Exclusive: Trailer for Jean Rollin Documentary Coming to ARROW

orchestrator storm trailer

After a successful screening at Arrow FrightFest, Orchestrator of Storms: The Fantastique World of Jean Rollin the superb documentary chronicling the life and work of the cult French director will be heading to ARROW in 2023. You can check out the exclusive trailer below.

The life and work of Eurocult director Jean Rollin is put under the spotlight in this fascinating documentary. From struggling artist with an unconventional upbringing to the purveyor of New Wave surrealist fantastique via such distinctive and unique films as The Rape of the Vampire, The Iron Rose, Fascination, Lips of Blood and The Living Dead Girl, friends, critics and actors tell all. Sex and nudity, innocence and perversity, stunning visuals and rule-breaking became Rollin trademarks and you’ll find out why in this provocative, moving and enlightening look at his myth and the magic. This is a must-watch for admirers of the prolific, provocative and hugely influential genre legend Rollin.

Orchestrator of Storms: The Fantastique World of Jean Rollin will also be screening at the Festival Européen du Film Fantastique de Strasbourg on September 29th and 30th. You can read our review here.

HASBRO TO UNLEASH ENGINE OF VENGEANCE ON FANS


Ghost Rider and his supernaturally powered 1969 Dodge Charger will be available in 1:12 scale thanks to the fans at Hasbro’s crowd-funding service, HasLab.

Ghost Rider celebrates it’s 50th Anniversary this year and Hasbro has chosen Robbie Reyes and his hell-powered muscle car to mark the occasion.

The toy features;  The Engine of Vengeance vehicle inspired by the supernatural muscle car in Marvel Comics All-New Ghost Rider (2014)  with an exclusive Robbie Reyes Ghost Rider 6-inch scale figure with comic-inspired accessories, including real metal chain.

The car  is fully equipped with 20 LEDs for scorching Hellfire light-up effects in tires, engine, grill, tailpipes, and driver’s seat headrest, interchangeable tires and flame effect pieces.

More information can be found via the HASLAB website.

Meg DeLacy | STARGIRL

Stargirl Season 3 continues in earnest. We’re about a third of the way through the season, meaning once-murky plot points and motivations are starting to reveal themselves. Showrunner Geoff Johns and company structure the story as a whodunit, allowing them to up their game and find new ways to surprise and enthrall viewers. As always, though, the show’s true brilliance shines from its complex, compassionate portrayals of both its heroes and villains.

One of Season 3’s most surprising arcs is Meg DeLacy’s turn as Cindy Burman/Shiv, a reformed mean girl later revealed to be the tormented daughter of Injustice Society member Dragon King. Throughout the first two seasons, DeLacy portrayed Cindy as a cruel, angry high schooler with more baggage than Frankenstein’s monster. Now, after a harrowing rescue from the Shadowlands, Cindy is determined to “break good.”

We caught up with DeLacy earlier this week to talk about Cindy, her struggle, and how occasional bits of improv altered the way the character was written. Check it out!

STARBURST: Let’s start by catching viewers up on what Cindy Burman is up to in Season 3.

Meg DeLacy: She kind of changes track a little bit and is trying to put away her villainous side. She’s trying to be a little more positive, little more good, trying to help out the greater good in Blue Valley and prove herself that she can be part of the JSA. That’s her mission, at least toward the beginning of this season.

One of the best things about how Cindy is written is that she goes in the direction of a person who really wants to be included and wants to be liked. The writers very easily could have played up the “Is she good or bad?” question but they don’t. They very purposefully portray her as good.

I do not think she’s focused on trying to make other people’s live a living hell anymore. I think she is trying to genuinely help and use her knowledge and her connections within the town. She’s a smart girl and I think that she sees her value. She wants to use it and she wants to use it well and share it with people. She’s not trying to cause trouble anymore but some people don’t seem to buy that.

She’s definitely trying to prove that she’s an asset. It’s as you said: she’s very smart, very connected, and she knows more about the ISA than a lot of the other characters. She’s definitely a window into how those villainous types think. This is more of a question than a comment but there’s a scene in one of the upcoming episodes where Cindy and one of the JSA members (no spoilers here!) clash. It has been building to it and made it clear that they don’t like each other. There’s not mutual trust there. There’s a moment where you see Cindy break down and she’s sad that no one seems to be there for her. It showcases how much pain she’s in.

