Category Archives: Emily Blunt

Steven Spielberg Insists He’d ‘Never Have Used AI’ In Disclosure Day After Emily Blunt Claims

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Steven Spielberg has clarified his stance on AI in cinema after Emily Blunt′ recent comments about their new film, Disclosure Day.

In Spielberg’s new sci-fi blockbuster, Emily plays a local weatherwoman who begins speaking in an unusual, clicking alien language mid-broadcast, for reasons that become apparent over the course of the film.

During a recent interview with Entertainment Weekly, the British star opened up about the origins of these noises, claiming that Spielberg had told her: “You know, we could do it with AI, or you could do it.”

“I was like, ‘I feel confident I can make some weird noises’,” she then quipped.

Meanwhile, she also revealed to Hot Ones host Sean Evans that AI was something she was “a bit terrified of” when it was apparently presented to her as an option for her Disclosure Day character’s alien language.

Emily Blunt in Disclosure Day
Emily Blunt in Disclosure Day

Since then, Spielberg sat down with ITV News to discuss the film, during which Emily’s comments about him supposedly offering to create these sounds with generative AI were brought up.

“I would never have used AI,” he insisted. “I would have gone the old-fashioned way, you get a dolphin, an elephant, you slow it down, you speed it up, you play it backwards.”

He added that his Oscar-winning sound designer, Gary Rydstrom, would have found an organic way to make the sounds had Emily not been able to do them herself.

Spielberg has put his foot down on using generative AI during the filmmaking process in the past.

“I’m not willing to substitute, because I don’t really believe in sentience,” he said on the IMO podcast in March. “I don’t believe there is any substitute for the soul. I don’t think that is an algorithm that is inventible.”

He claimed: “Use AI as a tool, but do not use AI as the final word on anything creative. That’s where I draw the line.”

Explaining how she settled on the sounds that eventually made it into Disclosure Day, she told Entertainment Weekly that she had sent the iconic filmmaker voice notes of herself “clicking, humming, doing weird Barry White low singing mixed with clicking mixed with Morse code sounds”.

“I just tried everything,” she added. “We sort of threw the kitchen sink at it, and I think he wanted it to sound mathematical and not too terrifying.”

The Devil Wears Prada actor shared that the final version audiences hear in Disclosure Day is a mix of layered noises she recorded in a sound booth.

Emily also expanded on Hot Ones about how she and the sound team for Disclosure Day ultimately created the chilling sounds that get broadcast across America in the film without AI.

She explained that the sound engineer had one microphone by her mouth and another by her throat to “capture it in a really weird way”.

“And then the sound designer went away and created that weird sound,” she continued. “Even kind of leading up to that moment where she starts speaking in this non-human language, it’s a four-minute oner that we shot that leads up to that moment where she’s gradually sort of disintegrating.”

Disclosure Day is out now in cinemas.

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Critics Hail Steven Spielberg’s ‘Gripping’ Disclosure Day As His Best Film In Years

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Critics have been weighing in on Disclosure Day, which sees Steven Spielberg returning to his beloved science fiction genre.

In his latest big-screen offering, the legendary filmmaker is once again exploring the idea of extraterrestrial beings coming to earth – only this time he’s taking a close look at the philosophical and religious implications of an alien invasion.

Disclosure Day boasts a star-studded cast that includes Emily Blunt, Josh O’Connor and Colin Firth, and tells the story of a small group of individuals who become involved in a government conspiracy to keep the existence of intelligent alien life a secret.

Early reviews hailed the film as a “gripping” and “thrilling’ masterpiece from the legendary director, earning an 82% score on Rotten Tomatoes.

However, not all reviewers were in love with the new sci-fi blockbuster, with some critics – including several from prominent British outlets – claiming it is “drab” and a “rehash” of Spielberg’s past works.

Here’s a selection of what critics are saying about Disclosure Day…

“Disclosure Day feels not like a repetition but like a thunderclap culmination, the kind of movie you make when, at age 79, you’re not only at the peak of your skills, but you realise time is running out. What, exactly, do you want to say, and how do you find the pictures, the words?

“The pictures and words are all right there in Disclosure Day, an eleventh-hour plea to reconnect with all that makes us human, even if we need to invoke the help of imaginary aliens to do it.”

Emily Blunt and Josh O'Connor as seen in one of Disclosure Day's most dramatic sequences
Emily Blunt and Josh O’Connor as seen in one of Disclosure Day’s most dramatic sequences

“Disclosure Day has many layers, but it is also a crackerjack rip-roaring ride for much of its running time, a movie that essentially centres on two main characters in search of answers to what is happening to them, keeping the audience in the dark as much as they are.”

