The Projection Booth

Director Shaun Paul Piccinino — a former stuntman and martial artist who cut his teeth on Jackie Chan documentaries — tells Mike White how Double Trouble came together as "Home Alone meets Ocean's Eleven": a Vegas heist comedy built around real-life sisters Madeleine and Violet McGraw, anchored by an Andrew Koji-led, Jackie-Chan-inspired kitchen brawl where even the lettuce gets used as a weapon.

Piccinino details the chaos of filming inside a live, working casino — sound so loud from slot machines and chatter that nobody expected to salvage any production audio, until the sound team proved them wrong — and the night 4,000 football fans unexpectedly descended on the casino floor mid-shoot for the climactic lobby fight, which his longtime cinematographer Brad Rushing called the hardest shoot day of his career. Add the limited hours mandated for the film's underage leads, and Double Trouble becomes a case study in improvising around a city that never actually sleeps.

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Johnny Flynn talks with Mike White about playing Jacob Hansen (opposite John C. Reilly's Doc) in A Prayer for the Dying, Dara Van Dusen's directorial debut adapted from Stewart O'Nan's novella. Flynn breaks down the challenge of embodying an unreliable narrator — a Civil War veteran whose PTSD warps everything the audience sees through his eyes — and the novella's hidden debt to the Book of Job, which is why he showed up to set in Slovakia with a real, unscripted beard he and Van Dusen eventually agreed on.

Flynn also gets into what drew him to working with a first-time feature director, tracing it back to his experience on Michael Pearce's Beast and explaining why a director who's spent a decade fighting to get a passion project made brings an urgency he finds irresistible. He talks about Van Dusen's path through Poland's famed Łódź Film School (where she met cinematographer Kate McCullough), her decade-long effort to secure the rights to O'Nan's book, and the film's long road from its 2024 shoot to premiering at the Berlin Film Festival.

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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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