Cate Blanchett Just Did Mermaidcore—the Right Way
We're used to mermaidcore having a Y2K, H2O: Just Add Water flavor: iridescent eyeshadow, beachy hair, paillette-covered tank tops, and flowing skirts. But with her collar of spiked shells, the corset takes on an almost menacing, armor-like meaning. She isn't Princess Ariel, but a siren who will lure men to their deaths.
Cate Blanchett at the Serpentine Gallery summer party
Doug Peters -Dilara Findikoglu fall 2025
Photo: Isidore Montag / Gorunway.com
Still, Blanchett did embrace the literal, swapping the lace-up leather pants from Findikoglu's runway for a pale purple mermaid skirt that jutted out at the knee, complete with body-contouring lines and raw seams galore. She finished her look with a pair of dusty lavender pointy-toe pumps lined with tulle that resembled seafoam after a wave breaks.
Styled by Elizabeth Stewart, Blanchett is not afraid of taking fashion risks. (See: the 102 spoons she wore as a top, from 2024 LVMH Prize winner Hodakova.) She's also always the first in line to wear designers early in their tenures, from Haider Ackermann's Tom Ford to Sarah Burton's Givenchy. But after seeing her in embellished seashell armor, we instantly need another collaboration between Cate Blanchett and Dilara Findikoglu.
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Yahoo
21 minutes ago
- Yahoo
12 alternative acts you should try and watch at Glastonbury 2025
When you buy through links on our articles, Future and its syndication partners may earn a commission. It's Glasto week, people! The world's most famous music festival touches back down at Worthy Farm this Wednesday for another five days of music, art, creativity and chaos, with Pyramid Stage headliners The 1975, Neil Young and Olivia Rodrigo heading up another stacked bill of the very biggest and best in pop, rock, dance, hip hop, reggae and just about everything in between. 'But where are the 'proper' alternative bands?!' I hear you yell. Don't worry: peel back the layers just a little and you'll find plenty of hard rock, metal and punk acts making a big, fat racket around the lineup this year. Because I'm nice, I've gone and picked out 12 of the very best alt artists you should go out of your way to catch live - or at least watch on TV if you're one of the unlucky gazillions that lost out on tickets this year. It was only a matter of time before grime metal was officially A Thing, and few current artists have so perfectly crystallised the urgent, visceral impact of both those components into one fluid sound as Aaron "Native" James. The Ipswich-based, MOBO-nominated rapper moulds scrappy, Ghetts-indebted bars around nu metal riffs and propulsive percussive blasts, merging the two styles that have most strongly defined his own musical journey growing up. Playing the politically-bent Greenpeace tent late on Thursday afternoon, James is perfectly placed to make an early mark as one of the first heavy artists to play this year's lineup. Once you've seen what he's all about, you'll be quickly converted - go check out his set while he's still confined by such small surroundings. If there's any festival to experience bands that are a little more unconventional, it's Glastonbury. Habitual name-changers (they've previously gone by The Ohsees, Thee Oh Sees and Oh Sees, among other aliases, as an attempt to confuse the music press), Californian heavy psych rockers Osees are also unique in that they have two drummers. When experienced live, the two full-sized kits make as much racket as an elephant falling down the stairs; meanwhile, their fuzz-drenched, oddball garage rock never fails to stir crowds into sweaty, clashing masses. In 2024, they released their 28th album, SORCS 80, a manic, entirely electronic work that doesn't include a single lick of guitar. But don't let that put you off: samplers and technical distortion buzz and bleed out with all the ferocity of a real six-string, producing an offbeat medley of Idles-reminiscent punk, jittery garage rock and funk, complete with unexpected honks of saxophone. Weird, but it works - so be sure to catch them. The nu gen sister duo who give so little of a shit about genres that they've smashed through about ten of them across one EP, some standalone singles and an acclaimed debut album, Alt Blk Era decided to settle into a more drum 'n' bass-oriented groove for this year's Rave Immortal. Even there, though, there were enough sprinklings of grunge, emo, metal and pop to mix things up, meaning that by the time Nyrobi and Chaya hit the BBC Introducing Stage on Friday, you'll have no idea exactly what to expect. This writer even witnessed his first ever rock show catwalk when the girls played the Underworld in Camden. Slaying and serving in equal measure. So assured is Biffy Clyro's status as national treasures of British rock music that it's easy to forget what a weird, angular and surprising force of nature they are. The trio's gorgeous, thematically-linked double-header of 2020's A Celebration Of Endings and 2021's The Myth Of The Happily Ever After helped us through the pandemic era, while new single A Little Love is another slice of bittersweet beauty to guide us through the absolute slop that is Planet Earth 2025. They've only got an hour, so back this to be just about as taught and perfect a set of emotional rock ragers as you're likely to find anywhere across Worthy Farm this weekend. And if you see me crying during A Hunger In Your Haunt, no you didn't (yes you did). The lairiest double-act to hit the scene since Kane and Undertaker teamed up to whack on