Film & TV, The Creative Process: Acting, Directing, Writing, Cinematography, Producers, Composers, Costume Design, Talk Art & Creativity

"I think  Riches  has all the hallmarks of the things I've worked on before in terms of complex, slightly subversive women. At the heart of it, it is negotiating power dynamics. And at the heart of it, there are two very complex and yet vulnerable black women, but I've always loved family drama shows and particularly family businesses, whether it's fictional ones or in real life. I think...

Abby Ajayi is a British Nigerian writer and director who serves as a show creator, executive producer, and writer on the Amazon Series Riches, which is currently on Amazon Prime and premiers on ITVX in the UK on December 22. She has previously worked on the shows Four Weddings and a Funeral, How to Get Away with Murder, Inventing Anna, The First Lady, and Eastenders. As a result, she had the oppor...

Writer/director Dean Craig's film career took off in 2007 when he wrote the hit UK comedy, Death at a Funeral, starring Matthew Macfadyen, Keeley Hawes and Peter Dinklage, and directed by Frank Oz. The film won several audience awards for Best Film, and was remade in the US starring Chris Rock, Zoe Saldana, Martin Lawrence, and Tracy Morgan. In 2020, Craig turned his attention to directing as well...

“Every movie is different. Every story is different. We've been talking about Lady Bird, and you mentioned Francis Ha. So we made Francis Ha first, and there's an interesting relationship between her and her best friend that is almost like a romance, but it's not actually romantic, but the way the story is told, it's like two lovers, but they get into arguments and there's a lo...

Sam Levy studied film in Paris with French New Wave director Eric Rohmer and began his career as an apprentice to legendary cinematographer Harris Savides. Sam first gained recognition as a cinematographer when he photographed Wendy and Lucy for director Kelly Reichardt - voted “One of the Best 25 Films of the 21st Century” by The New York Times. He went on to shoot France...

"Scott [Kid Cudi] is the most beautiful, kind, goodhearted man, but also he's brilliant. He's a generator of ideas. I feel like by being next to him, your role is to take all of these concepts that he's crafting and ideating and bring them to fruition, so it's a really beautiful gift where you feel like you're paired with an artist who is the source of so much. Scott was also really important to m...

Karina Manashil is the President of Mad Solar Productions. She began her career in the mailroom at WME (William Morris Endeavor) where she became a talent agent. She represented notable clients including Scott Mescudi, known by his stage name, Kid Cudi, and built her career taking talent into new arenas. In 2020, she partnered with Mescudi and Dennis Cummings to launch Mad Solar, which is backed b...

"It's a really exciting thing to make it all the way through and to have so many talented people work on your book, but TV is a different medium. And there's changes that are made that you're not necessarily a part of, but it does create another universe for your storytelling. And with season two, it was always going be difficult to use One of Us is Next because there's a time jump, and there's di...

Karen M. McManus is a #1 New York Times and international bestselling author of young adult thrillers. Her books include the One of Us Is Lying series, which has been turned into a television show on Peacock and Netflix, as well as the standalone novels Two Can Keep a Secret, The Cousins, You’ll Be the Death of Me, and Nothing More to Tell. Karen's critically acclaimed, award-winning work has been...

“First off meat-eating animals eat other animals. So, the meat-eating dinosaurs would be scary, but on the other hand, we should think of them more like an eagle or a hawk, rather than a Tyrannosaurus rex chasing jeeps around. The thing that Jurassic Park - and people didn't really realize it, but it's a Steven Spielberg thing. He makes animals that eat people, whether it be a shark or it be a din...

Jack Horner is a severely dyslexic, dinosaur paleontologist. He attended the University of Montana for 14 semesters without receiving a degree. He has since received two honorary doctorates of science and a plethora of awards including a MacArthur Fellowship. Jack was Curator and Regent’s Professor of Paleontology at Montana State University in Bozeman, Montana for 34 years. He has more than 300 p...

"It was a confluence of very fortunate events that this movie was produced, and it is a bit of an anomaly. It's quite unprecedented that, first of all, a major Hollywood film studio has produced a comedy in the year 2022. They don't get made very often anymore at this size or scale. And secondly, that movie centers a minority family of any sort, but specifically of a Filipino-American family with...

