Terminator 2: Judgement Day was revolutionary for its use of CGI. The villain in the film, the T-1000, was envisioned by Cameron as a form of liquid metal and required cutting-edge effect shots. “We eventually wound up with 42 CGI shots, and it took a year and was very, very challenging to get the very last shots done,” Cameron says. “We’re just finishing up Avatar 3 with 3,500 CGI shots. So that’s a huge leap across three-plus decades.”
Cameron’s next film, True Lies, was an action comedy—a tonal departure from his previous work. So was Titanic, which, in Cameron’s telling, was born after he walked into Fox exec Peter Chernin’s office with a photo of the Titanic and said, “It’s Romeo and Juliet on that.” He just needed $120 million to make the film.
“I cast Kate[Winslet] very quickly,” Cameron says. Getting DiCaprio proved to be more difficult. He didn’t want to do the project, even though everyone around him said he should; he didn’t feel the role was challenging enough. “He didn’t want to just be handsome young Leo,” the director says. “He signed on to do the movie when I told him he wasn’t ready to do the film.”
Technology had to catch up with Cameron before he could realize his vision for Avatar, which he originally wrote in 1995. The first Avatar pioneered performance-capture techniques; the newest entries in the series perfected the technology. “We spent a lot of money on research and development,” Cameron says. “Every nuance, every glance, every tiny little bit of eye movement, everything the actors did would be preserved. So we spent three years and $40 million perfecting that before we ever worked with actors.”
What’s been consistent throughout Cameron’s career is his desire to keep learning. “I’m just fascinated by any kind of challenge,” he says. “I don’t want to do anything that I’ve done before.”
For more of the industry’s biggest movers and shakers, read Vanity Fair’s “37 Hours in Hollywood” portfolio.
Set design, Viki Rutsch. Produced on location by Preiss Creative. For details, go to VF.com/credits.
The Stranger Things producer and Deadpool & Wolverine director still can’t quite believe he got tapped to make a new Star Wars movie, starring Ryan Gosling.
The ghosts of Hollywood’s past haunt Bryn Mooser’s office building—but that’s just the way he likes it.
At one of LA’s oldest soundstages, built by legendary movie producer Mack Sennett and opened in 1916, the walls are covered with pictures of Mabel Normand, one of the greatest comedians of the silent-film era and one of the first women to have her own studio. Charlie Chaplin filmed movies in this sprawling 25,000-square-foot space; so did David Lynch and Martin Scorsese. In its later years, music videos like Michael Jackson’s “Remember the Time,” No Doubt’s “Don’t Speak,” and Robin Thicke’s “Blurred Lines” were all shot there.
Mooser, a prolific movie producer, likes to be surrounded by reminders of Hollywood’s progress—the leap to talkies, the infiltration of color, the adaptation of new storytelling devices and media. “I wanted to be in a space that was, even on a subconscious level, a reminder that our industry has gone through a lot of technological changes in the past,” he says. “All those changes kind of make sense in the long term. But when you’re in them, the conversations about them must have been really brutal.”
Though Mooser has worked here only eight months, it’s already a bustling space centered around a large room with a dozen computers, where his employees are each focused on different projects—all using generative artificial intelligence.
Asteria, Mooser’s company, calls itself an artist-led generative-AI film studio. Unlike his rivals from Silicon Valley, Mooser sells himself as a creature of Hollywood who’s trying to use AI to enhance storytelling, not replace storytellers. “Basically, AI is a dead end in Hollywood until you solve the copyright issue,” he says. So he and his team at Asteria worked with the tech start-up Moonvalley to do just that, creating a new AI model called Marey (named after French cinematography pioneer Étienne-Jules Marey) that only uses legally licensed material. In July, Marey, which is designed to be used by professional filmmakers, became available across multiple channels, including through direct subscription. Moonvalley also partnered with Adobe to integrate Marey into Firefly and Premiere Pro.
AI is the dirty word on everyone’s lips in Hollywood these days. Weeks ago, AI “actor” Tilly Norwood sent ripples of panic through the industry thanks to rumors that she might sign with a talent agency. (Spoiler: That didn’t happen.) Then Sora 2—the newest version of OpenAI’s video app, which can generate clips of characters featuring the likenesses of actual actors provided that they opt in—raised alarms for agents and talent. On social media, Robin Williams’s daughter, Zelda,begged people to stop sending her AI-generated videos of her late father. Bryan Cranston and his agents spoke out when his Breaking Bad character Walter White began popping up in videos, including one with Michael Jackson. “I was deeply concerned not just for myself, but for all performers whose work and identity can be misused in this way,” Cranston said in a statement he released along with SAG-AFTRA, OpenAI, and others. OpenAI said it had strengthened guardrails that would protect individuals’ voices and likenesses, but the fear remains palpable.