Stone Cold, Bob Vylan's mash-up of furious punk and throttling, bass-y grime has been rattling skulls for almost eight years now. Deserved winners of the first ever MOBO award for Best Alternative Music Act in 2022, the critical clout that has come their way hasn't damped frontman Bobby's razor-wired tongue one iota. Put short, if you're looking for the rowdiest, most rawly politicised hour of power at Glasto this weekend, look no further: West Holts at 14.30 on Saturday is where you need to be. I'm not quite sure if they'll be able to pull off their traditional, show-ending stage invasion, but I'd love to see them try. Kings of nerd rock, it's taken an astonishing thirty years for Weezer to make their grand Glasto return, but judging by their stunning, hits-stacked showing at Download a couple of weeks back, back Rivers Cuomo et al to make up for lost time and then some in the Pilton sunshine (may have just jinxed it there but the weather's looking good! Keep the faith!). Weezer's own fanbase will be the first to admit that their discography runs the gamut from the pitch-perfect to the straight-up rubbish, but when they stick to the big anthems, there are few in all of rock music that can hang with them, and a mid-afternoon slot on the Other Stage feels like the perfect way to warm everyone up for what's on the way (more on that in a mo...). Genre-meshing two-piece Nova Twins have managed the curious achievement of playing Glastonbury four only appearing at two editions of the festival. Pulling a triple-header in 2022 with three separate sets before a follow-up one year later, the duo decided to take a break from Pilton in 2024, but will be back with a vengeance when they hit up Woodsies on Saturday. Shoving rock, punk, edm, grunge and plenty more into their blender of a sound, they've garnered critical praise, award nominations and collaborations with the likes of Bring Me The Horizon, Sam Smith and Pussy Riot. Basically, everyone loves them, and so should you. Melbourne's premier pub punks just got announced as main support for their heroes AC/DC on the rock 'n' roll titans' upcoming Australian tour, so if their star wasn't already rising fast, it may well be about to get strapped to a rocket. Angus Young's crew and fellow Aussie heroes Rose Tattoo have certainly had some influence on Amy et al's snotty, no-nonsense racket, but really it's the raw, guttural energy of punk OGs like Iggy And The Stooges and The Damned that has sewn the most DNA into their sound. The four-piece and former Louder cover stars will be making their third appearance at Glastonbury having previously kicked its ass in 2019 and 2022, and with last year's brilliant Cartoon Darkness still ringing in our ears, we can't see their late afternoon, Other Stage set being anything other than a lairy, sweaty triumph. Compared to Weezer, Deftones have only left it a breezy twenty-six years between Glasto sets (Christ, we're all getting old), but the alt metal icons are back, bringing those luscious, tidal riffs to the Other Stage as the perfect warm up me just check my notes Charli XCX. Anyway, one of the single most idiosyncratic and influential heavy bands to come out of the 90s, Sacramento's finest have been remarkably consistent across their three-decade career, 2020's Gore appraised as another high mark and voted Metal Hammer's album of the year. With no new material currently out, expect an all-killer, no-filler* set of nu metal-adjacent bangers from the back catalogue, starring big grooves, bigger hooks, even bigger emotional punches and Chino Moreno still being the coolest fucker in any given field he happens to turn up to play in. *Not that Deftones actually have many fillers, mind. We were only three days into 2024 when Louder writer Vicky Greer suggested that noisy post-punk Dubliners Sprints had just dropped the album of the year with their long-awaited debut full-length Letter To Self. It's wasn't hyperbole: the four-piece's urgent blend of grunge, indie, punk and alt-rock feels quite unlike anything else in the scene right now, and they'll surely be amassing their biggest Worthy Farm crowd yet at their third Glasto appearance this Sunday. If you're looking for a raw, intense but deeply cathartic burst of emotional anthemia to shake off that Saturday night bangover and prepare you for Glastonbury's final lap, get yourself to Woodsies early on Sunday afternoon and prepare to be blown away. Comfortably the biggest thing to ever emerge out of the US hardcore scene, Turnstile channelled the shimmering sounds and expansive songwriting of 2021's Glow On into something even more grandiose and bold on this year's excellent Never Enough. Between their knack for a killer riff and relentless ability to draw the biggest hooks possible out of everything they craft, it seems almost impossible that they won't steal the show on the Other Stage on Sunday. Judging by the band's headline set at Outbreak Festival earlier this month, they are primed for bigger stages, and few come bigger than this. Mosh pits are a rarity at Glasto, and Turnstile have left most of their heavier side behind, but if they decide to drop an old school rager like Keep It Moving?, who knows what could happen? You likely know Bambie from their brilliantly devilish, conservative media meltdown-inducing turn representing Ireland at Eurovision last year. Don't get it twisted, though: there's far more to this nu gen singer-songwriter's unique arsenal than Satanic gimmickry and elaborate stagecraft. Their calling card is a mixture of dark alt-pop, grinding metal and propulsive r'n'b, 2023's Cathexis EP - featuring the Doomsday Blue track that made its way to the Eurovision stage - a career highlight so far. You'll have to be in it for the long haul to catch them (they hit Shangri-La at 11pm on Sunday night), but it'll be a delectably bewitching way to see Glasto 2025 out for the year. Glastonbury 2025 takes place this week, June 25-29, at Worthy Farm in Somerset
