Meet Me at Crafty

Editor Daniel Garber explains how the movie balances deadpan comedy and ambiguity—as well as an unhinged central performance Primetime [A24] There’s a moment in Primetime when Robert Pattinson’s Chris Hansen is in a bathroom with Merritt Wever’s producer character and suddenly launches into a bizarre, sneering child voice. (It’s the scene pictured above, actually.) It’s shocking in its abruptness but also the kind of detail that lives rent-free in your brain for the next decade or so.

Cinematographer Patrick Ouziel conjured two realities from a single house using cyan gels, Steadicam, mirrors, haze and some old-school inspiration. Never After Dark [Magnolia Pictures] A house can be creepy all by itself. But in Never After Dark (in select theaters now), cinematographer Patrick Ouziel had to make the same house feel like two different places: the real world and the spirit world that Airi (Moeka Hoshi) enters during her ceremonial séances.

Editor Vikash Patel worked too hard hiding clues for you to second-screen it. Lanterns [HBO Max] Some editors like to go to set and see what everyone is painstakingly shooting. Vikash Patel is not one of them. “I just don’t want the attachment and the baggage of, oh, they’ve spent three hours doing this shot, and then I’m gonna look at it and say, ‘We don’t even need it, I’m gonna cut it,’” Patel says. “As an editor, you should be objective.

For a wig designer, the ultimate compliment is silence. That was the goal for Frédéric Bélanger, who designed the wig worn by Lili Reinhart as Olive in The Love Hypothesis. (Yes, it’s a wig.) And considering even the film’s focus puller—whose entire job involves staring closely at what’s happening on camera—didn’t realize Reinhart was wearing a wig until near the end of production, it seems Bélanger pulled it off. “Me, my job is to see it everywhere,” Bélanger says.

Everything about Fall 2: Deadpoint (on VOD October 6) is bigger and more heightened, if you’ll excuse a wholly unintentional pun. The stakes are higher, the backstories are more convoluted—too bad these two gals can’t jettison their emotional baggage to lighten the load!—and the sets are more complicated. No one is filming from the safety of The Volume: That series of planks attached to the side of a mountain?

Some movies politely introduce themselves and then hold the viewer’s hand to usher us into their world. Then there’s Buddy, which kicks down the door to reveal a unicorn with a penchant for pedicide, dragging us into an upside-down world. And editor Josh Ethier was not interested in taming that sense of barely controlled insanity in the cutting room.

Costume designer Valerie Klarich knew how to dress the oddballs, eccentrics, and comedians who populate the world of Stuart Fails to Save the Universe. She knew how to make Stuart Bloom look like Stuart Bloom, even when he was wandering through a post-apocalyptic wasteland. She knew how to create alternate-universe versions of Penny and Bernadette. Superhero costumes, though, were new territory. “I know my limitations, and I had never experienced superhero costumes before,” Klarich says.

For makeup designer Rebecca Wachtel, the goal on Lucky wasn’t to make Annette Bening look glamorous. It was, in fact, almost the opposite: Bening’s character needed to look like someone who was trying to hold herself together while quietly coming apart. Was it not Elizabeth Taylor who said, “Pour yourself a drink, put on some lipstick, and subscribe to Crafty”? “I want people to be messy,” Wachtel says of her approach to makeup.

Television scores can have spoilers. Not necessarily the kind that tells you who dies by episode’s end, but the musical equivalent of a raised eyebrow or a bolded word. For Starz’s Fightland, composer Paul Saunderson was determined not to give too much away. Not me, I’m giving Crafty away for free That was particularly important for a series that begins as one kind of show before abruptly revealing itself as something considerably darker.

Has Lucky stayed with you as much as it has with me? The Apple TV limited series starring Anya Taylor-Joy ended its seven-episode run on August 19, but its storytelling is so specific that I find myself thinking about moments from it on an almost daily basis. The setting helps, ranging from a Vegas casino to the desert to a sun-bleached gas works. But it’s also how the camera and the editing keep Lucky in perpetual motion.