But Scorsese happily provided her a list of films to watch to get the voiceover to click—“Of course if you ask him that question, you’re going to get a long answer.”
They stayed in touch, gave notes on each other’s films, and saw each other socially. Years later, Miller was chatting with her producing partner Damon Cardasis about making another documentary. Cardasis asked, “Who would be your favorite person?”
“The first person that popped in my head was Martin Scorsese,” Miller said. “And I think the reason was, it’s such a rich subject. I was really interested in his Catholicism and his fascination with violence, how those two things work together.”
They got together right before the pandemic, and when lockdown hit, they carried forward at Miller’s country house.
“We, in a weird way, were lucky that he was so bored and so stuck, because he traveled all the way upstate,” she said. “We did it on the porch.”
Five years later, Mr. Scorsese is here in all its hours-long glory. The film rips, zipping ahead with the same speed as one of its subject’s more frenzied flicks, dispatching quickly with hundreds of talking heads. It’s so expansive it seems definitive. One Apple exec compared it to The Last Dance, the documentary about Michael Jordan: a similarly focused, leave-no-stone-unturned look at an unquestionable GOAT.
But like The Last Dance, the doc shows its subject’s setbacks. As the panelists reminded the gathered faithful: This was not inevitable.
“So Marty made Who’s That Knocking at My Door?, and then he got this deal to do this Roger Corman-produced movie called Boxcar Bertha,” said Imperioli, who had a very early film role in Goodfellas as Spider, a lackey who meets a violent fate. “Cassavettes watched the movie and said to Marty, ‘You just wasted a year of your life on a piece of shit.’ This was his big thing in Hollywood, right? His second film. And he said, ‘You shouldn’t be doing stuff like this.’”
Only one streaming service lives on a site that will sell you paper towels with no shipping costs: Amazon Prime Video. But while shopping for household goods, you may also wonder, What are the best movies on Amazon Prime Video? Vanity Fair is here to help.
Truly, there are countless films on Prime Video you can rent for a few bucks—but if you are already an Amazon Prime subscriber, you get access to a ton of free, good movies. There are comedies, horror films, dramas, classics, sexy tennis movies with Zendaya (okay, only one sexy tennis movie with Zendaya), and a lot more. So don’t get stuck holding the remote like a schmuck while your spouse eats all the Häagen-Dazs. Take a look at this curated list and pick something out before you turn the television on.
All of Me (1984)
Director: Carl Reiner Genre: Comedy Notable cast: Steve Martin, Lily Tomlin, Richard Libertini MPA rating: PG Rotten Tomatoes: 85% Metacritic: 68
For those of us old enough to have seen this in theaters, we’ve been mumbling “put Edwina backinbowl” for 40 years. (It’s been a struggle.) This zany supernatural comedy is probably a little dated in its treatment of Eastern religions, but that hopefully won’t offend you too much when you see everyman Steve Martin’s physical antics after 50% of his body is overtaken by undead zillionaire Lily Tomlin. Though this is still a bananas picture, it was the first of Martin’s films that wasn’t just a joke parade like The Jerk or Dead Men Don’t Wear Plaid—an important turn in the road for a great career.
City Lights (1931)
Director: Charlie Chaplin Genre: Comedy Notable cast: Charlie Chaplin, Virginia Cherrill, Harry Myers MPA rating: Not rated Rotten Tomatoes: 95% Metacritic: 99
If you only know Charlie Chaplin as some dude who twirls a cane in three-second clips about “the magic of the movies,” well, you are in luck. The guy is famous for a reason, and while much of his success came from slapstick moments in short films, he was more than adept at sustaining an entire feature-length narrative. City Lights strings together a number of memorable bits (the boxing match! The rich drunk!) but is also a winning romance in which Chaplin’s Tramp (yes, the cane-twirling guy) wins the heart of a blind flower salesgirl played by Virginia Cherrill.
