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“What's really interesting is the breadth of what's going on,” Black Mirror visual effects supervisor James MacLachlan says of the buzzy seventh season. He adds that series creator Charlie Brooker "would pull things out of the recesses of his brain, references that were really obscure. Even to the point where we were discussing escalators in Tottenham Court Road, and how the metal shines when it catches the light." Watch our full interview above with MacLachlan joining our Gold Derby "Meet the Experts" VFX panel.

Season 7 of Black Mirror dropped on Netflix this year after a two-year break. Each episode of the anthology series takes on new characters to tell a dystopian tale of technology. However, the most recent season broke new ground with “USS Callister: Into Infinity.”

SEEPaul Giamatti, Chris O’Dowd, Rashida Jones, Cristin Milioti, Jimmi Simpson, and every 'Black Mirror' Emmy acting submission

The episode marked the series’ first sequel,...

John Travolta has enjoyed a brilliant career, and he continues to amaze us with his talent. But behind the glitz and the glamour and the Hollywood red carpets, the actor’s personal life has been marked by several tragedies.

Not only did Travolta lose his former girlfriend to cancer, but over the years, he has lost several more dear and loved ones. That includes his wife, actress Kelly Preston, and their son Jett. Here is a walk down memory lane into the life of the Pulp Fiction star.

John Travolta in Pulp Fiction (1994) | Miramax Films How did John Travolta lose his son and wife?

John Travolta first met in 1989, on the set of The Experts. After a couple of years and several relationships with other people, the two finally married in 1991, and since that day, they were inseparable until the actress’s unfortunate passing. They had three kids together, sons Jett and Benjamin,...

Female-led shows, crime dramas and politically charged stories are still making their mark.

“Anne of Green Gables” author Lucy Maud Montgomery will finally get the starry treatment worthy of her iconic characters in “Lucy. Maud.” Produced by Girls Productions, it’s created by Susan Coyne and presented at Berlinale’s Co-Pro Series.

“It’s a compelling drama about a powerful woman whose life experience remains relatable to this day,” promises producer Edwina Follows.

Another female protagonist, a young chef dealing with psychosis, will look for “Recipes for a Nervous Breakdown” in a Sophie White-created show, based on her own novel. Ireland’s Deadpan Pictures produces.

“What sets ‘Recipes’ apart is the stark, raw authenticity of the piece. It ties Sophie’s true story of managing – rather than ever fully healing from – a mental health collapse, through the glory and salvation of food. Sophie wants to bring the audience through the full descent into psychosis,...

Berlinale Series Market Selects has revealed its lineup. The European Film Market’s “boutique market for serial content from all over the world” will welcome Spanish shows in Berlinale Market Selects, its screening showcase, from “Internal Affairs,” focusing on one of the first female police officers in Spain, starting her first post, to “Honor” – yet another take on famous Israeli show which sees a judge covering his son’s crime.

Produced by Alex de la Iglesia, AtresmediaTV and Alex de la Iglesia and Carolina Bang at their Banijay-backed Pookepsie Films, “Sanctuary” turns to post-climate disaster future where women spend their pregnancies in a dome protecting them from pollution. It is not all they think, however.

Meanwhile, “City of God” director Fernando Meirelles and “Borgen” writer Maja Jul Larsen will bring projects to the Bsm’s Co-Pro Series strand.

Spain has been chosen as the Country in Focus at this year’s EFM.

Drug boss series, biopics, a Kiwi skateboarding drama and a smorgasbord of period pieces are set for the upcoming Berlinale Co-Production Market.

The line-up for this year’s Co-Pro Series pitch event, held during the Berlin Film Festival, features projects from Brazil, Canada, New Zealand, the U.S. and from across Europe.

The realities of financing premium drama mean co-production is in vogue and the shows pitched in Berlin will be scouting for partners.

Danish project The Best of Families will be on show, hailing from Piv Bernth’s ITV Studios backed banner Apple Tree. The series traces the impact of a chemical factory on the lives of various families and nature in the 1950s and comes from Maja Jul Larsen (Borgen) and director Charlotte Sieling (Homeland).

Two narco stories have made the grade. Wildlife comes from Brazil and the U.S. and is billed as a series about an unusual drug lord.

Known for his remarkable performances in films like Grease and Pulp Fiction, John Travolta is reportedly looking for love again, nearly four years after his wife Kelly Preston passed away. The couple initially met in 1989 during the screen test for The Experts and instantly fell in love. The actor proposed to Preston in 1991 and they got married later the same year.

John Travolta and Kelly Preston | Credit: Georges Biard/Wikimedia Commons

The tragedy struck their family when the Mischief actress passed away in 2020 following a two-year battle with breast cancer. Travolta has since reportedly taken a vow to celibacy and has remained single. However, recent reports state that the actor might be looking for love again as his kids encourage him to move on nearly four years after their mother’s death.

John Travolta is Reportedly Re-Entering the Dating Scene

Earlier this year reports stated that the Hollywood star John...

