Director Kevin Macdonald On The Real-Life Inspiration For ‘The Mauritanian’: “He’s Such An Extraordinary Person” – Contenders Film

as it was originally set up at Nat Geo in March 2019 — “Vasarhelyi and Chin will bring their signature filmmaking and nuanced character portraits to the against-all-odds story of the dramatic 2018 rescue of a boys soccer team trapped deep inside a flooded cave in Thailand,” per Nat Geo.

Director Rod Lurie, an Army veteran and West Point alum, drew upon his years of military experience while making “The Outpost,” a war film based on Jake Tapper’s book about the Battle of Kamdesh, during which a few dozen Americans were ambushed by hundreds of Taliban soldiers in Afghanistan.“I’m a military guy, I served a long time ago,” Lurie told TheWrap’s Steve Pond as part of TheWrap’s Screening Series.

Emmerdale stars Laura Norton and Mark Jordon have announced the birth of their first child. The soap stars - who play Kerry Wyatt and  Daz Spencer in the ITV series - shared pictures on Instagram of baby boy Jesse, who was born in the early hours of Friday 29th of January at the Royal Oldham hospital in Manchester, weighing 8lb 10 oz.

To follow up his 2017 breakout indie hit God’s Own Country, Francis Lee found inspiration in the story of a little-known British fossil collector named Mary Anning. For Ammonite, he embellished what little is known about Anning, fashioning a romantic story for her, and cast Kate Winslet as the enigmatic heroine and Saoirse Ronan as the young woman who cracks her shell.

Oscar winning screenwriter John Patrick Shanley says he had a simple reason for wanting to turn his play, Outside Mullingar, into a movie: location, location, location.

Norwegian director Mona Fastvold’s The World to Come takes her into frontier country, as two put-upon farmers wives—played by Vanessa Kirby and Katherine Waterston—unexpectedly find love in the drudgery of 1850s America, despite their strained relationships with their husbands, played by Casey Affleck and Christopher Abbott.

John Lee Hancock’s hunt for a serial killer script The Little Things drew a killer cast of Oscar winners Denzel Washington, Rami Malek and Jared Leto. In Deadline’s Contenders Film panel for the Warner Bros drama that premieres January 29, Hancock explains why it took nearly 30 years to make a movie he wrote when he had just completed the Clint Eastwood-directed Kevin Costner-starrer A Perfect World — ostensibly for Eastwood to direct it.

For all the praise of how great ’70s cinema was, when you come to think about it, many of the great crime classics like Straight Time, The Godfather and Thief were all testosterone-driven, with female characters resigned to second- or third-class status. Unfortunate, considering an era known for its sense of revolution.

When Amazon released it in the heat of presidential election season, Borat Subsequent Moviefilm captured the zeitgeist as Sacha Baron Cohen and his breakout co-star Maria Bakalova acted out a father-daughter story with the unwitting help of QAnon followers, Vice President Mike Pence and President Donald Trump’s lawyer Rudy Giuliani.

Kelly Reichardt’s First Cow, which won the New York Film Critics’ Association award for best picture of 2020, significantly centers on food and food preparation two centuries ago in the Pacific Northwest region we now call Oregon, four decades before the area became an American state.

Coming off the heat of the first DreamWorks Animation movie Trolls, a bonanza musical that saw its tune “Can’t Stop the Feeling” from Justin Timberlake get nominated for a Best Song Oscar on top of going quadruple platinum, the sequel Trolls World Tour was always going to be more music, more color, more glitz and more glamour.

In a wide-open year for Best Actor nominations, the buzz has been consistent around one performance in particular: Anthony Hopkins’ turn in Sony Pictures Classics’ The Father as an elderly man whose confused descent into dementia has heart-rending consequences for himself and his daughter.

After years of helping deliver some of the more legendary Disney animated characters like Aladdin and The Beast, Over the Moon director Glen Keane knew early on he had found his next great animated character to help bring to life.

“When I thought of Billie Holiday, I just thought of her as a jazz singer, maybe a troubled artist, you hear about drugs, a little bit of trouble with the law,” says Lee Daniels, director of the upcoming biopic The United States vs. Billie Holiday. With all that Holiday accomplished during her storied career, rarely highlighted is her work in the civil rights movement of the 1930s and ’40s, which was why Daniels was inspired to tackle this project.

After setting the original Wonder Woman during the sober period of World War I, Patty Jenkins made a left turn for the sequel, Wonder Woman 1984, putting the action in the gaudy, greed-is-good era of the 1980s.

Oscar-winning director Pete Docter shared that the idea behind Soul, his latest Walt Disney Pictures and Pixar animated film, came from his own self-reflection.

Irish actress Clare Dunne stars in Herself, a harrowing drama about a single mother who, after escaping an abusive partner, aims to rebuild her life in a unique manner. After months of struggling with the welfare and housing systems, she comes upon the idea of self-building an affordable home and, with the help of friends and neighbors, rebuilds her life and theirs from the ground up.

“It’s a beautiful story of brotherhood, just a display of Black men expressing themselves healthily in a space that we don’t get the opportunity to see Black men be,” says One Night In Miami director Regina King of what inspired her to make Kemp Powers’ play her feature directorial debut.

“It’s rare that you find a female character who is so challenging,” Elisabeth Moss says of her role as writer Shirley Jackson in the deeply fictional Shirley. “Challenging as to me as an actor and challenging to the other characters in the film and has so much vulnerability and so many soft spots, but is also so strong, so vocal and sometimes not very nice.