Exposure: Emma Thomas
Emma Thomas met Christopher Nolan while they were both students majoring in English literature at University College in London, England, and they were married during their last year at the school. Hardcore film buffs, Thomas and Nolan organized a film society and arranged screenings of classic movies for their fellow students; then used the money they earned from selling tickets to produce a 16 mm black-and-white film (Following), which premiered at the 1999 Slamdance Film Festival in Park City, Utah. While in Park City, they saw The Hi-Line, over at the Sundance Festival, and made it a point to find the film’s cinematographer, Wally Pfister, ASC. Thus began a creative partnership that would stretch over the breadth of Thomas and Nolan’s career - Memento, Insomnia, Batman Begins, The Prestige, The Dark Knight - and their latest effort, Inception.
Thomas juggles many duties in helping to bring Nolan’s fertile, cinematic visions to the screen - reading scripts as they evolve, bouncing back ideas, and, of course, acting as mother to the pair’s three pre-teen children. She has, for the most part, hired the same production team over the course of her six films with Nolan, filling in elements as their global locations demand. [Inception was shot in six different countries!] As Bob Fisher discovered, there may not be another producer in the industry quite like Emma Thomas. Just please don’t ask her anything about Batman 3 until after she takes her family away on a vacation!
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Exposure: Steve Ritzi
Stunt coordinator and 2nd Unit director Steve Ritzi grew up around boats on Florida’s Intracoastal Waterway on the Atlantic coast. In 1989 he auditioned for and won a role in the stunt boat show at Universal Studios Orlando. At the time, Florida ’s film and television industry was booming, and Ritzi decided he wanted to learn more about stunts. Fortunately, veteran stuntman Glenn Wilder had moved from Los Angeles to Florida, and Ritzi began attending informal training sessions in Wilder’s backyard where scaffolding had been erected so they could practice falls, and, of course, fights. Ritzi also attended a driving seminar held by another veteran stuntman, Wally Crowder, and soon found himself heading over to Orlando-area soundstages, resume and headshots in hand, to introduce himself to the stunt coordinators. The result has been a stellar career in Hollywood’s action game that has included executing physical “gags” on dozens of films - Passenger 57, The Patriot, Bad Boys II, Transporter 2, Body of Lies, Zombieland among them - while also adding stunt coordinator and second unit director credits to his resume on a number of films, most recently, Jonah Hex. Read more
Exposure: Ridley Scott
Ridley Scott’s extraordinary sense of visuals was clear from the start. In 1977, he made a big splash in the film industry with The Duellists. Based on a Joseph Conrad story and set in the Napoleonic era, the film was nominated for the Palme d’Or and earned Best First Work at the Cannes Film Festival, and BAFTA and BSC nominations for cinematographer Frank Tidy, BSC. For Scott, it was a case of an overnight sensation, a dozen years in the making: the filmmaker, who grew up in a military family and possessed an M.A. in graphic design from the Royal College of Art, had already revolutionized the advertising industry, having directed thousands of television commercials dating back to the early 1960s. Scott brought an artist’s eye and a storyteller’s passion for detail to the craft of selling with images, and his first stab at the big screen turned out to be a harbinger; his next film, Alien, changed the sci-fi genre, if not the entire film industry, forever. Scott followed that up with Blade Runner, one of the most influential films in cinema history in so many areas, first and foremost its cinematography by Jordan Cronenweth, ASC. Right through to his newest work, Robin Hood, the director/producer’s work continually displays the scale and grandeur of epic cinema. David Heuring caught up with Scott to probe his thoughts about cinema lighting, his roots in commercials, and his feeling about new digital technologies. (Hint: if the term “old school master” comes to mind, Scott would brook no quarrel.)