At the dawn of the 1980s, John Travolta was among the biggest film stars in the world. However, by the end of the decade, Travolta was in desperate need of a comeback.

The most logical explanation for the extended career slump that John Travolta experienced between the mid-1980s and mid-1990s is that Travolta stopped appearing in good films and, accordingly, made the public forget about the electrifying screen presence that Travolta projected in the films Blow Out, Grease, Saturday Night Fever, and Urban Cowboy.

Regardless, it stopped being cool to like Travolta. The flashpoint for Travolta’s stunning fall from grace in the 1980s was the 1985 romantic drama film Perfect, which, in addition to being a commercial and critical failure, also had the effect of turning Travolta into a proverbial joke.

After Perfect, Travolta didn’t appear in another feature film until the ill-fated 1989 comedy film The Experts,...

Getting Kris Tompkins to participate in the documentary, “Wild Life,” was not an easy task for co-director Jimmy Chin. “She is of the generation where they’re not looking to be famous. They were always about getting the work done and I don’t think, initially, she felt like there was any need to publicize her life or what she had done,” he tells Gold Derby during our recent Meet the Experts panel on TV Documentaries (watch the exclusive video interview above).

Through reassuring Tompkins about how much he commits himself to a project, she was eventually able to come around. “I think Kris took some time to think about it and I think she understood that we had this platform and that this story was one of the hopeful stories about the environment and about how to create change in this world in a meaningful way.”

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“The truth is, I knew nothing about the real story,” reveals “A Friend of the Family” director and producer Eliza Hittman. “So I came to it really with fresh eyes. I received the script from the writer, showrunner Nick Antosca, and it was just so exceptionally written, and the characters were so vivid on the page, and the world was so beautifully rendered that I just kind of devoured the script immediately.” We talked to Hittman as part of our “Meet the Experts” TV directors panel. Watch our exclusive video interview above. Click the Cc button on the video for closed captioning subtitles.

SEEInterviews with top Emmy contenders

“A Friend of the Family” tells the disturbing true story of Jan Broberg (played at different ages by Mckenna Grace and Hendrix Yancey), who in the 1970s was abducted multiple times by Robert Berchtold (played by Jake Lacy), a neighbor who had...

“Directing has always been in the back of my mind. Ever since I started working as an actor … I had to really pay attention to everything that was going on on the set,” explains Marlee Matlin about what inspired her to go behind the camera for the Fox anthology series “Accused.” But “back then I thought, well, wait a minute, how is a Deaf person going to direct? Is that possible?” We talked to Matlin as part of our “Meet the Experts” TV directors panel. Watch our exclusive video interview above. Click the Cc button on the video for closed captioning subtitles.

SEEInterviews with top Emmy contenders

Based on a British series of the same name, “Accused” tells a different story in each episode of a defendant on trial for a crime. Matlin directed “Ava’s Story,” in which the title character, a Deaf woman (played by Stephanie Nogueras), is...

When Jeanie Bacharach was casting “The Bear,” she never could’ve anticipated the fervent response it would receive when it premiered last June. “No idea. I loved the script. I knew it was special because it was showing a world that we haven’t really seen on television,” tells Gold Derby during our Meet the Experts: Casting Directors panel (watch the exclusive video interview above). “The characters were great, the writing was great, but then when I saw the pilot and what Chris [Storer, the creator] did tonally with the camerawork, the music, the intensity — literally after watching the pilot, I was shaking for 10 minutes afterward. Partly just from how intense it is, but I was like, ‘This is unlike anything I’ve ever seen before.’ And the fear was like, ‘Is it too inside baseball if you haven’t worked in a restaurant?’ Was it going to be too inside for...

Six TV documentarians will reveal secrets behind their projects when they join Gold Derby’s special “Meet the Experts” Q&a event with 2023 Emmy Awards contenders. They will participate in two video discussions to premiere on Tuesday, May 16, at 6:00 p.m. Pt; 9:00 p.m. Et. We’ll have a one-on-one with our senior editor Denton Davidson and a roundtable chat with all of the group together.

RSVP today to our entire ongoing contenders panel series by clicking here to book your free reservation. We’ll send you a reminder a few minutes before the start of the show.

This “Meet the Experts” panel welcomes the following Emmy contenders:

Dear Mama (FX)

Synopsis: It follows the life and legacy of Tupac Shakur and his mother, the Black Panther activist Afeni Shakur.

Bio: Allen Hughes is an Emmy nominee for “The Defiant Ones.” His career has included “Menace II Society,...

“It’s story and daydreaming,” says “Severance” production designer Jeremy Hindle about his favorite part of the creative process. “Literally daydream everything that you could possibly daydream first without any budget or any other conversation. Just be free.” We talked to Hindle as part of our “Meet the Experts” panel of Emmy-nominated production designers along with Francesca Di Mottola (“The Great”), Bill Groom (“The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel”), Gianna Costa (“RuPaul’s Drag Race”) and Bo Welch (“Schmigadoon!”). Watch our exclusive group discussion above. Click each person’s name to view their individual chats.

