Thread by @adamegypt

ARCHENEMY comes out very soon — so over the next few days I’m going to post about some of the amazing people who worked together on it. And then we can all see it on December 11!

Halyna Hutchins, ARCHENEMY’s DP, has a brilliant mind for light and texture. Her tastes and sensibility of what is cinematic were a huge asset for executing our style — the grimy but beautiful feeling I referred to as ROMANTIC BRUTALSM.

We instantly agreed about shooting with vintage anamorphics; her AFI training and her skill with the math of LUT settings gave us the best texture I’ve found yet in shooting digital.

We looked at Wong Kar Wei movies and Hiroshima Mon Amour and Place Beyond the Pines and she REALLY came alive when I handed her a compendium of Jim Steranko comics, whose graphic style became an inspiration.

Being Ukrainian, she had a strong sense of a non-American approach: on the occasions when I threw away the plan on paper to try something brand new in the moment she’d get very excited and say “Oh we’re shooting it like a European movie.”

She was a true wartime sister, fighting the battles to make this thing look amazing despite the unrelenting limitations and catastrophes that made us wonder if we’d been cursed by a witch.

Michelle Laine, the ARCHENEMY Costume Designer was an astonishing discovery. She made sure every single human on a screen had a specific personality emerge through their style and built a universe of colorful weirdo characters.

She designed custom jewelry pieces for Zolee and Glenn (she has her own jewelry line and put one of her pieces on Amy Seimetz) and she found ways to incorporate some of the most insane pattern matching ideas into scenes.

I’m so proud of the way that thanks to Michelle all the actors got to express character and personality through their clothes and how all of it forms together into its own universe.

Ariel Vida the ARCHENEMY Production Designer was our secret weapon on this impossible movie. She created amazing sets and generated millions of ideas and definitely never slept.

Ariel came OVERWHELMINGLY recommended by @amy_seimetz and by @JustinHBenson, @AaronMoorhead & @DavidLawsonJr as she’s killed it with all of them. She’s a hands-on get-grimy build-it-herself person but ALSO is a great communicator and conceptual thinker.

There’s many highlights but the set that blew everyone’s mind the MOST was Max’s tent city which sprang up overnight like a grimy miracle.

She’s fun and relaxed even under the most insane pressure and made me confident we’d have a beautiful container for the actors every day.

TERRY BEASLEY masterminded our characters’ hairstyles. And there’s a LOT happening on these actors’ heads. We’ve got Joe Manganiello at his gnarliest. We’ve got Zolee Griggs in electrifying blue braids, and Glenn Howerton as a mustachioed blond (swoon)

For Skylan, I wanted Terry to be inspired by Lil Tracy and she NAILED it.

There’s a few moments where we get to see Max in a super cleaned up, non scruffy look and Terry nailed a perfect Superman style (I think I actually gasped when I saw him on our last night).

I think sometimes the hair department is overlooked as a crucial element for creating place and character as well as unifying the tone of a movie — Terry understands how her work does ALL of this.

MAZENA PUKSTO, our key makeup artist, is a major talent. Her work included gnarly teeth and grime and scars for Joe, stunning colorful looks for Zolee, blood and bruises and wounds for everyone, face tattoos for Skylan Brooks and Paul Scheer (a particularly fun element!)

She’s incredible both with the glamorous / beautiful makeup looks and with full on SFX: she helped us achieve some excellent moments of ultra violence. And one day at lunch she had to sneak away to accept a MAJOR AWARD for her work on a previous project.

And she’s a great artist — both as a painter and a conceptual artist. Her work is rigorous and imaginative! Absolute superstar voyagela.com/interview/meet…

I cannot overstate the importance of our editor LANA WOLVERTON. She had to balance pathos with action, memory with psychedelia; the violence with the fun, the dark tragedy of Max with the colorful energy of Indigo & Hamster. And do it all in a way that would SLAP.

You look for a magic touch in an editor. Beyond the arranging and pacing (which she has to nail) There’s the ALIVENESS. You can have the performance and the shot but not yet the FEEL. As soon as Lana started, our scenes gave off those kinds of magic sparks and MAN was I thankful!

I’d gone into Archenemy expecting to work again with Brett Bachman, but he became unavailable. So we didn’t have Lana until after we’d shot and assembled. I get stressed explaining so late in the process the style, the intentions. But Lana got it FAST, easily entering our world.

And all this during COVID LOCKDOWN. I’ve yet to be in the same room with her! We cut via Zoom, everyday, all day, and it was flawless. It may have been MORE efficient because we had no travel time. We easily laughed and stressed and created. And occasionally had animal ear day.🐱

I'm mostly spotlighting department heads in this thread but I have to shout-out KATI SIMON @kati_simon, our ART DIRECTOR. She and Ariel work so perfectly together and her particular skills are vast and wondrous.

In addition to the sets and props and organization conceptual thinking, she also drew some beautiful storyboards for the final sequence and created designs and concepts for the animation. There's an amazing poster-sized comic book cover in a window that she hand painted.

One of my favorite Kati moments was on set when I asked for a prop we'd need right now! "A cat mask, like drawn on a paper plate" I said. In MOMENTS she had this creature carved from foam core. It's become a signature mascot in the Archenemy world and now hangs on my wall.

PRODUCER @kimbototron KIM SHERMAN was the *ultimate* partner on Archenemy. She’s the kind of rare producer who understands every single aspect of filmmaking from story development to casting to budgeting to the intricacies of union rules to on-the-fly problem solving on set.

Kim has a background as both a director and as the producer of tons of incredible movies including Adam Wingard’s HORRIBLE WAY TO DIE and YOU’RE NEXT and Amy Seimetz’s directorial debut SUN DON’T SHINE. She worked at Warner Bros before *thankfully* going indie again.

We had a TOUGH job making a sci-fi crime psychedelic superhero film with very few resources. What’s wonderful about Kim is how she internalized + held in her heart the VISION for the project and its fragile emotional framework while also carving a gritty practical production plan

(Pictured: Kim staring in disbelief as I describe what I want to get done before the sun goes down in 45 minutes) (Not pictured: Kim figuring out how to get it done)

One of Kim’s most wonderful traits, and it’s a filmmaker’s gift, is her dedication to ALL departments. She makes sure each one has what they need & their issues are heard on set. This is an emotional intelligence about peoples’ needs AND an understanding of what makes a good film

I developed AE with @_danielnoah_ for a long time. SpectreVision brought Kim in as the greenlight approached. It can be an anxious moment when someone new enters, but it was a seamless transition & I remember saying “I look forward to talking to you every morning.” That’s film ❤️