The most perceptive joke to air on American television in the last 10 years goes something like this:
Attorney Diane Lockhart (Christine Baranski), liberal lioness of “The Good Fight,” awakes one morning to find that Hillary Clinton, not Donald Trump, has won the 2016 presidential election. Struggling to assimilate the joyous news, Diane describes the Trump years to colleagues at her Black-owned Chicago law firm as one would a bad dream: “He kept calling Nazis ‘very fine people.’ And he did a Senate campaign for a child molester. And he put children in cages … And antisemitism and racism were on the rise.”
Wait, partner Liz Reddick (Audra McDonald) interrupts, “Where were the Obamas during all this?”
Diane pauses, searching her memory for a moment, then matter-of-factly delivers an indictment for the ages: “They had an overall deal at Netflix.”
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Premiering in April 2020, “The Gang Deals With Alternate Reality” finds Robert and Michelle King’s legal farce at its most laceratingly funny — and the deepest cuts are reserved for the Democratic Party and the donor class that sustains it. Diane soon discovers that #MeToo never happened, watching as Harvey Weinstein, protected by his checkbook and a coterie of don’t-rock-the-boat political operatives, receives an award from a group called Women Unite for Change.
As any student of the Kings will know, the point is not to conjure up some Pizzagate-style conspiracy about a cabal of liberal Hollywood predators. “The Good Fight,” like its predecessor “The Good Wife,” focuses on the moral and mental gymnastics of center-left elites — white-glove attorneys, influential producers, tech entrepreneurs, corporate consultants — because it takes the right’s penchant for selfishness, corruption, vanity and vacuousness as an absurd given. Rather, “The Gang Deals With Alternate Reality” skewers the failure of a major American political party and its allies in the world’s foremost cultural economy to conceive an appealing vision of progressive America, much less bring it to fruition. Even in Diane’s fantasy, Democrats’ ambitions top out at putting Harriet Tubman on the $20 bill.
After an election in which countless celebrity endorsements, speeches, concerts and fundraisers; coconut memes, camo hats and fan cams; late-night TV interviews, daytime talk show spots and “Saturday Night Live” sketches left Vice President Kamala Harris and running mate Gov. Tim Walz no closer to victory than their counterparts, Clinton and Sen. Tim Kaine, eight years ago, “The Good Fight’s” slings and arrows seem right on target.
Hollywood, the de facto public relations arm of the Democratic Party, has come to reflect, and reinforce, its political partner’s worst instincts, ceding the initiative for understanding and delivering what Americans want in order to chase the chimera of a stable, focus-group-approved midpoint in the culture. What’s left presents an impoverished picture, not only of the progressive future but of Hollywood’s own: the entertainment industry equivalent of “America is already great.”
This failure of imagination reminds me, in fact, of another joke — the oft-screenshotted moment in “The Holdovers” in which cafeteria manager Mary Lamb (Da’Vine Joy Randolph) chides classics instructor Paul Hunham (Paul Giamatti) as one might the doomed alliance that gave us Trump 2.0.
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“You can’t even dream a whole dream, can you?”
I. Going high
When Barack and Michelle Obama founded their production company Higher Ground in 2018, the notion of a postpresidential portfolio built around culture-making seemed both a canny innovation and a comfortable fit.
Although high-profile talent, powerful executives and well-connected agents had long been vital to Democratic fundraising efforts, the pact between Netflix and the Obamas formalized the relationship in a new way, and the former president and first lady — gifted orators as capable of cheesing with the Muppets as delivering a keynote at the DNC — were ideal impresarios. Other dignitaries with a liberal bent soon followed suit, including Hillary and Chelsea Clinton (HiddenLight) and the Duke and Duchess of Sussex (Archewell), all promising, in one way or another, to inspire viewers through storytelling.
What exactly we were being inspired to do, besides fire up Netflix or Apple TV+, remained unstated — an early red flag that this new kind of Hollywood power player could not be counted on to supply studios with an appetite for risk. Perhaps inevitably, the pointedly ideological projects to come out of these partnerships, such as “American Factory,” “Crip Camp” and “Zurawski v Texas,” were accompanied by forgettable, soft-focus celebrity interviews (“Gutsy”), fastidiously self-protective biographies (“Harry & Meghan”) and scripted projects with only the most tenuous connection to their producers’ public personas. (As a friend said to me recently about Higher Ground’s “Bodkin,” “What do murder mysteries have to do with the Obamas?”)
Alongside flattering documentary portraits of such figures as Nancy Pelosi, Stacey Abrams and Adam Kinzinger, or furious late-night segments from John Oliver, Seth Meyers and more, the films and TV series created by these production pacts slipped mostly unnoticed into the modern content mill, as ephemeral, and, at times, as cringeworthy as Texts from Hillary, “Joe-bi Wan Kenobi” or tote bags emblazoned with “Notorious R.B.G.” But as in the electoral realm, “When they go low, we go high” failed to meet a moment of profound frustration with, indeed rage at, American institutions and the elites within them. Joining the frictionless symbolism of franchise tentpoles with the defensive crouch of triangulation, celebrity political culture in the post-Obama years often appeared to prize the performance of progressive bona fides over the achievement of actual policy outcomes. No one could take the loose constellation of streaming titles, media appearances, corporate statements and #resistance memes that came to comprise this culture terribly seriously as an answer to the real problems facing the country.
