Filmmakers
This list comprises of filmmakers from around the world that I admire, dead and alive
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- Writer
- Director
- Second Unit Director or Assistant Director
Robert Bresson trained as a painter before moving into films as a screenwriter, making a short film (atypically a comedy), Public Affairs (1934) in 1934. After spending more than a year as a German POW during World War II, he made his debut with Angels of Sin (1943) in 1943. His next film, The Ladies of the Bois de Boulogne (1945) would be the last time he would work with professional actors. From Journal d'un cure de campagne (1951) (aka "Diary of a Country Priest") onwards, he created a unique minimalist style in which all but the barest essentials are omitted from the film (often, crucial details are only given in the soundtrack), with the actors (he calls them "models") giving deliberately flat, expressionless performances. It's a demanding and difficult, intensely personal style, which means that his films never achieved great popularity (it was rare for him to make more than one film every five years), but he has a fanatical following among critics, who rate him as one of the greatest artists in the history of the cinema. He retired in the 1980s, after failing to raise the money for a long-planned adaptation of the Book of Genesis.- Writer
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Jean Vigo had bad health since he was a child. Son of anarchist militant Miguel Almareyda, he also never really recovered from his father's mysterious death in jail when he was 12. Abandoned by his mother, he passed from boarding school to boarding school. Aged 23, through meetings with people involved in the movies, he started working in the cinema, then bought a camera and shot his first film, a short documentary, À Propos de Nice (1930) then, two years later, Taris (1931) (aka Taris champion de natation). These two very personal works frighten the producers, and it lasted two years before someone showed some interest in his project of a children movie. This would be his masterpiece, Zero for Conduct (1933) (aka Zero for Conduct), a subversive despiction of an authoritarian boarding school, which directly came from Vigo's memories. The film is straightaway censored for its "anti-French spirit." In despair, he nevertheless shot L'Atalante (1934), a romantic and realistic story of a young couple beginning their life together in a barge. He died just afterward of septicemy. His work would not be recognized before 1945. This accursed filmmaker is now admired for his poetic realism.- Writer
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Bernardo Bertolucci, the Italian director whose films were known for their colorful visual style, was born in Parma, Italy. He attended Rome University and became famous as a poet. He served as assistant director for Pier Paolo Pasolini in the film Accattone (1961) and directed The Grim Reaper (1962). His second film, Before the Revolution (1964), which was released in 1971, received an Academy Award nomination for best screenplay. Bertolucci also received an Academy Award nomination as best director for Last Tango in Paris (1972), and the best director and best screenplay for the film The Last Emperor (1987), which walked away with nine Academy Awards.- Writer
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The women who both attracted and frightened him and an Italy dominated in his youth by Mussolini and Pope Pius XII - inspired the dreams that Fellini started recording in notebooks in the 1960s. Life and dreams were raw material for his films. His native Rimini and characters like Saraghina (the devil herself said the priests who ran his school) - and the Gambettola farmhouse of his paternal grandmother would be remembered in several films. His traveling salesman father Urbano Fellini showed up in La Dolce Vita (1960) and 8½ (1963). His mother Ida Barbiani was from Rome and accompanied him there in 1939. He enrolled in the University of Rome. Intrigued by the image of reporters in American films, he tried out the real life role of journalist and caught the attention of several editors with his caricatures and cartoons and then started submitting articles. Several articles were recycled into a radio series about newlyweds "Cico and Pallina". Pallina was played by acting student Giulietta Masina, who became his real life wife from October 30, 1943, until his death half a century later. The young Fellini loved vaudeville and was befriended in 1940 by leading comedian Aldo Fabrizi. Roberto Rossellini wanted Fabrizi to play Don Pietro in Rome, Open City (1945) and made the contact through Fellini. Fellini worked on that film's script and is on the credits for Rosselini's Paisan (1946). On that film he wandered into the editing room, started observing how Italian films were made (a lot like the old silent films with an emphasis on visual effects, dialogue dubbed in later). Fellini in his mid-20s had found his life's work.- Writer
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Together with Fellini, Bergman and Kurosawa, Michelangelo Antonioni is credited with defining the modern art film. And yet Antonioni's cinema is also recognized today for defying any easy categorization, with his films ultimately seeming to belong to their own distinctive genre. Indeed, the difficulty of precisely describing their category is itself the very quintessence of Antonioni's films. Among the most-cited contributions of Antonioni's cinema are their striking descriptions of that unique strain of post-boom ennui everywhere apparent in the transformed life and leisure habits of the Italian middle and upper classes. Detecting profound technological, political and psychological shifts at work in post-WWII Italy, Antonioni set out to explore the ambiguities of a suddenly alienated and dislocated Italy, not simply through his oblique style of narrative and characters, nor through any overt political messaging, but instead by tearing asunder the traditional boundaries of cinematic narrative in order to explore an ever shifting internal landscape expressed through architecture, urban space and the sculptural, shaping presence of objects, shapes and emotions invented by camera movement and depth of focus.
