British broadcaster and biologist, David Attenborough, has been the undisputed voice of conservation in the UK and across the world for decades. He’s narrated over 100 documentaries about the natural world, including blockbuster series like Life on Earth, The Blue Planet, and Planet Earth, which all revealed never-before-seen footage of our environment and the secret lives of the wildlife we share it with.

This year, the presenter celebrated his 99th birthday and marked the milestone with the release of new feature-length documentary Ocean with David Attenborough, co-produced by Silverback Films and Open Planet Studios. Pitched as his most important message to decision-makers yet, the documentary uncovers the human destruction of the ocean while exploring the ways in which we can heal it. Released ahead of World Oceans Day on June 8, and the United Nations Ocean Conference that takes place from June 9 to 13 in Nice, France, the film is a message of hope that the team behind it believes highlights the oceans’ plight through groundbreaking cinematography and Attenborough’s voice of authority.

Toby Nowlan and David Attenborough on location while filming OCEAN WITH DAVID ATTENBOROUGH. (Credit: Conor McDonnell)

Conor McDonnell

“It’s David Attenborough’s story of the ocean for the world and, ultimately, its capabilities of recovery, which is the most exciting take home of the whole thing,” says director Toby Nowlan, who has worked with Attenborough for the past 16 years. “This is a hopeful message that if we protect a third of the ocean, then the rest of it will fill up with life again, which will be a win for every living thing on earth—for a stable climate, a breathable atmosphere, for our fisheries, conservationists, all marine life, and for the three billion people that rely on the ocean to eat.”

Keith Scholey and David Attenborough pose on location.

Silverback Films and Open Planet Studios/Keith Scholey

Paris is the archetype of a New York City arthouse theater. After all, it is the original. Established in 1948 by Pathé, the theater was the first in the country to screen Romeo and Juliet, A Room With a View, and Belle de Jour, among other gems in the international cinema. Sitting off the lower right corner of Central Park, Paris rubs elbows with Fifth Avenue darlings like the Plaza Hotel and the Bergdorf Goodman Building. Its relatively minimal Art Moderne design stands out amongst the neighborhood’s rhythm of windows set in white marble, and Paris is wearing its age well. After Netflix purchased the theater in 2019 to serve as the studio’s New York flagship, Paris carries the air of a landmark that is one-of-a-kind rather than one of a dying breed: it is Manhattan’s last standing single-screen cinema, and with 535 seats, it’s also the borough’s largest movie theater. This is the kind of place where size matters—the theater hosts year-round programming filled with special events, retrospectives, and filmmaker appearances, where the momentum of the crowd is a key ingredient.

This is why we need to bring back Deleted Scenes.

Yeah! There was a lot of comedy that I unfortunately had to cut.

Beer and Pringles aside, what are your travel essentials?

I never eat it normally, but I need beef jerky on a road trip. And gorp: peanuts, raisins, M&Ms. Trail mix.

After that scene at the steakhouse in Amarillo, Texas, we see a form of violence that’s quite unique to the 21st century: online vitriol. I imagine that even before reading the tweets, the hostility was felt in the room. What was it like capturing that?

It was hard. We had let our guard down because we’d primarily been met with acceptance. Sometimes, love. When we went in, we thought “Oh, Will’s going to try to eat a 72-ounce steak in under an hour, this will be a funny adventure.” I didn’t realize they would be put up on a stage. Will surprised Harper with this Sherlock Holmes costume which added to the problem. But showing up in costumes to surprise each other is something they’ve been doing for decades. I was trying to work that into the film and never found an organic way to say it. But it gutted us. I think if you talk to any trans person, when you’re in a space that feels potentially unsafe, it’s like a threat assessment where you start to feel the room is off, which Harper and then all of us felt quickly. We left dinner early, which was when we became aware of the online, or as you said, subterranean hatred that people for whatever reason feel empowered and safe to do.

“Safe” from behind the screen.

Exactly. But it was important to include it. Because that is part of the trans experience. The worst thing I could have done is paint this it’s-all-sunshine-and-rainbows picture, because it’s not. That said, and I think Harper will agree with this, in general we were met mostly with acceptance, and that notion that it’s hard to hate up close was proven true over and over.

I love that line.

I think when we enter a space and look one another in the eye, as Harper once said to me, our resting place is kindness. And I believe that to be true as well.