“What Spielberg has conjured here is some of his vintage boldness in transforming the cinema screen into a magical theatre of childlike wonder.”

“While Spielberg has never lost his sense of fun, Disclosure Day is uniquely fortified by the sense that he’s still searching for new ways to enrapture a jaded audience with his spectacle, and the movie’s ethos becomes that much harder to deny every time its director manages to suspend our disbelief all over again.

“There might not be anything here quite as inventive as the spider robot sequence from Minority Report, but a certain setpiece – the one that starts with a car getting shoved into an oncoming freight train – is as gripping as Hollywood action gets.”

“Disclosure Day is never anything other than entertaining and grade-A fun; rare enough in the movies or anywhere else, rocketing along with barnstorming set-pieces, exhilarating chases, funny lines and a career-topper of a performance from Blunt who may yet be morphing into a female version of Tom Hanks.”

Colin Firth joins fellow Brits Emily Blunt and Josh O'Connor in Disclosure Day
Colin Firth joins fellow Brits Emily Blunt and Josh O’Connor in Disclosure Day

“The movie duly pulls out all the stops, and then a couple more. As if to say, ‘still got it!’, there are big-ticket action sequences and the screwball comic interludes Spielberg always had a knack for. The ride is rarely dull.”

“There are allegories that can be read about fear of the unknown breeding cruelty and exploitation, but Disclosure Day is first and foremost a propulsive yarn with thematic roots in hope, truth, empathy and perhaps even spirituality.”

IGN (7/10)

“The film is, in a lot of ways, vintage Spielberg: He hasn’t lost a step with a camera that sprints from start to finish, there are some fantastic technical sequences, and the performances from the two leads in particular are great.

“And while Disclosure Day stumbles a bit for me at the finish line in a way that makes some of the film’s other nits a little more worth picking, it’s still an original, big-budget science fiction conversation-starter from one of cinema’s all-time greats.”

“While Disclosure Day doesn’t live up to the high standards he’s [Spielberg] set, it’s still a thrill ride, thumbing its nose at authority and begging its audience for more empathy, not less.

“Even if not all the pieces snap flawlessly into place, Disclosure Day is a reminder of how much magic is still left up Spielberg’s sleeve.”

Two-time Oscar nominee Colman Domingo in Disclosure Day
Two-time Oscar nominee Colman Domingo in Disclosure Day

“[Disclosure Day’s] script exaggerates the best and the worst of how humans might respond to such a revelation, and Spielberg struggles to split the difference between paranoid-thriller cynicism and his usual mode of emotional uplift.

“That waffling ultimately strands Disclosure Day on a heartfelt yet fuzzy middle ground, with a generalised plea for cross-species understanding that, even bolstered by the reliable stirrings of a John Williams score, left me dispiritingly dry-eyed.”

“Spielberg, as part of the film’s publicity, has suggested that he believes in alien visitations, and that he’s an advocate for disclosure. But where Close Encounters tapped into the mystery of all this with an innocence that was both starry-eyed and spectacular, Disclosure Day feels like a thriller docudrama that’s too cut-and-dried about what it believes.

“The actors are quite good (especially Blunt, who makes you feel she’s seeing the uncanny), but for all the film’s slow build it doesn’t take us anywhere overly surprising. It just confirms the ‘truth’ that’s been out there for so long it’s starting to feel like a fairy tale for the dispossessed.”

“Essentially, it’s a drab X-Files episode, or a more conventional One Battle After Another, in which some people we don’t care about are hunted by some other people we don’t care about.”

“Sadly, there’s nothing original here, or at least nothing to match, say, Jordan Peele’s vastly superior UFO drama Nope. Instead it’s just Spielberg badly rehashed, poorly reheated, lukewarm and with extra treacle.”

“It is shot and staged with Spielberg’s signature elegance: a central foot-to-car-to-train chase moves with such breathless lucidity it is as if the director is beaming excitement directly into your brain. But the plotting surrounding the action is often woolly and lopsided, while the tone is an awkward mix of solemnity and silliness.”

Disclosure Day is out in cinemas now.

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The Making Of Oppenheimer: 15 Fascinating Behind-The-Scenes Facts

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Clocking in at just over three hours, Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer is his longest and arguably most ambitious film yet.

The biopic sees Cillian Murphy giving a sure to be Oscar-nominated performance as the titular physicist, who is known as the ‘father of the atomic bomb’.

Its not just the lead star who is being tipped for award season glory either, with his cast mates, director Nolan and the film’s sound, special effects and wardrobe teams also likely to make it onto shortlists.

