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The original Star Wars movie was a mashup. George Lucas and his collaborators pulled from everywhere: westerns, samurai movies, Flash Gordon, and a 1955 war film called The Dam Busters. This video shows just how closely the attack on the Death Star mirrors a scene from The Dam Busters of a group of bombers attacking a dam. The dialogue is identical in places. From the Dam Busters Wikipedia page:
Director George Lucas hired Gilbert Taylor, responsible for special effects photography on The Dam Busters, to be the director of photography for the film Star Wars. The attack on the Death Star in the climax of Star Wars is a deliberate and acknowledged homage to the climactic sequence of The Dam Busters. In the former film, rebel pilots have to fly through a trench while evading enemy fire and fire a proton torpedo at a precise distance from the target to destroy the entire base with a single explosion; if one run fails, another run must be made by a different pilot. In addition to the similarity of the scenes, some of the dialogue is nearly identical. Star Wars also ends with an Elgarian march, like The Dam Busters.
You can also watch Star Wars footage with Dam Busters audio and Dam Busters footage with Star Wars audio to see just how closely the two scenes match.
Given modern IP concerns and stakes, it’s difficult to envision this type of homage working today. Star Wars came out just 22 years after The Dam Busters, which is a beloved & acclaimed movie in Britain…it’s not obscure. Imagine a movie released in 2026 by a young Academy Award-nominated director that lifts a scene wholesale from a 2004 film like The Notebook, The Incredibles, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, or Million Dollar Baby — it just wouldn’t happen without a lot of lawyerly conversation. I mean, maybe Lucas had those convos with The Dam Busters filmmakers… 🤷♂️
Andor loves a good monologue. Among the best of them is Nemik’s Manifesto:
Remember this, Freedom is a pure idea. It occurs spontaneously and without instruction. Random acts of insurrection are occurring constantly throughout the galaxy.
And Kino Loy’s speech to his fellow prisoners on Narkina 5:
There is one way out. Right now, the building is ours. You need to run, climb, kill! You need to help each other. You see someone who’s confused, someone who is lost, you get them moving and you keep them moving until we put this place behind us.
In this just-released episode of Nerdwriter, Evan Puschak breaks down Luthen Rael’s “extraordinary” monologue about what he’s sacrificed for the cause.
Here’s the original scene and a transcript of the speech:
Calm. Kindness. Kinship. Love. I’ve given up all chance at inner peace. I’ve made my mind a sunless space. I share my dreams with ghosts. I wake up every day to an equation I wrote 15 years ago from which there’s only one conclusion, I’m damned for what I do. My anger, my ego, my unwillingness to yield, my eagerness to fight, they’ve set me on a path from which there is no escape. I yearned to be a savior against injustice without contemplating the cost and by the time I looked down there was no longer any ground beneath my feet. What is my — what is my sacrifice? I’m condemned to use the tools of my enemy to defeat them. I burn my decency for someone else’s future. I burn my life to make a sunrise that I know I’ll never see. And the ego that started this fight will never have a mirror or an audience or the light of gratitude. So what do I sacrifice? EVERYTHING!
The great thing about Luthen’s monologue, which Puschak doesn’t really get into, is that it makes the viewer rethink the entire basis of the show — and of Star Wars in general. Instead of Good Guys and Bad Guys, you’re asked to consider shades of gray. These blurred lines are hinted at before, mostly through individual character arcs (Han, Anakin, Lando, Rey, Kylo), but Luthen plainly lays out the moral complexity involved: revolutions and rebellions are led by and made up of flawed people who do harmful things for the right reasons…or at least, that’s what they tell themselves, what they need to tell themselves.
Luthen, Mon Mothma, Cassian — there’s no solution to their personal trolley problem, except that they somehow have to keep living after condemning others to suffering and death. Viewed through that lens, the rest of Star Wars reads quite differently.
I’m gonna call it: Every Frame a Painting, my all-time favorite YouTube channel, is back. Tony Zhou and Taylor Ramos stopped producing their fantastic video essays back in 2017 and while they have popped up here and there since then, they’ve mostly stuck to their retirement.
But for the past few months, the duo have been releasing video essays produced in partnership with Criterion: Night of the Living Dead: Limitations into Virtues, The Blade (1995): The Edges of Wuxia, and just yesterday, The Visual Comedy of Isle of Dogs (embedded above).