Forbes
27 minutes ago
- Forbes
The Good German: How Steven Soderbergh Pulled Off Modern-Day Film Noir
CATE BLANCHETT stars as Lena Brandt and GEORGE CLOONEY stars as Jake Geismer in Warner Bros. ... More Pictures' and Virtual Studios' dramatic thriller "The Good German," distributed by Warner Bros. Pictures. The film also stars Tobey Maguire. PHOTOGRAPHS TO BE USED SOLELY FOR ADVERTISING, PROMOTION, PUBLICITY OR REVIEWS OF THIS SPECIFIC MOTION PICTURE AND TO REMAIN THE PROPERTY OF THE STUDIO. NOT FOR SALE OR REDISTRIBUTION. In November of 2006, The New York Times proclaimed: 'You Can Make 'Em Like They Used To.' The headline was in reference to Steven Soderbergh's semi-obscure historical thriller, The Good German, which dared to do the impossible by painstakingly recreating the black and white film noir aesthetic of the 1940s, a time when studios and contracted A-listers reigned supreme. 'I gave Warner [Bros.] two options. It was very much akin to the gun or the knife," Soderbergh recalls over Zoom. 'I said, 'I either want to shoot it in black and white, in the style of a movie made from that period, or I want to do it as an animated film.' And they went with the live-action notion … We all agreed to do the movie for a nominal amount of money. If I'm not mistaken, I think we all took the same amount just because we really wanted to make it. We knew that it was risky." 'From soup to nuts, Steven wanted it to be shot, lit, and acted [in that style],' affirms producer Ben Cosgrove, an erstwhile key figure in Section Eight (the now-defunct production company founded by Soderbergh and George Clooney in the late '90s). 'He was really obsessed with '40s-style Warner Bros. [films and] we were on the Warner Bros. lot. We were right there where a bunch of these movies had been shot and he said, 'Well, why don't we shoot like a '40s-style movie?'' While the star-studded adaptation of Joseph Kanon's novel clearly draws inspiration from Casablanca, The Maltese Falcon, The Third Man, and other monochrome classics from a bygone era, the film, a labyrinthine thriller set against the rubble-strewn backdrop of post-World War II Berlin, is more than just homage or pastiche, but a genuine and breathtaking resurrection of a long-forgotten method of cinematic storytelling — albeit with a contemporary, R-rated twist. 'There's the what-if aspect to the project,' Soderbergh explains. 'What if [Casablanca director]Nearly two decades after its inauspicious theatrical rollout, The Good German (now available to own on 4K UHD and Blu-ray) remains a criminally misunderstood masterpiece that uses the noir genre as a lens through which to explore the moral ambiguity in the immediate aftermath of the Second World War, particularly with regards to Operation Paperclip. Initially labeled 'Overcast,' the top-secret program undertaken by the United States government recruited Nazi scientists, many of whom were guilty war criminals complicit in the Holocaust, to the American side of the fomenting Cold War. 'There's a considerable amount of whitewashing of the Nazis and then specifically as it related to the rocket program, because we wanted those brains,' explains Good German screenwriter Paul Attanasio. 'I think you can look at it and say, 'Well, we got the brains and we got a rocket program, and maybe it was the right decision.' But then since we're on the eve of the Fourth of July, possibly our self-righteousness should be tempered.' At the end of the day, The Good German is a cinephile's greatest wish come true. It's an audacious, time-traveling, and thematically complex experiment undertaken by an fearless artist who proved beyond a shadow of a doubt that, as the Times said, the Golden Age ways of doing things were not as dead as one might think. "When Warners asked me, 'Who is this movie for, actually?' I said, 'It's for anybody that loves movies,'" the Oscar-winning director explains. The source material, which had been published in 2001 via Henry Holt & Company, was brought to Soderbergh's attention by Cosgrove. 'I had gotten a copy of the book from the Warner Bros. book scout, and just loved it,' the producer says. 'I thought it was really compelling and powerful [with] great characters. I thought it was something for George, but didn't know Steven well enough to know if it was his kind of thing yet. Warner Bros. optioned it on our behalf and then it was literally one of those situations where they said, 'Okay, just [go out to] whomever your favorite writer is. I had always wanted to work with Paul Attanasio. I'd been a huge fan of Quiz Show and Donnie Brasco. So I sent it to Paul and he immediately read it and loved it. It was surprisingly easy.' Having been impressed with Soderbergh since the director's 1989 debut — Sex, Lies, and Videotape — Attanasio considered it a nob-brainer. '[We] had a wonderful, close collaboration,' says the two-time Oscar-nominated screenwriter. 