Conclave (2024)
Director: Edward Berger Genre: Drama Notable cast: Ralph Fiennes, Stanley Tucci, John Lithgow MPA rating: PG Rotten Tomatoes: 93% Metacritic: 79
Even if you don’t know his name, you know the macabre legacy of Ed Gein. In 1957, the reclusive farmer from Plainfield, Wisconsin, was unmasked as the most crazed and disturbing serial killer America had ever seen—and arguably has ever seen since. So gruesome and grotesque were the crimes of the so-called Butcher of Plainfield, Plainfield Ghoul, or Grandfather of Gore that more than 65 years of filmmaking haven’t yet imagined much worse.
“You can understand why moviemakers gravitate toward Gein,” says Christopher Berry-Dee, author of Serial Killers at the Movies. “He’s unique, creative, enterprising, and imaginative. We don’t get many killers like Ed anymore.” As yet another version of Gein rears its ugly head into the zeitgeist—this time on Ryan Murphy’s new season of Monster, starring Charlie Hunnam as Gein and Laurie Metcalf as his overbearing mother—here’s a look back at Hollywood’s long and lurid history of borrowing from Gein for the big screen.
Psycho, 1960: “A boy’s best friend is his mother”
Alfred Hitchcock based Psycho on the eponymous 1959 novel by Robert Bloch, who lived just about 35 miles from Gein’s infamous Plainfield farm. According to Ed Gein: Psycho! author Paul Anthony Woods, Bloch penned his novel in a feverish seven weeks, and he was surrounded by sensational press (one headline from The Milwaukee Journal: “Obsessive Love for His Mother Drove Gein to Slay, Rob Graves”), but Bloch always denied his murderous neighbor was the inspiration for Norman Bates.
But viewers couldn’t ignore their parallel psychologies. Edward Theodore Gein (rhymes with “bean”) was born in 1906 to Augusta Gein, a fervently religious mother who taught her boys that modern women were evil seductresses. Augusta favored her second son, Ed—who became, according to Woods, “a mama’s boy from day one.” An avid reader who might have excelled, young Ed dropped out after the eighth grade after being bullied for his speech impediment and lazy eye. Gein lived on their 275-acre farm and did odd jobs for locals—including babysitting—who considered him strange but mild-mannered and nonthreatening.
In five short years, Gein’s father, brother, and mother all died, leaving the then 39-year-old bereft (if only for his mother’s loss) and isolated. Like Norman Bates, Gein kept rooms that his mother used to frequent untouched, boarding up their windows and doors. Gein’s rooms, meanwhile, grew increasingly squalid and crowded, and featured the results of both Bates’s and Gein’s preferred hobby: taxidermy.
Three on a Meathook, 1972: “I ain’t havin’ no trash in your ma’s home”
While Norman Bates is proprietor of the Bates Motel, young moviemaker William Girdler relocated his Gein-like killer to the backwoods fields of Girdler’s own hometown in Louisville, Kentucky. In Three on a Meathook, handsome farmboy Billy Townsend brings oft-topless young women home to his secluded farm, where they meet their gruesome fate at the hands of his fanatically religious father.
Each night, you look into your lover’s eyes and ask, “Will no legacy media outlet tell me about the best movies on Hulu?” Luckily, Vanity Fair is here for you. One glance at the platform’s A-to-Z listing reveals that there are almost too many good movies on Hulu to choose from, and it can become a chore to figure out which to select.
After a deep dive into the Hulu archive (the Hu-chive?), we’ve selected a top mix of classics, comedies, dramas, horror pictures, documentaries, and, importantly, a few titles that got overlooked upon their initial release. Our list is in alphabetical order, so you gotta scroll close to the bottom to get to Y Tu Mamá También.
A Complete Unknown (2024)
Director: James Mangold Genre: Drama/musical Notable cast: Timothée Chalamet, Monica Barbaro, Elle Fanning, Edward Norton MPA rating: R Rotten Tomatoes: 82% Metacritic: 70
The mercurial, Minnesota-born Robert Zimmerman, best known to humanity and the Swedish Academy as Bob Dylan, gets as good a straightforward musical biopic as the genre allows in A Complete Unknown.Timothée Chalamet nails the nasal twang and aloof demeanor of the musician as he transitions from politically relevant folk music to electric rock and roll. While there’s plenty in the movie that is pure Hollywood, it captures the essence of the Dylan phenomenon and how the transformation affected colleagues like Joan Baez and Pete Seeger, as well as his romantic life.