100%. Cindy was painted as this very manipulative and cruel person, but there are reasons why a villain is a villain. So by finding the heart and underbelly of everything she says, the reasons why she does things, and remembering where she comes from, I’m able to find this soft spot in her. And only really show it in certain moments when her guard is down. This moment that you’re talking about…it lingers a little bit more because of her vulnerability, where she’s put herself now, and the fact that she’s being attacked by people who are supposed to be on the same team. They’re talking crap about her behind her back and she knows it. She’s not dumb. She can see the issue that’s arising. So it’s only a matter of time before this clash happens, especially due to the history behind this JSA member.

It was such a good, emotional scene. We really felt for Cindy.

Oh, thank you so much! I appreciate that. That was my whole goal. That means so much to me.

You mentioned earlier that you wanted to bring out this softness in Cindy. Was that always the plan for her character? How much say did you have when bringing this character to life? What was it like working so closely with Geoff Johns?

I almost feel like we kind of found it together. Toward the beginning of Season 1, all my little one-liners like, “That’s my boyfriend, bitch,” they were all very short, blunt jabs. She’s also a really good liar, so you’re often asking, “Is this for real?” Then when I read and asked questions about her backstory, such as who her dad is, where she comes from, what her goals were, it was easier for me to not play just your typical mean girl.

I feel like Geoff and I found it together. Even the writers would notice moments I’d sneak in here and there to show a little more heart and they’d lean into that. It was really fun to help guide but also do a pure collaboration.

The nature of her lies has changed, too. She’s no longer doing it out of malice. It’s now more of a self-preservation kind of thing. She’s guarding her secrets because she doesn’t know how her teammates are going to react. That’s really smart because she doesn’t really trust them either. From her perspective, she shouldn’t.

No, she shouldn’t. She really wants to. I think Courtney’s probably the closest one she does trust because of what they went through in Season 2 in the Shadowlands. That’s her whole goal, to keep her own personal issues under wraps. At least for now. She really, truly doesn’t know what’s happening. She’s feeling it happen. She has ideas about where she can find more information and get help, which is what she starts to do. It gets her in trouble and creates more suspicion around her motives.

One of the most beautiful things about Stargirl as a series is its theme that the way we treat each other matters. Every character interacts with this theme in a specific way. How do you feel Cindy interacts with this idea?

I think that claim has become way more important to her now more than ever. She remembers how she’s been treated, not only currently but in her past. It scarred her, being treated like a science experiment instead of a daughter. That really broke her. It caused a struggle with her having trust in the world and having any kind of faith in general. So bringing that in and applying that now toward the way she’s treating people and how that may create warmness in her soul is important. She doesn’t want to be treated like crap anymore. Courtney has been one of the only people who has given her the benefit of the doubt. She doesn’t want to squander that or take advantage. But also, she does want to take advantage a bit…in a positive way!

STARGIRL Season 3 is currently screening on The CW in the US.

Nima Fakhrara | LOU

Composer Nima Fakhrara is no stranger to action, having scored the likes of The Courier, Danger One, and Becky, but his “suspenseful, vibey score” for Netflix’s Lou–produced by Bad Robot, and starring Academy Award-winner Allison Janney and Jurnee Smollett–might be his biggest yet. The film, directed by Anna Foerster, sees “A mysterious loner living a quiet life with her dog battles the elements and her own dark past when a neighbor’s little girl is kidnapped during a storm.”

For this upcoming cat-and-mouse, action-thriller feature film, Fakhara wanted his score to have the sort of tape-scratch elements found on cassette recordings of the 1980s. Composing a clean and modern score, he ran everything through an old cassette player – recording all his score audio onto cassette tape, and then captured that recording digitally to play around with and find the right kind of ’80s sound he was going for.

We spoke with the composer about all of this and more ahead of Lou‘s debut on Netflix, where it premieres on Friday, September 23rd.

STARBURST: Where are you speaking to us from?

Nima Fakhrara: I’m actually in LA, of all places. I’m here for the Lou premier, which was yesterday and and I’m heading back tomorrow.

Where’s your studio?

In February, we built kind of a small little farmhouse in Connecticut. So now, basically I work mostly out of Connecticut now and it’s pretty nice. I can’t complain. It’s basically the dream that me and the family have had for a while. I get to wake up every morning and write. That was always the point. We’re in the middle of the forest and stuff like that, so, but I get to come back to LA all the time.

