene that I cut in that episode even though they shot it early on because I felt like I had a real responsibility to do justice to telling that part of the story.”

Wiest explained that traditionally, in a scene like this, the sound would pick up seat movement and other sounds throughout the courtroom during the impact statement. “We didn’t do that with this because we wanted to be on the victims when they were talking,” she said. “My dialogue mixers Joe Barnett and Jamie Hardt were really careful in making sure that the futz on the microphones was going to be similar to what you would have noticed for those people who remembered watching it on TV.”

Filo summed up the experience: “Really it was just a matter of being able to tell this story as authentically as we could.”

“Dahmer – Monster: The Jeffrey Dahmer Story” is now streaming on Netflix.

Note: This episode of “How I Did It” was originally published at a prior date and has been updated to reflect the Emmy nominations received by “Dahmer.”

The post How the ‘Dahmer – Monster’ Crafts Team Stayed Authentic Without Glamorizing the Killer | How I Did It Sponsored by Netflix appeared first on TheWrap.

The Max original series is based on the true story of Texas housewife Candy Montgomery who started an affair with a neighbor (played by Jesse Plemons) and ended up killing his wife (played by Lily Rabe).

The show finds Candy getting into her car after the murder and driving to pick her kids up from school, and in a new episode of TheWrap’s “How I Did It” presented by HBO and Max, Olsen and Glatter broke down the harrowing sequence.

“In the car where she puts the music on trying to find that sense of self again, trying to get back to the fact that this never happened is so intriguing to me,” Glatter said. “And what was going on in Lizzie’s face with covering up the cuts and stopping the bleeding, the planning of that and seeing it all in her face, but there’s almost no dialogue until she pulls into the church parking lot. There were three different parts of the sequence and I had a progression in my mind. I knew that it was important to have music there because that was Candy’s kind of place a peace and freedom, but it wasn’t working, she can’t find that.”

“After you murder someone and are trying to figure out what the next steps to do, I think there’s no worse place you could go or be than a room filled with innocent children,” Olsen added. “I thought of it as a nightmare.”

Glatter played with sound when Candy is shown going into the school, to put viewers inside the character’s head.

“Part of going in with the kids in the lunchroom, I knew that I wanted the sound to be very subjective,” Glatter said. “And being in Candy’s mind in her point of view as she’s looking at her own children, and yes we played with variable frame rates but not a huge amount, just kind of taking the edge off reality. She’s in an altered state that she may never recover from.”

In approaching the series as a whole, Glatter said she wasn’t interested in merely retelling the crime. She wanted to dig into the why.

“For me, to just jump in and tell the story come of the crime, it’s not that interesting. I’m much more interested in why this happened and who these people were and that you have a most unlikely murder,” she said. “I really wanted to show what was in some ways very beautiful and bucolic on the surface and what has a whole different texture underneath. It’s a beautiful picket fence but the paint is peeling. So looking at both sides of that, kind of the cracks in the American Dream.”

The post ‘Love & Death’ Star Elizabeth Olsen Breaks Down Post-Murder Sequence | How I Did It Presented by HBO | Max appeared first on TheWrap.

Series lead Gary Oldman and director Will Smith sat down with TheWrap to explain how they approach the show, especially Oldman’s deliberately unkempt character, Jackson Lamb, in a new installment of TheWrap’s “How I Did It” sponsored by Apple TV+. As Oldman says, Lamb, a veteran MI5 spy who’s been relegated to the backwaters of Slough House, “doesn’t stand on ceremony.”

The series has already had two tense seasons and will be back for a third and fourth round, with Oldman keen to keep playing the delightfully “obnoxious and rude” character.

“Slow Horses” is the first TV series for the Oscar-winning actor, whose films include “Darkest Hour,” “Tailor Tinker Soldier Spy,” and “Mank.” “With film, you only really get to do it once. I love long-form and I’ve always envied those actors who could inhabit a character over many, many episodes,” Oldman said. “I was looking for something: British spy, fascinating characters and [this] just sort of fell from the sky.”

British writer Will Smith, who won two Emmys for his work on “Veep,” has penned several of the episodes. “I was never worried about the balance of comedy and drama. All the best dramas, great American dramas that I love, all have massive influence on me — ‘The Sopranos,’ ‘The Wire’ — they have comedy and it doesn’t detract from it.”

One of the sources of humor is Oldman’s character, who always looks like he’s slept in his clothes and who, in one funny Season 2 scene, noisily slurps noodles in front of one of his agents, River Cartwright (Jack Lowden.)

“The noodles [scene] isn’t in the book,” explained Smith. “It says in the script that Lamb is eating noodles and they’re kind of [falling] out his mouth and it’s disgusting. That’s at the top of the scene, but it’s what you did within that scene with the way you were eating.”

“It’s also part of his character, though, the disrespect to people, not standing on ceremony that he’s going to just keep eating in front of people and that’s part of his way of showing what he thinks of people,” added Smith.

“He doesn’t give an ‘f,'” Oldman agreed. “What you see is what you get. So there’s something very liberating about being able to dismiss people and insult them. It’s the last thing I would want to do as Gary, because the cast is so lovely. It’s such a great bunch of people, but when we’re in the scene, it is just so funny, playing a character who’s so obnoxious and so rude.”

As for the logistics of shooting the scene in question? “It was like a whole morning’s work. You’ve had 17 bowls of noodles and then they say okay, yeah, we’re breaking for lunch. I think I might skip lunch,” Oldman grinned.

The post Gary Oldman Embraced the ‘Liberating’ Nature of ‘Slow Horses’ Role: ‘What You See Is What You Get’ | Wrap Video appeared first on TheWrap.