‘Dawn of the Planet of the Apes’ stars Andy Serkis as Caesar who’s joined by Jason Clarke, Gary Oldman, Keri Russell, Toby Kebbell, Kodi Smit-McPhee, Enrique Murciano, Kirk Acevedo and Judy Greer. Director Matt Reeves (‘Cloverfield’ and ‘Let Me In’) takes over from Rupert Wyatt who didn’t return for the sequel after “creative differences” with the studio.

In this photo, first tweeted by Reeves with the note “A New Dawn…” shows Caesar has learned how to ride a horse and, along with another ape, looks to be rounding up and talking (yes, talking) to some of the surviving humans. That’s Jason Clarke out in front and you can see Keri Russell off in the back.

According to Fox, ‘Dawn of the Planet of the Apes’ goes like this:

A growing nation of genetically evolved apes led by Caesar is threatened by a band of human survivors of the devastating virus unleashed a decade earlier. They reach a fragile peace, but it proves short-lived, as both sides are brought to the brink of a war that will determine who will emerge as Earth’s dominant species.

Considering the movie is called ‘Dawn of the Planet of the Apes’ we’re going to go out on a limb and say that humans aren’t going to win that war on who is Earth’s dominant species.

‘Dawn of the Planet of the Apes’ hits theaters on May 23, 2014.

GALLERY LINKS:
- Dawn of the Planet of the Apes On the Set – May 10 2013

Creator Joe Weisberg and his fellow executive producer, Joel Fields, deserve a lot of credit for so deftly juggling The Americans’ different elements so well. In other hands, The Americans could have collapsed or just come off goofy or outright ridiculous, as we followed Elizabeth (Russell) and Phillip Jennings (Matthew Rhys) and saw their insane lives – running a travel agency as part of their cover, raising two kids (who they had in the first place in order to sell the lie) and, you know, going on various spy missions, complete with elaborate disguises, which often involve having sex with or killing various people.

But the scenario, as heightened as it was, felt genuine and engaging the vast majority of the time throughout the first season. It felt real and the Jennings were characters easy to invest in and care about – all the more notable given they are, ultimately, The Enemy, working against the United States.

An invaluable reason for this investment was, of course, thanks to the performances. Russell and Rhys are simply terrific in The Americans, playing two people who are asked to do the unthinkable time and again. She’s the hard-edged one; much more militant, much more strict. He is quicker to turn to sentiment or be affected by emotion. But both are very smart and very skilled and Russell and Rhys sold all of these qualities. We bought it when Elizabeth and Phillip were growing closer and sharing warm, genuine moments, while also believing these two could perform amazingly dangerous acts – and also be utterly deadly in a fight. It’s a tricky mix that not every actor could pull off so well.

A strong supporting cast surrounded them throughout the first season as well. Margo Martindale was predictably wonderful as the Jennings’ new handler, Claudia, bringing the same sort of unassuming ferocity she had on Justified. Martindale and Russell both went all out as Claudia and Elizabeth had increasingly angry conversations – which one time turned outright when Elizabeth assaulted Claudia. “Tell whoever approved this that your face is a present from me to them!” is still a standout moment.

Noah Emmerich brought exactly the right quiet intensity to his role as Stan, the FBI agent who seemed quite rational and thoughtful – but who clearly had seen some bad stuff in his time on the job (which hopefully we’ll learn more about in the future – including his time undercover with white supremacists). And Alison Wright and Annet Mahendru were both strong as Martha and Nina; two very different women whose similar scenarios, working in offices the KGB and FBI were targeting, led them to both be pulled into the Jennings’ and Stan’s plans.

Of course, Martha remained completely unaware of what was going on all season – a tragedy ready to happen, as she fell so hard for “Clark,” a man who doesn’t exist. Nina in the meantime was aware what had happened from the get go and her eventual decision to turn the tables on the man who had, in fact, forced her to become a double agent in the first place, made a lot of sense. I’m excited and nervous to see what happens for both Martha and Nina in Season 2, with both Mahendru and Wright promoted to series regular status.