Antonioni deftly manipulates the quieter, indirect edges of cinematic structure, often so discretely that his existential puzzles are felt before they can be intellectualized. The negative space is as prominent as the positive, silence as loud as noise, absence as palpable as presence, and passivity as driving a force as direct action. Transgressing unspoken cinematic laws, Antonioni frequently focuses on female protagonists while refusing to sentimentalize or morally judge his characters and placing them on equal footing with the other elements within his total dynamic system, like sounds or set pieces. And he violates spoken rules with unconventional cutting techniques, fractured spatial and temporal continuity, and a camera that insistently lingers in melancholy pauses, long after the actors depart, as if drifting just behind an equally distracted, dissipating narrative. Leaving questions unanswered and plot points irresolute, dispensing with exposition, suspense, sentimentality and other cinematic security blankets, Antonioni releases the viewer into a gorgeous, densely layered fog to contemplate and wrestle with his characters' imprecise quandaries and endless possibilities. Culminating in tour de force endings that often reframe the narrative in a daring, parting act of deconstruction, Antonioni's rigorously formal, yet open compositions allow his great, unwieldy questions to spill over into the world outside the cinema and outside of time.
Born into a middle-class family in the northern Italian town of Ferrara, Antonioni studied economics at the University of Bologna where he also co-founded the university's theatrical troupe. While dedicating himself to painting, writing film reviews, working in financial positions and in different capacities on film productions, Antonioni suffered a few false starts before expressing his unique directorial vision and voice in his first realized short film, Gente del Po, a moving portrait of fisherman in the misty Po Valley where he was raised. Uncomfortable with the neo-realist thrust of Italian cinema, Antonioni directed a series of eccentric and oblique documentary shorts that, in retrospect, reveal his desire to investigate the psyche's mysterious interiors. In his first fictional feature, Story of a Love Affair, Antonioni immediately subtly challenged traditional plot and audience expectation in ways that anticipate the formal and emotional expressionist dynamic that would fully flower within the groundbreaking L'Avventura (1960).
Reversing its raucous 1960 premiere to an infuriated Cannes audience, L'Avventura was rapturously lauded by fellow artists and filmmakers and awarded a special Jury Prize "for its remarkable contribution toward the search for a new cinematic language." It also presented the controlled ambivalence of Monica Vitti, who would become his partner, muse and psychological constant throughout his famed trilogy of L'Avventura, La Notte (1961) and L'Eclisse (1962) in addition to the exquisite Red Desert (1964), a film that marked another significant shift toward expressive color, male leads and working with soft focus and faster cuts. After the phenomenal commercial success of the MGM-produced Blow-Up (1966), Antonioni was devastated by the anti-climactic box office disaster of Zabriskie Point (1970) and returned to documentary. Invited to make Chung Kuo China by the Chinese government, Antonioni delivered a mesmerizing yet unsentimental four-hour tour of China which was vehemently rejected by its solicitors. A few years later, Antonioni returned to fictional form in his last masterpiece, The Passenger (1975), an enigmatic fable of vaporous identity that offers a bold companion piece to L'Avventura. Aside from the thematically retrospective Identification of a Woman (1982) and a period film made for television, The Mystery of Oberwald (1980) in which he conducted unusual experiments with color and video, Antonioni closed out his career with mostly short films, many of which were made after he suffered a stroke in 1985.