For Costa, the joy of production design is “going on deep dives, which is very easy for me to do.” She loves “finding very interesting things to pull into a set … I have so many folders of images, it’s ridiculous, but I could spend hours upon hours finding cool references.” Groom is also partial to the early...

“The Great” takes place in 18th century Russia during the reign of Peter III (Nicholas Hoult) and then Catherine the Great (Elle Fanning) after she overthrew him. But the show is very much a revisionist history, and that extends to the visual details. “The palace that we built from scratch is inspired by so many different palaces all around the world,” explains production designer Francesca Di Mottola. We talked with Di Mottola as part of our “Meet the Experts” panel of Emmy-nominated production designers. Watch our exclusive video interview above.

“Being really wide with our research” is “a great source of inspiration,” Di Mottola adds. “There’s always something in the script that will spark the initial research.” Kicking off those scripts for season two was Catherine’s coup against Peter, which left the royal palace in chaos. “We literally had to rebuild part of the palace to be able to tackle the destruction.

How do you ensure authenticity so that your designs don’t look like sets and props? What film of TV series do you hold up as a gold standard in production design?

These were some of the questions answered by six of today’s top TV production designers when they joined Gold Derby’s special “Meet the Experts” group roundtable panel with 2022 Emmy contenders: Tony Fanning (“The First Lady”), Stephan Olson (“Live in Front of a Studio Audience”), Bill Groom (“The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel”), Laurence Bennett (“The Offer”), Kave Quinn (“Pistol”) and Aiyana Trotter (“The Wonder Years”). Watch our full group chat above and click on each name above to view each person’s individual interview.

See over 350 interviews with 2022 Emmy contenders

“For me, realism is the number one,” Olsen says about ensuring a level of authenticity on set. “I mean, that’s what I try to go for, even...

Stefani Robinson, a four-time Emmy Award nominee as a writer and producer on both “What We Do in the Shadows” and “Atlanta,” says she and the “What We Do in the Shadows” team were already in the process of putting together the FX comedy’s third season when the second season broke through with eight Emmy nominations including Best Comedy Series. “It was just sort of like the gravy on top of working on such a great show,” Robinson reveals in an exclusive video interview. She joined our Gold Derby “Meet the Experts” panel for showrunners.

But Robinson says the success of “What We Do in the Shadows” hasn’t changed the approach the writers take to creating the mockumentary series about a group of vampires living on Staten Island.

“We are very adamant that people just throw up the stupidest, silliest ideas that they can possibly think of,” Robinson...

Few characters in recent memory have struck a chord online like Principal Ava on ABC’s “Abbott Elementary.” As played by actress and comedian Janelle James in the mockumentary, Ava is “a villain to root for,” according to Bustle, and James’ scene-stealing performance has her squarely in the conversation for Best Comedy Supporting Actress at the Emmy Awards.

“Janelle, in particular, was someone I was completely unfamiliar with,” reveals executive producer Patrick Schumacker in an exclusive video interview when asked about the breakout comedy’s casting process. “She was a writer on ‘Black Monday,’ she had written on ‘Central Park’ for Apple and she just walked in and immediately kind of exuded every quality of Ava that we wanted. In the middle of shooting the season, she was like, ‘This character is just like me.’ So I think a lot of it was – as with most of these things – just kind of dumb luck.

“This is Us” costume designer Hala Bahmet earned an Emmy nomination in 2018 for a wedding episode of the NBC family drama about the Pearson family across decades of their lives. She dressed another wedding this year for the sixth and final season of the show, but that actually wasn’t the biggest challenge for her department this year. We talked with Bahmet as part of our “Meet the Experts” TV costume designers panel. Watch our exclusive video interview above.

SEEExclusive Q&As: 2022 Emmy contenders

“I love making the wedding dresses. Those are my favorite,” she explains about crafting Kate (Chrissy Metz) another custom gown for her second trip down the aisle. “It was challenging because each one had to be different because they’re two different weddings, two different times in her life.” But bridal gowns have got nothing on time travel: “Overall the most challenging thing about our show...

“The journey with these characters is very different,” says costume designer Janie Bryant about how her work on the limited series “1883” compared to her Emmy winning wardrobe for another western drama that took place in almost exactly the same time period, the 1870s-set “Deadwood.” What is the same is I’m glad that I had the experience of so much distressing with ‘Deadwood’ because it really did help in terms of understanding how distressing works with ‘1883.’” We talked to Bryant as part of our “Meet the Experts” TV costume designers panel. Watch our exclusive video interview above.

SEEExclusive Q&As: 2022 Emmy contenders

“1883” is spun off from the Paramount drama “Yellowstone,” flashing back to tell the story of the ancestors of “Yellowstone” patriarch John Dutton (Kevin Costner). “1883” follows John’s great-grandfather James (Tim McGraw) and great-grandmother Margaret (Faith Hill) as they join a wagon train of immigrants that...