Alien (1979)
Director: Ridley Scott Genre: Sci-fi/horror Notable cast: Sigourney Weaver, Tom Skerritt, John Hurt, Veronica Cartwright MPA rating: R Rotten Tomatoes: 93% Metacritic: 89
The original and still the best. A haunted-house story, a workplace drama, and a twist-filled mystery—all set in outer space. Sigourney Weaver’s rocket to superstardom took off here when she played the greatest interplanetary final girl, and John Hurt’s legendary tummy ache was a milestone for practical special effects. Several (not all!) of the sequels and prequels to this movie are good, but no matter how many times you’ve seen Alien, you will always find something new in it.
BlackBerry (2023)
Director: Matt Johnson Genre: Comedy Notable cast: Jay Baruchel, Glenn Howerton, Michael Ironside MPA rating: R Rotten Tomatoes: 97% Metacritic: 78
Did Paul have to pitch the role to you or convince you in any way?
No, we were primed to work with each other. I was only a few pages in by the time I knew I absolutely wanted to do it.
What was it about those few pages?
I remember the words “he’s going there” going through my head, because I had no idea what the subject matter was going to be, what it was going to be approaching or reflecting about our lives today. And Paul, he’s sort of like Hal Ashby. Each movie is coming from a different world, a different tone. He’s so diverse in this way that there was no anticipating what it was going to be. When it was this, I knew I was in for something.
This character is so unique. How much did you add to what was on the page?
That’s always hard to say, because really good writing is like really good music. But that doesn’t mean I’m hearing the music like everyone else. You’re always a part of a bigger puzzle. With his writing—I’ve experienced it a few times, mostly in the theater, where the writing drives the choices.
What other films have you experienced that on?
I had a very similar experience with Woody Allen’s movie Sweet and Lowdown, where I felt like I heard the song clearly. I think it’s not surprising that the best directors, whether they write them or not, are working with the best material. And I’ve had a chance to work some. In fact, Leo and I have worked with a lot of the same directors, and it’s just nice to have the script feel you. Some of them could be interesting movies, but every day, you’re looking to find an organic thing, so you’re almost functioning like a writer. I prefer to be an actor.
Do you gravitate toward projects that speak to the present moment, or things that may be already weighing on your mind about the world or politics?
I’ve quoted this a lot over the years. E.L. Doctorow had a line: The responsibility of the artist is to know the time within which he lived. So somebody can make a period film, but in doing that, the good ones reflect something very current. Not modernizing it, but there’s something that is rhyming in history. I think that this became exponentially more timely after production finished and we watched, kind of shaking our heads. It’s also a great thing that because he doesn’t have a conventional dependence on what satire is, the movie is malleable. It’s not dependent on being a far-fetched idea that makes us laugh. And now that some of it is not at all far-fetched it takes on a more full quality.
You have said that before making the 2023 film Daddio, you had become disillusioned a bit with making movies.
You said it when you’re talking about the importance of narrative being somehow in rhythm with what’s interesting to you at that time. At a certain point, I found the criteria that maybe used to work—good project, interesting material, great director, fantastic cast—if that subject isn’t really what’s in your heart or interest, for me it just got miserable. And especially if you’re playing a leading role, you also have to offer leadership in spirit every day.
Ann Lee, whose father was a blacksmith by day and a tailor by night, grew up poor and illiterate in Manchester, England. She immigrated to New York in 1774, bringing along just six followers—including her loyal brother, William (played by Lewis Pullman), and lowly husband, Abraham (Christopher Abbott). By the time of her death a decade later, she’d created one of the largest utopian societies in American history. The group was collectively convinced she’d emerged as the female incarnation of Christ. Fastvold concedes that the Shaker experiment had its faults—“celibacy is a complicated solution,” she says—but found great inspiration in Lee’s vision.
“She took this horrible trauma and turned that suffering into compassion, into community, into how she could mother the world,” Fastvold says. “It’s all about worship through labor, creating something of beauty and of meaning and giving everything you have to it. As someone who wishes to try and create impossible things, that really spoke to me.”
A veteran of big-screen musicals including Les Misérables and Mamma Mia!, Seyfried has been friendly with both Fastvold and Corbet (who also produced Ann Lee) for years. “When you trust somebody as much as I trust Mona, you can’t help but go into the light,” she says. “But I just didn’t believe that I could embody someone who led this type of charge, in this time period.” Seyfried had already taken on a very different kind of cult-adjacent leader in The Dropout, winning an Emmy for her portrayal of scammer entrepreneur Elizabeth Holmes—but Ann Lee’s demands were especially daunting. “This felt further from me than anything that I can remember.”