Exposure: Shawn Levy
Shawn Levy, a product of Yale’s drama department and USC’s graduate film program, paid his dues doing one-off acting jobs on many hit TV shows from the late 1980s. And he says acting roles on shows like thirtysomething, 21 Jump Street, China Beach and Beverly Hills 90210 only fueled his aspirations to stand on the other side of the camera. Such ambition led to directing episodes of 1990’s era shows that were not quite as crucial in the cultural zeitgeist - The Secret World of Alex Mack, The Journey of Allen Strange and whatever iteration of Lassie was being produced a decade ago. However, Levy says he did hone his craft, learning the true importance of preparation when blowing through eight or more script pages a day. By the time he got to direct features with more resources and well-known actors, such as Just Married with Brittany Murphy and Ashton Kutcher, he no longer needed to feel his way through the job. That film led to two major studio remakes, Cheaper by the Dozen and The Pink Panther, both starring Steve Martin, so by the time of his breakout hit, Night at the Museum, with Ben Stiller, he was cementing a reputation directing and producing tentpole comedies with top tier talent. With Date Night, an action/comedy starring Steve Carell and Tina Fey, he builds further on that specialty, as Jon Silberg reports.
Exposure: Jon Landau
Although producer Jon Landau was born into the Hollywood industry, serendipity still played a role in his career. As COO of James Cameron’s production company Lightstorm Entertainment, Landau produced both Avatar and Titanic. His early career, however, didn’t seem headed in the direction of tent-pole movies. In fact, Landau was raised on the art house hits produced by parents Ely and Edie Landau, which included The Pawnbroker, Long Day’s Journey into Night, and The Man in the Glass Booth. He began as a production manager and in short order rose to be an executive vice president of feature production at Twentieth Century Fox, in the early 1990s. And that’s where the serendipity came in. He was a suit at the West L.A. studio lot when Cameron directed True Lies, and the proverbial “creative sparks” must have flown, because after Landau left Fox, Cameron asked him to join him on a little project called Titanic. “The idea I’d be doing movies like this had never crossed my mind,” Landau says with genuine surprise. “And the fact that I am? I am thrilled.” Debra Kaufman caught up with one of the industry’s most creative producers about the challenges of making Avatar, the new standard-bearer for 3D production around the globe.
Exposure: Rick Baker
If there is one person in Hollywood worthy of laying claim to the crown worn by Jack P. Pierce – Universal Studios’ makeup genius of the 1930s and ‘40s (Frankenstein, The Mummy, The Wolf Man) – it is Rick Baker. The special effects makeup designer grew up watching monster movies on late night television, and burst into prominence while still in his 20’s, winning an Emmy Award® for his startling aging makeup for Cicely Tyson in The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman (1974). Just seven years later, Baker won the first of his six Academy Awards® for John Landis’ horror comedy, An American Werewolf in London. With The Wolfman, starring Benicio del Toro, Baker not only barks back up the same tree that first earned him Oscar gold, but he puts his own spin on Pierce’s 1941 classic, which starred the legendary Lon Chaney, Jr. Matt Hurwitz went throat to nuzzle with the master of creature makeup to hear about Baker’s designs for the newest incarnation of Hollywood’s favorite monster, as well as his thoughts on the classic films that first fired his imagination.
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Exposure: Peter Jackson
Between his earliest low-budget films and later studio-sponsored efforts, New Zealand-born filmmaker Peter Jackson has blended inventive visual effects (sometimes hilariously over-the-top in nature) and photographic sleight of hand to portray apparitions, both ghastly and ghostly. These treatments have varied greatly down through the years: Bad Taste, Meet the Feebles and Braindead show grotesque horrors through a darkly-comedic glass and a “home movie” approach to filmmaking that is utterly unique. Heavenly Creatures, by contrast, captured the fantasies of teenaged girls in a delicate, even artful approach that was both giddy and ethereal. Jackson’s acclaimed The Lord of the Rings trilogy, along with King Kong (all shot by Andrew Lesnie, ACS, ASC), boldly reaffirmed his ability and inclination to depict fantastic realms within a deeply felt drama, human or otherwise. With his new adaptation of the Alice Sebold novel, The Lovely Bones, Jackson explores a much different “middle earth” than any J.R.R. Tolkien imagined; a Pennsylvania suburb in 1973, where the ghastly takes the form of a serial killer of young girls, and the ghostly the spirit of his most recent victim trapped between life and what lies beyond.