The Americans moved fast – sometimes a bit too fast. It still seems like a bit of a waste to have Gregory (Derek Luke) killed so quickly, when their felt like a lot more could be done with the idea of this American who had been turned by Elizabeth and also become her true confidant and lover. It also seemed surprisingly early in the series to have Elizabeth and Phillip split from one another, since the fact that this was only Season 1 made their reconciliation feel like a certainty the entire time they were apart. Still, plenty of great drama did come from this situation and by the time Elizabeth asked Phillip, in Russian no less, “Come home,” it was very easy to feel genuine empathy and emotion for them…

…which is all the more impressive considering what we’ve seen them do. They’ve committed all sorts of crimes, including threatening to kill a college kid whose mother was important to their mission, and took out more than a few people along the way. All in service of defeating America. And let’s not forget that poor security guard Elizabeth killed in cold blood, when he nearly (unwittingly) stopped them. There’s no sugar coating that act. And yet, we know Elizabeth is no psychopathic killer. She killed that man because he was endangering their mission and Elizabeth is a loyalist through and through – determined to do what she thinks is for the greater good, which means following her country’s orders.

On the heels of Vic Mackey, Walter White and Tony Sorpano, The Americans offered a very different kind of anti-hero with the Jennings’, and especially with Elizabeth. If you’re an American, she is quite literally the enemy, given the era and scenario of this show. But she and Phillip are so fully formed as characters that we can still empathize with them and see their point of view. If viewers can be so involved with corrupt, murderous cops and drug dealing egomaniacs, this show asked why we couldn’t be invested in the story of a Russian spy determined to subvert the American way of life. And it proved, quickly, that we certainly could be, when offered characters this strong.

What was also great about The Americans was it made sure that in a world packed with spies, there was a level playing field. Characters rarely did dumb things just to move the plot along. Nina’s bosses noticed her questionable behavior and had her followed – and the FBI noticed she was being tailed and abruptly called off the meet. Sometimes attempts to assassinate or grab someone hit a snag, because the person begin targeted was well trained themself and able to fight back. Victories had to be earned.

Meanwhile, there were plenty of twists and turns and escalating tension, with the threat of the Jennings being found out a constant threat – one that also extended to Nina by the end. With Elizabeth’s contact in custody and her daughter now suspicious, there’s plenty to worry about next season and beyond… And at this point, how can you not be hooked?

Oh, and let’s not forget, the 80s music is awesome!

Source: http://uk.ign.com/

GALLERY LINKS:
- Magazine Scans TV Guide – April 29 2013

GALLERY LINKS:
- Screen Captures 1×13 – The Colonel

If you’re a fan of the show, you may want to watch the whole thing. But be aware, developments that occurred late in Season 1 and in the season finale are discussed by panelists Joe Weisberg (executive producer/creator), Joel Fields (executive producer), Matthew Rhys (who plays Russian spy Philip Jennings), Noah Emmerich (who plays FBI agent Stan Beeman), Margo Martindale (Claudia) and Annet Mahendru (Nina). You’ll also want to check out our recent interviews with Rhys, Martindale and Emmerich, and a post-finale chat with Fields and Weisberg.

If you don’t have time to watch the whole hour, we’ve provided the approximate time stamps of different topics of discussion, which include: Keri Russell’s propensity for slapping Rhys just before the director shouts “Action;” wigs; the effect of clandestine work on family life; and Stan’s complicated love life.

By the way, the panel was moderated by yours truly, and I must confess — if I had known the camera would be on me that much (or at all), I would have gotten a better wig.

Source: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/

For most people, working on a hit television series is the most exciting and challenging job they’ll ever have. Joe Weisberg, creator and one of the executive producers on THE AMERICANS, says this is the case, but he was in fact a CIA agent from 1990-1994. He says the inspiration for the show came from the real-life incident a few years ago, when a group of Russian sleeper agents were uncovered living apparently ordinary lives, though it made more sense to set the story when the Cold War was at its height.

ASSIGNMENT X: You had a really interesting-sounding job. Is Hollywood actually more appealing than the CIA?

JOE WEISBERG: I have to say, I like it a lot better. And another funny thing is, the hours are a lot worse [laughs].

AX: Why did you leave the CIA?