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So no one did. Which may explain why an electorate that overwhelmingly claims to want celebrities out of politics just voted a celebrity back into the White House, representing the same party that brought us President Ronald Reagan, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, Sen. Fred Thompson and Rep. Sonny Bono. It’s not just any association with Hollywood that voters reject but the specific message, and medium, of the Democratic status quo.
(Golden Cosmos / For The Times)
After all, as Democrats perfected the star-studded convention, replete with rumored performances and TV star emcees, Republicans and their allies constructed a self-sustaining, cross-platform media and entertainment ecosystem that actively prides itself on spurning “the mainstream,” even if much of its talent pool once worked in showbiz, or aspired to. Built atop existing strata of conservative newspapers and magazines, right-wing blogs, talk radio shows, Facebook groups and more, this alternate reality — think of it as Hollywood’s nimbler Wario — features not only Fox News but also Fox Nation and DailyWire+, X and Truth Social, “The Joe Rogan Experience” and Angel Studios, plus an entire universe of individual influencers.
In roughly the same period, Hollywood studios scrambled to build, program and market streaming platforms that could compete with Netflix — destroying a lucrative business model in the process — only to discover that millennial and Gen Z viewers had begun to abandon traditional movies and TV shows in favor of video games, Twitch streams, YouTube tutorials and short vertical videos on platforms like Instagram and TikTok.
With both sides of the alliance caught flat-footed by changes in where and how Americans consume information, it’s little wonder that the combined reach of Hollywood and the Democratic Party has not been an ace in the hole with voters. Even those red-district undecideds who would have enjoyed hearing Julia Roberts and George Clooney discuss the secret ballot may not have received the message, for the very people such spots were designed to target were the least likely to be tuned into them. And the (presumably much larger) contingent concerned about Gaza, inflation, climate change or the housing crisis found not a no-holds-barred case for the Democratic platform but a tone poem about the White House from the cast of “The West Wing,” or Harrison Ford repeating the losing slogan from 2016.
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This is the problem, of course, with the development deal as political act, “inspiration” as mission statement, celebrity as selling point. Horrifying though it may be, Republicans and their media allies drive the political agenda through culture, unafraid to stoke emotions or gin up controversy to achieve their desired ends. Democrats in Hollywood, despite having the industry’s bully pulpit at their disposal, could not even ensure that prizewinning Israeli-Palestinian documentary “No Other Land” and its labor-movement sibling, “Union,” secured U.S. distribution. Instead, more concerned with feeling good than forcing change, they have pioneered a form of safe, bland liberalism that must necessarily seem meaningless, and therefore toothless, to any American not already sold on it. We were supposed to have learned this lesson in 2016: You can’t bring a “Fight Song” to the culture war and expect to win.
II. Going ‘woke’
It would be tempting to conclude that Hollywood should heed postelection autopsies inveighing against “magic words,” “radical chic” and “going woke.” In truth, this tack to the right was already underway. Long before the friendly drop-ins on Mar-a-Lago or inauguration fund donations, it had become a fixed idea among wags and wonks that the industry had gone “too far” in its commitments to diversity, equity and inclusion after the 2020 murder of George Floyd and was due for a correction.
But this notion is built on a convenient fiction. Despite consistent pledges to improve diversity since at least 1999, when a consortium of watchdog groups threatened to boycott the broadcast networks over the whiteness of their fall lineups, Hollywood has made only modest progress toward inclusion — certainly nothing on the order of a revolution to be reversed. The ratio of men to women with speaking roles remains largely unchanged since 2007, for instance, while Latinos have lost ground as their share of the population grows. Pipeline programs for underrepresented groups have not prevented the ranks of directors, screenwriters and executives from remaining predominantly white and male. And leaders with the ostensible authority to drive systemic change have been “managed out” before being given the chance to do much of anything. All of this against the backdrop of study after study after study showing that diverse storytelling and diverse audiences are sound business, not “virtue-signaling.”
For Hollywood to pander to conservatives by rolling back progress it hasn’t actually made, or self-impose a gag rule so as not to ruffle the feathers of President Trump, is not an adaptive response to consumer demand. It’s a capitulation to the asymmetrical political polarization that inflects seemingly every aspect of American life. How else does one explain the hypocrisy of claiming to value LGBTQ+ creators, audiences and employees, then forging lucrative, multiyear relationships with transphobic comics or excising a trans storyline from a children’s series? How else to justify paying more for the resuscitation of Brett Ratner and Melania Trump than the cost of three best picture winners?
