Five Behind-the-Scenes Veterans Reveal Their Work on the Year’s Top Movies for Grownups

There’s an intimacy Hiro shares with the actors, and not just because it takes hours to apply prosthetics. (He estimates that Johnson sat in the makeup chair for three to four hours for the facial features alone.)

There’s also a tricky balance with making a movie star — who the audiences are presumably coming to see — look unlike themselves. “Sometimes I cannot take it far enough,” Hiro says, noting that his designs have to be functional as well as believable. “It’s also based on [an actor’s] commitment. The first [makeup] test is when they understand what they are getting into.” That’s when both the actor and the artist learn how the prosthetics will work to the film’s advantage and as a tool for the performance. “It’s just like a costume,” he says.

(From left) Casting director Francine Maisler, Viola Davis, Wunmi Mosaku and Michael B. Jordan attend the SAG-AFTRA Foundation Conversations Presents “Sinners” Dec. 14, 2025, in Los Angeles.

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Casting Director Francine Maisler

Francine Maisler, whose age was not disclosed, isn’t used to attention. But the veteran casting director, whose résumé boasts 195 credits across film and television since she got her start in the early ’90s (and includes collaborations with directors James L. Brooks, Michael Mann, Noah Baumbach, Alejandro G. Iñárritu and Aaron Sorkin, among many others), is in the running for this year’s inaugural Oscar for best achievement in casting, a long overdue addition to the awards. “I’m very much a behind-the-scenes [person],” says Maisler. “I’m being thrust in front of the camera, which I’m trying to get used to.”

It makes sense that she’s in demand for Oscar campaigning as much as she is as a casting director. In addition to Apple TV’s The Studio, for which she won her second Emmy this year (following her first win for HBO’s Succession in 2022), Maisler cast eight films released in 2025: Mickey 17, Holland, Sinners, Mountainhead, Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere, The Lost Bus, A Big Bold Beautiful Journey and The Running Man. Her schedule remains busy not just because she loves her job. “I did not know that I wanted to be a casting director,” Maisler explains. “I knew that I loved film, I loved television, I loved theater and just wanted to be around it.”

Maisler sees her work as in service of the director, bringing their vision to life by finding the best players for the film. For Sinners helmer Ryan Coogler, whom Maisler calls “the most remarkable young director I’ve had the chance to work with,” that required a very specific performer. “Ryan said, ‘I’m going to start this little film.… Are you available to go look for this young 18-year-old kid who can sing the blues and play music?’ ” she recalls. Maisler’s search took her to blues clubs and music conservatories before she received a self-tape from a relatively unknown singer-songwriter named Miles Caton. “He was in his basement and very darkly lit, and this voice came off the tape that just stopped you in your tracks.” Soon enough, Caton was flown to Los Angeles to read with star Michael B. Jordan, after which he booked the part — and that little film went on to gross more than $300 million across the globe and is now a front-runner for the Oscar for best picture.

Maisler had a more personal investment in 55-year-old director Scott Cooper’s Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere. “I’m a New Jersey girl,” she says of her love for the musician. “I was the girl who was in the nosebleed section and never got to the floor. I was very familiar with who was in the band and even who was in the audience.” During production of the film, she returned to her old stomping grounds, making a rare set visit to The Stone Pony in Asbury Park, where the real Bruce Springsteen wandered around as the production recreated moments from his life. Usually she is on to the next film by the time a project enters production, but how could she not go to The Stone Pony? “If I’m ever going to visit a set, that’s when you go,” Maisler says, laughing.

(From left) Actors Jayme Lawson, Wunmi Mosaku, Michael B. Jordan, Miles Caton, Li Jun Li during the filming of “Sinners.” For costume designer Ruth Carter, working on the film captured the history-spanning work that has defined her career.

Warner Bros/Courtesy Everett Collection

Costume Designer Ruth Carter

In the middle of director Ryan Coogler’s new film Sinners, Miles Caton’s blues prodigy Sammie Moore plays an original song in the Clarksdale, Mississippi, juke joint established by his twin cousins, Elijah “Smoke” Moore and Elias “Stack” Moore (both played by Michael B. Jordan). It’s in that moment that Sammie’s musical powers come to life, summoning ancestral spirits from the past, present and future who weave through the crowd of dancing revelers, joining in the celebration.

The film takes place in 1932, but the scene transcends time as African tribal, swing and hip-hop dancers join the Jim Crow–era crowd — ultimately capturing the history-spanning work that has defined 65-year-old Ruth E. Carter’s costumes throughout her career. “It was very clear, when we read the script, that this was going to be a very special moment in the film,” says the costume designer, a two-time Oscar winner for her work on Coogler’s Black Panther films. Despite watching the scene nearly “maybe 100 times” in post-production, Carter was still in awe when she first saw the film on the big screen. “I felt like I saw it for the first time.”