Seyfried worried most about pulling off Ann’s 18th-century Manchester accent, which she devised—effectively, made up—alongside Fastvold and a dialect coach. “The ecstatic dancing and thumping and pounding, the frenzy that the Shakers lived in—I love that. It makes me feel alive,” Seyfried says. “That’s not the thing that intimidates me.” About five months before filming, she started recording songs at Fastvold and Corbet’s apartment with composer Daniel Blumberg (who won an Oscar for The Brutalist and made his feature-film debut on The World to Come). “I was amazed by how she was singing, dancing, getting water thrown over her face,” Blumberg says of Seyfried. “It was such an extreme job.”
Blumberg developed what Fastvold calls a “radical score” based on mostly existing Shaker hymns before composing an original song that plays as the end credits roll. The pair introduced the cast to improvisational singing via vocalists like Shelley Hirsch and Maggie Nicols, honing Ann Lee’s soundscape to feel as primal as possible.
“It’s prayer—it’s not entertainment. So it was important to find strong intent in the way you were using your voice, in the way you were moving your body,” Fastvold says. “It was definitely the most experimental project that I’ve ever worked on,” Blumberg agrees. He was constantly adding and subtracting, finessing tones and rhythms. One day while in New York, Blumberg walked by a music shop and came across a “little bell” from the 1700s. “Suddenly, the bell was all over the film,” he says.
The sound mix we hear in the final film uses those pre-shoot recordings, live singing from Seyfried et al. on set, and studio sessions that took place mere months ago. Seyfried kept reaching deeper and deeper into Ann’s internal life, with Hirsch and Nicols’s exercises encouraging her to run wild. “So much of it was screaming and doing weird takes. I had these crazy moments of complete freedom—the weirder, the better,” Seyfried says. “I was, like, ‘So, basically, we can do whatever the fuck we want.’ But it’s got to come from somewhere—it’s got to be grounded in something. You could ruin your fucking voice, I’ll tell you that.”
Every actor knows Hedda Gabler. The protagonist in Henrik Ibsen’s 1891 play is considered one of the great dramatic roles in theater. Elusive and complex, Hedda is a newlywed who, already bored with her marriage and the life she’s chosen, manipulates and terrorizes those around her—leading to deadly consequences.
Maggie Smith, Isabelle Huppert,Annette Bening, Rosamund Pike, Mary-Louise Parker, and Cate Blanchett are just a few of the actors who have taken a stab at the role onstage. There have also been several screen adaptations of the play, including the BBC’s 1962 version, starring Ingrid Bergman; a 1981 movie with Diana Rigg; and a 1975 film, which earned Glenda Jackson an Oscar nomination for best actress.
Tessa Thompson, Nina Hoss, and Imogen Poots in Hedda.
Courtesy of Amazon MGM Studios.
But there has never been a version of the main character quite like filmmaker Nia DaCosta’s Hedda Gabler. Hedda, which will have its world premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival on September 7, is a voluptuous cinematic reinvention of the text, with a towering performance by Tessa Thompson in its lead role. “Hedda is an inscrutable character,” says DaCosta. “And since the beginning, for the past hundred years, people have been like, ‘What the fuck is her deal?’”
DaCosta’s adaptation digs deep into that question. Hedda is often characterized as just a bored, moody society wife, but DaCosta builds a character who has a lot more. In the film, Hedda is hosting a party at her new home with her husband, George (Tom Bateman), and over the span of a single night, she struggles with unfulfilled yearnings for a past lover while wreaking havoc on those who come into her orbit. “Hedda is someone who wants people’s animals to come out,” says DaCosta. “She just feels like everyone is cowardly, everyone’s lying. She has this deepening emptiness inside of her that makes her do things she doesn’t understand—and she is living in a world that she doesn’t get.”
The film, which Amazon MGM Studios will release in select theaters on October 22 and globally on Prime Video on October 29, is set around 1954, but told through DaCosta’s modern sense and singular vision, showcasing Thompson’s agile work as a troublemaking woman for whom audiences can’t help but fall. “She’s mad and bad, but she’s still a person, and you kind of love her because she’s so ridiculous,” says DaCosta.