In the aftermath of two bruising strikes and a protracted slowdown, Hollywood’s susceptibility to such forces should be no surprise. The chasm between the industry’s haves — highly paid CEOs, marquee mega-producers and A-list stars — and its have-nots — the dying middle class — continues to expand. And the drumbeat of stock sales, tax write-offs, brutal job cuts and obscene bonuses has made it ever harder to separate these haves from the tech oligarchs who’ve infiltrated our halls of power or the quasi-sovereigns of the last Gilded Age. For the leaders of today’s cultural industries, films, TV series, albums, even books seem to be no more than widgets on an algorithmic assembly line, as fungible as yards of textile or gauges of steel.
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Against the devoted coalition of evangelical Christians, neocons, pompous billionaires and MAGA Republicans who now dominate the other side of the aisle, this prevaricating has failed to muster enthusiasm for the Democratic Party or much of the industry’s own product. A system in which the rank-and-file are weakened to the point of “exodus,” the most prominent are silent for fear of reprisal and the most powerful are willing to throw both under the bus at the first sign of trouble is a system only an expert in mergers and acquisitions could love. It’s a potent reminder that Hollywood’s claims to represent us were never a foundational ideological principle nor an act of political solidarity. They were a form of trend forecasting, no different from putting a finger to the wind and assessing whether slim-fit or boot-cut jeans will be “in” this season.
But when you show yourself to stand for anything, you prove that you stand for nothing at all. What happens if Hollywood manages to alienate the 48.4% of the electorate who voted for Harris by pursuing the 49.9% who voted for Trump? Perhaps nonvoters, for whom the 2024 campaign did not offer a stark enough choice, constitute an untapped market. Perhaps the median consumer of Hollywood fare will join the fickle ranks of the undecided voter. Either way, the situation presents an opportunity for progressive audiences, who for all the bluster about their hegemony have been taken for granted — expected to show up, shell out and shut their mouths for too long.
Loyal consumers have certainly accrued the capital to demand better; audiences share more of the burden for the industry’s ups and downs than ever before. TV has evolved into a costly, complicated bundle of streaming services for which viewers must pay for the privilege of being fed ads. Theatrical films have become “premium” experiences, defined by high-end formats, cushy seats, expanded concessions and exorbitant prices to match. And Hollywood, for all its supposed reluctance to wade into politics, has not shied from applying pressure to the progressive conscience, with viewers tapped to maximize the “completion rate” of their favorite inclusive series and encouraged to buy tickets in the service of historic firsts.
Like progressive voters who are urged cycle after cycle to contribute, to sign up for door-knocking and phone banks to get out the vote, progressive fans have surely done their part. They might well expect the industry, like the party, to hold up its end of the bargain.
III. Going, going, gone
In the summer of 2022, at the behest of a visiting friend and fan of the podcast, I attended a live taping of “Lovett or Leave It,” the culture-and-politics show hosted by former Obama speechwriter Jon Lovett.
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Goofier (and gayer) than “Pod Save America,” the flagship he hosts with Crooked Media co-founders and fellow Obama alums Jon Favreau and Tommy Vietor, “Lovett or Leave It” has the pleasantly rambling energy of very-late-night TV. But something about seeing its listeners, the choir to which Crooked preached, unsettled me. What was the object of this exercise? To build a global California where progressive ideals reign supreme? Or to believe that such an outcome could be achieved without disrupting the good vibes?
I thought back to that night this summer as President Biden, reeling from a disastrous debate performance, seemed destined for defeat, and again the day after the election, when Vice President Harris conceded hers. I see now that the liberal fantasy of “Lovett or Leave It,” the calculated inoffensiveness of Higher Ground’s portfolio at Netflix and the fleeting dopamine hit of childless-cat-lady memes are all of a piece, signaling the ultimate irrelevance of the liberal consensus. And voters’ belief that its beneficiaries are complacent elitists skilled only in symbolic victory can no longer be blamed on brainwashing by right-wing media. It’s time to admit that the losers in the culture war have also brought this on themselves.
The costs of cable, streaming and a night out at the movies have combined to push consumers into the arms of conservative or “independent-minded” podcasters and YouTubers whose content is free. Nor would what’s on offer from the major studios and networks, in the aggregate, convince skeptics that the industry is in touch with the common man: the IP-driven “cinematic universe” and other forms of conglomerate-made “culture”; streaming pablum to fold laundry by, whether labeled “casual viewing” or “mid TV”; every flavor of luxury, quiet or otherwise, from media magnates to mega-ranchers to Real Housewives and the capitalist origin stories that got them there. Even the principal exceptions, often in the form of allegories that point to the brokenness of our world without depicting it directly — “Severance,” “Squid Game,” “Andor,” “Dune” — easily segue into yet another form of self-congratulatory back-patting. Consider the speed with which the barn-side-broad parable of “Wicked,” based on a book published during Bill Clinton’s first term, was subsumed into a narrative by which Hollywood would embrace its “radical” message and perhaps award it best picture at the Oscars to thumb Trump in the eye.