Will Forte joins Will and Harper for a bit of hitchhiking.

Courtesy of Netflix

Near the beginning of the 1999 movie Notting Hill, the character of bookseller William Thacker (Hugh Grant) spins round a London street corner and collides with superstar actress Anna Scott (Julia Roberts), spilling orange juice over the both of them. It’s a meet-cute that sets into motion one of the better known romantic comedies of the last 25 years, and entered Portobello Road into the pop culture ranks alongside Katz’s Deli where Meg Ryan faked her orgasm. The scene also, perhaps more significantly, cemented the London neighborhood as a tourist destination: Notting Hill had long drawn visitors, but almost immediately it was flooded with fans of the movie. On any given day, decades later, you’ll still find daily hordes of influencers posing in front of that blue door and tourists lining up outside The Travel Bookshop (now The Notting Hill Bookshop) where the film’s Scott later uttered her now famous line: “I’m just a girl, standing in front of a boy, asking him to love her.”

With those words, what was once just another London postcode instantly became a pin on the Hollywood map.

Yet “this small village in the middle of a city,” to quote Thacker, also happens to be where I grew up—and why I remain disproportionately attached to this relic of the rom-com era. Watching the pair crash into each other in the orange juice scene is, for me, a prompt to remember what was taking place outside the frame: If the camera were to zoom out beyond the perimeters of the movie set, exposing the lights and the producers and the catering trucks, you’d also see me, age nine, walking the dog with my mother, amid the many different types of Londoners who call Notting Hill home—all of us unaware that we were witnessing our neighborhood turning into something that would no longer feel like it quite belonged to us.

In the years since, the movie Notting Hill has evolved from a well-worn VHS tape on a shelf into a virtual museum preserving my childhood and adolescence that I revisit at least once a year. When Thacker walks down Portobello Road as the seasons change, heartbroken over Scott’s return to America, I can see Alan, my parents’ then-grocer, manning his market stall; the antique shops my father loved to waft in and out of on Sundays in search of secondhand cameras; the rooftop cafe my mother liked to take me to for pancakes; the newsagent where I bought my first pack of cigarettes (Marlboro Lights); even a street corner that holds memories of an electrifying teenage kiss. During the pandemic, when I was unable to travel home for almost two years, I actively avoided watching the movie out of fear that it would make me unfathomably homesick.

But while it’s impossible for me not to place the weight of nostalgia and romanticism on what is, by all accounts, a fluffy movie, I can’t help but see that it’s also a flawed one. Much has been said over the years about director Richard Curtis’ erasure of Notting Hill’s large West Indian community, which is responsible for so many of the things that make the neighborhood special: the smell of jerk chicken wafting down All Saints Road from Jay Dees Catering; the gentle reggae drifting out of the few remaining record shops, once anchors of the area; and, of course, the throb of Notting Hill Carnival in August, which is so culturally significant it draws two million visitors each year to dance to jungle, dub, and dancehall. (Now Europe’s largest annual celebration of Black culture and Caribbean creativity, it was established in the wake of race riots in the 1950s following the police murder of an Antiguan-born carpenter.) Curtis has since said he regrets using an all-white cast in his love letter to the neighborhood.

Even with this nagging at me as a viewer, I still find so much pleasure and comfort in watching this movie over and over. I’m now 35, the same age as Thacker when he loses control over his life and ends up cohabitating with a half-naked Welshman while pursuing an entirely unrealistic—and out of reach—relationship with a film star. Throughout the ups and downs of his year, Notting Hill remains a steady backdrop, the tattoo shop and the dodgy hairdresser and the market stalls of Portobello giving a loose sense of permanence as time inevitably passes and summer moves into fall, winter, and then spring. The movie serves the same purpose for me. Real life, with all its challenges, continues to ebb and flow, but the home of my childhood remains immortalized on screen, just as I remember it—a fleeting respite from the ever-changing unpredictability of adulthood.

In Drive-Away Dolls Ethan Coen has made what he dubs “filthy fun,” and what his wife and co-writer Tricia Cooke calls a “queer road trip movie.” Whatever you want to call it, the film—the director’s first written and directed without his brother Joel—is a fast-paced journey that follows lesbian heroes and friends Jamie and Marian (Margaret Qualley and Geraldine Viswanathan, respectively) on a road trip from Philadelphia to Tallahassee, Florida, with stops in states like North Carolina and Georgia along the way (and cameos from Pedro Pascal and Matt Damon). Why Tallahassee, you ask? “Tallahassee is actually beautiful,” explains Marian to an unconvinced Jamie at the start of the movie. “They have live oaks, Spanish moss, birding…”

We spoke to production designer Yong Ok Lee about how Drive Away Dolls—a road-trip movie covering more than 1,000 miles—was made possible on screen.