Tremendously influential yet largely taken for granted, Antonioni made difficult, abstract cinema mainstream. Embracing an anarchic geometry, Antonioni turned the architecture of narrative filmmaking inside-out in the most eloquent way possible, with many of his iconic scenes eternally preserved in the depths of the cinema's psyche. Observing modern maladies without judgment - sexism, dissolution of family and tradition, ecological/technological quandaries and the eternal questions of our place in the cosmos - Antonioni's prescience continues to resonate deeply as we find our way in the quickly moving fog.- Writer
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Tokyo-born Yasujiro Ozu was a movie buff from childhood, often playing hooky from school in order to see Hollywood movies in his local theatre. In 1923 he landed a job as a camera assistant at Shochiku Studios in Tokyo. Three years later, he was made an assistant director and directed his first film the next year, Zange no yaiba (1927). Ozu made thirty-five silent films, and a trilogy of youth comedies with serious overtones he turned out in the late 1920s and early 1930s placed him in the front ranks of Japanese directors. He made his first sound film in 1936, The Only Son (1936), but was drafted into the Japanese Army the next year, being posted to China for two years and then to Singapore when World War II started. Shortly before the war ended he was captured by British forces and spent six months in a P.O.W. facility. At war's end he went back to Shochiku, and his experiences during the war resulted in his making more serious, thoughtful films at a much slower pace than he had previously. His most famous film, Tokyo Story (1953), is generally considered by critics and film buffs alike to be his "masterpiece" and is regarded by many as not only one of Ozu's best films but one of the best films ever made. He also turned out such classics of Japanese film as The Flavor of Green Tea Over Rice (1952), Floating Weeds (1959) and An Autumn Afternoon (1962).
Ozu, who never married and lived with his mother all his life, died of cancer in 1963, two years after she passed.- Writer
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Krzysztof Kieslowski graduated from Lódz Film School in 1969, and became a documentary, TV and feature film director and scriptwriter. Before making his first film for TV, Przejscie podziemne (1974) (The Underground Passage), he made a number of short documentaries. His next TV title, Personnel (1975) (The Staff), took the Grand Prix at Mannheim Film Festival. His first full-length feature was The Scar (1976) (The Scar). In 1978 he made the famous documentary From a Night Porter's Point of View (1979) (Night Porter's Point of View), and in 1979 - a feature Camera Buff (1979) (Camera Buff), which was acclaimed in Poland and abroad. Everything he did from that point was of highest artistic quality.- Actor
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Frank Borzage was born on 23 April 1894 in Salt Lake City, Utah, USA. He was an actor and director, known for Bad Girl (1931), 7th Heaven (1927) and No Greater Glory (1934). He was married to Juanita Scott, Edna Skelton and Rena Rogers. He died on 19 June 1962 in Hollywood, Los Angeles, California, USA.- Director
- Producer
- Actor
William Wyler was an American filmmaker who, at the time of his death in 1981, was considered by his peers as second only to John Ford as a master craftsman of cinema. The winner of three Best Director Academy Awards, second again only to Ford's four, Wyler's reputation has unfairly suffered as the lack of an obvious "signature" in his diverse body of work denies him the honorific "auteur" that has become a standard measure of greatness in the post-"Cahiers du Cinéma" critical community.
His directorial career spanned 45 years, from silent pictures to the cultural revolution of the 1970s. Nominated a record 12 times for the Academy Award for Best Director, he won three and in 1966, was honored with the Irving Thalberg Award, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences' ultimate accolade for a producer. So high was his reputation in his lifetime that he was the fourth recipient of the American Film Institute's Lifetime Achievement Award, after Ford, James Cagney and Welles. Along with Ford and Welles, Wyler ranks with the best and most influential American directors, including Griffith, DeMille, Frank Capra, Howard Hawks, Alfred Hitchcock, Stanley Kubrick and Steven Spielberg.
Born Willi Wyler on July 1, 1902, in Mulhouse, Alsace (then a possession of Germany), to Jewish parents. His Swiss-born father, Leopold, started as a traveling salesman but later became a thriving haberdasher in Mulhouse. His mother, Melanie (née Auerbach; died February 13, 1955, Los Angeles, aged 77), was German-born, and a cousin of Carl Laemmle, founder of Universal Pictures. Melanie Wyler often took him and his older brother Robert to concerts, opera, and the theatre, as well as the early cinema. Sometimes at home his family and their friends would stage amateur theatricals for personal enjoyment.