Hedda filmed in England at Flintham Hall, a stunning estate featuring a 40-foot high conservatory in stone and glass .
Courtesy of Amazon MGM Studios.
DaCosta discovered Ibsen’s work while studying at London’s Royal Central School of Speech and Drama. “I thought that this character was terrifying, but also how brave to write a character like this, who is—to me, at least—unredeemable and does horrible things, but you’re telling it from her perspective and have huge empathy for her,” she says. She spent hours watching Hedda Gabler stage adaptations at theater libraries, but much of what she saw didn’t quite capture everything she thought the text could be. “I liked it, but I thought, This is not as funny or dark or sexy as what I read or what I felt when I was reading it,” she says. “So I was like, Wouldn’t it be cool to do a movie where I make all the subtext text?”
When DaCosta wrote the first draft of the script a few years ago (around the time she was working on her 2021 Candyman sequel), she made one major change: Eilert Lövborg, a man competing with George for a teaching position and who was also once in love with Hedda, would be a woman. “My initial instinct was this character should be female because it helps themes about power and autonomy, about choice, about self-regulation,” says DaCosta. “I think Hedda is someone who imprisons herself a lot as well, as much as society does.”
Eileen Lovborg (Nina Hoss) is openly in a relationship with another woman, Thea Clifton (Imogen Poots), when she arrives at Hedda’s home, on the verge of social redemption after a drinking problem. She is a threat to Hedda’s carefully crafted life in several ways: She is up for the position that Hedda’s husband hopes to get, which would provide financial stability, and she is Hedda’s former lover. The love triangle helps to show the contrast between the choices Hedda has made and those of Eileen. “You do have this extra layer of another thing that these women are fighting against to just feel like they’re people who matter in the eyes of the men that tell them what they should and shouldn’t be doing,” says DaCosta. “This made it more potent, more powerful, and also more unfortunately tragic.”
“Nia and I were really interested in this idea of what happens when we’re pretending to be something that we’re not, trying to fit into a world, a life, a marriage, a house, a place that doesn’t suit us,” says Thompson. “How that perverts our fundamental nature.”
Courtesy of Amazon MGM Studios.
Thompson and DaCosta first met at the Sundance Directors Lab before working together on DaCosta’s 2018 feature directorial debut, Little Woods. The pair stayed in touch over the years, and DaCosta brought Hedda to her first. “She’s so brilliant at playing characters who have a roiling ocean inside of them but have to keep a façade,” says DaCosta. “She’s just really great at that tension.”
Thompson was aware of the character of Hedda Gabler, as every actor is. “I had always just been really fascinated by the work of Ibsen, the questions that he asks, particularly about female personhood and how hemmed in or boxed in we can be by societal expectations,” she says, adding that she studied every adaptation of the play on which she was able to get her hands. “Obviously, he was writing so, so long ago, but how resonant some of those ideas continue to be.”
Tom Bateman with Thompson.
Courtesy of Amazon MGM Studios.
The world of Hedda is built through lush production design, a provocative score by Oscar winner Hildur Guðnadóttir, and bold cinematography by Sean Bobbitt, who worked with DaCosta on The Marvels and is best known as Steve McQueen’s longtime collaborator. When it comes to the costumes, Hedda’s looks are inspired by the Dior silhouette of the time—and its impossibly small waist. Thompson liked the connection to the “idea of being hemmed in emotionally. You’re literally really hemmed in inside of those garments because of the construction and the boning. There is a kind of suffocation that I found really helpful in character.”
As the tragedy unfolds into the late hours of the night, Hedda’s self-imprisonment and desire for acceptance become even more obvious, even as she leaves a trail of destruction in her wake. “The tragedy isn’t that like, ‘Oh no, she’s sad, her marriage sucks,’” says DaCosta. “The tragedy is that she herself will never know herself and she herself doesn’t understand why she does the things she does. And these people around her suffer because of it.”
Hedda will premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival before being released in US theaters on October 22. This feature is part of Awards Insider’s exclusive fall film festival coverage, including first looks and exclusive interviews with some of the biggest names set to hit Venice, Telluride, and Toronto.
“I’ve always been interested in that space on the fringes,” says DaCosta (pictured with Thompson). “Not just literally in Little Woods, but also mentally where she exists inside of her head is such a foreign land even to herself.”