'Steven would come over to my house and he liked to drink Dr Pepper. So my kids, even at that time, started calling him 'Dr. Pepper.' And so, 'Dr. Pepper' would come to the house and we would talk through the script. Steven believed in outlines and I didn't, so I submitted to that process, and we outlined it together. Then I went off and wrote it.' Soderbergh concurs: 'He and I spent a lot of time together, working on the adaptation. But it never ran into any of the typical obstacles that we all run into on most things. Everything seemed to go right until it came out [laughs]. So it was a happy memory — the whole experience of it for me, anyway.' The biggest challenge of shaving Kanon's nearly 500-page tome down into a manageable shooting script (the final runtime is just under two hours) was trying to keep the subject matter accessible to a wide demographic. 'You have to contend with an audience expectation for what a World War II film is [and] at same time, you need to present a film for a new audience that maybe doesn't know anything about World War II, which would obviously be a younger audience," notes Attanasio. As for Kanon's involvement, Cosgrove remembers the author being very helpful to the production. 'He had a lot of resources for us [because] he had done a lot of research for his novel. He was there [on set and] I think his son was even an extra in the movie …. I had a lot of conversations with him about the story, and he was very thoughtful about it, because the movie is significantly different [from the book] … In his own mind, he was able to say, 'I wrote my book. It's one thing, the movie is a different thing, I see where they cross over, and I see where they diverge.' He was totally fine with it.' Though the final result ended up being a more of a loose adaptation of Kanon's work, the general bones of the story remained the same, laying the foundation for a paranoid yarn chock full of harsh lighting, stark shadows, cynical characters, voiceover narration, and a conspiracy that goes all the way to the top: American journalist Jake Geismer lands in Berlin to cover the Potsdam Conference and ends up in a snarled web of sex, lies, and murder involving his black marketeering driver, Patrick Tully, and the German woman he once loved before the war, femme fatale Lena Brandt. 'The basic thing we were going for was [the famous saying from] Casablanca: the problems of these people 'don't amount to a hill of beans in this crazy world,'' reveals Attanasio. 'That these people, who are on the fringes of this kind of grotesque historical scandal, got swept into and crushed by it.' And who better to play these hardboiled characters than the biggest movie stars of the day, as would be the case in Golden Age Hollywood? George Clooney, a handsome and strong-jawed A-lister, would play the Bogart-ish role of Jake Geismer, while Tobey Maguire and Cate Blanchett tackled Tully and Lena, respectively. As Joseph Kanon simply puts it over email: 'It was a dream cast — then and now.' A 2005 call sheet from 'The Good German' 'Looking back, I think the trickiest thing was the actors and explaining to them the style of performance that was going to be required here,' Soderbergh shares. 'My mantra to them was, 'If it doesn't feel weird, you're not doing it right.' And it took a little [time for them to get used to it]. It was going against what you're doing most of the time, which is to to be natural, and I needed this kind of performance that was italicized [in order] to fit inside of the style of the film … It was just a completely different way of approaching performance. And, as you might have read, we didn't use any body mics, no lavalier mics. It was all boom mics. So generally, they did have to project more." The director purportedly didn't want the actors to get dialect coaches, but Blanchett 'got one anyway," Cosgrove says. 'She wasn't about to have that.' 'Cate loves to play dress up and loves to transform,' concedes Soderbergh. 'And so, for her to become a brunette and wear these brown contact lenses and really alter her way of moving and speaking. I think she's really good at that and she enjoys it.' As for Jake, Soderbergh compares Clooney's character to another film noir icon with the same name: Chinatown's Jake Gittes. 'George's performance is really wonderful and subtle. There aren't a lot of actors who could pull off what George is pulling off here. He's got to play the sort of movie star, but it's got to be undercut with this layer of self-incrimination. It's a really delicate balance and he gets everything wrong in a way. It really is like Jake in Chinatown. He gets everything wrong." Maguire was the black sheep of the top-billed stars, having been cast against type. A far cry from the mild-mannered Peter Parker in Sam Raimi's Spider-Man films, Tully is an abusive, hot-headed, and greedy slime ball who leverages post-war desperation into a thriving criminal business. He doesn't last long, however, once he starts asking dangerous questions about Lena's supposedly dead husband, Emil (the late Christian Oliver), a member of Hitler's rocket program and the titular 'Good German.' When Tully's body washes up on the shores of Potsdam early on in the runtime, the story pivots over to Jake's crusade to uncover the truth. 'I think the beauty of not having to carry the entire film is being able to do something wild like play that character,' Soderbergh says of Maguire's performance. 'I think you have to be careful how you use movie stars. They bring with them a certain expectation that's been built around the persona that made them movie stars … We start with Tobey McGuire's character, [who then] hands the movie over to George. And then George, at a certain point, hands the movie over to Cate. That was a Paul Attanasio's idea that I thought was really interesting." Attanasio, however, is rather hard on himself for the Psycho-esque bait and switch. 