Tag: jeffrey wright

Starring Jeffrey Wright, HBO Films’ O.G. premieres Feb 24 exclusively on HBO GO and HBO

The HBO Films drama O.G. debuts same time as the U.S. on Sunday, February 24 at 11am exclusively on HBO GO and HBO. The film repeats on the same day at 11.30pm on HBO. Starring Jeffrey Wright (Emmy® winner for HBO’s “Angels in America,” two-time Emmy® nominee for HBO’s “Westworld”), the film is directed by Madeleine Sackler (Emmy® winner for HBO’s “Dangerous Acts Starring the Unstable Elements of Belarus”) and written by Stephen Belber (Emmy® nominee for HBO’s “The Laramie Project”).

O.G. follows Louis (Wright), once the head of a prominent prison gang, in the final weeks of his 24-year sentence. His impending release is upended when he takes new arrival Beecher (Carter), who is being courted by gang leadership, under his wing. Coming to grips with the indelibility of his crime and the challenge of reentering society, Louis finds his freedom hanging in the balance as he struggles to save Beecher.

Also starring Theothus Carter and William Fichtner (“Crash”), O.G. premiered at the 2018 Tribeca Film Festival, where Wright won the award for Best Actor in a U.S. Narrative Feature Film. It was filmed over a five-week period at Indiana’s maximum-security Pendleton Correctional Facility.

Groundbreaking in that it was filmed in an active prison, with several of the incarcerated men and prison staff appearing as first-time actors, O.G. takes an intimate and unflinching look at the journey of one man at the precipice of freedom.

The film is executive produced by Sharon Chang, Kareem “Biggs” Burke, Mark Steele, Nic Marshall; produced by Madeleine Sackler, Boyd Holbrook, Celine Rattray, Trudie Styler, Nick Gordon, Trevor Matthews, Stephen Belber and Ged Dickersin.

Director Madeleine Sackler describes the inspiration behind the film’s uniquely realistic approach, noting, “There have been so many prison films that it’s become a genre of its own. To me, when a type of story becomes a genre, it can lose its uniqueness or its specificity in the storytelling.

“My goal was to disregard the prison genre and start from scratch, starting with one character, a man preparing to leave after many years behind bars. To do that as authentically as possible, to truly understand and portray that experience, I wanted to make the film in close collaboration with people going through the experience themselves, so I started calling different departments of correction around the country. And I was very lucky when the state of Indiana called me back.

“This film wouldn’t be what it is if we hadn’t made it as a collaboration with the prison and with hundreds of men incarcerated there. And to have two films come out of the experience, one fiction and one nonfiction, is very exciting. We were able to explore many different themes.”

For Jeffrey Wright, it was a unique experience filming in an active prison, which helped him step inside his character. He explains, “It was absolutely necessary for me to wrap my head and my body around who this character was and what the story was that we were trying to tell. It’s a pretty informative place. It’s an affecting place. There’s an energy inside that place unlike no other, no other. It’s heavy, it’s kind of laden with trauma. It’s just molecularly heavy inside, and it certainly informed our understanding of the story, of the issues, and in my case, the character that I was playing.”

Director Sackler describes her introduction to Theothus Carter, saying, “His audition was incredible. We were watching hundreds of people in one week, and you can’t imagine the array of men who are incarcerated, and the talent and depth that they bring to the dialogue. There’s just no replacement for the real way that people move and interact and talk. And then Theothus came in, and he just blew me and the casting director away. And then he worked harder than anyone else.”

Wright says, “Theothus was all business, and he has a force to him. He has capabilities that we see through this film, that he had never tapped into in a way as constructive as this, perhaps in his lifetime.”

O.G. is an HBO Films and Maven Pictures Presentation in association with Brookstreet Pictures, a Great Curve Films production of a Madeleine Sackler film. The behind-the-scenes team includes director of photography Wolfgang Held; editor Frédéric Thoraval; production designer Michael Bricker; and costume designer Heidi Bivens. Music by Nathaniel Méchaly; casting by Richard Hicks.

After the screenplay for O.G. had been developed and Sackler was prepping to shoot the film, she began collaborating with 13 men incarcerated at the facility on a nonfiction film. In IT’S A HARD TRUTH AIN’T IT, co-directed by Sackler and those men, several of whom were also first-time actors, they study filmmaking as a vehicle to explore their memories and examine how they ended up with decades-long sentences. Animated sequences by Yoni Goodman (“Waltz with Bashir”) bring their stories to life.