For the past three decades, Wes Anderson has left a distinctive fingerprint in American comedy, with his penchant for artificial worlds, deadpan performances, literary devices, and snappy narration. But there’s something else. These movies are funny to look at. Over the years, Anderson has experimented more and more with visual comedy. And none of this is more apparent than in Isle of Dogs.
It looks like they’re doing about one video a month. I hope they keep it up…I love their videos.
(Ok, maybe don’t read this bit until you’ve watched the Isle of Dogs video, but did you detect that Zhou’s narration seems to be synced to the mouth movements of the characters in the clips he’s talking over? Such a great little detail of visual comedy…I clapped my hands in glee like a toddler when I noticed.)
For his latest video essay, Evan Puschak tells us about Un Chien Andalou, the pioneering surrealist short film by Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dalí. The film is particularly notable for a shocking shot in the opening scene, which, if you’ve seen it, you’ve likely never forgotten. Said Buñuel of the film:
This film has no intention of attracting nor pleasing the spectator; indeed, on the contrary, it attacks him, to the degree that he belongs to a society with which surrealism is at war.
You can watch Un Chien Andalou on YouTube:
One wonders what Buñuel and Dalí would have made of YouTube…
Every Frame a Painting’s Taylor Ramos & Tony Zhou are back with a video essay about pushing the boundaries of genre in Tsui Hark’s 1995 film The Blade.
One reason filmmakers like to work in a genre is that it gives us a pre-made box: a set of expectations, tropes, and boundaries. On the one hand, we want to play within that box, and on the other, we want to push against its edges. Tsui Hark’s The Blade is an exploration and a deconstruction of the box that is wuxia.
If you’re not familiar with wuxia, the video explains the genre; it’s basically Chinese martial arts fantasy — think Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon or Hero. (thx, neil)
Along with Sinners and One Battle After Another,1 Wake Up Dead Man is one of my favorite films of the year. So I enjoyed director Rian Johnson breaking down the investigative scene in the bar in this Vanity Fair video.
This is, for me, even a little more personal than the previous movies because faith and religion is at the heart of this movie. And I grew up very Christian. I grew up not Catholic. This movie is set in a Catholic church. I grew up Protestant, kind of what we would call evangelical today. I was a youth group kid and it wasn’t just that my parents took me to church. I really, my whole perspective in life was really based on a relationship with Christ. It was very important to me. I’m not anymore, I’ve kind of grown away from that later in life, but it’s still something that I have deep feelings about. So this movie, in a way, by having Father Jud and Benoit Blanc kind of talk about this and kind of butt heads about it, it was a way for me to take both of those perspectives inside me and get them talking with each other.
The practical effect with the photograph (~10:05 mark) was 💯.
In his most recent video, Evan Puschak takes a close look at Marlon Brando’s face and gestures in a scene from On the Waterfront to explain how Brando changed film forever.
And this is what makes Brando a genius: when his eyes betray his words. His voice says, “What do you really care?” But his eyes say, “Please care. Please show me that you care.”
Welp, time to watch On the Waterfront, I guess.
Listening to Ethan Hawke talk about his career for 30 minutes is a treat. He starts with Explorers (which I loved as a kid) and continues with Dead Poets Society, Before Sunrise, Boyhood, and First Reformed. Good Lord Bird is on the list as well…I’m making my way through the book right now and I’ll be eager to check out the miniseries after I’m finished.
I wish they would have included Gattaca but you have to stop somewhere otherwise the dang thing’s gonna be an hour long.
If you were one of those people who loved watching DVD extras, you’ll enjoy the hell out of ILM visual effects artist Todd Vaziri breaking down some of the special effects that he and his team have worked on, including Rogue One, The Force Awakens, and Dungeons and Dragons: Honor Among Thieves. Introducing the video on his site, Vaziri writes:
My goal was to highlight the artistic process of visual effects. Movies like the ones I highlight in the video are crafted by hundreds of artists, technicians and production folks, all working together to achieve the vision of the director. I’m so proud to have worked with such amazing crews over the years.
Many of the effects he highlights aren’t the obvious ones — monsters, digital Leia, lightsaber battles — but rather effects that you’d never notice — indeed effects that you shouldn’t notice because they are designed to be seamless. Like a “dust poof” from a slingshot shot — it registers and helps sell the scene, but you’d never think, “oh, that’s an effect”.
The whole thing is fascinating — and the rope thing is genius.
