Jack Huston has worked with Scorsese, Ridley Scott, David O’ Russell, The Coens, had meaty roles on series like Mayfair Witches, Fargo, and, maybe most notably, Boardwalk Empire, where he played Richard Harrow. His latest project is Lulu Wang’s Amazon series Expats. On this episode he talks about gaining 30 pounds for that part (which wasn’t as much fun as it sounds), why it all starts with the voice for him, writing and directing his passion project The Day of The Fight for Michael Pitt and Joe Pesci, and he reveals a common trait of all great directors he’s known. […]

Music videos have been good to Cristina Dunlap. As a photography-obsessed high schooler, a chance meeting landed the L.A. native a gig shooting stills on a music video. It happened to be for Death Cab for Cutie, leading to a run of jobs with influential directors like Hiro Murai and Ace Norton. After working her way up to the role of cinematographer, a Coldplay video collaboration with Dakota Johnson led to Dunlap shooting a pair of features starring the actress, Am I OK? and Cha Cha Real Smooth, both of which premiered at the 2022 Sundance Film Festival. A music […]

The Killer begins with an assassin (Michael Fassbender) in a half-completed WeWork office awaiting the arrival of his latest target. As he waits, he details his vocational mantras for the audience in voiceover: stick to the plan. Don’t improvise. Never yield an advantage. Forbid empathy. Fassbender proceeds to miss his shot and spends the rest of the film breaking each and every one of those tenets in the chaotic aftermath. Many of the pieces written about the film have pointed out perceived similarities between the film’s methodical, detail-oriented titular character and the perfectionist reputation of its director, David Fincher. However, […]

My annual exercise in what our audience — as well as our “audiences,” the latter term used to refer to the concoction of first and possibly last-time readers driven to our site by algorithmic determinism and SEO “best practices” — is always a mixture of the predictable and the unexpected. Regular features like our 25 New Faces series and Vadim Rizov’s survey of 35mm production always show up, as do articles by our excellent columnist Matt Mulcahey and podcaster Peter Rinaldi. I was particularly happy to see this year on the list two pieces that were especially deeply researched and […]

You know Spenser Granese from memorable roles on Better Call Saul, Fear of the Walking Dead, Pam & Tommy, and, perhaps most memorably, the character of Bevel in the final season of Barry. On this episode, he talks about landing that role after trying hard to get on the show for three seasons and the incredible working environment he found on set. He opens up about his unique approach to the craft having no formal training, why he keeps the lines barely memorized, avoids expectations, operates on his instinct, and much more! Back To One can be found wherever you […]

In The Holdovers, a professor, a student and a grief-stricken cook are stranded together at a New England boarding school over the holidays. The story takes place in the early 1970s, an era whose films are beloved by both Holdovers director Alexander Payne and cinematographer Eigil Bryld. However, they took opposing philosophical perspectives in imbuing their movie with the spirit of that epoch. Though he looked at the work of Hal Ashby for inspiration – particularly The Landlord and The Last Detail – rather than attempt to replicate it, Payne’s approach found him imaging what kind of film he himself […]

Discovering Michelle Monaghan in Kiss Kiss Bang Bang was like finding evidence that the old-school Hollywood comedy actress gene, long thought extinct, was alive and well. She did more than hold her own opposite Robert Downey Jr. and Val Kilmer — she stole the movie. I’ve been rooting for her ever since. A few Mission Impossibles, Gone Baby Gone, True Detective followed, as well as some significant work in small indies like Trucker, Fort Bliss, and Nanny. She returns to comedy with her latest, The Family Plan, which is streaming now on Apple TV+. On this episode, she talks about […]

Melora Hardin is best known for playing Jan on the American version of The Office. She was nominated for an Emmy for her work on the series Transparent. Recently she stepped back into the role of Trudy Monk for Mr. Monk’s Last Case: A Monk Movie, which is streaming now on Peacock. On this episode she talks about bringing the character Mabel Montgomery-Mayflower to life in the new independent film Golden Vanity, and how the perfect combination of director’s vision and true collaboration helped her deliver that tour-de-force performance. She takes us back to her early days as a child […]

You might know Robbie Tann from Preacher, The Deuce, or when he played Billy on Mare of Easttown, or Whitty in the “Mazey Day” episode of the latest season of Black Mirror. Currently he plays Shipley in this year’s most exciting and original sci-fi film, The Creator. On this episode, he tells how the run-and-gun style of shooting on that production, combined with the cast and crew’s infectious passion for the project, helped with all aspects of his work. He explains why he now bypasses a straightforward “roadmap” of preparation, focusing instead on letting the role seep into his unconscious. […]

You know Olli Haaskivi from his work in series such as Winning Time, Manifest, and The Sinner, and films like Motherless Brooklyn, Nancy and of course, this Summer’s blockbuster Oppenheimer, where he played scientist Edward Condon. On this episode he shares his experience of working with Christopher Nolan on that film (which he says seemed less sprawling than some student films he’s worked on!), why he felt the freedom to bring his ideas and “all of himself” (spoiler: Nolan is not afraid of actors!), and how all this affected the work in the moment. Plus he talks about his “this […]