The answer is not a sudden profusion of expressly political films; didacticism doesn’t win elections any more than it does the box office. Still, the shuttering of Participant Media and the travails of Trump biopic “The Apprentice,” coming in tandem with C-suite fantasies of a politics-free popular culture, suggest an unwillingness to make waves that profoundly misunderstands our moment, where fortune — think Kendrick Lamar vs. Drake, or Chappell Roan — favors the bold. Perhaps most worryingly, there were vital examples of civic life to be seen onscreen last year, with citizens debating the fate of their communities and protesting the tyranny thereof. It’s just that all of them depicted societies abroad: “Evil Does Not Exist” (Japan), “Dahomey” (Benin), “The Seed of the Sacred Fig” (Iran), “I’m Still Here” (Brazil). The last time authoritarianism was on the march, Hollywood responded with bold, courageous filmmaking that confronted the threat head on. This time, it seems far more likely to turn a blind eye.
In a sense, the entertainment industry and other influential, at least nominally liberal forces in American life have come to echo the moment in “The Good Fight” when the co-founder of Women Unite for Change questions Diane’s effort to jump-start #MeToo in her alternate reality: “If Hillary doesn’t win, Trump wins. Then what do we have?” Now, on the eve of Trump’s second inauguration, with a solidly conservative majority ensconced on the Supreme Court and Republicans in control of the House and the Senate, the disastrous consequences of that logic are upon us — as is the urgent need to develop and promote a progressive alternative to climate catastrophe, white nationalism, imperial adventure and middle-class collapse that is capable of persuading voters, whether inside or outside the Democratic Party.
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The celebrity political culture of our time, a far cry from the audacious front-line activism of Harry Belafonte during the civil rights movement or Jane Fonda against the Vietnam War, turns out to be the logical end point of the fear that Obama’s 2008 slogan, “Hope,” was fundamentally empty if it didn’t specify the hoped-for. The unifying feature of Hollywood’s current relationship with the Democratic Party, after all, is inscrutability — politics as scrubbed clean of potential controversy, and therefore of power, as a corporate press release.
For many, of course, participating in this culture has been a source of succor, whether in the dog days of “brat summer” or the depths of election week 2020. There’s no need to censure the desire to forge kinship, to lick one’s wounds, to seek respite or joy. At a certain point, though, communing only with other true believers, lashed together by shared values and secret language as if at a church service, cannot be counted on to transform society in tangible ways. Indeed, such a strategy might eventually come to resemble the conservative practice of placing faith over works: As disciples of Jon Lovett might say over their ethically sourced Crooked Media coffee, thoughts and prayers never stopped a school shooting.
If this week’s Telugu release Gurram Paapi Reddy were a human, it would most likely be a teenager. It bursts with energy, overflowing with ideas and wearing its unabashed enthusiasm like a badge of honour. The audience too might end up surrendering to its infectious energy. Yet, like a distracted teenager, the film also gets so enamoured by its very idea that it loses control and does not know where to stop.
The vibe is eerily similar to Jathi Ratnalu early on. Again, Brahmanandam (as Vaidyanathan), is a judge. Faria Abdullah, the actress in the former film, is the only female presence in the lead lineup here. The other oddball male characters — Gurram Paapi Reddy (Naresh Agastya), Chilipi (Vamshidhar Goud), Goyyi (Jeevan Kumar) and Military (Rajkumar Kasireddy) — are the not-so-smart ones who get entangled in a mess.
The similarities end there. Brahmanandam, who is in terrific form, sets the tone of the comedy, doling out harsh punishments to petty criminals, not for their crimes, but for their sheer stupidity in getting caught. Gurram, Chilipi, Goyyi and Military are the victims who reunite after their jail term. This time, they are joined by Soudamini (Faria).
Storyline: A gang of four ex-convicts swap dead bodies for easy money and land in a ‘royal’ mess.
While their earlier heist at a jewellery store goes terribly wrong, the new plan is strangely simple. The four men need to swap a dead body from Srisailam with another body in a graveyard in Hyderabad for a meagre sum. While they execute it, albeit with difficulty, it gets messy when the motive behind the swap comes to the fore, dating back to a royal gift from the pre-Independence era.
The key conflict is established prior to the intermission, but newer problems surface later. Though the story idea is deceptively straightforward, the director builds many layers to the fun quotient and it’s evident that he treats comedy like serious business.
The actors react to the situations without trying too hard to impress. The scenes are not only thematically funny, but also packed with outrageously hilarious one-liners. Every time one feels the film’s trajectory is sorted, there is a surprise. The screenplay is busy with backstories and subplots.
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The second hour could have benefited from some economy in writing. Past connections are strung together, newer characters and their complexities are introduced, there are backup plans, flashbacks and a song is thrown into the mix. Thankfully, the humour quotient remains unaffected. Some breather would have been welcome.