In a review of City of Angels, the 1998 Hollywood remake of Wings of Desire by Wim Wenders, Roger Ebert says:
To compare the two films is really beside the point, since “Wings of Desire” exists on its own level as a visionary and original film, and “City of Angels” exists squarely in the pop mainstream.
In his latest video, Evan Puschak leans into the vast gulf between the two films to “explore the differences in cinematic cultures and styles”. He takes a close look at the same scene in both films and what they reveal about Hollywood on the one hand and European art cinema on the other.
Clocking in at almost an hour, this “definitive interview” with Wes Anderson by Vanity Fair about all 12 of his films is perhaps only for Wes stans or cinephiles, but then again, listening to thoughtful, creative people talking earnestly about their work is almost always worth the time.
Hi, I’m Wes Anderson. I have made, apparently, 12 films and I’m now going to walk us through every one of them in some way.
(via open culture)
In this episode of Nerdwriter, Evan Puschak takes a look at a simple scene from one of my favorite recent films and shows how director Steven Soderbergh makes it sing.
Like Spielberg or Fincher, Soderbergh is a master craftsman, who can translate a scene from page to screen with the confidence of a seasoned pro. You feel that confidence when you watch his movies, and it’s both relieving and engaging.
I thought Black Bag was great (and great fun) — it’s got a 96% rating on Rotten Tomatoes and is streaming on Peacock in the US.
Even after 60+ years, Lawrence of Arabia is one of the best-looking films out there; this video explores why. I got to see Lawrence of Arabia on a big screen last fall and it was stunning — the colors, the amount of detail, the cinematography in general.
Filmmaker Ryan Coogler (Black Panther, Creed) is a big ol’ movie dork, and it’s endearing to watch him break down all the different types of film, aspect ratios, and projection options as he explains how many ways you can watch his latest movie, Sinners, when it comes out this week. Super informative too if you’ve always wondered about the different IMAX formats and just what the heck it means when someone you love gets excited about 70mm.
For the final video in their current series, Taylor Ramos & Tony Zhou of Every Frame a Painting tackle one of the fundamental questions in filmmaking: where do you put the camera? I was especially struck by Greta Gerwig’s comments about camera movement in two of her films:
Well, I kind of had an image of Lady Bird that I wanted it to be almost like stained glass windows in churches, because it is Catholic school and all of that. I was thinking of everything as a presentation within a frame. But then when I got to Little Women, I had the opposite feeling. I felt like I wanted the camera to be alive and curious and a dancer. Like I almost wanted the camera to start young and then get older, like the girls did.
I wanted to camera to start young and then get older, like the girls did — that’s pretty brilliant. The full interview with Gerwig is available here.
So that’s all for now from Every Frame a Painting…hopefully they will be back soon with a new project because I truly love their perspective on how films are made.
So first of all, before you watch this analysis of Chris Marker’s fantastic La Jetée, you should watch the film itself if you’ve never seen it. It’s 28 minutes long, entirely in black & white, and is a “speculative fiction masterpiece” done with “422 photos, a voiceover, and a score”. You can find it streaming at Amazon, Apple, Criterion Channel, or Kanopy. You will not regret it. And then come back and watch this analysis/appreciation by Evan Puschak.
Billy Wilder (Sunset Boulevard, The Apartment, Some Like It Hot) was both a great director and a great writer. In this video essay, Taylor Ramos & Tony Zhou examine how Wilder balanced the verbal, dramatic, and situational ironies of his scripts with making it all work on the screen, emotionally and structurally.
I just got back from the XOXO Festival and one of things that happened was that Taylor Ramos and Tony Zhou showed their new short film The Second and their first new Every Frame A Painting video essay in eight years!! And now the video essay is on YouTube:
It’s a quick one about the sustained two-shot, a type of shot that was used a lot in the olden days but still has its uses today — and gives actors room to actually act.
So happy to see Ramos and Zhou back at it. I’m not sure if I should even say this, but they indicated during their XOXO appearance that there will be more to come (in fewer than 8 years).
Here’s my post about them shuttering the channel and a few of my favorite videos of theirs.
In this video, Evan Puschak takes a close look at the iconic chase scene in Point Break to see how director Kathryn Bigelow uses POV shots to help put the viewer right into the action in a way that is incredibly immersive. Oh, and there a surprise appearance by Disneyland’s Mr. Toad’s Wild Ride.
Confession: I have never seen Point Break. Guess I should watch it now?