Ken Cheng is a writer/producer who has previously written for Wilfred, Betas, and Sin City Saints. Ken’s feature comedy Easter Sunday, which he co-wrote, and executive produced for Amblin Partners, Rideback, and Universal, is inspired by the life and comedy of standup comedian Jo Koy. Forthcoming projects include writing and executive producing the half-hour comedy series, House of Chow, for HBO,...

"We came up with this idea that we were going to make a 'Juan Hughes' film, which is like in the world of John Hughes, the look of John Hughes, the way it was shot, the color palette, but with Latinos. And so we put a little bit of a Latinx spin on that." "When you immigrate, it's kind of like you're going through adolescence because you're in a new place. You feel weird in your own skin. You're l...

Claudia Forestieri and Brigitte Muñoz-Liebowitz serve as the creator and showrunner of the Latin-focused comedy series for HBO Max, Gordita Chronicles, making them the first female Latinx showrunner and creator duo. The series is executive produced by Zoe Saldana and Eva Longoria. Inspired by Claudia’s own life experience, the show centers around a Latina reporter looking back...

“Every time I ask, ‘What do you need? What do I want? What does the director want? How do we collaborate? What is generated during the collaboration? What ideas, questions come across? And then I can start constructing something like a look.” Florian Hoffmeister is a prolific director of photography. Recent works by Hoffmeister include his lensing on the Apple TV+ series Pachinko, the critically-a...

Florian Hoffmeister is a prolific director of photography. Recent works by Hoffmeister include his lensing on the Apple TV+ series Pachinko, the critically-acclaimed political thriller Official Secrets starring Keira Knightley, Ralph Fiennes, and Matt Smith, and the forthcoming film TÁR starring Cate Blanchett. Hoffmeister is well-known for his collaboration with Terence Davies on feature films Th...

“Before coming on board Under the Banner of Heaven, I had very little knowledge of Mormonism, but having read the script by Academy Award-winning screenwriter Dustin Lance Black, who is also the showrunner for the show, I resonated deeply with Jeb Pyre (played by Andrew Garfield) when it comes to his growing ambivalence and his crisis of faith. And the more he learned about the gruesome, grisly hi...

Redefining being a multi-hyphenate for artistic control and representation, Sandoval made her television debut directing the 6th episode for the new FX limited series, Under the Banner of Heaven based on the New York Times best seller by Jon Krakauer.  Isabel Sandoval is a Filipina filmmaker who made history with the World Premiere of Lingua Franca at the 2019 Venice International Film Festiv...

"What drew me to the time period of the 70s was the real story of these magazines  Playgirl, Viva, Foxy Lady,  all the magazines that existed in this period. So it was a natural outgrowth of trying to tell a story that was inspired by, to some extent, real-life events. When I started developing  Minx , what struck me about the 70s, in particular, is just how similar it was to our ti...

Ellen Rapoport is the creator, executive producer, and showrunner of the breakout hit comedy series, Minx , for HBO Max. The series, which aired on the platform on March 17, takes place in 1970s Los Angeles and follows the story of an earnest young feminist who joins forces with a low-rent publisher to create the first erotic magazine for women. In May, it was announced that the series was renewed...

Peter Weller · Actor, Art Historian & Director Peter Weller is a renowned theater and Hollywood actor. His performance in films such as Robocop and Naked Lunch garnering him much critical and commercial success over the years. Unbeknownst to most, Weller has spent much of his time over the decades, honing his appreciation for the visual and musical arts through his studies of the Renaissance era....

Peter Weller · Actor, Art Historian & Director Peter Weller is a renowned theater and Hollywood actor. His performance in films such as Robocop and Naked Lunch garnering him much critical and commercial success over the years. Unbeknownst to most, Weller has spent much of his time over the decades, honing his appreciation for the visual and musical arts through his studies of the Renaissance era....

“What we deal with more in the second season is how your online persona and your real-life persona sometimes can't help but be at odds with one another. In the first episode back we get into how women are treated, how women in relationships are treated online. In a later episode, we deal with how women are or are not allowed to express their anger online as content creators. So it’s something we t...

Ali Schouten is a showrunner, executive producer, and writer who is quickly establishing herself as a creative on the rise as her formidable talent and artistic versatility continue to make waves. Schouten currently serves as the showrunner and executive producer of the wildly successful iCarly revival for Paramount+, which set 10 years later, features Miranda Cosgrove reprising her iconic role. T...