We’re still many months away from the Golden Globes and Oscars nominee announcements but to tide you over, here are 15 behind-the-scenes facts that remind you just how impressive Oppenheimer is…

The Trinity Test recreation was filmed without special effects

Nolan is no stranger to recreating dramatic events on the big screen but in perhaps his most ambitious move yet, the director decided to film the atomic bomb test without using any CGI or visual effects. That means what you see on screen really did take place – although on a smaller scale.

Visual effects supervisor Scott R. Fisher has explained how his team created real ‘miniature’ explosions and filmed those.

He told Total Film: “We don’t call them miniatures; we call them ‘big-atures’. We do them as big as we possibly can, but we do reduce the scale so it’s manageable.

“It’s getting it closer to the camera, and doing it as big as you can in the environment.”

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In order to create the intense burning created by the successful test run, Scott’s team used gasoline and propane, while aluminium powder and magnesium were added to replicate the blinding white light of a nuclear explosion.

Scott added: “We really wanted everyone to talk about that flash, that brightness. So we tried to replicate that as much as we could.”

The opening Prometheus quote is a nod to Nolan’s source material

Oppenheimer opens with an ominous opening caption, which reads: “Prometheus stole fire from the gods and gave it to man. For this he was chained to a rock and tortured for eternity.”

The film is based on Kai Bird’s 2005 Oppenheimer biography American Prometheus and explaining the comparison, Kai writes in his book: “Like that rebellious Greek god Prometheus—who stole fire from Zeus and bestowed it upon humankind, Oppenheimer gave us atomic fire.

“But then, when he tried to control it, when he sought to make us aware of its terrible dangers, the powers-that-be, like Zeus, rose up in anger to punish him.”

Cillian Murphy got his role without auditioning

Christopher Nolan and Cillian Murphy
Christopher Nolan and Cillian Murphy

Neil P. Mockford via Getty Images

Oppenheimer marks Christopher and Cillian’s sixth film together – following the Batman trilogy, Inception and Dunkirk – and given their close relationship, the Irish actor no longer needs to audition for roles.

During an interview with Radio 2, Cillian recalled the moment when he received a casual call from Nolan, who explained he had the perfect lead role for him.

“If you’re lucky you get one or two of those [calls] in your career, you know?” he said. “It was the best, best feeling. It was kind of euphoric, and then you go ‘oh that’s a lot of work’. So I immediately just started working.

“I had like six months before, between when he called me and we started the shoot. The script was solid and was there. It was one of the greatest scripts I’ve ever read. It was magnificent.”

The cast lived together during filming

Oppenheimer sees America’s greatest scientific minds living together at the Los Alamos facility in New Mexico and for the movie, Nolan also moved his cast and crew into digs together.

Emily Blunt likened the situation to ‘summer camp’ and told People: “We were all in the same hotel in the middle of the New Mexican desert. We only had each other.”

But Cillian skipped their group hangouts

Emily Blunt and Matt Damon at the Oppenheimer premiere
Emily Blunt and Matt Damon at the Oppenheimer premiere

Karwai Tang via Getty Images

Longterm pals Emily and Matt Damon organised group dinners for the cast during filming – but the former’s on-screen husband RSVP’d with a firm no.

Mary Poppins actor Emily added to People: “The sheer volume of what he had to take on and shoulder is so monumental.

“Of course he didn’t want to come and have dinner with us.”

Cillian added: “You know that when you have those big roles, that responsibility, you feel it’s kind of overwhelming.”

Another contributing factor was the Irish star’s strict diet, as he lost weight to play the scientist, who in real-life subsisted on cigarettes, martinis and not so much food.

“He was losing so much weight for the part that he just didn’t eat dinner, ever,” Matt told Entertainment Tonight.

The hard to hear dialogue is (sort of) intentional

While Oppenheimer is very much deserving of its five-star reviews, cinema-goers have complained about one thing: the sound levels.

Posting on social media after seeing the movie, numerous fans noted that some of the speech sounds muffled and exchanges on-screen can sometimes be difficult to fully hear.

This is down to the fact the IMAX cameras used by Nolan aren’t soundproofed.

Most directors would work around this by getting actors to re-record dialogue in post-production to make it clearer, but this is something he isn’t a fan of.

“I like to use the performance that was given in the moment rather than the actor re-voice it later,” Nolan told Insider. “Which is an artistic choice that some people disagree with, and that’s their right.”

Christopher Nolan
Christopher Nolan

Pascal Le Segretain via Getty Images

The script was written in first person

In another unusual move, Nolan wrote the script in first person in order to reflect how most of the film is being told from Oppenheimer’s perspective and using his memories.