YouTuber Nerrel takes James Cameron to task for releasing 4K remasters of Aliens and True Lies that have been, well, ruined by using AI to clean them up.
The best 4k releases tend to follow a pretty simple template: clean and scan the negative, repair any obvious signs of damage, and restore the colors to match the original grading, with as little meddling beyond that as possible. The process should not be about modernizing the style or forcing film to look like digital video. 35mm film was capable of incredible picture quality, and 4k is the first home format capable of delivering most of that detail — that should be enough. A well done 4k is like having a pristine copy of the original negative to watch in your own home, with the full data from that celluloid — grain and detail alike — digitally preserved forever. And that’s the problem with deep learning algorithms — they can’t preserve details. They make their best guess about what an object is supposed to be, then pull new details out of their digital assholes and smear them across the screen.
If Hollywood and one of its best directors don’t care enough about their movies to do them right, how are they supposed to convince us to care about their movies?
From the SoundWorks Collection, this is a 30-minute featurette on the sound design of Dune, in which the film’s sound teams talks about how they created the sounds of the Arrakis desert, the sandworm, ornithopters, spice, and the voice of the Bene Gesserit.
That’s something which - I learned a trick from Lee Scratch Perry, who I worked with in Switzerland about 10 years ago. He’s the pioneer of dub reggae, which must be the genre of music with the most bass. And one of the tricks that he used was to record a bass line and then to play it back through a huge speaker in a room that’s resonant…and record that. So it enhances the resonance of the bass. You also hear something of the shaking of the room. So that was one of the tricks that we used to give a sort of a very tactile sense to this spiritual adventure that Paul’s going on.
There are several other videos on this topic should you desire to rabbit-hole: The Sounds of Dune, How The Sounds of Dune Were Made, Dune Sound Design Explained, Director Denis Villeneuve and Sound Team on Dune, and Dune: Part Two | Deeper into the Desert: The Sounds of the Dune:
I haven’t watched this yet, but it’s definitely in my queue: a recording of a livestreamed panel of all the visual effects nominees from this year’s Oscars, talking about their work on those films. I got this from Todd Vaziri, a visual effects artist at ILM, who says:
If you’re at all interested in visual effects, you gotta watch this Academy presentation that took place last weekend. It goes in-depth with all five nominees, and shows before/after material that hasn’t been seen publicly.
The meat of the program begins at around 24 minutes when they start showing visual effects reels from the nominated films (The Creator, Godzilla Minus One, Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3, Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One, Napoleon), followed by a discussion with the members of the effects teams.
The Academy has several other nominee programs available on YouTube (including animated feature films & documentary feature films) and more to come in the next few days (including best picture and international feature films). What a trove of material for film lovers.
This is a treat: almost 25 minutes of legendary director Martin Scorsese talking about how he made his most iconic movies, from Mean Streets and Raging Bull to Gangs of New York and The Irishman. You have to laugh at the number of times he says, “Well, I didn’t want to make this film, but…” From an accompanying profile/interview with Scorsese (which is quite good as well):
It is a peculiar fact about Martin Scorsese that he does not enjoy actually making movies. “I don’t mean to be funny,” he said, “but, the thing is, you get up real early.” And Scorsese has never been a morning person. For most of his life, he recalled, “I’d stay up late watching movies on TV or reading late, or doing homework late, or trying to write scripts late. I lived at night and the streets were dark, and I never saw the light. It took me many years to understand where the sun set and where the sun rose. I didn’t know. I’m not kidding. I learned it in LA. When you’re going on Sunset Boulevard and you hit the Pacific Coast Highway and it’s seven o’clock and the sun is setting — it’s right there.”
He likes to borrow a complaint from Kubrick. “They said, ‘What’s the hardest thing about directing?’ He said, ‘Getting out of the car.’ Because once you get out of the car, the questions start.” Now, when Scorsese gets out of the car in the morning, he looks at his AD and says, “What can’t I have today?”
Starting with Jaws, his first big blockbuster movie that defined the genre, Steven Spielberg has filled the audiences of his films with a sense of wonder, that alchemical mix of fear and astonishment of the unknown. No other director does it better and this video essay explores how he does it.
The other day I posted about how contemporary filmmakers, Wes Anderson in particular, use miniatures in their films. The model/prop maker featured, Simon Weisse, has worked with Anderson on several films, including his latest, Asteroid City. Weisse has been posting behind-the-scenes shots of his studio’s work on Asteroid City to his under-followed Instagram account and I thought a separate post highlighting some of those props and miniatures would be fun.