He used his family connections to establish himself in the film industry. Upon being offered a job by his mother's first cousin, Universal Studios head Carl Laemmle, Wyler emigrated to the US in 1920 at the age of 18. After starting in Universal's New York offices as an errand boy, he moved his way up through the organization, ending up in the California operation in 1922. Wyler was given the opportunity to direct in July 1925, with the two-reel western The Crook Buster (1925). It was on this film that he was first credited as William Wyler, though he never officially changed his name and would be known as "Willi" all his life. For almost five years he performed his apprenticeship in Universal's "B" unit, turning out a score of low-budget silent westerns. In 1929 he made his first "A" picture, Hell's Heroes (1929), Universal's first all-sound movie shot outside a studio. The western, the first version of the "Three Godfathers" story, was a commercial and critical success.
The initial years of the Great Depression brought hard times for the film industry, and Universal went into receivership in 1932, partially due to financial troubles brought about by rampant nepotism and the runaway production costs rung up by producer Carl Laemmle Jr., the son of the boss. There were 70 Laemmle family members on the Universal payroll at one point, including Wyler. In 1935 "Uncle" Carl was forced to sell the studio he had created in 1912 with the 1912 merger of his Independent Motion Picture Co. with several other production companies. Wyler continued to direct for Universal up until the end of the family regime, helming Counsellor at Law (1933), the film version of Elmer Rice's play featuring one of John Barrymore's more restrained performances, and The Good Fairy (1935), a comedy adapted from a Ferenc Molnár play by Preston Sturges and starring Margaret Sullavan, who was Wyler's wife for a short time. Both films were produced by his cousin, "Junior" Laemmle. Emancipated from the Laemmle family, Wyler subsequently established himself as a major director in the mid-1930s, when he began directing films for independent producer Samuel Goldwyn. During this key period, he alternated between adaptations of famous plays and filming versions of classic novels. Willi would soon find his freedom fettered by the man with the fabled "Goldwyn touch," which entailed bullying his directors to recast, rewrite and re-cut their films, and sometimes even replacing them during shooting.
The first of the Wyler-Goldwyn collaborations was These Three (1936), based on Lillian Hellman's lesbian-themed play "The Children's Hour" (the Sapphic theme was jettisoned and sanitized into a conventional heterosexual love triangle due to censorship concerns, but it resurfaced intact when Wyler remade the film a quarter-century later). His first unqualified success for Goldwyn was Dodsworth (1936), an adaptation of Sinclair Lewis' portrait of a disintegrating American marriage, a marvelous film that still resonates with audiences in the 21st century. He received his first Best Director Oscar nomination for this picture. The film was nominated for Best Picture, the first of seven straight years in which a Wyler-directed movie would earn that accolade, culminating with Oscars for both William Wyler and Mrs. Miniver (1942) in 1942.
Wyler's potential greatness can be seen as early as "Hell's Heroes," an early talkie that is not constrained by the restrictions of the new technology. The climax of the picture, with Charles Bickford's dying badman walking into town, is a long tracking shot that focuses not on the actor himself but the detritus that he shucks off to lighten his load as he brings a baby back to a cradle of civilization. The scene is a harbinger of the free-flowing style that would become a hallmark of his work. However, it was with "Dodsworth" that Wyler began to establish his critical reputation. The film features long takes and a probing camera, a style that Wyler would make his own. Now established as Goldwyn's director of choice, Wyler made several films for him, including Dead End (1937) and Wuthering Heights (1939). Essentially an employee of the producer, Wyler clashed with Goldwyn over aesthetic choices and longed for his freedom. Goldwyn had demanded that the ghetto set of "Dead End" be spruced up and that "clean garbage" be used in the water tank representing the East River, over Wyler's objections. Goldwyn prevailed, as he did later with the ending of "Wuthering Heights." After he had finished principal photography on the film, Goldwyn demanded a new ending featuring the ghosts of Heathcliff and Cathy reunited and walking away towards what the audience would assume is heaven and an eternity of conjoined bliss. Wyler opposed the new ending and refused to shoot it. Goldwyn had his ending shot without Wyler and had it tacked onto the final cut. It was an artistic betrayal that rankled Wyler.