WEISBERG: I wasn’t there very long. It’s such a bureaucracy. You say you want to leave, and they call you into an office and there’s a ton of paperwork and they call you into a little cubicle. I knew one person who, when they left, somebody said, “If you stay, we’ll bump you up a pay grade,” because that person spoke two foreign languages fluently, including a very hard-to-learn language, so the bureaucracy churned and said, “We should make an extra effort to keep this person.” [laughs] Everybody else, they have no problem with you leaving. You go into a room, they push your secrecy agreement back and read you your secrecy agreement, and it turns out if you didn’t notice the first time, there’s an extra line at the bottom of your secrecy agreement for you to sign your name again for when you leave so they can remind you of everything you promised not to talk about, but it’s all like a churning bureaucratic movie.

AX: You were in the CIA, but the primary U.S. government agency we see in THE AMERICANS is the FBI. Why is that?

WEISBERG: Well, Philip and Elizabeth are foreign spies working on American soil, and it’s the FBI counter-intelligence unit that’s responsible for tracking, chasing, fighting that threat within the continental United States. So they were juts the appropriate agency to battle against Philip and Elizabeth. The CIA does have some roles that it plays within the continental United States; specifically, they try to recruit foreigners that are here on visas or studying or things like that, so that when they go back to their countries, the CIA can run them abroad. But it’s just the FBI was the right agency.

AX: Is your fellow executive producer Joel Fields your writing partner on THE AMERICANS?

WEISBERG: Well, we’re co-show-running together, and we’re writing episodes together and we’re sort of doing the whole thing as partners.

AX: Now, did you guys know each other before, or is this a KGB/FX-arranged marriage?

WEISBERG: [laughs] Yes, this is an arranged marriage and it’s working out well.

AX: Can you talk about casting Keri Russell and Matthew Rys as your leads?

WEISBERG: It’s funny. Looking back on it, it seems like it happened easily and naturally. Gavin O’Connor, who directed the pilot, was a big voice in the casting and I think he’s known as somebody with a great gift for that and a great intuitive sense. Same for the people at FX who obviously had a lot of experience and know how to cast shows. It all just came together very naturally. And when we first saw the two of them together, we just knew right away that it was right. I feel sort of funny saying that, because that must be what everybody says, but it does feel like that’s that couple, right?

Until we started casting this, I hadn’t seen Matthew in BROTHERS AND SISTERS. I had seen Keri over the years. I hadn’t seen WAITRESS and I saw it, and I was like, “Whoa.” She could do anything. And I saw MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE III. But you know what was funny – I saw MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE, and it was like, “Okay, she can kick people and do amazing action stuff,” but after WAITRESS, it was like [sighs], “Oh, she’s so moving and powerful.” It seemed like she could just becomeElizabeth so quickly. And then the cool thing, too, was how the characters start to shake themselves around the actors in wonderful ways.

AX: There’s a scene in the pilot where the Russian general says, “The Americans have elected a madman!” Is this a show in any way for Americans who didn’t necessarily feel Ronald Reagan was a good president?

WEISBERG: Well, I think it’s got a special interest for them. I didn’t plan it for them, but it was one of the groups that I thought it was going to be interesting for them. The specific context for that speech was that, after the Soviet Union fell, a lot of stuff came out about how the Soviet leadership thought and felt about Ronald Reagan. And until the Soviet Union fell, there was nothing [known about the thinking of the Russian leadership], just speculation. It’s not that the Iron Curtain was quite as rigid, it’s not that nothing came out, but how the people at the Politburo thought and felt and talked, there was nothing. So what started coming out was, they thought he was crazy. They thought he was mentally unstable. So for him to [say about Russia], “This is the evil empire!” and to talk in that way, they thought this was a crazy man with his finger on the button, and they were terrified. I don’t know if he was literally crazy, but he was very openly committed to their destruction. I think some people feel that [Reagan was a great president] and some people think he was crazy. I’m always surprised by how little middle ground there is. That interests me.

AX: Will Philip and/or Elizabeth get involved in American politics, as volunteers or something like that?

WEISBERG: One thing I think would be really fun – I just have this storyline in my head that I want Elizabeth, when the time comes, to find herself almost working on Geraldine Ferraro’s vice-presidential campaign, which means she has to be a Democrat.

AX: Prior to creating THE AMERICANS, had you thought about the Eighties at all as a period you were interested in, or did you just feel, “This is when we need to set this story”?

WEISBERG: I hadn’t thought about it at all. In fact, I originally started thinking about the Seventies, but then it was like they had to be [in the same era as] Ronald Reagan. The funny thing is, the Eighties – the music and culture and clothes seem so rich, and everybody seems to have the perception that the Eighties was kind of a drag in all those ways.