This video shows a bunch more of the miniatures used in the movie:
I also ran across a few behind-the-scenes videos of the production if you’re in the mood to deep-dive (as I appear to be):
If you’re lucky enough to be in London in the next week and a half, you can go and see some of these props and sets and even eat at the diner at 180 Studios. Very. Jealous.
Vox talks to prop & model maker Simon Weisse, who made miniatures for Wes Anderson’s Asteroid City, about the perhaps surprising popularity of miniatures in contemporary filmmaking, when the technique works and when it doesn’t (e.g. when unscalable elements like rain or fire/explosions are involved), and why certain directors use it instead of CGI.
Miniatures in movies are way more common than you may realize, and one of the most stylish filmmakers keeping them alive is Wes Anderson. In this video we spoke to Simon Weisse, prop maker and model marker for some of Wes Anderson’s recent projects, like The Grand Budapest Hotel, The French Dispatch, and Asteroid City.
Older movies, like 1977’s Star Wars: Episode IV — A New Hope, had no choice but to use miniatures to make their worlds feel real. But even in the modern day of CGI, filmmakers are still using minis — just look at projects like The Mandalorian, Blade Runner 2049, Harry Potter, and The Dark Knight series. In those movies, miniatures are used for expansive sets that establish the world of a film, otherworldly vehicles like spaceships, and more.
It’s perfect for Anderson’s storybook aesthetic, of course…it looks great in Asteroid City (which I really enjoyed overall).
Yesterday I posted a link to a Twitter thread by Stanley Kubrick scholar Filippo Ulivieri about a previously overlooked (*ahem*) aspect of The Shining: Jack Nicholson breaks the fourth wall by micro-glancing at the camera dozens of times during the film. It turns out that Ulivieri also made a visual essay about this and it’s really worth a watch.
Let’s go back to that glance that has been noticed by a few film critics. Some say it’s a Brechtian effect to expose the artifice of the mise en scène and have the audience reflect on the film medium. But Kubrick’s films are not intellectual, despite what the critics say. “The truth of a thing,” Kubrick said, “is in the feel of it, not in the think of it.” If this look at the camera means anything, for me it means that we are not safe from Jack’s fury. He knows where we are, he may come for us next. But what about the others? Why on Earth is Jack Torrance constantly glancing at us, breaking the fourth wall over and over, and over, and over.
What all of these micro-glances mean is open to interpretation. Ulivieri offers a few theories of his own — e.g. Jack is looking at ghosts, or perhaps just one ghost: the camera ghost — but says one of the reasons he made the video is to hear what other film critics and fans think might be going on here. I thought this response to his thread hit near the mark:
My gf’s read The Shining, and it’s really interesting now that they notice all these fourth wall breaks Jack does. throughout the whole book, Jack feels like he’s being watched and judged, and that’s why he feels so much pressure to keep up appearances.
If Jack is the only one in the MOVIE to consistently break the fourth wall, where it’s always just passing glances, that’s a pretty effective way to show the character’s fear of being watched or judged. Especially if WE don’t notice it at first.
I wonder how many The Shining re-watches this video and thread have inspired…I’m gonna watch it again in the next few days and see how my awareness of the glancing changes the film for me.
I loved this analysis of a scene from the final episode of season three of Mad Men.
The scene shifts. The partners go from standing in disarray around the room to orderly sitting, two by two across from one another. They go from tense standing disagreements to calm, relaxed collusion.
This video is also a reminder of what a great show Mad Men was (it’s in my all-time top 5) and how they just don’t make TV like this anymore.
Insider has been doing a whole series of videos on how movie props are made (view the entire thing here) and I found this one on how prop makers rely on noiseless props to be particularly interesting. To cut down on distracting on-set noise (so dialogue can be heard, for instance), they swap racquetball balls for pool balls, silicon chunks for ice cubes, and paper bags made out of coffee filter material for real paper bags. So weird to watch those objects in action without their usual sounds. (thx, caroline)
Do you want to sit in on a 30-minute cinematography masterclass with Roger Deakins as he talks about the process behind some of his most iconic films? We’re talking Sicario, The Shawshank Redemption, 1917, Fargo, Blade Runner 2049, and No Country for Old Men here. Of course you do. And when you’re done with that, you can listen to all of these other filmmakers and actors talking about their films.
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