Goldwyn loaned out Wyler to other studios, and he made Jezebel (1938) and The Letter (1940) for Warner Bros. Working with Bette Davis in the two masterpieces, as well as in Goldwyn's The Little Foxes (1941), Wyler elicited three of the great diva's finest performances. In these films and his films of the mid-to-late 1930s, Wyler pioneered the use of deep-focus cinematography, most famously with lighting cameraman Gregg Toland. Toland shot seven of the eight films Wyler directed for Goldwyn: "These Three", Come and Get It (1936), "Dead End," "Wuthering Heights" (for which Toland won his only Academy Award), The Westerner (1940), "The Little Foxes" and The Best Years of Our Lives (1946). Compositions in Wyler pictures frequently featured multiple horizontal planes with various characters arranged in diagonals at varying distances from the camera lens. Creating an illusion of depth, these deep-focus shots enhanced the naturalism of the picture while heightening the drama. As the photography of Wyler's films was used to serve the story and create mood rather than call attention to itself, Toland was later mistakenly given credit for creating deep-focus cinematography along with another great director, Orson Welles, in Citizen Kane (1941). His first use of deep-focus cinematography was in 1935, with "The Good Fairy", on which Norbert Brodine was the lighting cameraman. It was the first of his films featuring deep-focus shots and the diagonal compositions that became a Wyler leitmotif. The film also includes a receding mirror shot a half-decade before Toland and Welles created a similar one for "Citizen Kane."
Wyler won his first Oscar as Best Director with "Mrs. Miniver" for MGM, which also won the Oscar for Best Picture, the first of three Wyler films that would be so honored. Made as a propaganda piece for American audiences to prepare them for the sacrifices necessitated by World War II, the movie is set in wartime England and elucidates the hardships suffered by an ordinary, middle-class English family coping with the war. An enthusiastic President Franklin D. Roosevelt, after seeing the film at a White House screening, said, "This has to be shown right away." The film also won Oscars for star Greer Garson and co-star Theresa Wright, for cinematographer Joseph Ruttenberg and for Best Screenplay.
After "Miniver," Wyler went off to war as an officer in the U.S. Army Air Forces. One of his more memorable propaganda films of the period was a documentary about a B-17 bomber, The Memphis Belle: A Story of a Flying Fortress (1944), He also directed the Navy documentary The Fighting Lady (1944), an examination of life aboard an American aircraft carrier. Though the later film won an Oscar as Best Documentary, "The Memphis Belle" is considered a classic of its form. The making of the documentary was even the subject of a 1990 feature film of the same name. "The Memphis Belle" focuses on the eponymous B-17 bomber and its 25th, and last, air raid flown from a base in England. The documentary features aerial battle footage that Wyler and his crew shot over the skies of Germany. One of his photographic crew, flying in another plane, was killed during the filming of the air battles. Wyler himself lost the hearing in one ear and became partially deaf in the other due to the noise and concussion of the flak bursting around his aircraft.
Wyler's first picture upon returning from World War II would prove to be the last movie he made for Goldwyn. A returning veteran like those portrayed in "The Best Years of Our Lives" (1946), this film won Wyler his second Oscar. The movie, which featured a moving performance by real-life veteran and double amputee Harold Russell, struck a universal chord with Americans and was a major box office hit. It was the second Wyler-directed picture to be named Best Picture at the Academy Awards. The film also won Oscars for star Fredric March and co-star Russell (who was also given an honorary award "for bringing hope and courage to his fellow veterans"), film editor Daniel Mandell, composer Hugo Friedhofer and screenwriter Robert E. Sherwood, and was instrumental in garnering the Irving Thalberg Award for Samuel Goldwyn, who also took home the Best Picture Oscar that year as "Best Years" producer.
Though Wyler elicited some of the finest performances preserved on film, ironically he could not communicate what he wanted to an actor. A perfectionist, he became known as "40-Take Wyler", shooting a scene over and over again until the actors played it the way he wanted. With his use of long takes, actors were forced to act within each take as their performances would not be covered in the cutting room. His long takes and lack of cutting slowed down the pacing of his films, providing a greater feeling of continuity within each scene and intimately involving the audience in the development of the drama. The story in a Wyler film was allowed to unfold organically, with no tricky editing to cover up holes in the script or to compensate for an inadequate performance. Wyler typically rehearsed his actors for two weeks before the beginning of principal photography.
While more actors won Academy Awards in Wyler movies, 14 out of a total of 36 nominations (more than any other two directors combined), few actors worked more than once or twice with him. Bette Davis worked on three films with him and won Academy Award nominations for each performance and an Oscar for "Jezebel." On their last collaboration, "The Little Foxes" (1941), Davis walked off the production for two weeks after clashing with Wyler over how her character should be played.
