Set during a time when indigenous peoples in the area were tremendously wealthy owing to oil discovered on their land, “Killers of the Flower Moon” chronicles the horrendous series of murders that were designed to transfer ownership of the land back to white people, all told through the eyes of Mollie Burkhart (Lily Gladstone) and her husband Ernest (Leonardo DiCaprio).

“History is fascinating, and you can’t begin to design a film until you know about the people and their backgrounds,” production designer Jack Fisk said in TheWrap’s latest installment of How I Did It, presented by Apple Original Films.

Fisk, whose filmography includes “There Will Be Blood,” “Days of Heaven” and “The Revenant,” said his first order of business was designing Mollie’s house, which plays a central role in the film.

“I needed to know what her house was like to understand her family,” he said. “When I read David Grann’s book, he suspected what her house might’ve looked like, but he never found it. I found what I think was the house in Gray Horse but it was too small to shoot in. But I picked an Osage house that had outside porches so I could put beds on it for sleeping, and in every bedroom we put two or three beds because the Osage would gather for dances and parties and they would just come and stay with their family and friends.”

Jacqueline West, the film’s costume designer, took particular interest in the blankets that adorned the Osage characters.

“Julie, my Osage consultant, she calls it the Osage mink coat because they were treasured,” West — whose expertise ranges from “Dune: Part Two” to “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button” — said of the designs. “But I always thought of it as armor. When Mollie would put it on to go into this town, it was us the Osage against you in your suits and ties.”

When it came to putting together the costumes for DiCaprio’s Ernest, West took inspiration from Tom Mix, Hollywood’s first Western star and actor in over 200 films from the early days of cinema. “I felt he would identify as a quasi-cowboy because of his uncle’s cattle ranch,” she added.

While the production set up shop in northeast Oklahoma where the events depicted actually took place, movie magic was needed to transform the landscape back to 1921. Some existing structures could be reworked, but Fisk couldn’t find a train station that fit for the film’s big opening sequence – so he built one.

“It was fun creating a train station because we couldn’t find one that looked like that,” he said. “And that was with the same plans of the train station in Fairfax.”

In casting the extras that populated each scene, Scorsese and his team found real descendants of those depicted in the film – many of whom wore pieces of clothing from their family members.

“Marty sort of gave us marching orders, he wanted it as real and natural as possible and as true to the Osage story,” Fisk said of the overall theme of the production. “That was great because I would like to approach it almost like a documentary, so I think it became our personal challenge to tell their story correctly.”

The post ‘Killers of the Flower Moon’ Design Team Felt a ‘Personal Challenge’ to Tell the Osage’s Story Correctly | How I Did It appeared first on TheWrap.

As Greenwood said, fans may feel they had a Barbie Dreamhouse exactly like the one Margot Robbie’s Barbie lives in within the movie, but that’s not possible because of how Greenwood and Spencer mixed and matched elements from the Mattel toyline’s past. It’s really a cherry-picking of all the various eras of the famous doll.

“She [Gerwig] wanted a place that wasn’t full of disappointment. You open the present and it’s exactly what you want,” said set decorator Katie Spencer. “It is that idealized version of a remembered past.”

The team had the entire history of Barbie to work with and, as costume designer Jacqueline Durran has spoken about before, that required everyone to explore that history through a child’s lens.

“I wanted to make it multidimensional so that you could look at it [as a] child; the child would just enjoy it from a point of view of colors, but there was something else going on if you wanted to look at it [deeper],” Durran said while adding that the entire concept of “Barbie” was “very funny because I had no idea where it would lead us.”

The only narrative rule that was set came from how one plays with a doll, according to Spencer. It’s a sentiment echoed by Greenwood. “What is it to be a doll,” the production designer said. “That was the first big conversation … the philosophy of being toys.”

In the dance sequence that opens the movie, all the Barbies and Kens are dressed the same or are making similar choices, said Durran. That was coupled with some of Gerwig’s own favorite looks and all of that needed to be blended to create a cogent vibe between all the characters. “It had to have a real atmosphere and cohesion,” said Greenwood.

For the big dance sequence set to “Dance the Night Away,” Durran settled on white and gold and worked with Gerwig to nail down the specific colors of the costumes, then had to figure out how to make the variety of costumes work together. “I just had to work out a way to bring that cohesion back to the dance so that when you looked at it, it looked like a whole thing, not lots of individuals.”

Durran also stressed the importance of working closely with Greenwood, Spencer and cinematographer Rodrigo Prieto to ensure that the bold aesthetic choices would cohere.

Because of that hive mind in Barbieland, the colors had to be similar, but not identical. “The pinks behave so differently against other colors,” said Spencer. The team started with hundreds of different shades of pink before eventually whittling it down to 12 and 13.

“It was like an amazing firework,” Spencer said of the experience making the film.

Watch the full “How I Did It” in the video above.

The post ‘Barbie’ Designers Created a Dream House That Was an ‘Idealized Version of a Remembered Past’ | How I Did It appeared first on TheWrap.

“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 streaming on Netflix.

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.