MovieMaker

Sonic the Hedgehog director Jeff Fowler says when he first released images of Sonic — and fans savaged them online — he wallowed through “a good hour of feeling sorry for myself.” But only one hour. Then he got back to work, and made changes that led to a massive hit. He says in the latest MovieMaker Interviews podcast that Sony and Paramount, the film’s distributor, quickly agreed that they neede...

"Horse Girl," now in theaters and on Netflix, stars Alison Brie as a young woman who loves horses. That's as much as we can tell you without ruining the film, which Brie and director Jeff Baena co-wrote. Spoilers follow. The film, which premiered at Sundance last week, isn't what it at first appears to be. Baena doesn't care about genre or classification. What he and Brie do care about is committi...

Christina Hodson, writer of Birds of Prey and Bumblebee, talks to us about what makes the Clockwork Orange- influenced girl gang movie tick. She also talks about the Lucky Exports Pitch Program (LEPP) in which she and Margot Robbie's Lucky Chap Entertainment helped six female writers break into the action genre. She also talks about mapping out fight scenes with some help from YouTube and True Rom...

Promising Young Woman stars Carey Mulligan as a young woman who goes to nightclubs and acts too drunk to stand. When nice guys take her home, they realize she isn't as helpless as she seems — and that they aren't very nice. That's just scratching the surface of the wickedly funny, brilliant Sundance debut for writer-director Emerald Fennell, who tells us she designed the film to feel like a great...

Three Christs director Jon Avnet has one of the most impressive IMDb pages in Hollywood: He produced films from Risky Business to Black Swan , and has worked with everyone from Tom Cruise to Joan Didion. He's also faced a lot of rejection — and figured out how to get past it. Three Christs , which Avnet co-wrote as well as directed, stars Richard Gere as a psychologist in the 1950s trying to treat...

Before the age of 30, Rishi Rajani rose to become president of Lena Waithe's Hillman Grad Productions, the company that brought you Queen & Slim and BET's Boomerang and Twenties , among other projects. In this episode, he talks about how Hillman Grad wants to help other people break into Hollywood—especially underrepresented creators who want to make protest art. He also talks about how he worked...

Director Destin Daniel Cretton had no choice but to make sure Just Mercy , his Michael B. Jordan and Jamie Foxx death row drama, was very accurate: Cretton says Bryan Stevenson, who inspired the film, "was constantly keeping us in check in the best way." Stevenson's memoir, Just Mercy, describes his efforts to save Walter McMillian, a man who was wrongly convicted of murder in 1988. Jordan plays S...

The Lighthouse was one of Willem Dafoe's biggest acting challenges: Dafoe and Robert Pattinson are onscreen for almost every second of Robert Eggers' film, shot in harsh weather on a barely hospitable stretch of the North Atlantic. But Dafoe says in our interview that he delighted in the challenge of having nowhere to hide. Then we talk with Laure de Clermont-Tonnerre, whose film The Mustang is on...

Clemency is one of the last films to be released in 2019, and it's one of the best films of 2019. This week we talk to the film's director, Chinonye Chukwu, and the film's stars, Alfre Woodard and Aldis Hodge. You know all the cliches of death-row movies: the cruel warden, the Jesus imagery, the lawyers who clear their client at the last second. Clemency knows them too, and subverts them in favor...

Alan Cumming and "Two Popes" screenwriter Anthony McCarten are our guests this week. We talk with Cumming -- whose Twitter profile describes him as a "Scottish elf trapped inside middle-aged man's body" -- about dancing, DJing, mentoring young moviemakers, and his role in Stanley Kubrick's Eyes Wide Shut . He tells us about the visual sex joke that Kubrick asked him to do again and again, and abou...

Margot Robbie, our first guest, is earning accolades galore for her role in "Bombshell" as Kayla, a Fox News employee whose TV ambitions draw the attention of the predatory Roger Ailes. She talks with us about playing a character with whom she has almost noting in common, and how she used social media to understand her. We also talk about one of the most underrated parts of her acting, how she bal...

Hotel Mumbai , the feature debut from Australian writer-director Anthony Maras, deserved more attention when it premiered in the United States earlier this year. Now that the film has premiered in the most important country on its release calendar, India, we spoke to Maras about the horrific attacks that inspired Hotel Mumbai and the heroism of the real people involved. Maras' story is essential l...

Writer-director Annabelle Attanasio's debut feature film "Mickey and the Bear" stars Camila Morrone as an 18-year-old helping care for her father (James Badge Dale), a veteran coping with PTSD. In this episode, Attanasio talks about crafting an elegant, efficient script that skips exposition and lets the actors really act. Morrone and Dale also talk about the importance of persistence in being a p...

This week, two interviews we love: The first is with "Queen & Slim" star Daniel Kaluuya, and the second with "A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood" writers Noah Harpster and Micah Fitzerman-Blue, as well as Tom Junod, whose Esquire profile of Mister Rogers is a major influence on the film. In "Queen & Slim," which is in theaters Wednesday, Nov. 27, Kaluuya and Jodie Turner-Smith play a couple on a...

In the first episode of MovieMaker Interviews, "Dolemite Is My Name" screenwriters Scott Alexander and Larry Karaszewski tell us how they went from college roommates to masters of the biopic. They walk us through their writing process, from research to cards to first draft, then get into specifics about "Ed Wood," "The People vs. Larry Flynt," "Man on the Moon," "Big Eyes," "The People vs. O.J. Si...