The subplots involving Sangi Reddy, particularly the courtroom proceedings, and Markandeya Raju’s son crowd the screenplay, leaving the viewers with too many dots to connect. It’s inevitable for some restlessness to creep in towards the final 45 minutes — a stretch packed with several events and coincidences. A clever climax salvages the film.
Gurram Paapi Reddy is aware of the crucial balance between the goofiness of its characters and the seriousness of the plot. Too many characters and a packed, expansive narrative make the film exhausting, given its 160-minute runtime.
Naresh Agastya, Vamshidhar Goud, Faria Abdullah, Jeevan Kumar and Rajkumar Kasireddy share wonderful on-screen camaraderie and get ample scope to shine individually too. Yogi Babu, as a convict with night-blindness, brings the roof down even when he doesn’t dub for himself. Motta Rajendran’s antics look repetitive at times, though they land well.
This is also among Brahmanandam’s best on-screen appearances in recent times. It’s an absolute joy to see the veteran actor ever-hungry to prove his worth when he senses potential in a scene. John Vijay is in dire need of reinvention with his dialogue delivery and body language. Both songs in the film, composed by Krishna Saurabh, though well-shot, feel abrupt.
A narrative with lesser flab would have amplified the film’s impact. The makers tease the audience with a potential sequel idea, but appreciably it does not appear forced. The film is also complete in itself.
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Gurram Paapi Reddy is a smartly written and performed con-comedy that delivers laughs aplenty, though a few segments become indulgent.
It is often said that film directors are siloed off from one another, that they don’t get to watch how others work. So when you put a group of them together, as with the six participants in The Envelope’s 2025 Oscar Directors Roundtable, they are quick to share all sorts of ideas. Like where they prefer to sit in a movie theater — centered in a row or on an aisle? How far back is the best for sound, or so the screen runs up to the edges of your peripheral vision? Should you even take the worst seats in the house, since somebody will eventually be asked to pay money to sit there?
Guillermo del Toro, there with his adaptation of Mary Shelley’s classic novel “Frankenstein,” likes the top of the first quarter of the theater. Rian Johnson, who finds new twists for Benoit Blanc in his third “Knives Out” detective story, “Wake Up Dead Man,” says, “I look for wherever Guillermo’s sitting.” Nia DaCosta, who made the bold, adventurous Ibsen adaptation “Hedda,” likes the top of the first third. Mona Fastvold, who explores the life of the founder of the religious movement known as the Shakers in “The Testament of Ann Lee,” likes the center a little farther back. Jon M. Chu, who made the second part of a musical adaptation with “Wicked: For Good,” sits dead center — and has been known to talk to the theater manager if the sound isn’t loud enough. And Benny Safdie, who explores the rise and fall of mixed martial arts fighter Mark Kerr in “The Smashing Machine,” tries to find a spot where he can fidget in his seat and not bother anyone.
Read on for more excerpts of their conversation about the art of adaptation, navigating budget constraints at any scale and much more.
Jon, I’ve heard you say that with “Wicked: For Good,” you wanted the film to be deeper but not darker. And it doesn’t pull any punches as far as dealing with themes of antiauthoritarianism. What was it like to have those very serious ideas and yet still have this be a buoyant, crowd-pleasing musical?
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Chu: The reason we made it was because it had that meat to it, and it was always a two-movie, yearlong experience that set up the fairy tale first. And Movie 2 is kind of where we all are, this moment of this fairy tale shattered in front of us.
I have five children now, so I’m thinking about how to present stories to my kids. Do I still believe in the possibility of dreams and the American Dream? “For Good” really gets to delve into that stuff. And because it was shorter than the first half, we get more room to do it. We added new songs to explore that idea. So it all felt really fitting. Movie 1 could be an answer. Movie 2 is much more of a challenge: Who are we gonna be now that we know the truth?
All of your films in their own way are speaking to right now. Rian, “Wake Up Dead Man” is specifically set in the year 2025 and all the “Knives Out” pictures have been dealing with our contemporary reality. What makes you want to do that?
Johnson: That kind of started for me with the first movie. This is a genre, the murder mystery genre, that I love and that I’m just seeing so much of growing up. But it’s also a genre where most of what I had seen throughout my whole life, murder mysteries are period pieces set usually in a cozy little bubble of a little “Queensfordshire” place in England.
And I guess my realization was, that’s not what Agatha Christie did. She was not writing period pieces. She wasn’t an incredibly political writer, but she was always writing to her time. It’s not trying to do anything radical in terms of making it new or updating it, but let’s set it very much unapologetically in the modern moment. … You have a group of suspects that have a hierarchy of power amongst them and the person at the top they all wanna bump off — it’s such a potent vehicle for building a little microcosm of society.
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Benny, one of my favorite things in “The Smashing Machine” is that it’s funny to realize setting a story at the turn of millennium is a period piece now. What was it like crafting this very specific, recent time period?