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Exposure: Ken Burns
Ken Burns was born in Brooklyn and raised in Ann Arbor, Michigan. He enrolled at Hampshire College in Amherst, Massachusetts, in 1971 with, as he puts its, “a naïve notion of preparing for a career as a narrative filmmaker in the tradition of John Ford or Alfred Hitchcock.” Jerome Liebling and Elaine Mayes were among his mentors on the faculty. They were both still photographers who focused on socially relevant issues.
“(Jerome and Elaine) taught me that there can be more drama in documentaries than in fiction filmmaking,” Burns says. “I also learned to use the camera to look under the surface, and find the meanings and symbolic importance of the images we recorded.”
In 1975, Burns and several classmates, including Buddy Squires, organized Florentine Films. They lived on the edge of poverty, working freelance for the BBC, an Italian TV network, and some industrial film producers.
Brooklyn Bridge was the first of 22 nonfiction films produced under the Florentine Films banner. Subsequent subjects have ranged from Thomas Jefferson and Huey Long biopics to the histories of the Civil War, World War II, baseball and jazz music.
The documentaries produced by Burns and his colleagues form a “living history” of America and Americans that is preserved (on film) for future generations. The nonfiction master’s most recent venture is The National Parks: America’s Best Idea, a 12-hour documentary that premiered on PBS in late September in six two-hour segments.
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Exposure: Debbie Allen
Fans of the old television series Fame will never forget hearing: “You want fame? Well, fame costs. And right here is where you start paying in sweat,” from a tough-as-nails teacher whose compassion and sense of purpose was matched only by her drive. It’s been well over 20 years since Lydia Grant, aka Debbie Allen, said those words; and two decades later, Lydia’s passion and drive haven’t dissipated at all. In fact, as cinematographer Mark Doering-Powell (Everybody Loves Chris) says, producer, director, choreographer, teacher Debbie Allen is a lot like her character. “Especially when she’s working with young people. When she’s directing, she’s fast, fun, and moves the camera. She has unbelievable energy and an infectious laugh.”
Allen, who broke onto the scene with Fame, is living the dream those students fantasized. She’s received three Emmy Awards honoring her choreography, and two Emmys and one Golden Globe for her role as Lydia Grant. She’s appeared in, choreographed, directed or produced hundreds of television and stage projects, from award winning sitcoms and television movies, like the second highest rated original movie in Lifetime Cannel history, Life is Not a Fairytale: The Fantasia Barrino Story, to staged musicals at the famed Kennedy Center.
When her daughter returned from studying at the Kirov Ballet, Allen realized there was nowhere for Vivian to continue her dance education. “Are you waiting for permission?” Amistad production designer Rick Carter asked. “Jump off the ledge and open your own school.” Today, Debbie Allen’s Dance Academy (DADA) provides a venue for young dancers to study with instructors from the Kirov, Bolshoi and Alvin Ailey American Dance Theatre. What about Lydia Grant, you ask? Well, fans can see her on the big-screen this month in MGM’s feature updating of Fame, albeit with a new incarnation of Lydia Grant - the school’s tough but caring Principal Simms.
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Exposure: Nathan Crowley
Born in London, production designer Nathan Crowley began his career working as a set designer on Hook and has actually worked far more in the U.S. than in the U.K. He’s been involved on a wide range of projects, moving up the ranks through action, period epic and comedic films like Braveheart, John Carpenter’s Escape from L.A., Mystery Men, and Mission Impossible II. Crowley is probably best known for his four film collaborations with fellow Londoner, Christopher Nolan; those include Insomnia, Batman Begins, The Prestige and The Dark Knight, the latter two earning Oscar nominations for Best Achievement in Art Direction. Clearly, the versatile and talented designer has a way with period movies, whether it’s travelling back hundreds of years in the past to create a peat and fire village in the Scottish Highlands, or decades into the future for the wildly techno-noir Gotham City. It’s no wonder detail freak Michael Mann selected Crowley to recreate 1930’s gangland Middle America: his inventive approach to Public Enemies’ set design included fabricating a removable rubberized cobblestone street and re-welding the steel bars in the dilapidated Indiana jail from which Dillinger made his epic escape.
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