He proved hard on other experienced actors, such as Laurence Olivier in "Wuthering Heights," who gave credit to Willi for turning him from a stage actor into a movie actor. "This isn't the Opera House in Manchester," Wyler told Olivier, his way of conveying that he should tone down his performance. A year earlier, Wyler had forced Henry Fonda through 40 takes on the set of "Jezebel," Wyler's only direction being "Again" after each repeated take. When Fonda demanded some input on what he was doing wrong, Wyler replied only: "It stinks. Do it again." According to Charlton Heston, Wyler approached him early in the shooting of Ben-Hur (1959) and told him that his performance was inadequate. When a dismayed Heston asked him what he should do, "Be better" is all that Wyler could supply. In his autobiography, Elia Kazan, a famed "actor's director", tells how he offered advice to an actor acquaintance of his who was making a Wyler picture as he knew that the great director was inarticulate about acting and would be unable to give advice.
Wyler believed that after many takes, actors got angry and began to shed their preconceived ideas about acting in general and the part in particular. Stripped of these notions, actors were able to play at a truer level. It is a process that Stanley Kubrick would subsequently use on his post-2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) films, though to different results, creating an otherworldly anti-realism rather than the more naturalistic truth of a Wyler movie performance. His methods often meant that his films went over schedule and over budget, but he got results.
Wyler's reputation has suffered as he is not considered an "auteur," or "author" of his films. However, in his postwar career, he definitely was the auteur, or controlling consciousness, behind his films. Although he never took a screenwriting credit (other than for an early horse opera, Ridin' for Love (1926)), he selected his own stories and controlled the screenwriting, hiring his own writers in a development process that could take years. His postwar period films include The Heiress (1949), a fine version of Henry James' novel "Washington Square," with an Oscar-winning performance by Olivia de Havilland; Detective Story (1951), a police drama that takes place on a minimal, controlled set almost as restricted as that of Hitchcock's Rope (1948); and Roman Holiday (1953), which won Audrey Hepburn an Oscar in her first leading role. The other films of this period are Carrie (1952), The Desperate Hours (1955) and Friendly Persuasion (1956).
Wyler returned to the western genre one last time with The Big Country (1958), a picture far removed in scope from his two-reeler origins, featuring Gregory Peck, Heston, and Wyler's old "Hell's Heroes" star Bickford. Burl Ives won a Best Supporting Actor Oscar for his role as the patriarch of an outlaw clan in conflict with Bickford's family. Wyler was next enlisted by producer Sam Zimbalist to helm MGM's high-stakes "Ben-Hur" (1959), a remake of its 1925 classic. It was a high-budget ($15 million, approximately $90 million when factored for inflation), wide-screen (the aspect ratio of the film is 2.76 to 1 when properly shown in 70mm anamorphic prints, the highest ratio ever used for a film) epic that the studio had spent six years preparing. Principal photography required more than six months of shooting on location in Italy, with hundreds of crew members and thousands of extras. Wyler was the overlord of the largest crew and oversaw more extras than any other film had ever used. Wyler's "Ben-Hur" grossed $74 million (approximately $600 million at today's ticket prices, ranking it #13 film in terms of all-time box office performance, when adjusted for inflation), the film was the fourth highest-grossing film of all-time when it was released, surpassed only by Gone with the Wind (1939), DeMille's The Ten Commandments (1956), and Walt Disney's Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937). "Ben-Hur" went on to win 11 Oscars out of 12 nominations, including a third Best Director Academy Award for Wyler. The 11 Oscars set a record since tied by Titanic (1997) and The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King (2003).
In the last decade of his career, he remade "These Three" as The Children's Hour (1961), a franker version of Hellman's play than his 1936 version. The Collector (1965) was his last artistic triumph, and he had his last hit with Funny Girl (1968), for which Barbra Streisand repeated Audrey Hepburn's success of 15 years earlier, wining an Oscar in her first lead role. Wyler's last film was The Liberation of L.B. Jones (1970), an estimable failure that tackled the theme of racial prejudice, but which came out in the revolutionary time of Easy Rider (1969) and other such films and held little promise for such traditional warhorses as Wyler.
Although he reportedly dreamed of making more pictures, Wyler's failing health kept him from taking on another film. Instead, he and his wife Margaret Tallichet, the mother of his five children, contented themselves with travel. William Wyler died on July 27, 1981, in Beverly Hills, California.- Director
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Andrzej Wajda is an Academy Award-winning director. He is the most prominent filmmaker in Poland known for The Promised Land (1975), Man of Iron (1981), and Katyn (2007).