If you could give your younger self some career advice about directing, what would it be? Have you ever felt a sense of “imposter syndrome” or self doubt after reaching a certain level of success?

These were some of the questions answered by five of today’s top TV directors when they joined Gold Derby’s special “Meet the Experts” group roundtable panel with 2022 Emmy contenders. Watch our full group chat with David Paul Meyer (“The Daily Show with Trevor Noah”), Mimi Leder (“The Morning Show”), Emily Mortimer (“The Pursuit of Love”), Reggie Rock Bythewood (“Swagger”) and Ken Olin (“This is Us”) above. Click on each name above to view that person’s individual interview.

See over 200 interviews with 2022 Emmy contenders

“Whenever you think about your favorite film or show, you’re really thinking about those key moments,” Meyer reveals. “Whatever it was. A piece of dialog or some shot.

“I was sort of feeling a frustration that there was really this one-dimensional representation,” remembers Nida Manzoor about being asked to write “heavy-hitting dramas” and “very dark stories about Muslim women” even though “all my specs are comedy scripts.” She took a step back and “thought about, if I could make my dream show and I had to talk about this aspect of being a Muslim woman, what would it be?” That turned out to be Peacock’s “We Are Lady Parts.” We talked to Manzoor as part of our “Meet the Experts” TV showrunners panel. Watch our exclusive video interview above.

SEEExclusive Q&As: 2022 Emmy contenders

“We Are Lady Parts” centers on Amina (Anjana Vasan), a socially anxious PhD student whose real passion is playing the guitar but whose greatest fear is playing it in public. She is reluctantly recruited by Lady Parts, an all-female, all-Muslim punk band in need of a lead guitarist.

Five top TV animators and animation producers will reveal secrets behind their projects when they join Gold Derby’s special “Meet the Experts” Q&a event with 2022 Emmy Awards contenders. They will participate in two video discussions to premiere on Tuesday, May 24, at 6:00 p.m. Pt; 9:00 p.m. Et. We’ll have a one-on-one with our contributing editor Charles Bright and a roundtable chat with all of the group together.

RSVP today to our entire ongoing Emmy contenders panel series by clicking here to book your free reservation. We’ll send you a reminder a few minutes before the start of the show.

This “Meet the Experts” panel welcomes the following 2022 contenders:

Arcane (Netflix)

Synopsis: Set in utopian Piltover and the oppressed underground of Zaun, the story follows the origins of two iconic League champions-and the power that will tear them apart.

Bio: Christian Linke was a nominee...

Four top TV composers will reveal secrets behind their projects when they join Gold Derby’s special “Meet the Experts” Q&a event with 2022 Emmy Awards contenders. They will participate in two video discussions to premiere on Tuesday, May 24, at 4:00 p.m. Pt; 7:00 p.m. Et. We’ll have a one-on-one with our senior editor Christopher Rosen and a roundtable chat with all of the group together.

RSVP today to our entire ongoing Emmy contenders panel series by clicking here to book your free reservation. We’ll send you a reminder a few minutes before the start of the show.

This “Meet the Experts” panel welcomes the following 2022 contenders:

1883 (Paramount+)

Synopsis: Follows the Dutton family on a journey west through the Great Plains toward the last bastion of uncolonized America.

Bio: The career of Breton Vivian has included “Galavant,” “Agent Carter,” “Sausage Party,” “The Fate of the Furious,...

“The Underground Railroad” is an American fantasy and historical drama that premiered on Amazon Prime Video last May. The limited series was created and directed by Oscar winner Barry Jenkins and received seven Primetime Emmy nominations. The series is based on the novel of the same name by Colson Whitehead and for executive producer, Adele Romanski, weaving fantasy with the horrific realities of American history was something they had to do carefully. Watch the full interview with the PGA Awards nominee above.

“We had early conversations with focus groups about the novel in a few different American cities,” Romanski tells Gold Derby in our “Meet the Experts” panel. “Specifically focusing the conversation around Black television audiences. And also white television audiences too, but starting a dialogue early in terms of what people felt was sacred to the text and needed to be respected in the translation and also, perhaps, where...

When an opportunity comes along to work with comedy legends Steve Martin and Martin Short, it can be an intimidating and daunting proposition. That was the feeling “Only Murders in the Building” co-creator, executive producer and writer John Hoffman had. The mystery-comedy series premiered on Hulu last August and follows three strangers who share an obsession with a true crime podcast. Watch the full interview with the PGA Awards nominee above.

“It’s been the most welcoming experience,” Hoffman tells Gold Derby in our “Meet the Experts” panel. “The greatest part of this has been the support. That started with Dan Fogelman, who is our great shepherd on this, producing-wise, and Jess Rosenthal, his producing partner.” Rosenthal called Hoffman and asked him to be a showrunner for a series based on an idea Martin had. “You don’t say no,” Hoffman says with a smile. “You immediately cross your fingers,...