Safdie: It’s a time period that I think everybody thinks is just yesterday. But when you actually get into the nitty-gritty, it’s a long time ago. And things were very different and everybody knows exactly what those things are too. Because it was heavily documented, there was so much footage of it, it’s so top of mind. And I think a large amount of people also want to go back there a little bit, to this time where the internet was just kind of happening. People want to go back to this simpler moment. But trying to re-create what that feels like is what I was really going after — just thinking about how you would live in that time, and then represent that in the movie. Because I did want it to kind of feel like time travel.
Guillermo, you’ve spoken so much about how “Frankenstein” has been a lifelong dream project for you. Now that it’s done, where does that leave you?
Del Toro: There’s a massive postpartum depression, No. 1, and it’s real. And it affected me more than I thought it would, to be candid. But fortunately, I’ve been very interested in two new themes that are going to be sure to produce blockbusters, which is memory and regret. The dynamic duo of past 60. And I always thought about that in the abstract, but now I try to make the movies not only about the moment I’m in, but about me.
And I’m seriously trying to express what makes me uneasy, what makes me believe in the possibilities of grace even in the most horrible circumstances. And I’m not talking only social, but personal or philosophical. Something happens when the six clicks in on the counter. And all you can do is [ask], “Do I feel I have something to say, genuinely?” And then you go to that. Cronenberg, I had dinner with him when he was turning 74, and he said you have to scare yourself into being young again.
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Nia, “Hedda” is such a bold adaptation of the play “Hedda Gabler.” You switched the gender of one of the main characters. You aren’t afraid to inject issues of race and class and sexual identity into the story. Were you ever concerned that you were asking too much of this classic text?
DaCosta: I wrote it on spec, so I wasn’t thinking about anything besides letting my freak flag fly, basically. I just thought, “This character makes more sense as a woman.” OK, what does that mean now? How does that affect the rest of the story? And then I just go from there. And then it ended up being really bountiful and generative.
And then when I met Tessa [Thompson] three years later, I thought, “Oh, when I write this, eventually Tessa will play Hedda.” So now she’s Black. OK, what does that mean? And Tessa’s also mixed-race. So then you get that element of it as well. And then I chose the 1950s, and then I chose England and the country house. You just treat these things as truths, and the story has to go in a certain direction. So I never worry about those things. Maybe because I’m a Black woman, so my presence or my identity for some people will complicate the story. But for me, it just is life.
Guillermo, in adapting “Frankenstein,” did you feel like you were dealing with the Mary Shelley text and also all the Frankenstein movies that we know?
Del Toro: I put all the cinematic stuff on the side. I didn’t want to make an erudite cinematic movie or a referential movie. I have lived with the three iterations of the text for my entire life. And there’s a lot of the interstitial stuff that I took from her biography, fusing with my biography, because even if you sing a song everybody knows, you’re doing it with your lungs. And your passion and your pain and your throat. … It’s the difference between seeing a living animal and taxidermy. If you just want the text, then buy the text. You cannot be more faithful to that text than reading the text. But if you want to see how we interact and resuscitate something into being emotional again, then that’s what we try to do.
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Mona, “The Testament of Ann Lee” is a story told with music, but is it a musical? Is that a question you asked yourself as you were making it?
Fastvold: I consider it a musical. I do. But it’s just a different kind of musical. No one’s singing dialogue. It’s not magic when they start to sing. I think, as I was writing the script with Brady [Corbet], we realized early on it had to be a musical because the Shakers worship through ecstatic song and dance. They would be moved by the divine spirit and then receive a song or a piece of movement, and then they would start to sing and dance. Their life was a musical, so that’s what it had to be. And that was exciting to me, to create the whole structure of that.
But it couldn’t be, “OK, here’s a story and then here’s an amazing musical number.” It had to come from this place of worship. So all the musical bits and pieces of the film, our moments of feeling moved by the spirit and having this sort of religious experience, it had to be grounded in that and it had to be really organic-sounding and -looking. So we had to ground it in live recordings and create the soundscape and the music in dialogue with my choreographers. Every body slap and stomp is part of the rhythm and the music of it, because it couldn’t just be where diegetic audio fades out and then there’s this great, wonderful piece.
Chu: In a weird way, we all make musicals. All the movies, everybody has a take on how music integrates with it.
Del Toro: I was aiming for opera.
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Guillermo, Jon, both of your films have a sense of scale to them. What kind of challenges does that present? Is it wrangling all the extras? Is it having the sets built on time? Jon, just the number of florists credited at the end of “Wicked: For Good” is wild.
Chu: It’s like building Disneyland, essentially. We had the warehouses going — there’s first a recording studio, so we’re recording music while their dance rehearsals are going on. You have hundreds and hundreds of people. Then you go to the costumes department and then you have the hair, just the wigs alone. People are getting there at 2:30 in the morning. And that’s before you even start the day.