He was Born on March 6, 1926, in Suwalki, Poland. His mother, Aniela Wajda, was a teacher at a Ukrainian school. His father, Jakub Wajda, was a captain in the Polish infantry. Wajda described his childhood as a happy pastoral country life before the Second World War. In 1939, Poland was invaded by Nazi Germany and Soviet Union. In 1940, Wajda's father was killed by Stalin's agents in the Katyn massacre.
Young Wajda survived the Second World War with his mother and his brother in Nazi-occupied Poland. In 1942, Wajda joined the Polish resistance and served in the Armia Krajowa until the war ended in 1945. In 1946 he moved to Kraków. There Wajda went to Academy of Fine Arts. He studied painting, particularly the impressionist and post-impressionist painting, and was especially fond of Paul Cezanne. From 1950-1954 he studied film directing at the High Film School in Lódz under directors Jerzy Toeplitz and Aleksander Ford. Later, Wajda described the influential and eye-opening experience from seeing French avant-garde films, like Ballet mécanique (1924) by artist-director Fernand Léger.
In 1955 he made his debut as director of full-length A Generation (1955), about the generation of youth coming of age during the Nazi occupation of Poland. His award-winning Kanal (1957) and Ashes and Diamonds (1958) concluded the trilogy about life in Poland during WWII. Although he was under pressure from the Soviet-dominated Polish authorities, Wajda positioned himself as an artist who was above the conflict. He still managed to show the undeclared civil war between two anti-Nazi Polish forces, which were divided by political ideology: the Polish communists and the partisans - folk heroes of the Home Army.
His Oscar-nominated The Promised Land (1975) was a work of multi-layered allegory and Symbolism. Wajda's witty depiction of the 19th century capitalism in Poland actually alluded to the contemporary Communist politics. The shooting of workers in the final scenes was actually unmasking of the official politics of killing workers in the Soviet Union in 1962, under Nikita Khrushchev, and in Poland a few years later. The story of a film student who traces the life of defamed "hero" in Man of Marble (1977) was a deconstruction of the false impressions that official propaganda was using to brainwash the public. The same main characters in Man of Iron (1981) continued unmasking the Communist regime's manipulations against working class people. In 1981, Wajda joined the "Solidarity" labor movement of Lech Walesa.
From 1989 to 1991 Wajda was elected Senator of the Republic of Poland. From 1992 to 1994 he was Member of Presidential Council for Culture. In 1994 he founded the Center of Japanese Art and Technology in Kraków, and was awarded the Order of Rising Sun in Japan (1995). Wajda was President of Polish Film Association (1978-1983). He was Member of "Solidarity" Lech Walesa Council (1981-1989). He won an honorary Oscar (2000) for his contribution to cinema, and an honorary Golden Bear (2006) at the Berlin Film Festival.
Wajda's Katyn (2007) was nominated for Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film of the Year in 2008, and received many other awards and nominations. The film shows historic events in Katyn during WWII, where Wajda's father was among thousands of Polish officers killed by Soviet communists under the dictatorship of Joseph Stalin. Wajda's film was well received by the last Soviet leader, Mikhail Gorbachev, who initially opened the facts about Katyn to help people understand each other and overcome the tragic past.
"We never hoped to live to see the fall of the Soviet Union, to see Poland as a free country", said Andrzej Wajda.- Director
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Admirers have always had difficulty explaining Éric Rohmer's "Je ne sais quoi." Part of the challenge stems from the fact that, despite his place in French Nouvelle Vague (i.e., New Wave), his work is unlike that of his colleagues. While this may be due to the auteur's unwillingness to conform, some have argued convincingly that, in truth, he has remained more faithful to the original ideals of the movement than have his peers. Additionally, plot is not his foremost concern. It is the thoughts and emotions of his characters that are essential to Rohmer, and, just as one's own states of being are hard to define, so is the internal life of his art. Thus, rather than speaking of it in specific terms, fans often use such modifiers as "subtle," "witty," "delicious" and "enigmatic." In an interview with Dennis Hopper, Quentin Tarantino echoed what nearly every aficionado has uttered: "You have to see one of [his movies], and if you kind of like that one, then you should see his other ones, but you need to see one to see if you like it."