“The Handmaid’s Tale” originally premiered on Hulu in April of 2017, pulling viewers into the world of Gilead, where fertility rates have collapsed and the totalitarian government rules following an American civil war. The Hulu series was an instant hit with viewers and critics alike, becoming the first Emmy winner for Best Drama Series from a streaming service. After four seasons, creator and executive producer Bruce Miller says the key to the show’s continued success is sticking with Margaret Atwood’s story. Watch the full interview with the PGA Awards nominee above.

Atwood’s 1985 novel of the same name remains the foundation of the series. “As long as you’re extending out what is a really well thought-through, strong foundation of a world, it makes it a lot easier,” Miller tells Gold Derby in our “Meet the Experts” panel for Producers Guild Awards nominees. “Luckily, Margaret’s been around for the whole process.

Six top TV directors will reveal secrets behind their projects when they join Gold Derby’s special “Meet the Experts” Q&a event with 2022 Directors Guild Awards nominees. They will participate in two video discussions to premiere on Tuesday, February 22, at 5:00 p.m. Pt; 8:00 p.m. Et. We’ll have a one-on-one with our senior editor Rob Licuria and a roundtable chat with all of the group together.

RSVP today to this specific event by clicking here to book your reservation. Or click here to RSVP for our entire ongoing panel series throughout February. We’ll send you a reminder a few minutes before the start of the show.

This “Meet the Experts” panel welcomes the following 2022 DGA television nominees:

“Dopesick”: Barry Levinson and Danny Strong

Synopsis: The epicenter of America’s struggle with opioid addiction, from the boardrooms of Purdue Pharma, to a distressed Virginia mining community,...

“What I love to do is go to the video and look at the comments,” acclaimed songwriter Diane Warren admits about reading feedback about her songs on social media. “The comments are mind-blowing,” she exclaims.

“There’s a lot of comments,” she says, from people at “the end of their rope, where the song gave them hope and made them stronger. There’s thousands and thousands,” she sighs. “One night I just stayed up almost all night, reading them and I was crying. The fact that I wrote the song for this movie, sitting in my room and somehow it got through to people going through a hard time, it’s just crazy.”

We talked with Warren as part of Gold Derby’s special film songwriters “Meet the Experts” Q&a event with key Oscar contenders. Watch our exclusive video interview above.

See Gold Derby interviews with 2022 Oscar contenders

“Four Good Days...

Five top composers will reveal secrets behind their projects when they join Gold Derby’s special “Meet the Experts” Q&a event with 2022 Academy Awards and guild contenders. Each person from these films is now on the Oscar shortlist. They will participate in two video discussions to premiere on Wednesday, January 19, at 4:00 p.m. Pt; 7:00 p.m. Et. We’ll have a one-on-one with our senior editor Joyce Eng and a roundtable chat with all of the group together.

RSVP today to this specific event by clicking here to book your reservation. Or click here to RSVP for our entire ongoing panel series throughout January and February. We’ll send you a reminder a few minutes before the start of the show.

This “Meet the Experts” panel welcomes the following 2022 awards contenders:

“Being the Ricardos:” Daniel Pemberton

Synopsis: Follows Lucy and Desi as they face a crisis...

Seven top sound editors and mixers will reveal secrets behind their projects when they join Gold Derby’s special “Meet the Experts” Q&a event with 2022 Academy Awards and guild contenders. Each person from these films is now on the Oscar shortlist. They will participate in two video discussions to premiere on Tuesday, January 18, at 4:00 p.m. Pt; 7:00 p.m. Et. We’ll have a one-on-one with our senior editor Christopher Rosen and a roundtable chat with all of the group together.

RSVP today to this specific event by clicking here to book your reservation. Or click here to RSVP for our entire ongoing panel series throughout January and February. We’ll send you a reminder a few minutes before the start of the show.

This “Meet the Experts” panel welcomes the following 2022 awards contenders:

“Belfast:” James Mather

Synopsis: A young boy and his working-class Belfast family experience...

Producer Todd Black has been interested in making a film about Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz since 1995, but their children weren’t “ready to do that at that time.” But eventually Black met with Lucie Arnaz and the two started a “trust-building” process that ultimately led to Amazon’s “Being the Ricardos.” Arnaz didn’t want a fawning portrait of her parents, though. “She said, ‘I don’t want to soften it. I want to really get real and raw.'” We talked with Black as part of our “Meet the Experts” Film Producers Panel. Watch our exclusive video interview above.

Written and directed by Aaron Sorkin, “Being the Ricardos” isn’t a traditional cradle-to-grave portrait of Ball and Arnaz’s lives and careers. Instead, it focuses on one week during production of “I Love Lucy” when Ball (played by Nicole Kidman) is publicly accused of being a communist amid...