AX: The Eighties saw the rise of today’s capitalism, so since you have main characters who are critiquing that …

WEISBERG: Yes. Thematically, it’s perfect for us in every way. It’s the perfect time frame for us. If the show keeps going, it will just end the show in time for the ending of the Cold War.

AX: Did the success of HOMELAND in any way pave the ground for THE AMERICANS?

WEISBERG: I don’t know. We were developing this before HOMELAND was around, so I don’t know if it’s helping us or not. I watch HOMELAND. I love it. A number of people in the media have said to me that HOMELAND has made the public very receptive to espionage dramas, so enough people have said that to me that I’m starting to think, “Yes.”

AX: Is there anything else you’d like to say about THE AMERICANS right now?

WEISBERG: The thing we didn’t talk about that much is, it’s supposed to be a show about a marriage, more than anything else, and what I really hope is that people will really connect to that relationship and find things in it that they relate to. As this married couple goes through the crazy things that they do, and they do some crazy, crazy things, they’re still dealing with the same things any married couple deal with as they do them.

Source: http://www.assignmentx.com/

It’s often said, admiringly, that “The Americans” is a show about marriage that is dressed up as a spy drama. One of its premises is that marriage itself is a matter of dressing up and performing, and that those enactments, particularly when children are watching, can be its most genuine part. Paige, the Jennings’s thirteen-year-old daughter, and Henry, her younger brother, watch their parents like spies. They are the hard pegs in a marriage constructed by the K.G.B. as cover for their parents, whose decision, early in the season, to figure out whether they have fallen in love with each other leads to problems on the job and a separation. (“Hitting the pause button,” as Philip describes it, when they give the children the news over a basket of fried chicken.) It’s familiarly sad.

But if the show were just about marriage it would only be half as interesting. There are many shows about men and women and children; fewer—maybe just one—in which so many characters are obsessed with the Strategic Defense Initiative, the space-based anti-missile Star Wars dream. I’ll have some spoilers here, including that the great revelation of the finale—the secret that Philip and Elizabeth think they’re risking everything to get, from an Air Force colonel who’s set up a meeting on a park bench—is that S.D.I. doesn’t actually work. The technical plans are “a fantasy.” (As, indeed, they were.) The only thing that may be real is Reagan’s enthusiasm. Nor is it clear that the truth matters to anyone; this isn’t “War Games” for grownups.

The American farce does not serve to redeem the Russians, either. Philip and Elizabeth are less antiheroes than studies in what leads apparently earnest people to behave cruelly. They represent, respectively, the banality and the ideology sides of that debate; Philip, who doesn’t seem to care much about Marxism, is at times the more ruthless than Elizabeth, who does, as when he grabs a pillow to smother the son of Caspar Weinberger’s housekeeper. They both kill a lot of people.

The real antihero may be Stan Beeman, an F.B.I. counterintelligence agent who is also the Jennings’s neighbor, played by Noah Emmerich. (Tad Friend writes about Emmerich in the magazine this week.) Stan started the season as a amiable threat, a G-man version of Jack McGee from “The Incredible Hulk.” (Matthew Rhys, who plays Philip, has some of the affect of Bill Bixby.) Now he’s carried out a revenge killing, sleeping with Nina, a young woman in the K.G.B.’s Washington rezidentura whom he’d blackmailed into sleeping with and then setting up her old boss, and generally messing up his marriage. Nina is now a triple agent, having confessed to Arkady, the new head of the K.G.B. office. (Arkady is one of many strong characters, along with Martha, the tragic F.B.I. secretary, and Claudia, the Jennings’ handler, who plays Pac-Man and gets lines like, “The first time I saw him he was standing over two dead Nazis.”)

Nina re-pledges her loyalty to the Party and State out of some mixture of personal, ideological, and maybe even patriotic motives—and the way that each of those factors has some reality and irrationality to it is, again, the show’s strength. (The spy scenes also work well in terms of craft, maybe because the head writer, Joe Weisberg, spent time with the C.I.A.) “The kind of man who did what was done to you, Nina, is weaker and more vulnerable than he seems,” Arkady tells her. He’s talking about Stan but could be describing himself or, for that matter, the Soviet Union, or any country that has lost its bearings.