We love the fact that you’re in a small farmhouse in the woods, as that seems to dovetail perfectly with the score for Lou. Did it offer any inspiration in terms of being in a similar situation?

I think that’s why they hired me. [laughs] Sure. Absolutely. It was really a really funny thing, ’cause all of this was a two-year plan for us to move to Connecticut and Lou kind of came about in February, early February kind of thing. So it was really funny. When I was starting this score, I was in the middle of the woods during a New England winter. It was very similar to Lou’s life. I was basically stuck in a cabin and just writing music for Lou. It was really fun. It was some of my most fun I’ve had in a project. It all worked out.

This isn’t your first foray into action. You did the score for Becky a couple years ago, among other. Is there something a appealing about what action allows? You got to do some fun stuff with this score, but it feels like you go to go a little bit further than standard action tropes.

Well for this one, it was a little bit different, ’cause we are dealing with a Netflix/JJ Abrams movie. It’s not an indie action film that I could throw the kitchen sink at it and then we could figure out what it is, but the beauty of this film became that I was able to experiment and they wanted something unconventional.

They didn’t want an action movie–and this was the entire team, including JJ, [director] Anna Foerster, Jon [Cohen, producer], Hannah [Minghella, producer]–everybody at Bad Robot and Netflix, and that was very refreshing to hear as well as to be asking for. The job for me in in that moment for Lou was to how to create the convention realities with the unconvention that I usually like to mess around with.

I was capable of giving that to them and to keep everybody happy and to make sure that I do my job correctly, but still do it some sort of a fresh take of it. How do we do that? That was the challenging part about it.

If it’s an action movie, you’ve gotta get blood pumping, but Lou is not your typical action film.

Oh, no. We have probably–without giving away anything–three, four action scenes. You’re watching Alison Janney kick ass and it’s pretty fucking cool to see that. That was the fun part. It was like, “How do I create this momentum within the entire score without us feeling that it’s another action film?”

To that end, that’s what really made us want to talk to you–the idea that you recorded all of this onto cassette tape. Is it correct to assume it was inspired a bit by the Walkman that the daughter, Vee, has during the early parts of that movie?

Yeah. It was, kind of. You know, the whole movie takes place in the ’80s. I didn’t wanna age the score or write it in the style of the that time period, because we’re dealing with a modern character with modern kind of things and I was like, “Huh, how do I do this?” and then cassettes came into play.

I recorded every single element on a cassette before it went to Pro Tools and even when we recorded at the Village, everything was being recorded on a cassette before it was coming into Pro Tools, so you get this really interesting warmth and texture. I was able to play with all of this, literally just taking the cassette tapes and just stretching them, making it move faster and then throwing all of this into synthesizers. I wasted a lot of cassettes, but it was so much fun.

It was a big challenge ’cause you’re dealing with tapes and now you gotta figure out how to deal with tapes and how to take the take from this one and make it this one. It was a big challenge in that sense, but the texture, it just gives you the warmth of the time period and how it was recorded. One of the other things I made sure to do in the sense of the way it was being recorded at the time was just smaller ensembles and intimate sounds, and then just everything is in your face. Extreme panning and things like that just kind of brought it alive into the cassette world.

You alluded to this earlier in Lou is a Bad Robot Netflix movie, starring Allison Janney. This is not low profile in any way, shape or form, but it also is a period piece. What are your trepidations going into this?

At the end of the day, I’m a composer and I’m a servant to film. It doesn’t matter $700 million worth of story or if it’s $150,000 worth of story. At the end of the day, I’m just scoring to the characters and idea of what these characters are going through and commentating on it, whether it’s a small little animation or a big movie, the fun part becomes is that how do you do something fresh every time? And how do you approach it with a sense that, “You’re still doing your job.” Also, there is–you are dealing with your idols.

When you hang out with JJ Abrams, it’s like, “Oh, cool. This is JJ.” It’s just a different world, but at the same time, at the end of the day, I’m still a composer. I’m still that little kid that just likes to write stories and likes to make music. I guess that the recklessness and my child’s kind of mentality just comes into play as well within the music of itself. At the end of the day, it’s just music.

Lou hits Netflix on Friday, September 23.