'The pass-off structure I invented was more clever than good in my view,' he professes. 'Because if you introduce the audience to a character and then you [suddenly] kill him, that's bracing and shocking. But it's also kind of saying, 'F— you for investing in this.' You can do that, but you have to be careful about it … As much as I love all the stuff with Tully, is that the best way to get into this story? It was in the book, but I don't know…" If he could do it all over again, the screenwriter says he'd juice up the relationship between Jake and Lena, tighten the plot a little more, and provide a greater narrative context for critical plot points like the US government's desire to nab as many Nazi eggheads as they could before the Soviets. 'I think it's really crying out for a Hitchcock-ian treatment," he muses, self-effacingly. "It needed to go further into that Hitchcock-ian direction and just be more densely plotted with more twists.' (L-r) TOBEY MAGUIRE stars as Tully, GEORGE CLOONEY stars as Jake Geismer and CATE BLANCHETT stars as ... More Lena Brandt in Warner Bros. Pictures' and Virtual Studios' dramatic thriller "The Good German," distributed by Warner Bros. Pictures. PHOTOGRAPHS TO BE USED SOLELY FOR ADVERTISING, PROMOTION, PUBLICITY OR REVIEWS OF THIS SPECIFIC MOTION PICTURE AND TO REMAIN THE PROPERTY OF THE STUDIO. NOT FOR SALE OR REDISTRIBUTION. With a script and cast in place, Phil Messina (Soderbergh's collaborator on Solaris and the Ocean's trilogy) began to formulate the physical world of The Good German. 'I was so jazzed [about] being able to work on something that was kind of experimental a studio level — and with Steven, who's pretty fearless that way,' he says. 'I had my hands full on trying to figure out what this thing was going to look like." In keeping true to the productions of the '40s, it was decided that principal photography would solely take place in Los Angeles, with the Universal Pictures backlot standing in for the bombed-out ruins of Berlin. 'A lot of filmmakers in the immediate aftermath [of WWII] went to Berlin and shot films there, Billy Wilder being one of them,' Cosgrove says. 'They were known as this sub-genre called 'rubble films,' which were films that were shot in the rubble of post-war Berlin.' 'I went to both the backlots [Warner Bros. and Universal], did a scout, and took extensive photos,' Messina adds. 'I realized very quickly that true to the style of those films and also because of a lot of restraints, that we had to really pick frames. It wasn't about a camera moving. It was not a modern day methodology for making the film … We had these conversations about, 'Can you even make a film that has constraints that no longer exist? Can you put yourself back in time?' They did it this way because they were forced to do it this way, not because they're choosing to do it this way. And that's a big conceit and whether that was successful or not, I'll let others decide." For reference material, the production designer watched old film noirs and hired researchers to sift through 'a ton of photos of post-war Germany, [a lot of which] was pretty destroyed, so rubble was going to be a big part of what we were adding,' he continues. And since rubble was a lot of our language, we literally had a rubble department … Between scouting and film and pictorial research, it started develop a scope for what were going to do. It was pretty complicated.' And since not all productions in the mid-to-late 1940s had the luxury of going abroad like the few American-made 'rubble films,' many films set in post-war Germany had to go off photos. 'Maybe they'd have a plate unit or something, but they never went there,' notes the production designer. 'They had to deal with it from photo. So in some ways, I was doing the same thing that they were doing. We had a little bit of CG, but even 20 years ago, we had to pick and choose our shots for set extensions. It was a big deal. So the goal was to keep it most of it in camera. I feel like we really kind of dipped into their methodology, pretty one-to-one.' At the end of the day, his job was to capture the archaic, yet charming, simplicity of '40s-era movie magic. The most notable instance of that philosophy can be found in the scene where Jake and Lena are framed against a painted backdrop (see below) in a bombed-out stairwell. 'It just really captured what that era was all about. That was something I came up with. It was just romantic and told a lot of the story.' Says Cosgrove: 'Phil Messina's sets were brilliant … and all of this was on a budget of $30 million, which sounds like a lot, but for a film shot in Los Angeles with movie stars on a studio backlot, that's pretty fantastic." George Clooney stands against a painted backdrop in 'The Good German' 'I remember walking around the sets with [Paul Attanasio] and thinking that all of this stuff had been built because of something out of his imagination,' says Cosgrove. 'I was watching the expression on his face and he was incredibly moved by that.' A similar sentiment was shared by Kanon, who visited the set while gearing up to write his 2009 novel Stardust, which takes place in post-World War II Hollywood. What better place to conduct research on that particular period of cinema than the set of The Good German? 'I got to go back in time every day to a '40s movie set — same soundstages, same cameras, same costumes as might have been used then,' the author recalls, characterizing Soderbergh as 'a model of professionalism.' Soderbergh's interactions with Kanon were 'were remarkably pleasant, given that the process of transforming a book into a movie can be traumatic for the novelist,' the director says. 