If the show has a weakness it is, oddly enough, an unwillingness to fully commit to the early eighties, Henry’s “Star Wars” bedspread notwithstanding. It has more of a second-term Reagan feel, leached of the sourness of the seventies, with an admixture of Eisenhower. There is a school assembly with a heroic astronaut. Part of this is production design: only token graffiti and garbage, an unwillingness to give Keri Russell puffy hair. (Ironic, I know.) More than that, the one sort of complexity the show seems to have trouble with is the American kind.

In a single serpentine plot line a few episodes back, the show killed off two of its best characters and, not incidentally, its only two visible non-white ones: Chris Amador, Beeman’s partner; and Gregory Thomas, a black man working with the K.G.B., played by Derek Luke. This felt like a structural mistake, particularly in the case of Gregory. In the marriage plot, he created a triangle; there is an awful lot of transactional sex in “The Americans,” but his relationship with Elizabeth is portrayed as going beyond that. So do his reasons for working with the Russians. Elizabeth recruited him at a meeting of Martin Luther King’s Southern Christian Leadership Conference. He wanted to make a difference. He runs surveillance teams and gets VIN numbers filed off cars. He talks about the K.G.B as if the term had glamour.

Some critics were uncomfortable with Gregory’s back-story, worried that it wrongly impugned King’s circle—and some, over at the National Review, saw an opportunity for Schadenfreude in the idea that J. Edgar Hoover was right about the civil-rights movement being riddled with reds. But both readings are misguided. There was a whole range of reactions to the experience of racism in America; how could there not be? Injustice would be a strange machine if all the responses to it were wise. Some are utopian or tragic or enraged or just wrong. If that wasn’t the case, King’s triumph wouldn’t have been so great. Gregory, as a figure, was challenging, misguided, and sadly wasted, but provocative and hardly impossible. (Read Richard Wright’s “Black Boy,” for example.) When F.B.I. agents finally raid Gregory’s apartment in a housing project, they find rooms of books and paintings, with portraits of King and Andy Warhol. Maybe there could also have been a photo of Paul Robeson.

Gregory’s death, on the other hand, was absurd. He offers himself up for suicide by cop, to cover Philip’s killing of Amador, even though that purpose can be more safely served by smuggling Gregory to Moscow. He can’t see himself there, and Elizabeth can’t persuade him otherwise. This serves none of the show’s purposes. If he really only loved Elizabeth, she could tell him she’d meet him at the Hermitage in three years. If it was ideology, she could set up a rendezvous at the World Festival of Youth, or talk about being buried in the Kremlin Wall. Instead, Gregory gets a faraway look, as if he’s been visited by visions of Chernobyl and Boris Yeltsin, and talks about how he only wanted to serve. That’s the wrong sort of magical character.

That crowded history we know is coming may also give the series room to rebuild, in unexpected ways. FX has renewed “The Americans” for another season. Is it too much to hope that they make it to Andropov? Can we see Claudia in disguise at the Iran-Contra hearings? Meanwhile, this season ended with Paige in the basement, inches away from where her parents stashed their secrets, looking for something, but not sure what.

Source: http://www.newyorker.com/

Believing the meeting with a possible intelligence asset is actually an FBI setup, Phillip decides to take on that mission himself, leaving Elizabeth to simply pick up a recording and then get the kids out of town. But it’s Elizabeth’s seemingly simple mission that’s actually the setup. Nina (Annet Mahendru) is able to deduce a coup is coming after Stan (Noah Emmerich) guarantees her extradition, but, because it’s the ’80s and there are no cell phones, the KGB is unable to warn their agents, resorting to more archaic methods to send the abort message. But when Phillip realizes the abort is meant for Elizabeth, he goes straight into the FBI’s trap to save her — and although they are able to escape, Elizabeth gets shot in the process.

Obviously, Elizabeth will survive into Season 2 — they’re not firing Keri Russell, ‘natch — but other characters’ fates are left up in the air, including Claudia (Margo Martindale) who was told she’d be reassigned, but risked her own life to save Phillip and Elizabeth after getting the abort signal. To get the scoop on Season 2, TVGuide.com turned to executive producers Joe Weisberg and Joel Fields.