“I think we all are familiar with her later part of her life, which I of course knew a lot about because I’m a big fan of hers and have watched so many shows. But the early part I was not as familiar with at all. So that was the difficult part,” explains production designer Ina Mayhew about recreating the life and times of Aretha Franklin for the biopic “Respect.” We talked with her as part of our “Meet the Experts” Production Designers Panel. Watch our exclusive video interview above.

SEETracey Scott Wilson (‘Respect’ writer) on letting go of ‘preconceived notions’ about Aretha Franklin to pen Queen of Soul’s biopic [Exclusive Video Interview]

Franklin (played by Jennifer Hudson) may have been the Queen of Soul, but she was also “a very private person, so she talked very little about her life growing up.” It required “a lot of detective work to...

Megan Mylan’s process of finding the five families to focus on for her documentary, “Simple as Water,” was an extremely arduous one. “We did a deep dive: Research, pre-production, almost a mini-grad school of trying to understand what are the through-lines, what are the commonalities of this family experience,” Mylan tells Gold Derby in our Meet the Experts: Film Documentary panel (watch the exclusive video interview above). This led to talking with hundreds of Syrians in countries all over the world and Mylan getting a very critical assist. “The way I worked is we had two Syrian co-producers who worked across storylines, but then each vignette had its own family and its own particular crew.”

“Simple as Water,” which is currently streaming on HBO Max, tells the story of five families who are living with the horrible effects of the Syrian civil war. One is a mother in...

Director Kenneth Branagh and cinematographer Haris Zambarloukos were putting the finishing touches on the forthcoming sequel “Death on the Nile” when working on that project and everything else in Hollywood ground to a halt. It was March 2020, and the early days of the coronavirus pandemic put a stop to Branagh and Zambarloukos’s plans to fly to Egypt for additional photography on the Agatha Christie drama. But friends for years, the pair stayed in contact regularly during the spring and summer of 2020, both about “Death on the Nile” and a new project Branagh was writing, “Belfast.”

Months later, the Oscars favorite — which won the prestigious audience award at the Toronto International Film Festival this year — is in theaters and marks Branagh and Zambarloukos’s eighth collaboration together. According to the Gold Derby odds, “Belfast” is an early awards front-runner in multiple categories.

See Gold Derby interviews with 2022 Oscar contenders

Set in the late 1960s,...

Aaron Sorkin and Oscar-nominated cinematographer Jeff Cronenweth first became acquainted on the set of David Fincher’s “The Social Network.”

“The last shot of ‘The Social Network,’ Fincher wanted to avoid the emotional goodbyes to everybody and left with one insert to be shot that Aaron directed and I photographed,” Cronenweth tells Gold Derby in the “Meet the Experts” cinematographers panel. “That was really our first director-cinematographer collaboration back at the end of ‘The Social Network.’”

More than a decade later, Sorkin and Cronenweth have reunited in an official capacity as director and cinematographer for “Being the Ricardos,” Sorkin’s third film as a director and his first with Cronenweth behind the camera.

“He loved his experiences on ‘Molly’s Game’ and with Phedon [Papamichael] on ‘Chicago 7’ and Phedon got an Oscar nomination on that, it was a beautifully photographed film,” Cronenweth says. “But it was predominantly stuck in a courtroom. My...

“I’m not one of those showrunners who is like, ‘this is my vision and everyone hop on board’,” Rafe Judkins declares about how he approached bringing the epic fantasy series to life. “I think that television is at its best when everyone who comes to the table is lifting it up,” he says. “When you have that and you have people creatively invested, then you can really make something that feels special and you feel people’s passion for it on the screen.”

We talked with Judkins as part of Gold Derby’s special TV showrunners “Meet the Experts” Q&a event with key award contenders. Watch our exclusive video interview above.

See Gold Derby interviews with 2022 Oscar contenders

Judkins, a former “Survivor” castaway who’s worked on “Chuck” and “Marvel’s Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.,” adapted the Robert Jordan fantasy novel series “The Wheel of Time” for Amazon Prime.

“Five years kind of felt the right amount of time to make our show,” admits Prentice Penny, Emmy-nominated showrunner of HBO’s acclaimed comedy “Insecure.” “I’m glad we’re leaving at a space when people still want us around. I mean, it’s better to leave, you know, a year early the year late, for sure.”

We talked with Penny as part of Gold Derby’s special TV showrunners “Meet the Experts” Q&a event with key award contenders. Watch our exclusive video interview above.

See Gold Derby interviews with 2022 Oscar contender

“Insecure” stars Emmy nominee Issa Rae, who co-created the show with Emmy winner Larry Wilmore (“The Bernie Mac Show”), and co-stars fellow Emmy nominee Yvonne Orji, Jay Ellis, Kendrick Sampson, Natasha Rothwell, Amanda Seales, Leonard Robinson and Courtney Taylor.

The HBO Max comedy broke through with new viewers last year, likely because many of them discovered the...