Geraldine Viswanathan, Margaret Qualley, and Beanie Feldstein outside the She Shed in Drive-Away Dolls.

Wilson Webb / Working Title / Focus Features

In Drive Away Dolls, Jamie and Marian travel from Pennsylvania to Florida. Did the crew follow this route?

No, we only shot in Pittsburgh! On the road, the girls make stops in North Carolina and in Georgia, but we never actually shot there. From the production side, we just cannot afford to travel like that—following the highway from Philadelphia to Tallahassee—so we shot everything in Pittsburgh for cost and ease. It was all fine by me, though my biggest concern was the Florida part, because it looks so different. Besides that, most of the locations are in bars, motels, and hotels, or a diner on a highway, so it didn’t really matter to be honest. Some locations we built completely ourselves, others we shot on location but rebuilt the facades or dressed streets differently.

So, are you saying we can’t stay at El Conquistador hotel in Tallahassee for real?

Let’s go to Vegas. What spirit did you want to capture?

Elvis actually went to the Stardust among other places, and all of the references for the places he was going had these pastels that we didn’t want to use at all. We went with deep reds and golds for Vegas. We had this great shooting location called the Elgin [and Winter Garden] Theatre in Toronto. We filmed in the lobby, which is full of beautiful gilded gold details, and there’s two theaters—we shot the casino and its entrance with VFX for Vegas because it’s just Young Street in Toronto. The theaters are stacked the way old movie houses are—in the Winter Garden Theatre, we also shot the cinema where Elvis and Priscilla go on a date in Germany. And then we shot Elvis on stage upstairs.

We just made Vegas there, we made slot machines and blackjack tables quite painstakingly with bright graphics. But when I showed the location to Sofia and Philippe, it was just like, “That’s such a shift for her.” It’s not the pastels of Graceland or the gray, yucky greens and browns of Germany. It’s something new to embrace, and that stayed true for the hotel set that we built for them at the end. It was a conscious color choice informed by the location, which we fell in love with.

Were there any other locations around Toronto that grabbed you in that way?

Parkwood in Ottowa is something we use a lot, [Guillermo del Toro and I] shot Nightmare Alley there, for these houses on the German military base. And there was a dreadful, dreary closed childrens’ psychiatric hospital that was kind of haunted and horrible. We used it for the German high school.

Since you live in Toronto, what is your relationship with the city when you work with it?

You know, I’m always thinking about what can be used and what cannot. But, to be honest, I get bored with Toronto and I’m super excited because I’m going to the United Kingdom to shoot Frankenstein with Guillermo next.

While accepting one of the many Oscars he received for the film Parasite at the 92nd Academy Awards in 2020, South Korean director Bong Joon Ho advised that Americans would do well to “overcome the one-inch tall barrier of subtitles” in order to discover an even broader swatch of amazing films than already available at our fingertips. Indeed, subtitles are nothing to be afraid of—but that doesn’t mean the movies they caption can’t be scary themselves. Amongst our editorial staff, in fact, there’s a consensus that foreign horror productions are actually much more terrifying than those produced stateside—bolder, bloodier, darkly funnier, and more haunting for their willingness to leave questions unanswered.

As Halloween fast approaches and you seek out some suitably spooky viewing to celebrate the season, we encourage you to step outside of your comfort zone. Below, the team lists a few of our favorite international horror movies—including one from director Bong—spanning classics from Italy, Japan, and beyond.

