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Week 4 of IndieWire's Craft newsletter travels to the past and to Pandora.
by Sarah Shachat · IndieWireHappy Boxing Day! Or, happy Friday. It’ll be a short newsletter this week, and coming at the end of the holiday week, too. A lot of my time this week has been spent explaining to family what the Oscar shortlists are (no, not every category has one), and being called upon to rule on what the good movies coming out at Christmas are: IMHO, “Marty Supreme” if you like Peter Gabriel, “The Testament of Ann Lee” if you like Florence + The Machine, “The SpongeBob Movie: Search for SquarePants” if you are still obsessed with “Golden” from “Kpop Demon Hunters.”
But I keep coming back to a couple of things about “Marty Supreme” whenever I’m asked to talk about craft at the movies this year. It’s been a stacked one across the board, in a lot of different aesthetic directions, for one thing, from “Sinners” and “Sirât” to “One Battle After Another” and “Hamnet” to “Frankenstein” and “A House of Dynamite.” But it is really fun to see a movie that pulls in different aesthetic directions to reveal characters and do a little tonal whiplash, without being stylistically disjointed or at war with itself — that’s “Marty Supreme.”
We have some great stuff coming to the site about all of that, from the film‘s very creative casting process to the meticulous, cramped (and so damp-looking!) recreation of the Lower East Side by production designer Jack Fisk, to the ways cinematographer Darius Khondji’s distanced approach to camera gives Marty Mauser (Timothée Chalamet) the space to defeat himself, to the magic of table tennis, and a Filmmaker Toolkit with director Josh Safdie.
Obviously, he’s not the first person to pair modern music with a period setting to give us an intuitive grasp of a charismatic protagonist’s inner life, chafing at the strictures imposed on them by their circumstances. But the needle drops in “Marty Supreme” are some of the best examples of this in recent memory, and it’s a huge credit to both Daniel Lopatin’s score (named one of our best scores of 2025!) and music supervisor Gabe Hilfer that it works as well as it does.
The other thing we have a lot of around the site this week is Jim Hemphill-powered adoration for “Avatar: Fire and Ash.” There’s a fantastic Toolkit with James Cameron, but also thoughts about the wall-to-wall music (which also made our best scores of 2025 list!) about how filmmakers and their team keep changing and adapting over years and years of collaboration, and a whole article in praise of Oona Chaplin as Varang, leader of the murderous tribe of Na’vi raiders and a great connoisseur of ripping out people’s hearts. Chaplin brings a ton to the material, and Cameron talked to (IndieWire’s) Jim about how she improved scenes even as part of the audition process.
What I want to talk about is how the character design really complements everything Chaplin brings to the part, and also, much to my own surprise, about Spider (Jack Champion). The reason for all those Spider memes out there on Reddit is that “Avatar” is the most unforgiving version of the “one human, all Muppets” approach.
Because at least in “The Muppet Christmas Carol” (the very best version of “A Christmas Carol”), all of the production design and costumes and the overall look have a similar level of realism to your lone Michael Caine, but also there are muppets. On the magical planet of Pandora, this isn’t true. Everything’s digitally rendered, which allows Joe Letteri and his VFX team to do really wonderful, tactile work creating an image depth and level of immersive detail that is absent, frankly, in some fully live-action films. But also, there is Spider.
Even if Champion or the other humans back in Hell Gate don’t stand out as wrong-looking in contrast to the landscape, they don’t benefit from the same level of novelty and wonder we can project onto the Na’vi characters. And the vice is plenty versa, too. It really does say something about Chaplin’s performance, her physicality, and her timing choices, as translated by the animators, that it (pun incoming) burns itself into memory, compared to the other mo-cap work by the rest of the cast.
Fully digital environments: They’re not all the same. There are still all kinds of interesting creative choices and trade-offs that affect the overall sense of immersion in a film world. Wild. Anyway, we’ll be back with one more newsletter this year’s film craft in a few days.