Will there be a time jump between Season 1 and Season 2?
Joel Fields: We’re still figuring stuff out. We have a lot of the ideas about the next season. There’s not going to be some great leap forward in time. Elizabeth has been shot, but I don’t think it’s a great spoiler to say she won’t die, the relationship will continue, and we’ll probably want to pick up the story fairly close to where we left off.
Joe Weisberg: No one ever goes backwards to like ’77. That would be interesting.
Fields: One of the things we say in the writers’ room is that all joke pitches eventually become true pitches.

What was the decision behind having Elizabeth shot in the finale? How does that change her feelings about the KGB?
Weisberg: The thing that we always try to remember is that it’s a show about a marriage. That’s the thing that we think lends for the depth of feelings and helps the viewers connect to it. Even when she gets shot, what that really is about is what Phillip and Elizabeth feel for each other. When we first started thinking about that, what intrigued us was how that would alter the relationship between the two of them. That was the main thing that was important about it, that it would be a catalyst for her to be able to say what things she’s been feeling ever since that night in the hotel room when she found out that Phillip was getting an apartment. It allowed her to say she wanted him to come home and it pretty clearly motivated him to want to come home as well. I don’t think it’s something she’s going to blame the KGB for. She might blame Stan, but at least he made it up to them by watching the kids. [Laughs]

Do you think that this will reenergize their commitment to the KGB, or will this make them second-guess the organization?
Fields: I don’t think what happened in the finale is really going to challenge their attitude towards the KGB. There may be other reasons for them to question that as the show continues to unfold. I think they’re soldiers in a military operation behind enemy lines and what happened happened. In that sense, it’s par for the course. I think the real question is how does it affect the dynamic of their relationship and marriage? There’s probably nothing more lonely than being a spy. You’re living a life that’s a constant lie and you can’t have an honest conversation with anybody. Phillip and Elizabeth are in this strange situation where there is somebody with whom they can try to be honest. Now the question is how much they’re going to open up emotionally? That’s going to be the story of next season.
Weisberg: The KGB, in terms of operations, was right. They were right that the meeting with the colonel provided almost unimaginably valuable intelligence and they were right that the meeting should’ve gone forward because it wasn’t a setup. The thing that turned out to be a setup neither the KGB, nor Phillip and Elizabeth, nor Claudia could’ve anticipated. It would be hard for anybody in the world of intelligence to blame anybody else for that. That was just damn good work by the FBI.
Fields: When you think about it from an operational standpoint, the KGB did everything it could when they got the information. Arkady (Lev Gorn) went and spray-painted the cars, which put them at risk for exposing his operation inside the Rezidentura. Claudia, who was not in disguise and had every reason to figure they were past their fail-safe, drove her car into the middle of the park to try to get Phillip up. Had that been a setup, she was giving herself up too!
Weisberg: There you go defending the KGB again, Joel. [Laughs]

Speaking of Claudia, will Margo Martindale still be a part of The Americans next season, or is Claudia’s transfer a way to facilitate her exit for other projects?
Fields: Whether she’s there or not there, she’ll be part of The Americans. Our hope is that she’ll be there. She’s a fantastic actress and we love the character. Margo does have a pilot that she’ll find out about soon, but there’s always a hope for Claudia in the world of The Americans.

In the closing moments of the finale, we see Paige (Holly Taylor) exploring the laundry room. Will we see the possibility of Phillip and Elizabeth’s children discovering or being let in on their secret in the second season?
Weisberg: We think that Season 2 is going to be a big chance to explore the family dynamic between the parents and the kids. As you saw, one of the kids is starting to get a little curious about what the hell is going on with this family. Not that she thinks her mom is in the KGB, but that some of the things that have been going on in the family are starting to not add up for her.
Fields: We’ve explored this in the writers’ room that every adolescent, at some point, starts to get a feeling that their parents aren’t who they imagined them to be from the moment they were toddlers moving forward. It just so happens that in Paige’s case, when she starts to ask those tough questions, boy is there a secret she doesn’t know about.