We were planning two movies at the same time. So we had 20-something musical numbers rehearsed and worked with our cinematographer and our team to understand everything and build sets around these pieces. And then you get there on the day and how do I say, “Hey, all that stuff we did, this is actually happening over here. Let’s move everything over here”? I felt the hardest thing was being OK with wasting money if it was the right thing to do at that moment. I needed to feel free and had everybody aware that if I’m moving all of a sudden, we’ve got to go and we’ve got to figure it out. And I think that’s where the magic is.
Del Toro: To me, it’s three things. The first one is tonal, meaning everything that you do, you’re not doing eye candy, you’re doing eye protein. You’re telling a story. So it’s not about looking good or looking big. It’s about, does the gesture happen at the right moment? Because you can make gestures on the wrong moment of the film, and they don’t have a dramatic impact. I say we designed the movie for the Creature to feel real, of a piece with the world. So that’s the first one.
The second one: Is it expressing something different every time we go to a bigger thing? It’s not about the scale. And the final one to me is, does it feel real in the world? So the way I go at it is, there’s no typeface, no paint, no photograph, nothing, that cannot be investigated and designed to within an inch of its life. Even great movies, I’m very fidgety. I go, “That’s not a painting from the 1930s. Somebody painted it much later.” Or a typeface or a carnival banner or something like that. So at the end of the day, if you do your job right, you have a world and people just get into it almost like a vibe. Nobody should notice, but if you do it right, they want to experience it over and over again.
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Rian, you make a really bold decision in “Wake Up Dead Man,” where the signature character of the series, Daniel Craig’s Benoit Blanc, is offscreen for much of the first 45 minutes or so of the movie. Did you have to convince people that’s the way things should go?
Johnson: Not really. For this one, first of all, it is a little closer to actually a traditional detective structure. That’s kind of how most Agatha Christie books work, is you meet the suspects in the first act. You get a very good idea of who’s gonna get bumped off. And then, end of the first act, the murder happens, and then the detective shows up and starts to solve it. So there was a precedent for it. But the real reason I had done backflips in the previous two movies to get around that was so we could get Blanc in there earlier. The reason it made sense for this [is] because Father Jud, who’s played by Josh O’Connor, [is] kind of the protagonist of it because of the themes of religion, and so the whole lay of the land was more complicated and delicate in this one to set up. I felt like the audience would be best served by having that runway and getting the time before this powerhouse that is Daniel playing Benoit Blanc comes in and brings this whole new energy to it.
The other thing that I’ve landed on with them is you have to constantly resist the candy of the mystery. You have to always remind yourself [that] the mystery elements are not a load-bearing wall, that those are never going to keep an audience entertained or engaged. You need to do the same thing you do in any movie where you have an emotional, bold line going that’s thrown at the beginning, that lands at the end. And the mystery then has to support that.
Mona, with “Ann Lee,” but also with “The Brutalist,” it seems like the movies that you and Brady Corbet are collaborating on together, you’re doing so much with relatively limited resources. What is it that the two of you are doing in these films that you’re able to make them seem so grand?
Fastvold: I mean, there’s no trick. I had to prep for almost a year for this one, because I knew that no one was going to give me a lot of money to make a musical about the founders of the Shakers. It was not gonna be this sexy pitch. It was a hard pitch. So I knew that it was going to be a limited budget. But at the same time, I just desperately wanted “Ann Lee” to have a really grand story. And I wanted there to be a believable, lush world. And I wanted to tell a story about her whole life, not just a day in her life.
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So I had to make it work somehow. It was so much about saying, “OK, I’m working with my [director of photography], my production designer, my costume designer every weekend and night for months and months before we started official prep. And same with my choreographer and composer and with all of the cast as well, just rehearsing. Amanda [Seyfried] was rehearsing at night while she was shooting something else. She would go and have dance rehearsals at night, on the weekends, so we could keep on adjusting.
So the only way that I could, to quote David Lynch, get dreamy on set, which was something I really wanted, was by having so much prep time, and then just really knowing what my Plan A and B was, and to sort of experiment in advance more. And because I knew there’s no way that you can try and build a world and then have the same flexibility on this budget, it’s all about knowing every line item in my budget, what everything costs in Hungary, what everything costs in Sweden. “OK, this is how much a cherry picker in Hungary costs, and therefore I’m gonna take out two shots and only build half the roof.”
The 2025 Envelope Directors Roundtable. Top row, left to right: Rian Johnson, Benny Safdie, and Mona Fastvold. Bottom row, left to right: Nia DaCosta, Jon M. Chu and Guillermo del Toro.
Chu: I think that’s one of the biggest lessons I learned being a director. You don’t have a right to make your movie, because it costs so much and you need so much help. You do have to earn the right to make your movie. That is a part of our job.
Nia, you come to “Hedda” having just made a Marvel movie. You’ve just also finished a sequel to “28 Years Later.” Is there a secret through line for you that connects all these projects?
