Published Jun 1, 2026, 7:30 PM EDT
Michael Zimmermann is a video host and interviewer at Collider. In addition to his work on Collider’s Behind the Scenes video channel, Michael covers junkets, red carpets and premieres. He also contributes to the music vertical, writing features and lists. As a Jersey Shore local, Michael’s hero is Bruce Springsteen — and you can’t convince him that Born To Run is a better album than Darkness on the Edge of Town.
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Have you ever wondered what really goes into making your favorite shows and movies? At Collider, we’re now taking you behind the scenes with the actors, directors, writers, and crew who bring the stories to life. Collider Access is an on-set interview series that brings audiences directly into the worlds of movies and TV shows. Filmed on location where productions are actually shot, the series combines immersive set tours, candid cast conversations, and behind-the-scenes storytelling to reveal the atmosphere, craft, and chaos behind filmmaking.
In the debut episode of Access, Asif Ali and Saagar Shaikh take Collider behind the scenes of Hulu’s critically acclaimed series, Deli Boys, touring the meticulously recreated deli, Baba’s secret apartment, and Max’s outrageous casino office while sharing some of the funniest memories from filming Season 1 and 2.
During this exclusive Deli Boys interview, Ali and Shaikh explain how production rebuilt the deli set almost identically to the original pilot location, why the cast kept breaking during certain scenes, and how the set design helped make every location feel lived in. They also talk about chaotic ensemble scenes and the surreal experience of stepping into spaces that genuinely reminded Saagar Shaikh of growing up in a family-run gas station business. Poorna Jagannathan, Fred Armisen, and Amita Rao reveal some of the shenanigans the cast were up to while filming Seasons 1 and 2, secrets behind the wardrobe, and improvising scenes.
From awkward gun scenes nobody could finish without laughing to snack raids between takes, this behind-the-scenes tour captures the energy that makes Deli Boys feel so distinctive. Check out the first episode of Collider Access below.
Your answers have pointed to one Oscar Best Picture winner above all others. This is the film that was made for the way your mind works.
You are drawn to films that operate on multiple levels simultaneously — that begin in one genre and quietly, brilliantly migrate into another. Bong Joon-ho’s Parasite is a film about class, desire, and the architecture of inequality that manages to be darkly funny, deeply suspenseful, and genuinely shocking across a single extraordinary running time. Your instinct is for cinema that hides its true intentions until the moment it’s ready to reveal them. Parasite is exactly that — a film that rewards close attention and punishes assumptions, right up to its devastating final image.
You want it all — and this film gives you all of it. The Daniels’ Everything Everywhere All at Once is one of the most maximalist films ever made: action comedy, multiverse sci-fi, family drama, existential crisis, and a genuinely earned emotional core that sneaks up on you amid the chaos. You are someone who responds to ambition, who doesn’t want cinema to choose between being entertaining and being meaningful. This film refuses that choice entirely. It is overwhelming by design, and its overwhelming nature is precisely the point — because the feeling of being crushed by infinite possibility is exactly what it’s about.
You are drawn to cinema on a grand scale — films that understand history not as a backdrop but as a force, and that place their characters inside that force and watch what happens. Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer is a film about the terrifying gap between what we can do and what we should do, told with the full weight of one of the most consequential moments in human history behind it. You want your films to feel important without feeling self-important — to earn their ambition through sheer craft and the gravity of their subject. Oppenheimer does exactly that. It is enormous, complicated, and refuses easy comfort.
You are drawn to films that foreground their own construction — that make the how of the filmmaking part of the what it’s about. Alejandro González Iñárritu’s Birdman, shot to appear as a single continuous take, is cinema examining itself through the cracked mirror of a fading actor’s ego. You respond to formal daring, to the feeling that a film is doing something that probably shouldn’t be possible. Michael Keaton’s performance and Emmanuel Lubezki’s restless camera create something genuinely unlike anything else — a film that is simultaneously about creativity, relevance, self-destruction, and the impossibility of ever truly knowing if your work means anything at all.
You are drawn to cinema that trusts silence, that refuses to explain itself, and that treats dread as a form of meaning. The Coen Brothers’ No Country for Old Men is a film about the arrival of a new kind of evil — implacable, arbitrary, and utterly indifferent to the moral frameworks we use to make sense of the world. It is one of the most formally controlled films ever made, and its controlled restraint is what makes it so terrifying. You want your films to haunt you, not comfort you. You are not interested in resolution if resolution would be dishonest. No Country for Old Men is honest in a way that most cinema never dares to be.
Collider is dedicated to bringing its audience premium coverage from both in front and behind the camera. In-depth conversations and insight from directors, showrunners, costume and production designers, stunt coordinators, producers, and writers will make you feel even more connected to your favorite titles. You’ll find out about the last-minute changes that were made to iconic and viral scenes and moments, alternate storylines left in the writer’s room, and the hours put in to creating sets, wardrobe, and fight scenes.
Along with hearing from creatives, Collider offers Set Stories as a complement to the below-the-line work that goes into making your favorite films and shows. Set Stories is a video series that takes you onto set from the point of view of the actors. What does the cast talk about between takes? What was the most challenging scene to shoot? Who has the best trailer to hang out in? We answer all of those questions and more!
Check out the first episode of Collider Access above and stay tuned for more from the new series Collider Set Stories.
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