Carter got her start with filmmaker Spike Lee, 68, providing contemporary looks for his early films School Daze, Do the Right Thing, Mo’ Better Blues and Jungle Fever. Lee’s Malcolm X earned Carter her first Oscar nomination in 1993 (making her the first Black designer to receive a nom in the category), and later she earned her second nom for another period film: 79-year-old Steven Spielberg’s Amistad. Between that second nom and her history-making Oscar win for the Afro-futurist looks in Black Panther are movies set across all timelines from directors like John Singleton, Lee Daniels and Ava DuVernay.

Carter’s work always begins the same way no matter the project: by talking with the director before she even reads the script. “Listening is a big part of the process because you're very much like a baby — you’re hearing what the director’s passionate about,” Carter explains. With Sinners, she knew from the start that it was a personal project for Coogler. “He called me on the phone and [said], ‘I’m gonna write a movie about the blues,’ and he told me about his uncle.” (Coogler has credited his late uncle James for his appreciation for the genre.) 

Of course, there was a personal element in the film for Carter, too. “I can’t help but love the history of Black Americans in this country,” she adds. “As [Ryan talked] about it, I [felt] a sense of responsibility and passion about the story, the time period, what people were going through and how the blues were created out of nothing.”

Carter notes that she still incorporates what she learned early in her career when she’s working on something new. Take, for example, needing to reflect the hot and humid Mississippi weather. “I was always on set … carrying a bottle of glycerin and water [so that] nobody was dry,” she recalls. “I actually got that from my days [with] Spike Lee and Do the Right Thing. He wanted to show the hottest day of the year. We went in with water bottles and were squirting people and making them [look] sweaty. It actually does work.”

(From left) Hugh Jackman, Kate Hudson, and writer-director Craig Brewer chat during filming of "Song Sung Blue," about Neil Diamond’s life.

Courtesy Focus Features

Writer-Director Craig Brewer

Song Sung Blue writer-director Craig Brewer admits he was never much of a Neil Diamond fan as a young filmmaker. One might understandably expect that from the 54-year-old director of Hustle & Flow, Brewer’s breakout film that featured Terrence Howard as a hustler-turned-rapper. Neil Diamond, for Brewer, was “one of those artists that your parents’ generation really loved.” 

Ahead of his latest film — which stars Hugh Jackman, 57, and Kate Hudson as musicians Mike and Claire Sardina, who performed as the Neil Diamond tribute band Lightning and Thunder in the ’90s and 2000s — Brewer comes clean about his change of heart toward the singer-songwriter’s music. “What happens is: You start living life,” says Brewer. “Some songs just completely speak to you. The more I started getting into his lyrics, I was like, ‘This guy’s really into isolation. He really knows what it feels like to be lonely and to long for love and connection.’ ”

Brewer’s appreciation for Diamond came before he had learned about Lightning and Thunder’s story, which features the exciting highs and tragic lows often seen in musical dramas. Many of Brewer’s films center around music — the blues in Black Snake Moan, rock ’n’ roll in his remake of Footloose, hip-hop in Hustle & Flow — so a project inspired by Diamond’s songs was promising, even if a traditional biopic didn’t interest him. “It seemed like a perfect situation, to give people that fix of fan love but at the same time tell this real human story that is rather unexpected,” he says. “People may go into it thinking that this is going to be an inspirational joy ride. But then they realize that there's some real human stakes and conflict involved.”

Song Sung Blue is a continuation of Hugh Jackman’s foray as a musical entertainer, following The Greatest Showman, The Music Man on Broadway and a globe-spanning world tour, while the film boasts Kate Hudson’s best work since her breakout in another musical drama, Cameron Crowe’s Almost Famous. Brewer says this project came to his stars at the perfect moment. “I try to grab actors at a time when they're experiencing something comparable to their characters,” he says. “[Hugh’s fans] love him and his kindness. He’s genuine in his heart and soul, and he loves all people. That also was the spirit of Mike Sardina.” 

Brewer was also inspired by Hudson’s own music career after she released her debut album, Glorious, in 2024 (although she’d long since proven herself a double threat in the same fashion as her mother Goldie Hawn, having also sung her own vocals in the movie musical Nine and on the TV series Glee). “For an actor, when you're waiting around on roles, you want to have some sort of say as to who you are. And so she was like, ‘I'm going to make music because I can do it. I can write the songs, I can record the music. I can perform and have some control over my life,’ ” says Brewer, noting the parallels between his actor and her character, Claire. “[Kate] kind of disarms you [the viewer], and then by doing that, you're part of her journey. When she goes to this painful place and tries to move forward, you feel just the women in the audience taking every essential step with her.”

Brewer has long resided in Memphis and credits his adopted hometown with keeping him on the filmmaking path. “The thing that has kept me happy in my career is that I can have a community that knew me when I was making films in the streets of Memphis with a small camcorder," he says. Brewer also notes the cultural communities that serve as inspiration: “You're constantly surrounded by musicians.”

Because at the end of the day, of course, it all comes back to the music. “I remember listening to the song ‘Play Me’ over and over again, and I could see two people playing music together,” Brewer recalls. “I can kind of see it, and then I can write it. [Music is] not something that I just sprinkle on at the end. It's very much involved in the writing of it.”