“Empathy is a really important leadership quality,” Amanda Peet declares about her approach to her first time as a showrunner, which also happens to be a key theme of her show, the Netflix hit dramedy “The Chair.” “Empathy isn’t a weakness when you’re in a supervising role necessarily. The ability to take in multiple perspectives at once is an advantage,” she says about her approach to producing a TV series.

We talked with Peet as part of Gold Derby’s special TV showrunners “Meet the Experts” Q&a event with key award contenders. Watch our exclusive video interview above.

See Gold Derby interviews with 2022 Oscar contenders

In “The Chair,” Emmy nominee Sandra Oh stars as Professor Ji-Yoon Kim, the newly appointed chair of the English department at fictional Pembroke University. As the first woman chosen for the position, she attempts to navigate the stuffy old boys club faculty,...

“I decided pretty early on to limit the palette to something that felt like it could relate to not only the sport of tennis, but also the way that the film felt,” Oscar and Emmy-nominated composer Kris Bowers declares about his ambitiously rhythmic score for “King Richard.” “To represent both this family and also Venus and Serena themselves and how much of a force they were when they came into the game and how much they changed the way that the sport felt in so many different ways.”

We talked with Bowers as part of Gold Derby’s special film composers “Meet the Experts” Q&a event with key Oscar and guild contenders. Watch our exclusive video interview above.

See Gold Derby interviews with 2022 Oscar contenders

“King Richard,” directed by Reinaldo Marcus Green and written by Zach Baylin, stars Oscar nominee Will Smith as Richard Williams, the father and coach...

“The film wants to show the really human side of Louis, the sweet side, the side that cared, the side that loved, the side that tried to bring joy to the world,” declares composer Arthur Sharpe about the titular English artist at the center of biopic “The Electrical Life of Louis Wain,” which was directed by the composer’s brother Will Sharpe, who co-wrote the film with Simon Stephenson.

We talked with Sharpe as part of Gold Derby’s special film composers “Meet the Experts” Q&a event with key Oscar and guild contenders. Watch our exclusive video interview above.

See Gold Derby interviews with 2022 Oscar contenders

In “The Electrical Life of Louis Wain,” Oscar nominee and Emmy winner Benedict Cumberbatch stars as eccentric English artist Louis Wain, who rises to prominence at the end of the 19th century for his surreal cat paintings that seemed to reflect his declining sanity.

One of the big twists on the “game-changing” fifth season of Fox’s “The Masked Singer” was the addition of wild cards. As producer Craig Plestis reveals during Gold Derby’s Meet the Experts: Reality TV panel (watch above), “We had the idea since Season 3 about doing wild cards, where we bring people into the game.” He continues on, “Every time our show airs I watch the feeds at night and see what they talk about. A lot of fans say, ‘What if we had a new celebrity that entered the game at the last minute?’ We kept thinking about it, pondering about it, and this was the season to do it.”

Because of the Covid-19 pandemic, the show was getting flooded with requests from celebs who wanted to take part, and the wild card twist allowed them to join a little bit later than the other contestants. “The fans love it,...

After producing hundreds of episodes and winning five Emmy Awards, “Life Below Zero” is still going strong nearly a decade after it first premiered on Nat Geo in 2013. “It really felt like there was something special” from the very beginning, reflects showrunner Joseph Litzinger during Gold Derby’s Meet the Experts: Reality TV panel (watch the exclusive video interview above). “You never know if the audience is going to respond or what the ratings will be, but [there’s] no way I could have predicted [the show’s success],” he adds. The most recent 15th season aired on Nat Geo last fall and is now available to stream on Disney Plus.

“It’s nice to win awards and get recognized,” the producer says about the show’s recent triumphs at the Emmys, winning for cinematography in 2016, ’18, ’19 and ’20 and for picture editing in 2017. “The beauty of the cinematography and the editing awards is that it’s recognition from your peers.

HBO Max’s new reality TV show “Full Bloom” is a florist’s dream come true. Each week the contestants have an unlimited arsenal to create beautiful flower arrangements and compete in epic team challenges. The program enters the 2021 Emmys season already an award winner, claiming the Directors Guild Award for Joseph Guidry in April. Since the DGA Awards weren’t televised, what did Guidry say in his acceptance speech? “I thanked my crew and my family … and everyone else that basically helped me to get to this point in my career,” the director reveals during Gold Derby’s Meet the Experts: Reality TV panel (watch the exclusive video interview above).

What originally drew Guidry to the project? “I’m not a florist by day,” he notes. “But when I was presented with this project, I had to jump at the chance. It’s a very big task, believe it or not,...

HBO’s “I May Destroy You” and “Industry” are two very different shows, but casting director Julie Harkin approached both in a similar way: shining a light on new or little-known talent.