Brit Marling is an inspiration. The talented multi-hypenate became an indie darling in 2011 with Another Earth and Sound of My Voice—collaborations with Mike Cahill and Zal Batmanglij respectively. She avoided various vapid roles and unfulfilling career paths and instead went on to star in (and co-create with Batmanglii) the hit Netflix series The OA, which was bafflingly cancelled after two seasons, despite a rabid and large fan base. The two are back with another series, FX’s A Murder At The End of The World—a cool Zoomer detective whodunit set in a remote super-hotel in Iceland. On this episode, she […]

Brandon K. McLaughlin remembers the exact moment he knew he wanted to work in the movie business. It was Halloween night and McLaughlin was eight years old. His uncle—a special effects technician—had invited him to set to watch the Disney adventure The Rocketeer being made. “I got to see them blow up the zeppelin while the Rocketeer was running on top of it,” McLaughlin said. “From that point on, I never wanted to do anything else. I was fascinated with everything that went into the magic of moviemaking, and the special effects department creates that magic, tricking the audience into […]

The SAG strike is over and Back To One returns in the most fitting way—with The Sixth Annual Kevin Corrigan Episode. The living patron saint of the indie actor fills us in on what’s been going on in his world over the past year, talks about playing off of Tim Blake Nelson in his latest film Bang Bang, takes us way back to his first time on a film set as an extra in 1987, describes a recent rewarding experience of performing his own ultra personal material, and ponders his strange case of involuntary lens spiking. Plus stories about “manhandling” […]

Eigil Bryld must be feeling funny lately. After a career peppered with reality-based dramas (You Don’t Know Jack and The Report), thrillers (Deep Water) and romantic period pieces (Tulip Fever and Becoming Jane), the Danish cinematographer has lightened up with a trio of comedies out this year—The Machine, Alexander Payne’s The Holdovers and No Hard Feelings. In the latter, Jennifer Lawrence plays a Montauk Uber driver who agrees to seduce the son (Andrew Barth Feldman) of a wealthy couple summering in the quaint Long Island enclave in exchange for a used Buick Regal. Bryld spoke to Filmmaker about lensing the […]

On big budget spectacles, the tail of VFX often wags the dog of principal photography. With The Creator—an $80 million sci-fi epic about a war between mankind and humanoid AI starring John David Washington—director Gareth Edwards sought to reverse that arrangement. The Monsters and Rogue One filmmaker has described the process of meticulously recreating previs on set as painting a target on the wall and trying to fire an arrow into the bullseye. With The Creator, Edwards wanted to fire the arrow first, then paint the target around it, with VFX ideation occurring later in the pipeline after being inspired by […]

Dogleg is one of the best films of the year. A unique and hilarious feat of cinematic inventiveness, it follows amateur director Alan, played by Al Warren, after he loses his fiancé’s dog at a gender reveal party on the day of an important shoot. Warren also wrote and directed the film, which took more than half a decade to finish. On this episode, he tells us why he was in no hurry to complete the film, and why he has taken a much more intentional and meaningful approach toward bringing it to the audience. He takes us back to […]

Aidan Gillen returns to the podcast (first time: Episode 40). You know him from some of the most beloved shows of the century: Game of Thrones, The Wire, Peaky Blinders, to name a few. Now he stars in the Irish neo-noir film Barber, where he plays a private investigator hired by a wealthy widow to find her missing granddaughter. He talks about why he doesn’t look at the lines until the day before shooting, how his latest venture on the stage affected his work, why he still doesn’t like rehearsal for film, what bothers him about an “actor-centric” production, and […]

In December of 1964, principal photography finished on the pilot of Star Trek, featuring captain Christopher Pike (played by The Searchers’ Jeffrey Hunter) as the commander of the Enterprise. When the show’s first episode finally aired almost two years later, Pike was nowhere to be found. The initial pilot had been scrapped and re-shot, with William Shatner’s James T. Kirk taking the helm and a different crew boldly going where no man had gone before. However, that wasn’t the end of Christopher Pike. The character returned as a Kirk mentor in the J.J. Abrams-directed reboot films. Now, with the Paramount […]

Onur Tukel is a boldly independent writer-director-actor who, for more than a decade, has been making cutting edge comedies in New York City that sometimes land in the horror category, sometimes social satire, are often absurd, mostly hilarious and always thoughtful—Catfight, Applesauce, Summer of Blood, The Misogynists, Scenes From An Empty Church, to name just a few. His latest, Poundcake, about a serial killer who only targets straight white men, is maybe his boldest yet, which says a lot. In this hour, he talks about his reluctant approach toward acting in his own films, the ways he has navigated low […]

The great actor of the stage and screen, Ron Cephas Jones died on August 19, 2023, at the age of 66. On this episode from 2020, he details the value of a true collaborative relationship with the director, why the script never leaves his side in preproduction, talks about what it was like to slowly build “William” on This Is Us through many seasons of that show, and takes us back to his early days at LAByrinth theater in New York City to explain how Philip Seymour Hoffman forever changed his approach to work, plus much more! This is an expanded version […]