Lexi Alexander’s bio packs a punch. She was born in Germany, to a Palestinian father and German mother. She’s a former World Kickboxing Champion. She worked her way up from stuntwoman to Oscar-nominated director with her live-action short film Johnny Flynton, a drama about a boxer. Lexi studied at the Piero Dusa Acting Conservatory and traveled to Russia to study the Nikolai Demidov technique, before helming feature films including Green Street Hooligans, Marvel’s Punisher: War Zone, and Lifted. Her televisionRead more
Posts filed in: English Language
The Great Game Frame by Frame
Check out this behind the scenes look at “The Great Game” with Steve Lawes in my new journal, Powers of Expression! http://powers-of-expression.com/the-great-game-frame-by-frame EXCERPT: The Beginning of a Beautiful Relationship “The Great Game” (TGG) has it all. It was the first episode of Sherlock filmed in Series One, and as I write during the filming of Series Four, to my mind it remains the best. It’s got a complex twisty time bomb of a plot. Mark Gatiss’s dialog pops with characteristic witRead more
All About the Wallpaper: An Interview with Production Designer Arwel Wyn Jones
by Mary Jo Watts (mid0nz) Arwel Wyn Jones is a beloved figure in the Sherlock fandom. It all started with a tweet, a photo of an empty studio, the blank canvas of series three. Each day he would post something new. A scaffold. A wall. Some crew members joking around. “What’s this?” he’d ask about a board with some holes in it, and the guesses would come tumbling in by the hundreds before he would tweet its more famous side, confirmation in theRead more
With Love and Respect to the Characters: A Q&A with Director Douglas Mackinnon
By Mary Jo Watts (mid0nz) Sherlock fans? We’re a thirsty lot. We fell in love on the 25th of July, 2010 when the first episode, “A Study in Pink”, debuted on the BBC. Until January 1, 2016 we had only nine full-length episodes to drink up, with at times years between the three seasons. Millions of fans all over the world live in limbo, a nearly perpetual state of hiatus. Each broadcast of a new episode is a respite. WeRead more
AUDIO: Steve Lawes on the Cinematography of Sherlock
Audio snippets from my latest in-depth interview with cinematographer Steve Lawes (February 2015) Steve was the Director of Photography on Sherlock series one (ASiP, TBB, ASiB), and the first two episodes of series three (TEH, TSo3). The audio clips are excerpted from several hours of conversations I had with Steve in Ithaca, NY during the long, brutally cold winter of 2015 as a follow-up to our 2014 interview “Each Frame Tells a Story.” They’re a sneak peak at just a few ofRead more
For Interesting, Intelligent, Complicated Women: An Interview with Tammy Riley-Smith
by Mary Jo Watts Delicious is an extreme rarity. It’s a micro-budget independent film written, directed, and co-produced by a woman, Tammy Riley-Smith, starring a woman, Louise Brealey, about a woman named Stella who suffers from an eating disorder. In 2013 only 6% of the directors of the top 250 films were women. A paltry 11% of readily identifiable protagonists in those films were women. The interview that follows is largely about a film that both Tammy (obviously) and I bothRead more
Music to Picture: An Interview with Composer Michael Price
by Mary Jo Watts (mid0nz) That quintessentially Sherlock moment. Every time I see the scene I feel a confusing zap, a wicked little thrill. Sherlock Holmes elevates his arm and whoosh! His riding crop slices the air. Sherlock thrashes and thrashes and thrashes. Molly Hooper, his only witness, has no more intention of averting her eyes than we do. Oh, she winces a bit when the crop makes contact, but not because Sherlock is flogging a corpse. That is incidental.Read more
Each Frame Tells a Story: An Interview with Cinematographer Steve Lawes
By Mary Jo Watts (mid0nz) I’m hopelessly, obsessively besotted with BBC Sherlock. It’s impossible for me to temper my enthusiasm for Steven Moffat and Mark Gatiss’s modern adaptation. At 43 years old, I’m proud to call myself an unabashed fangirl of the show and to count myself among the millions of others who comprise its global fandom. It was when I watched the credits roll on The Great Game, season one’s gripping cliffhanger, that I realized I’d become utterly immersedRead more
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