Matt Damon told Vulture: “I’ve never seen that done before. Instead of ‘Oppenheimer walks across the room,’ it’s ‘I walk across the room.’ This was a way for him to signal that, Okay, this is what the movie’s going to feel like. It’s going to feel immediate.”

Kodak had to manufacture a new type of film especially for Oppenheimer

Film purist Nolan filmed the biopic on large format cameras with IMAX 70mm film, but there was one small problem.

Oppenheimer features two timelines with one in colour and another in black-and-white. Unfortunately, black and white IMAX 70mm film didn’t exist so cinematographer Hoyte van Hoytema put in a call to Kodak.

He told Variety: “They came out with test rolls for us to run through our camera. We had to re-engineer our cameras a little bit, and we had to remake our pressure plates and our backend lab work needed to be readjusted.”

“I do remember when Chris and I were sitting in the cinema and watching the results of our first black and white test and it was just freaking amazing. We had never seen anything like it.”

Cillian had no physics knowledge – but one co-star was well-prepared

Benny Safdie
Benny Safdie

Michael Loccisano via Getty Images

The Inception star has admitted that he doesn’t “have the intellectual capacity to understand quantum mechanics” but the same can’t be said for Benny Safdie, who plays Edward Teller.

Prior to becoming an actor, Benny was a budding scientist and studied nuclear physics in high school.

“I was working with a physicist at Columbia University,” he told Vulture. “I was doing cosmic rays. It is a deep passion of mine.”

And another actor previously starred in another Oppenheimer-inspired project

Christopher Denham, who plays Klaus Fuchs, appeared in the 2014 series Manhattan, which took its name from the project developing the atomic weapons.

We won’t spoil the TV drama but Christopher’s Manhattan character, the entirely fictional Jim Meeks, has parallels to his Oppenheimer alter-ego.

There are no deleted scenes and there’ll never be a director’s cut

Nolan’s love of IMAX cameras and 70mm film makes movie-making incredibly expensive, so he makes sure every single second of his movies is mapped out before yelling ‘action’.

Cillian told Collider: “There’s no deleted scenes in Chris Nolan movies. That’s why there are no DVD extras on his movies because the script is the movie. He knows exactly what’s going to end up – he’s not fiddling around with it trying to change the story. That is the movie.”

Oppenheimer features Nolan’s first ever sex scenes

Despite having directed 11 feature films before starting work on his latest, Nolan had never directed intimate scenes before.

Oppenheimer features sex scenes with the titular scientist and Jean Tatlock, a member of the communist party who was his lover before and during his marriage (played by Florence Pugh).

Florence Pugh and Cillian Murphy in Oppenheimer
Florence Pugh and Cillian Murphy in Oppenheimer

Justifying the intimate moments, Nolan told Insider they are “essential” to understanding Oppenheimer’s life as a whole.

“His very intense relationship with Jean Tatlock […] is one of the most important things in his life,” he said. “But not least for the fact that Jean Tatlock was very explicitly a Communist and his obsession with her therefore had enormous ramifications for his later life and his ultimate fate.

“It felt very important to understand their relationship and to really see inside it and understand what made it tick without being coy or allusive about it, but to try to be intimate, to try and be in there with him and fully understand the relationship that was so important to him.”

Florence Pugh’s topless scene is very different in some cinemas around the globe

The intimate scenes between Oppenheimer and his lover earned the film its R rating, but some cinema-goers noticed an odd addition to one scene.

In countries including India, Pakistan and the United Arab Emirates, digital censoring has been used to cover Florence’s body with a CGI black dress.

Nolan had been thinking about Oppenheimer since he was a teenager

The director grew up in England in the 1980s when the scientist was “a part of pop culture then, without us knowing a lot about him.”

He told Bulletin: “I think I first encountered Oppenheimer in that relation; I think he was referred to in Sting’s song about the Russians that came out then and talks about Oppenheimer’s ‘deadly toys.’

“It was the peak of CND, Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, the Greenham Common [protest]; the threat of nuclear war was when I was 12, 13, 14 – it was the biggest fear we all had,” he added.

And there’s even an Oppenheimer reference in Tenet

In the same interview, Nolan recalls learning of how the Los Alamos scientists were told there was a chance the atomic bomb could destroy the world.

He explained: “That struck me as the most dramatic situation in the history of the world, with any sort of possibility being an end to life on Earth. That’s a responsibility that nobody else in the history of the world had ever faced.

“I put a reference to that in my last film, Tenet; there’s dialogue, a reference to that exact situation by Oppenheimer. That film deals with a science-fiction extrapolation of that notion: Can you put the toothpaste back in the tube? The danger of knowledge, once knowledge is unveiled—once it’s known, once it’s fact—you can’t wind the clock back and put that away.”

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