The Projection Booth

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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First-time feature director Matt Sukkar cold-approached William H. Macy with a letter to land his Sheriff Krueger, then built The Deputy's tone around Scorsese's After Hours: "one bad decision leading you on the course of a night where the protagonist is trying to get things back to normal, and reality is becoming increasingly absurd the whole time." Adapted from Victor Gischler's novel — relocated from Oklahoma to Natchez, Mississippi, where Sukkar did a full dialect-and-reference pass on Carlo Bernard's long-dormant script — the film follows rookie deputy Toby Sawyer (Duke Nicholson) through one disastrous overnight shift, flanked by an ensemble Sukkar calls "eccentric, weird, but real": Macy, Tiffany Haddish, Stephen Dorff, Billie Lourd, and Julia Fox among them.

Sukkar tells Mike White about matching Natchez's genuinely low-budget sheriff's station — a converted mechanic shop dressed by production designer Julie Tosh with taxidermy and desk-drawer trinkets — to the film's own scrappiness, shooting nights capped by hours limits for underage cast, and editing across four cities (Mississippi, New York, Mexico City, and LA) with editor Javier Velasco, chasing a different room each time to keep the same footage feeling fresh. He also talks about living with his real-life close friend and star, Duke Nicholson, for the length of the shoot, and the nationwide theater tour and Q&A run following the film's September 25 release.

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After getting killed off in John Carpenter's 2018 Halloween and walking that film's red carpet, musician-actor Kurt Deimer called his friend Kevin Wayne with a pitch: let's start our own horror franchise, the way Halloween launched Michael Myers. Wayne had already heard about a haunted attraction in Vincent, Alabama — Hellbilly Hollow — and the two built their new killers, hulking Bull (Deimer) and childlike, disfigured Tickles (Wayne, who also directs), around the real attraction's actual layout, shooting the whole film on-site and living in campers on the property.

Wayne and Deimer tell Mike White about the three-week shoot, the freedom Wayne gave his co-star to improvise Bull's "deep inner soul of craziness," the pandemic slowdown that gave Deimer time to finish producing the original songs (mixed with mentor Chris Lord-Alge) that score the carnage, and the slate of horror-franchise sequels and other genre roles already lined up behind Hellbilly Hollow, including a new killer for producer Andy Gould (House of 1000 Corpses, The Devil's Rejects).

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