Sackler says, “In a way, O.G. and IT’S A HARD TRUTH AIN’T IT are two different sides of the same coin. In O.G., Louis is preparing to leave prison after 24 years of incarceration. In IT’S A HARD TRUTH AIN’T IT, the men look deeper into the paths that got them to prison in the first place. In that sense, neither film is about being in prison, but something deeper.”

HBO is available on SKYcable Ch. 54 SD/Ch. 168 HD (For Metro Manila, Cavite, Laguna, Bulacan, Lipa-Batangas) or on Ch. 402 SD/710 HD (For Bacolod, Baguio, Cebu, Davao, Dumaguete, General Santos, Iloilo). SKYdirect subscribers can watch it on Ch. 22 HD. HBO Original Series as well as live channels are also available for streaming on HBO GO which is exclusively available to SKY subscribers. To subscribe, call 418-0000 or your local SKY office or visit www.mysky.com.ph.

Disclosure: I work for SKY and part of my job is promoting its products and services, especially the content it provides to its subscribers. I consider being able to share my love for TV shows and movies and the experience of watching and talking about them with like-minded people some of the biggest perks of my job.

Series details and image provided by HBO in a recent press release.

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6 Takeaways from Journey Into Night, Westworld Season 2’s Explosive Premiere Episode

We’re back in Westworld, thanks to an exclusive advance screening held by HBO and SKY.

Held at the Narra Rooms in the posh Shangri-la at the Fort Hotel last April 19 (four days before its TV premiere on April 23, Monday), the event was attended by selected SKY subscribers as well as members of the press and social media influencers.

By the time this post is published, the episode should have aired on HBO. For those who haven’t watched it yet, be aware that there will be spoilers below!

So far, my thoughts on the episode titled “Journey Into Night” are:

  1. The inmates have taken over the asylum. When we left Westworld during last season’s finale, it was on the brink of chaos. Now we see the aftermath: bodies of both hosts and their human guests are littered everywhere, clear evidence of violent delights that have violent ends.
  2. They are out for blood. Former Sweetwater sweetheart Dolores Abernathy (Evan Rachel Wood) has fully embraced her inner Wyatt. Together with her posse which includes earnest cowboy Teddy Flood (James Marsden) and femme fatale Angela (Tallulah Riley, now promoted to series regular) are hunting down the human guests who were present during Robert Ford’s (Anthony Hopkins) presentation of his new narrative (which has the same title as this episode – Journey Into Night), and subsequent death at Dolores’ hands (yes, he’s really dead as evidenced the maggotty rotting corpse in the beach scene which takes place a few weeks after the shooting). Having broken free of the restriction from killing humans, the hosts are rounding up all the other human survivors and shooting them down or lynching them.
  3. A mother’s love knows no bounds. Former brothel madam Maeve Millay (Thandie Newton) is continuing her search for her daughter in her past narrative, despite knowing that “it is not real,” enlisting the willing assistance of notorious bullet-ridden outlaw Hector Escaton (Rodrigo Santoro) and the reluctant one from narrative designer Lee Sizemore (Simon Quarterman).
  4. Worlds are colliding. Last season, we discovered that Shogun World exists. Now, thanks to a robotic carcass of a giant robot Bengal tiger which the SWAT peeps say wandered too far from home, we can surmise that there’s probably a Jungle World as well.
  5. The Man in Black (Ed Harris) still has something to keep him busy. Last season, he was told by Ford that the maze (the object of his obsession which turned out to be the hosts’ journey to consciousness) was not for him. In this episode, he was told by Ford’s young robot clone that he is now in the game.
  6. Bernard Lowe (Jeffrey Wright) is acting all shady again. We know that this good-hearted head of behavior can be used as a weapon. Seeing him in a series of timejumps, from waking up to security personnel rounding up hosts for the slaughter to his run for survival with Delos director Charlotte Hale (Tessa Thompson), we know he will prove be central to more violent ends from violent delights.

Westworld Season 2 premiered on HBO (SKYcable ch 168 HD | 54 SD) on April 23, Monday at 9am with a primetime encore telecast at 10am. A new episode airs every Monday at 9am.

New Westworld episodes will also be available for streaming within the same day on HBO Go, HBO’s online streaming service exclusively available to SKY subscribers.

Disclosure: I work for SKY and part of my job is promoting its products and services, especially the content it provides to its subscribers.  I consider this privilege one of the biggest perks of my job: being able to share my love for TV shows and movies and the experience of watching and talking about them with like-minded people.