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DaCosta: Being a nerd, Marvel, horror, comic books, for me, those things that I’ve done that I haven’t written are worlds that I loved as a kid. So “Candyman” was hugely important to me when I was younger. I used to love Marvel comics as a kid. “28 Days Later” is one of my formative films that I watched. And so when the opportunities came up to be a part of those worlds, it was really exciting for me. And then “Hedda,” I’m a theater nerd too, so I just really go by my passion, and I’m really compelled by just interesting characters.
“Hedda” and “28 Years Later” are very different films, but for me, they were so similar because I learned from my experience jumping into the studio system after making a sub-million-dollar movie [“Little Woods”] what works for me and what doesn’t work for me. And what works for me is really being given authorship. And so I’m setting the tone early. We’re not here to battle. We’re here to make the vision that I have. And if you’re into it, cool and great, let’s work together. If you’re not into it, then it doesn’t have to exist or I’ll find another way for it to exist.
Del Toro: The ambition should always be beyond the budget. If they give you $130 [million], you want to make a movie that is $260 [million]. But the way to that I found by doing “Devil’s Backbone,” which is $3 million, or “Shape of Water,” which is $19.3. “Shape of Water” opened with all the different sets in the first 15 minutes. And then it’s two sets. Lab, apartment, lab, apartment, lab, apartment. I always tell the departments, let’s choose meatballs and gravy. Where do we put the real resources? You reach a plateau no matter what the budget. Never spend money on a plateau. It always needs to mean something.
Safdie: You pick and choose the moments when you’re gonna get big. We were doing the hospital scene and then we built the plane in the hallway of the hospital. Because that was the most affordable. But there was a column in the middle of the plane, and I would always joke that we should go through the column. I find those limitations exciting. Because you really have to figure it out.
Rian, “Glass Onion” had a more robust theatrical release than “Dead Man” has gotten. Do you feel like as filmmakers that all of you are being put in this position of fighting for the future of theaters and moviegoing?
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Johnson: I actually feel incredibly optimistic at this moment about the future of moviemaking. I don’t feel that way because we’re all picking up signs and marching down the street and preaching to people that they need to keep this sacred. I feel optimistic about it because I go to movie theaters and I see them packed with young people who want to go to movie theaters and have that experience.
And I see them coming out for new movies. I see them at revival cinemas. I see theaters at 2 p.m. on a Tuesday showing a Melville film that are just full of young people who are excited. And then you see it with movies that have come out this year. You see it with something like Ryan [Coogler]’s movie, “Sinners,” or with so many films that have struck chords with audiences and created cultural events. You can’t wag your finger at people and say, “You should be going to the theater and having this theatrical experience,” but you feel it rising right now. And so for me, it’s less that I want to advocate for it. It’s more that I want to ride that wave of it coming up.
James Cameron clarifies Matt Damon’s viral claim that he turned down 10 per cent of ‘Avatar’ profits
Filmmaker James Cameron has addressed actor Matt Damon’s long-circulating claim that he turned down the lead role in Avatar along with a lucrative share of the film’s profits, saying the version widely believed online is “not exactly true.”
For years, Damon has spoken publicly about being offered the role of Jake Sully in the 2009 blockbuster in exchange for 10 per cent of the film’s gross, a deal that would have translated into hundreds of millions of dollars given Avatar’s global earnings of USD 2.9 billion. The role eventually went to Australian actor Sam Worthington, according to The Hollywood Reporter.
“Jim Cameron called me — he offered me 10 per cent of Avatar,” Damon says in the clips. “You will never meet an actor who turned down more money than me … I was in the middle of shooting the Bourne movie and I would have to leave the movie kind of early and leave them in the lurch a little bit and I didn’t want to do that … [Cameron] was really lovely, he said: ‘If you don’t do this, this movie doesn’t really need you. It doesn’t need a movie star at all. The movie is the star, the idea is the star, and it’s going to work. But if you do it, I’ll give you 10 per cent of the movie.’”
However, speaking to The Hollywood Reporter, Cameron said Damon was never formally offered the part. “I can’t remember if I sent him the script or not. I don’t think I did? Then we wound up on a call and he said, ‘I love to explore doing a movie with you. I have a lot of respect for you as a filmmaker. [Avatar] sounds intriguing. But I really have to do this Jason Bourne movie. I’ve agreed to it, it’s a direct conflict, and so, regretfully, I have to turn it down.’ But he was never offered. There was never a deal,” according to The Hollywood Reporter.
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The director added that discussions never progressed to character details or negotiations. “We never talked about the character. We never got to that level. It was simply an availability issue,” he said.
Addressing the widely shared belief that Damon turned down a massive payday, Cameron said the actor may have unintentionally merged separate ideas over time. “What he’s done is extrapolate ‘I get 10 percent of the gross on all my films,’” Cameron said, adding that such a deal would not have happened in this case. “So he’s off the hook and doesn’t have to beat himself up anymore.”