'But I think he understood … if we were making changes, it was to make the story even more of what it was. We had no interest in compromising what he was trying to do. We were actually trying to really go narrow and deep and and be uncompromising about it. So he seemed very happy that it was happening and my recollection of him seeing the finished film was that he appreciated and understood what we had done. I think the historical novel is a really fascinating genre, and Joe happens to be very good at it.' Before principal photography began in earnest, Soderbergh 'gave everybody a syllabus of films that they had to watch before they showed up on set," Cosgrove remembers. "So we all went to the film noir film school with Steven, which was a great experience.' The director's biggest influence, of course, was Michael Curtiz, whose 'understanding of staging and storytelling was so deep, especially during the '40s,' Soderbergh declares. 'I enjoyed living inside of that and really forcing myself to use the rules and grammar that he was using during that period. I didn't find it restrictive at all. I found it kind of freeing to know exactly what I was allowed to do and what I wasn't allowed to do. And there were little things I would do that I felt pushed the grammar just a little bit with the belief that if you were operating at that point with the freedom that would come later; little technical flourishes that you would indulge in that would have been kicked back by Jack Warner.' Once filming officially got underway, Soderbergh began to realize just how much ingenuity film crews of the '40s needed to employ to solve moviemaking problems that would one day become a cinch with the advent of better equipment and CGI. 'It's always a good thing when you have logistical and economic parameters that you have to work within, because it forces you to think laterally instead of vertically all the time," he says. "If the solution to every problem can't be, 'Let's just throw more money at it,' you have to be more creative.' HOLLYWOOD - DECEMBER 04: (L-R) Actress Robin Weigert, actor George Clooney, actress Cate Blanchett, ... More actor Tobey Maguire and Director Steven Soderbergh arrive at the premiere of Warner Bros. "The Good German" held at the Egyprian Theatre on December 4, 2006 in Hollywood, California. (Photo by) And as if trying to recreate a defunct style of filmmaking wasn't hard enough, Soderbergh also decided to be his own cinematographer and editor, going under the pseudonyms of Peter Andrews and Mary Ann Bernard. 'He didn't look at those three tasks independently,' stresses Cosgrove. 'He had edited a scene in his head before he shot it. Our director's cut was literally [completed] just days after we'd finished shooting.' In terms of cinematography, Soderbergh wanted to pay homage to a pair of Golden Age DPs, Gregg Toland (Citizen Kane) and Sam Leavitt (Exodus), both of whom 'had very different methodologies,' he explains. 'Gregg Toland really pioneered the idea of adhering to a single light source. He would establish whatever the source of the light was and do the best that he could, given the film stocks of that day to really stay faithful to it — no matter where the camera was. That was kind of a new approach. Sam Levitt was exactly the opposite. Sam Leavitt just put a light wherever he wanted to illuminate whatever he wanted to illuminate. It was a very blunt style, and it had its own kind of appeal to me. So the film is kind of a mixture of both of those. There are times where I'm being very, very faithful to whatever the source is in the room, and then there are times where I just put up a lamp and hit somebody with it and, and all the subtlety is out the window.' 'I remember we were originally talking about actually shooting it in black and white, with arc lights. The old kind of lighting [style], really going full method,' adds Messina. 'And I'm not quite sure. I think it was maybe the difficulty in actually developing black and white film. With the Digital Intermediate, it was just easier to shoot in color and turn it into black and white.' One of the trickiest things to pull off was rear screen projection, the now-quaint green screen forerunner used to simulate a moving vehicle. While Soderbergh and his team had hoped to accomplish genuine rear screen projection for the driving scenes with Geismer and Tully, they were, ironically, forced to do it as a green screened CGI effect, albeit with genuine driving footage from the epicenter of the Nazi war machine. Finding it, however, "was literally a Sisyphean task" and 'crazy, crazy impossible,' Cosgrove recalls. 'We looked at at archives all around the world, in Russia, in Europe, in the US. I finally found a couple reels where some GIs had basically strapped a camera onto the hood of their Jeep and drove around Berlin in the aftermath of the war. They were turning corners, you could see people. All we had to do was play it in reverse and we could shoot in that classic style. All the stuff in the background as they're driving through Berlin is all actual shots of Berlin from the immediate post-war [period]. Interestingly, the footage we found was in color, so we had to reduce to black and white. But the sense of joy of finding that piece of footage was fantastic.' Per Soderbergh, this plate footage was shot for Billy Wilder's 1948 'rubble film,' A Foreign Affair. 