A-list action screenwriter Simon Kinberg gives 30 Ninjas Editor John Freeman Gill the inside story on the physical chess game of Robert Downey Jr.’s wing chun kung fu, how the actor authored his own fight scenes, and how the filmmakers handled the delicate issue of Sherlock’s cocaine addiction. The Erudite Kung Fu of Robert Downey [...]

Spartacus: Blood and Sand is picking up popularity in recent days. At the very least, it is popular enough to be renewed for a second season! Now, have any of you seen Spartacus: Blood and Sand? No, no you haven’t, because the series hasn’t premiered yet. That’s right, Starz resigned a contract for a program [...]

So the week started out on an unusual note for me — I headed out to Staten Island to receive a commendation from the U.S. Coast Guard for the rescue Captain Ludwig and I performed in August. It was really touching and a little embarrassing to be standing in a conference room full of uniformed [...]

A couple of posts ago, I talked about working with my composer, John Powell. Out of all the different people I work with on my films, I’m most consistent with my choice of my music team (aside from my agent, my lawyer, and David Bartis, my business partner). After making Swingers, I started doing commercials, [...]

Many of you have been Mixed Martial Arts fans since Royce Gracie won the first Ultimate Fighting Championship in 1993, but it’s clear that a lot more people have been joining the party lately and the UFC is gaining a huge, huge following. That got us wondering how the rise in popularity of MMA fighting [...]

Maybe it’s a kind of penance, or community service. Now that German director Roland Emmerich has successfully savaged the planet in every imaginable way in his big-budget S&M epic 2012, he and his visual effects team are hard at work building a major city from scratch for their next collaboration, Anonymous. The new film, which [...]

Saar Klein and I went to SNL on Saturday because I have a friend who’s a producer there. There’s something so appealing and exciting about live television: the control room, the countdown, the way they do set and wardrobe changes, and how they do it all in 60 seconds because they have to go back [...]

An exclusive interivew with Ninja Assassin’s stunt coorinator Chad Stahelski who also worked on all three of the matrix films. Chad tells us about the custom weapons made for the film as well as the ridiculously amazing skills of Korean pop star Rain who plays raizo.

The fight between Edward and Felix, the hulking Volturi vampire, which happens toward the end of the New Moon, has plenty of special effects, but it’s nothing compared to the wolves and the fighting sequences with the wolves. The wolves in the novel are described by Stephenie Meyer as being the size of horses, which [...]

A big question for me as director of New Moon was how to appeal to both boys and girls by making the movie work not only as a romance but also as an action film. With a film like this one, you sort of know the girls are going to come, but you want to [...]

So much of the apocalyptic blockbuster 2012 was computer-generated — 1,315 shots, created by 15 visual effects houses using thousands of computer processors — that it seems the only thing in the movie not done with CGI is John Cusack’s smirk. In Part 3 of our exclusive interview, Volker Engel and Marc Weigert, 2012‘s VFX [...]

What does Roland Emmerich have against the world’s most treasured monuments? As aficionados will note, the director sank the Statue of Liberty in a tidal wave in The Day After Tomorrow and fired alien death rays at the White House and Empire State Building in Independence Day. But after watching his newest film, it’s clear [...]

Team Edward and Team Jacob are squaring off this week in the run-up to the Nov. 20 release of New Moon, the second installment of the epically popular Twilight Saga. (You really have to love a franchise that takes itself so seriously it calls itself a Saga without the slightest bit of irony.) The haters [...]

You may have seen the sequence in the 2012 trailer: High atop a Himalayan mountain, a red-robed monk, enjoying the crisp morning air and the serenity of his chosen profession, rings a solitary bell in a Buddhist temple. The next moment, before the poor holy man can even begin to ponder where he might find [...]

It’s the end of the world as we know it. Again. Serial disaster fetishist Roland Emmerich, who blew up the White House in Independence Day, stomped the Empire State Building in Godzilla, and trashed Tokyo with football-size hailstones in The Day After Tomorrow, is back for another round of planet-savaging mayhem in 2012. And this [...]