They also follow the same ecological through line that informed the first movie. The oil crisis of the 1970s hit the Australian city of Melbourne particularly hard, Miller recalls. Eventually, only one gas station in the city remained open for business. As lines to fill up grew longer and tensions continued to mount, “it took 10 days for the first shot to be fired,” Miller says.
“It wasn’t fired at anybody,” he hastens to add, saying, “We don’t have a gun culture in Australia.” But still, the ostensibly nonviolent incident stuck with him. If it only took 10 days for gas-related gunfire to break out, “what would happen in a hundred days?” he says he thought. “What would happen in a thousand days?” The Mad Max movies attempt to answer that question.
Man’s eternal struggle to secure and protect resources provided the seed for the original 1979 film, with the great, roving hordes of Hannibal and Genghis Khan inspiring some of its most indelible images—mobile groups that “consumed everything before them.” But because Miller’s hordes are enabled by fossil fuels instead of elephants or horses, we’re back to that issue of scarcity. (Electric cars don’t work in the Mad Max universe, as “you can’t charge them anymore.”)
While Miller’s most recent Mad Max films share the DNA of the first film, 1981’s The Road Warrior, and the Tina Turner–starring Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome, the director acknowledges one major development that happened between the third film’s 1985 release and 2015, when Fury Road debuted to global acclaim. “The biggest shift in cinema after sound was the digital dispensation,” Miller says, citing Jurassic Park as the film that ushered in the digital-effects era.
Miller dipped his toes into those waters with the porcine fairy tale Babe, which he cowrote and produced, and then dove in with Happy Feet, the 2006 penguin saga that netted Miller his first Academy Award, for best animated feature. “Almost at the same time, I was thinking, Wow, these tools…we could apply [them] to action films or stories like Mad Max,” Miller says. “We can do things that we can never dream of doing in the past.”
An indelible image from Buster Keaton’s 1926 action comedy, The General, informed a memorable shot in Beyond Thunderdome. Technological advances allowed Miller to take the moment to its logical conclusion in Fury Road, which was impossible to safely shoot before the advent of digital. “Cinema, like all arts or all human endeavors—there’s a kind of cultural evolution. One thing builds on another,” he says.
Between theaters and streamers, there’s a lot to sift through if you want to find the best movies of 2023. To spare you that effort and save you some time, we’re keeping a running list of good movies to watch as they open throughout the year. Existential unease, literate thrills, and devastation await. And, yes, most of the films listed below are either in theaters or available for streaming or rental (or will be soon). Happy watching.
You Hurt My Feelings
‘You Hurt My Feelings.’Jeong Park/ Courtesy of Sundance Institute.
At first glance, writer-director Nicole Holofcener’s witty, beautifully acted comedy seems like a mere light romp through monied Manhattan. But as she always does, Holofcener has deeper things on her mind. You Hurt My Feelings is a sharp and often poignant study of the mechanics of love, how its eagerness to support and encourage can sometimes have the exact opposite effect. It’s a clever and thoughtful movie about white lies and well-meaning indulgence, wise in its detailed observation of human behavior. And what a human Holofcener has cast in the lead: Julia Louis-Dreyfus (who is also excellent in Holofcener’s Enough Said) gives a radiant star turn, as naturally dexterous with the film’s peppery comedy and she is with its bleary drama. It’s an immensely charismatic performance, one that would, in a just world, be recognized by awards-giving bodies at year’s end.
Past Lives
By Jon Pack/ Courtesy of Sundance Institute.
One of the most striking debut features in years, Celine Song’s decades- and continents-spanning romantic drama took Sundance by storm in January. Although “storm” implies something aggressive, which Past Lives, in all its delicate emotional insight, certainly is not. Instead it’s a sad, swooning, graceful look at the journeys of immigration and aging, telling a story about two old friends and maybe lovers. The film follows Nora (played as an adult by Greta Lee) and Hae Sung (played as an adult by Teo Yoo), early adolescent pals in Seoul who are separated, seemingly forever, when Nora’s family moves to Canada. Past Lives traces their initially tentative and then wholehearted reunion years later, as they reconcile the realities of their adult selves with their dreamily remembered youth. Song swathes her film’s metaphysical questions in gorgeous, summery light, crafting a lilting portrait of life in its infinite dimensions and sliding-doors possibilities. Past Lives is a must-see gem of a film, one that augurs many good things for its fledgling creator. (In limited theaters June 2)