'I don't know what we would have done if we hadn't had that. It would have been impossible to recreate. And back then, the possibility of building it as a total CG background wouldn't haver worked either,' he says. 'So we got really lucky, because studios may hang on to the movie that material was used in, but it's really rare for them to hang on to that kind of [raw] footage. And it's interesting. I think that first scene where Tobey picks him up at the airport and we go into the Jeep is a real inflection point for whoever's watching the movie. You either smile at it and go, 'Okay, I'm in! They're going for it!' Or you're like, 'This is weird. That's not real. This is weird.'' CATE BLANCHETT stars as Lena Brandt and GEORGE CLOONEY stars as Jake Geismer in Warner Bros. ... More Pictures' and Virtual Studios' dramatic thriller "The Good German," distributed by Warner Bros. Pictures. The film also stars Tobey Maguire. PHOTOGRAPHS TO BE USED SOLELY FOR ADVERTISING, PROMOTION, PUBLICITY OR REVIEWS OF THIS SPECIFIC MOTION PICTURE AND TO REMAIN THE PROPERTY OF THE STUDIO. NOT FOR SALE OR REDISTRIBUTION. Given that the film was being made at Warner Bros., Soderbergh came up with the ingeniously meta idea of modeling the theatrical poster design after the iconic one WB had made for Casablanca over six decades before. 'It's the same studio, so I thought why not rip off your own material?' went his rhetorical thinking. 'It's hard to get a good poster these days. I thought that was really beautiful … I had convinced Warners that with critical support, we could build an audience for the film. But people [who saw it] weren't just angry at it — I think they were maybe confused by its intention.' The Good German hit theaters on December 15, 2006 to mainly negative reviews from critics, who saw the film as more of an exercise in style over substance when, ironically, Soderbergh was using the singular noir aesthetic as a clever way to get at the substance of the story. 'My sense is that a lot of the negative things that were said were really sticking to the surface of it and not realizing that the style was the Trojan horse to get in and talk about some really difficult aspects regarding human duality,' muses the director. 'It was just sort of written off as pastiche. It's not a pastiche, it's using that style and that grammar to get at its subject. Part of its subject, in addition to what the United States did in the aftermath of World War II to get Nazi scientists into the country, is also getting at our relationship to the movies — specifically our relationship to the movies from that period, which were restricted in terms of what stories they could tell and how they got to tell them. It would be another 20-plus years before filmmakers could make movies about what was actually happening in the world." Attanasio, meanwhile, chalks up the film's failure to a cognitive dissonance amongst the audience, who couldn't quite reconcile the cynical tone with the appearance of big movie stars. 'It creates a kind of a confusion about, 'What am I watching?'' he theorizes. 'And then the audience was changing, too. The audience in the decades that I've been doing this has become less curious. They don't want that kind of confusion, find it piquant, or it just annoys them. That's only gotten worse in the 20 years since then.' 'It's a very, very dark ending, but it's inevitable,' Soderbergh continues, referring to the film's inversion of Casablanca's optimistic conclusion. Rather than helping altruistic characters escape on a plane — à la Rick, Isla, and Laszlo — Jake unknowingly secures safe passage out of Germany for a Jewish woman who worked with the Gestapo to save her own life. Did he do the right thing or should he have let her be prosecuted for her crimes? The question and answer are less clear-cut than they might have been in the '40s. 'It has to end this way," the director affirms. "I think Cate's character, who's both a victim and a monster, was difficult for people to to grapple with. So I should only have been surprised at how hopeful I was about the movie and maybe I was kind of blinded by my happiness at having gotten almost everything I imagined onscreen.' Interestingly, The Good German was one of two black and white projects being produced by Section Eight in the mid-2000s, the other being Good Night, and Good Luck (recently adapted into a Broadway production starring Clooney). 'I think that if you would have asked anybody at that point which one would become part of the cultural conversation, and which one would have more of a limited impact, you would have reversed them," Cosgrove says. "I think we were all very surprised at the reaction of The Good German and pleasantly delighted with Good Night, and Good Luck.' Adds Messina: 'I give credit to the studios back then for actually trying stuff like that. I think we were probably in between some of the Ocean's movies. So at that point, Steven was kind of like, 'One for them, one for me.' It was just a different time and place — and I was glad to have been a part of it.' Theatrical posters for 'Casablanca' and 'The Good German' Despite the response and a lackluster box office performance (a mere $6 million worldwide against a $32 million budget), the film was recognized by the Academy at the 79th Oscars ceremony for Thomas Newman's original score, which emulated the swelling and romantic style of Max Steiner (Casablanca, Key Largo). The 15-time Oscar nominee, came aboard late in the process after Soderbergh showed a cut of the film to a colleague, who encouraged him to nix the original music, which had been 'written in the style of like '60s, Italian television," reveals the director. '[My friend] pretty much grabbed me by the lapels and said, 'That's fatal! You're asking a lot of the audience already, but to not have a score done in the idiom of that period, you're really shooting yourself in the foot.' He was right. [Thomas's score] really pulled all of the elements together in a way that the other score was kind of pulling those elements out of orbit. That's a tough call, to tell somebody that you're replacing the music, but it had to be done.' Despite containing all the necessary ingredients for cult status, The Good German has not received much positive reappraisal over the last two decades. 