The Projection Booth

Cristóbal León and Joaquín Cociña built their new film inside a Santiago museum, in front of a live audience, using rear-projected scale models and painted backdrops instead of CGI. The Chilean directing duo talk with Mike about Donkey Princess, their shape-shifting reimagining of the Donkeyskin fairy tale starring Antonia Giesen as Princess Diana.

León and Cociña describe the chaotic, caffeine-fueled process of splitting one overstuffed script into two films, Donkey Princess and its companion piece The Hyperboreans, written during Chile's 2019 social uprising and the pandemic that followed. They talk about the year and a half they spent animating a sequence for Ari Aster's Beau Is Afraid, their resistance to letting the film's politics dictate its story even as an editor read it as being about patriarchy and dictatorship, and how Francisco Melo's own experience as a father reshaped the king's arc.

The directors also get into fairy tales as a shared cultural language, the six-stars-that-used-to-be-seven storytelling parable that keeps them hooked, and what's next — including a stop-motion adaptation of Hansel and Gretel. Donkey Princess, also starring Andrew Bargsted as Lalo, is awaiting North American distribution from KimStim, which previously released the duo's The Wolf House.

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Bil Richardson's Ephemera was built backwards: instead of writing a script and shooting it, the longtime below-the-line filmmaker and West Virginia University professor emeritus assembled the entire 87-minute film from licensed stock footage on Artlist and Envato, recording all dialogue as ADR, and discovering — only while writing the final log line — that he'd accidentally told his own story. Richardson tells Mike White how the project began as a distraction during a year-long hospitalization for a twelve-inch, six-inch-deep leg wound that wouldn't heal (doctors twice recommended

amputation), and how the film's pyromancer heroine — burned in a firefight, fitted with an artificial "nanoskin" graft, and left afraid of the very fire that once made her exceptional — turned out to mirror his own ordeal without his realizing it until the film was done. He also breaks down directing a movie from the picture outward: writing dialogue to match lip movements already on screen, voice actors in Scotland, LA, and the Philippines who never met in person, and the four years it took to get from the first assembled scene to release.

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Cinematographer Bella Gonzales talks with Mike White about shooting the season 4 premiere of Ted Lasso, the episode that sends Ted back to Kansas for the first time since the show began. Gonzales, brought on by director Declan Lowney as the show's first American DP, explains how she and showrunner Jason Sudeikis worked to make the Kansas scenes feel distinct from the series' established English look without resorting to an overtly "American" filter — dusky light, a three-filter stack, and a deliberate Wizard of Oz reference when the characters first step off the plane.

Gonzales traces her path to the show through her years on Fargo (seasons 4 and 5) and Alien: Earth, where she worked alongside DPs Colin Watkinson and Dave Franco, and talks about the prep process behind Ted Lasso — full shot lists, overheads, and photo boards built with Lowney and longtime series DP David Rom and Vanessa Whyte. She also gets into her approach to blocking (including the deceptively simple staging of Nate's Backyard Barbecue), the influence of her father's decades on film crews, and what she's working on next for Apple TV+.

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First-time writer-director Benjamin Finkel built Family (2026) out of his own childhood: his father died of cancer when Finkel was fourteen, and he spent the years afterward filling a script with "everything that was scary and interesting" to him. He tells Mike White how a screenwriting professor passed that script to a literary manager, how a self-shot fake trailer (made in the house he grew up in) landed Fifth Season as a studio partner, and how Ruth Wilson came aboard after one coffee and a phone call. Finkel also credits cinematographer Elisha Christian (Columbus) with tying the camera to his young lead's point of view throughout.

Cameron Dawson Gray, who plays ten-year-old Johanna in her first feature role, joins separately to talk about the gap between her earlier series and short-film work and a full feature shot out of order, the scream coach she worked with to get comfortable going all-out on camera, turning twelve on set (the crew brought cake on her one day off), and the surprisingly lighthearted set — "we used to joke all the time ... that we were shooting a rom-com" — that let her trust her castmates enough to commit fully to the film's horror.

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Dave Boyle built Never After Dark (2026) around a lifelong passion for ghost stories and a desire to find something new in a "well-worn genre." He tells Mike White and co-star Moeka Hoshi about the sound design holding the film together: Japanese sound designer Natsuko Inoue (Godzilla Minus One, House of Ninjas), who handled all sound design and foley in Tokyo before flying to Los Angeles to mix at Warner Bros. with longtime American mixer Carlos, plus composer Jonathan Snipes — a deliberate pairing of Japanese and Western collaborators Boyle says rarely happens across either country's insular film industries.

Hoshi, who plays wandering medium Airi, talks about the unusual challenge of acting opposite co-star Kurumi Inagaki's dead-sister character Miku, who appears only as a reflection — meaning entire scenes were performed without ever actually making eye contact with her scene partner, down to taping marks on walls to hit precise mirror angles. Boyle also details the funnier-than-scripted performance castmate Mutsuo Yoshioka brought to the film's mysterious man, and a hint of what's next: his in-development remake of the J-horror classic Pulse, based on what he calls his favorite script he's ever been handed.

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Become a supporter of The Projection Booth at http://www.patreon.com/projectionbooth