There’s only so long that Stan Beeman can be unaware that his neighbors are KGB agents. Is there any part of him that suspects that his neighbors could be this couple?
Weisberg: We think he’s really over that. That it was something he suspected in the pilot and he got over it and dismissed it as him being paranoid based on his undercover days. He really let that go. Until there is really more evidence that appears, there’s no real reason for him to suspect again. Those things do have to come up, but it’s up to us to dole them out as we see fit. For example, those sketches came up, but those sketches don’t really look like them.
Fields: We spent hours seeing different sketches to make sure that they felt believable, but they would also never tip Stan off.
Weisberg: Lucky it’s the 1980s because those were the days before sketch artists used computers and get these much more realistic sketches. We talked a lot about what people see when they’re victimized and how those ideas are fused with their different fears.

Arkady raised the question of whether Stan could ever be turned since Nina is really working for the KGB instead of against them. Do you actually think that’s a possibility?
Fields: Well, we’ll see, won’t we? I don’t mean that to be cagey, but Stan is a character who has really surprised us over the course of the season. Noah Emmerich is such a deep and rich actor. As we started to explore the cast story in terms of what may or may not have happened when he was undercover and take him on this journey with Nina to becoming a guy who’s really using his position of power to enter into a sexual relationship with somebody who had her life in his hands to a guy who would kill somebody. Who knows where Stan could go? He’s also a guy who is deeply patriotic and loves his family. What was partly exciting about that moment with Arkady was that it was a chance for Nina to suddenly be faced with a different view of Stan. She saw him as a very powerful FBI agent, but to allow a different perspective from Arkady, she’s been shown Stan has a weakness.

In that same vein, Phillip has married Martha (Alison Wright). How long can he really keep up this charade?
Weisberg: We think those kids really have a chance! [Laughs] In the real world, KGB illegals married secretaries of important men with access to classified information. Some of those marriages lasted for years. I think some of them lasted over a decade. Now that doesn’t mean that a fictional one that you created on television necessarily can believably last as long or feel real for that length of time. It depends on how you set it up. We don’t know how long it will last or how long we want it to last. One of the most interesting things to explore in that relationship is what Martha does and doesn’t know. I love the moments where she says to him, “Is this real?” or “You came out of the blue.” You get the feeling that a part of her either knows or suspects, but she’ll push anything down for love because that makes her feel so human. If being in love with this guy is more important than anything, that means it could last forever.

In the beginning, you guys set out to make viewers feel sympathetic towards the KGB. How successful do you feel about that now looking back at the season?
Fields: Oh I’m so glad you asked that!
Weisberg: [Laughs]
Fields: I love Joe Weisberg, we get a long great. I don’t mind that we’re quoted interchangeably to the press, but I did not say I wanted you to root for the KGB, that was Joe. For me, I wanted people to root for Phillip and Elizabeth Jennings and for these two human beings in this crazy, super-charged, emotional relationship behind enemy lines. We know that Communism failed, they lost the Cold War, so we’re not trying to get people to root for that. But for that world that they lived in in 1981, a world where nuclear weapons are poised and at the ready, and their nation is teetering on the edge of survival, it’s a very powerful place to put two characters in a love story. I hope, in that, we were successful.
Weisberg: To a certain degree, people are just letting go of rooting for this or that. They don’t feel so much that it has to be one side or the other. Everything is complicated and you can root for the different sides all at the same time; it doesn’t have to be one or the other. I think that’s a real interesting to feel while watching a show about the Cold War.

Source: http://www.tvguide.com/

Keri Russell (The Americans) and Josh Hamilton face off against pesky suburban alien invaders in Dark Skies, the horror thriller that will be touching down May 28 on Blu-ray and DVD.
Dark Skies was made for only $3.5 million and has earned an estimated $17.2 million at the domestic box office and $20.9 million worldwide. It was first released theatrically on February 22, 2013.

The Blu-ray edition of Dark Skies will be a combo with DVD and be presented in 1080p video and 5.1 DTS-HD Master Audio. Bonus features include the following:

Alternate and deleted scenes

Source: http://www.thehdroom.com/

]]> http://kerirussellsource.org/updates/?feed=rss2&p=1250 0 http://kerirussellsource.org/updates/?p=1248 http://kerirussellsource.org/updates/?p=1248#comments Fri, 26 Apr 2013 21:18:05 +0000 Mary http://kerirussellsource.org/updates/?p=1248 I added 3 Episode Stills from the Season finale. I hope everyone is so excited.

GALLERY LINKS:
- Episode Stills 1×09 – Safe House

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