With “I May Destroy You,” Harkin was instructed by creator, writer, co-director and star Michaela Coel to “give opportunity to people that wouldn’t necessarily get given the opportunities that we were giving them,” she shares during Gold Derby’s Meet the Experts: TV Casting Directors panel (watch the exclusive video interview above). “Michaela was a very open collaborator who just wanted to push inclusivity in terms of how we cast the show but also how everybody behaved behind the scenes. … She said to me very early on, ‘Go find the African-American, Black actors who have not had any screen opportunity to date and find me the actors of color who have not had their moments onscreen.

“The Kominsky Method” will wrap up its run when its third and final season drops on Netflix on Friday, May 28 — an end that creator Chuck Lorre says was a mutual decision between him and the streaming giant.

“I don’t know that I was prepared to end the show, but after a lot of discussions with Netflix, they agreed we didn’t have an opportunity to bring the characters any kind of closure in the first two seasons,” Lorre tells Gold Derby at our Meet the Experts: Showrunners panel (watch above). “We didn’t anticipate a Season 2 in Season 1 and I wasn’t anticipating a Season 3 in Season 2. I was taking it one show at a time. And it felt like, especially not having Alan Arkin in the final season, this was an opportunity to bring Sandy, Michael Douglas’ character, to fruition. I can’t believe I said fruition.

“The Social Dilemma” showcases the harmful impact social media has had on society, and for director Jeff Orlowski, he hadn’t always seen it that way. As an “avid, super-heavy user,” Orlowski “used it all the time.” “I describe myself as addicted and that has swung all the way to today where I don’t touch it at all,” he shares at Gold Derby’s Meet the Experts: Documentary panel (watch above). “I don’t use it. I haven’t deleted the accounts because they still provide access to people and connectivity, but as I learned during this project, they don’t provide connection really. It’s a false sense of connection. But it has been such a huge shift for me personally to remove social media from my daily life.”

Orlowski started reexamining his relationship to social media in 2017 when some of his friends from Stanford who had...

Like many people, J. Clay Tweel, director of “Heaven’s Gate: The Cult of Cults,” first heard of Heaven’s Gate when the bodies of 39 members of the group were discovered in March 1997. “I was in high school at the time in 1997. I grew up in a household that watched a lot of news, so I was inundated with it for about a two-, three-week basis. It just sort of took over the whole 24-hour news cycle back then,” Tweel recalls during Gold Derby’s Meet the Experts: Documentary panel (watch above). “I think I saw it through the lens of a lot of Americans back then, which was it quickly became a joke, something to be exploited and laughed at. I watched all the nightly news clips about it, the monologues for all the late-night shows.”

Tweel didn’t really think about Heaven’s Gate again until the opportunity came up...

“The New York Times Presents: Framing Britney Spears” was initially conceived as an “‘O.J.: Made in America’ but for Britney Spears,” taking a deep dive into the invasive and inappropriate media coverage the pop star endured throughout the 2000s, but that quickly changed, according to director Samantha Stark. “As we were reporting and researching for the film, the conservatorship really came out as a huge storyline,” Stark shares at Gold Derby’s Meet the Experts: Documentary panel (watch above).

Spears has been under a conservatorship, overseen by her father Jamie Spears, since 2008 following her very public breakdown, preventing her from making any personal, business or financial decisions on her own. Since 2019, the conservatorship has been under intense scrutiny, sparking the fan-made #FreeBritney movement, which calls for an end to the legal arrangement. In August, Spears’ court-appointed lawyer, Samuel D. Ingham III, filed documents stating that the singer does not...

Seven top TV animation producers will reveal secrets behind their projects when they join Gold Derby’s special “Meet the Experts” Q&a event with key 2021 guild and Emmy contenders this month. Each person will participate in two video discussions to premiere on Wednesday, May 19, at 5:00 p.m. Pt; 8:00 p.m. Et. We’ll have a one-on-one with our contributing editor Charles Bright and a group chat with Charles and all of the group together.

RSVP today to this specific event by clicking here to book your reservation. Or click here to RSVP for our entire ongoing panel series. We’ll send you a reminder a few minutes before the start of the show.

This “Meet the Experts” panel welcomes the following 2021 guild and Emmy contenders:

“Archer”: Casey Willis

Willis is an Emmy winner among four career nominations.

“Big Mouth”: Mark Levin and Jennifer Flackett

Levin...

Six top TV documentary directors will reveal details behind their projects when they join Gold Derby’s special “Meet the Experts” Q&a event with key 2021 guild and Emmy contenders this month. Each person will participate in two video discussions to premiere on Monday, May 10, at 5:00 p.m. Pt; 8:00 p.m. Et. We’ll have a one-on-one with our senior editor Joyce Eng and a group chat with Joyce and all of the group together.

RSVP today to this specific event by clicking here to book your reservation. Or click here to RSVP for our entire ongoing panel series. We’ll send you a reminder a few minutes before the start of the show.

This “Meet the Experts” panel welcomes the following 2021 guild and Emmy contenders:

“Framing Britney Spears”: Samantha Stark

Stark was a News Emmy nominee for “Coming Out.” Other projects have included “They Get Brave,...