Suspiria (1977 & 2018)

Suspiria is a film so nice they made it twice. While remakes for great films (both in the English language and not) are often embarked upon, of course, it is rare if not unheard of that the said remake is truly great. And I’m not just talking about rebottling the magic of the original, by the way. While both films concern a sinister coven of witches embedded within a well-regarded German dance academy (Freiburg in the former, Berlin in the latter), the beauty of Luca Guadagnino’s 2018 Suspiria remake is that it’s not at all interested in biting the neon camp of the original—far from it, in fact. While Dario Argento’s 1977 film is a deliciously tight 90 minutes of slasher decadence—audio performances dubbed for maximum descent into mad hysteria—the 2018 take is imminently sensual and sprawls towards a three-hour runtime. Halogenic pinks and purples are traded for muted reds and browns, abject terror and shrieking screams largely for simmering tension. The prosthetics and practical visual effects, in particular during the demise of an unfortunate dancer by the name of Olga, must be seen to be believed.—Charlie Hobbs, editorial assistant

Everett

House (1977)

If you enjoy the original Suspiria, rejoice in the knowledge that another film very much in that spirit was released the same year. Nobuhiko Obayashi’s House is an experimental, delightful rollercoaster to Hell with the brakes cut clean out. Gorgeous, a lovely Tokyo schoolgirl, plans to visit her aunt in the country to get out of attending her father’s marriage to a new woman. In tow are her six close friends: Prof, Melody, Kung Fu, Mac, Sweet, and Fantasy—know that each is aptly named. What follows is a surreal spin into madness, wherein the friends are eaten alive by the (missing) aunt’s home one by one. Toho Studios had approached Obayashi with the request that he create something like Jaws for Japanese audiences—and this is what he came back with.—C.H.

Apple

Looking back on the film, what scenes stand out to you?

There’s a scene where Marty walks you through Mollie’s house. He goes in the front door, walks around the whole house and comes back to [matriarch and murder victim] Lizzie Q sitting on the daybed in the living room. It shows all this activity and Osage and white people together in this small house. There’s a life to it that excited me.

The other scene that really stood out for its location is at the very beginning of the film when Henry Roan is driving Ernest to the William Hale ranch. They’re on this long road and you see hundreds of oil derricks in the background. Ernest asks, “Whose land is this?” and Henry Roan says, “Mine.” I thought that was an important line for establishing the environment of that period.

Why was it important to be part of this groundbreaking film?

I love history, and a great part of our history in the United States is the Indigenous people who were here before Europeans arrived. This film encouraged me to learn more about treaties and how land was transferred away from Indigenous families to white settlers. There was this idea of manifest destiny—that God wanted us to have all this land or he wouldn’t have put it here. William Clark of Lewis and Clark felt so guilty about the treaty he signed with the Osage in 1825 that he said something to the effect of, “If I’m ever going to be damned, it’s for this treaty.” He’d cheated them, and he knew it. I’m always curious as to what the world would have become if the Indigenous people of North America were able to keep building and what we would have found if we came here to visit with our passports.

I’m also fascinated by how horrible man can be to man. Unless we can learn from our history, we’re just going to continue on this same path. We’ve got to somehow rise above and understand that we’re all in this together. Like Rodney King said, “Can’t we all get along?” It’s a heavy topic, and it happened in every country. And it’ll probably continue to happen because I don’t think people are really ready to admit that we might not always be right. But this is just the beginning, because there are millions of Indigenous stories that need to be told. I hope the film gives Indigenous people strength and that more of their stories get told and resonate with all of us, so that we can become better.

The action largely takes place in a fictional country called New Asia, a combination of present-day Laos, Thailand, Vietnam, and Cambodia, although production primarily took place in Thailand. The focus was on utilizing real locations as much as possible—in fact, only a few scenes ended up being shot on soundstages.

“Throughout our movie, hopefully the audience feels like they’re in a real place, but then they’re confused because they see robots walking around and futuristic vehicles and buildings,” Clyne says. “It’s all about them hopefully not knowing what’s real and what’s not real.”

Here Clyne discusses how actual locations around Thailand became New Asia in 2065.

Director Gareth Edwards wanted to shoot The Creator in a tropical landscape, lush and decidedly on Earth—not typically seen in sci-fi.

Courtesy of 20th Century Studios.

Why did Gareth want to use as many real-world locations as possible to make a futuristic sci-fi film?

That came from Gareth’s desire to shoot in exotic locations that are not other planets. We’re not on Jupiter. We’re not on some fictional planet. We’re on Earth and because we’re on Earth, the question was: Where can we go that’s exotic and beautiful and new and fresh for sci-fi? In sci-fi, we’re used to being on a moon base or a crazy planet. Iceland is used a lot because it looks so desolate and otherworldly. We wanted to go the opposite direction, where it’s lush and green. And then we could offset all that natural beauty with futuristic architecture and vehicles.