'This one has just been a third rail that people who write about films have just not taken up," Soderbergh laments. 'And that surprises me, because it's such a movie lovers movie.' 'My mother-in-law says that it's become a cult film, although I've yet to meet anybody in that cult," commiserates Cosgrove. "But maybe they're out there…' With all of that said, deferred support and appreciation has begun to trickle in with the passage of time. In April of this year, for instance, both IndieWire and Collider made compelling cases for why the film stands among Soderbergh's greatest achievements to date. Naturally, the movie's biggest fan has, is, and always will be, Soderbergh himself. 'There are very few films I've made where, at the end of it, I felt that I'd gotten what I saw in my head before we started,' the filmmaker concludes. 'Maybe that clouded my judgment a little bit. I wish we could hand out an old tube black and white television with every disc. That would be a fantastic way to see it.' The Good German The Good German The Good German The Good German The Good German The Good German is available to own on 4K UHD and Blu-ray
Yahoo
37 minutes ago
- Yahoo
Oasis Announce 30th Anniversary Reissue of ‘(What's the Story) Morning Glory?,' With 5 Unplugged Versions of Classic Tracks
In the lead-up to Friday's (July 4) kick-off of their much-anticipated reunion tour Oasis announced the details for an upcoming 30th anniversary edition of their landmark sophomore album, (What's the Story) Morning Glory? The collection, due out on Oct. 3 via Big Brother Recordings, will feature new unplugged versions of five of the album's classic tracks: 'Cast No Shadow,' 'Morning Glory,' 'Wonderwall,' 'Champagne Supernova' and 'Acquiesce,' with the latter available today (July 2). The re-issue follows up on last summer's 30th anniversary expanded edition of the band's 1994 debut album, Definitely Maybe and will be issued in 2-CD, 3-LP and digital formats. More from Billboard Liam Gallagher Hits Back at Remarks That Oasis Fans are 'Rowdy, Intoxicated, Middle-Aged Men' Foo Fighters Celebrate 30th Anniversary of Debut Album With Emotional New Track 'Today's Song' At First, Kapo 'Didn't Dare' to Release Afrobeat Music, But Then He Leaned Into 'What Truly Made Me Feel Most Unique' The five new unplugged versions were produced and mixed by band songwriter/guitarist and sometime singer Noel Gallagher and Callum Marinho from the original master recordings at Gallagher's London Lone Star Sound studio, according to a release announcing the project. The deluxe album — which will come in a variety of vinyl formats — will feature new artwork shot by original sleeve designer Brian Cannon as well as new sleeve notes; all formats will also include the 2014 remastered version of the album alongside the new bonus unplugged tracks. What's the Story was released in Oct. 1995, 14 months after the band's debut album and has sold 22 million copies to date, including more than 5.5 million in the U.S., according to a release, which notes that it stands as the U.K.'s third best-selling album of all time. In the wind-up to the reunion tour some fans never thought would happen Oasis recently announced a series of pop-up stories for fans to purchase merch for the tour that kicks off on Friday with the first of two gigs at Principality Stadium in Cardiff, Wales. The first in a series of Oasis Live '25 Fan Stores launched nationwide last month in the U.K. and Ireland — in Manchester and Cardiff, with shops in London and Birmingham opening on July 8, followed by Edinburgh and Dublin on Aug. 4 — giving fans the chance to purchase merchandise ahead of the shows. In addition, Big Brother Recordings has launched the Oasis Live '25 Map Experience, a Google Maps-based immersive, interactive location-based platform that allows fans to explore each city on the U.K./Ireland tour through curated hotspots tied to the band's history, including bars and venues they've played in and links to official merch outlets and AR experiences with exclusive content throughout the tour. The London map, for instance, chronicles the photo shoot locations for the 'Cigarettes & Alcohol' single, the Creation Records HQ, Abbey Road studio and favorite pubs, including The Good Mixer. Following the run of shows in Cardiff, Manchester, London, Edinburgh and Dublin, the band will jump the North America in late August for gigs in Toronto, Chicago, New Jersey and Los Angeles before moving on to Mexico City, South Korea, Japan, Australia and South America. The outing is currently slated to wrap up with a Nov. 23 show at Estádio MorumBIS in Sao Paulo, Brazil. Listen to the new unplugged 'Acquiesce' below. Best of Billboard Chart Rewind: In 1989, New Kids on the Block Were 'Hangin' Tough' at No. 1 Janet Jackson's Biggest Billboard Hot 100 Hits H.E.R. & Chris Brown 'Come Through' to No. 1 on Adult R&B Airplay Chart