Detractors have no problem in expressing their displeasure. They use such phrases as "tedious like a classroom play," "arty and tiresome" and "donnishly talky." Gene Hackman, as jaded detective Harry Moseby in Night Moves (1975), delivered a now famous line that sums up these feelings: "I saw a Rohmer film once. It was kind of like watching paint dry." Undeniably, his excruciatingly slow pace and apathetic, self-absorbed characters are hallmarks, and, at times, even his greatest supporters have made trenchant remarks in this regard. Said critic Pauline Kael, "Seriocomic triviality has become Rohmer's specialty. His sensibility would be easier to take if he'd stop directing to a metronome." In that his proponents will quote attacks on him, indeed Rohmer may be alone among directors. They revel in the fact that "nothing of consequence" happens in his pictures. They are mesmerized by the dense blocks of high-brow chatter. They delight in the predictability of his aesthetic. Above all, however, they are touched by the honesty of a man who, uncompromisingly, lays bear the human soul and "life as such."
Who is Eric Rohmer? Born Jean-Marie Maurice Scherer on December 1, 1920 in Nancy, a small city in Lorraine, he relocated to Paris and became a literature teacher and newspaper reporter. In 1946, under the pen name Gilbert Cordier, he published his only novel, "Elizabeth". Soon after, his interest began to shift toward criticism, and he began frequenting Cinémathèque Français (founded by archivist Henri Langlois) along with soon-to-be New Wavers Jean-Luc Godard, Jacques Rivette, Claude Chabrol and François Truffaut. It was at this time that he adopted his pseudonym, an amalgam of the names of actor/director Erich von Stroheim and novelist Sax Rohmer (author of the Fu Manchu series.) His first film, Journal d'un scélérat (1950), was shot the same year that he founded "Gazette du Cinema" along with Godard and Rivette. The next year, Rohmer joined seminal critic André Bazin at "Cahiers du Cinema", where he served as editor-in-chief from 1956 to 1963. As Cahiers was an influential publication, it not only gave him a platform from which to preach New Wave philosophy, but it enabled him to propose revisionist ideas on Hollywood. An example of the latter was "Hitchcock, The First Forty-Four Films", a book on which he collaborated with Chabrol that spoke of Alfred Hitchcock in highly favorable terms.
Rohmer's early forays into direction met with limited success. By 1958, he had completed five shorts, but his sole attempt at feature length, a version of La Comtesse de Ségur's "Les Petites filles modèles", was left unfinished. With Sign of the Lion (1962), he made his feature debut, although it was a decade before he achieved recognition. In the interim, he turned out eleven projects, including three of his "Six contes moraux" (i.e., moral tales), films devoted to examining the inner states of people in the throes of temptation. The Bakery Girl of Monceau (1963) and Suzanne's Career (1963) are unremarkable black-and-white pictures that best function as blueprints for his later output. They also mark the beginning of a business partnership with Barbet Schroeder, who starred in the former of the two. The Collector (1967), his first major effort in color, has been mistaken for a Lolita movie; on a deeper plane, it questions the manner in which one collects or rejects experience. Rohmer's first "hit" was My Night at Maud's (1969), which was nominated for two Oscars and won several international awards. It continues to be his best-known work. In it, on the eve of a proclaiming his love to Francoise, his future wife, the narrator spends a night with a pretty divorcée named Maud. Along with a friend, the two have a discussion on life, religion and Pascal's wager (i.e., the necessity of risking all on the only bet that can win.) Left alone with the sensual Maud, the narrator is forced to test his principles. The final parts in the series, Claire's Knee (1970) and Love in the Afternoon (1972) are mid-life crisis tales that cleverly reiterate the notion of self-restraint as the path to salvation.
"Comedies et Proverbs," Rohmer's second cycle, deals with deception. The Aviator's Wife (1981) is the story a naïve student who suspects his girlfriend of infidelity. In stalking her ex-lover and ultimately confronting her, we discover the levels on which he is deceiving himself. Another masterpiece is Pauline at the Beach (1983), a seaside film about adolescents' coming-of-age and the childish antics of their adult chaperones. Of the remaining installments, The Green Ray (1986) and Boyfriends and Girlfriends (1987) are the most appealing. The director's last series is known as "Contes des quatre saisons" (i.e., Tales of the Four Seasons), which too presents the dysfunctional relationships of eccentrics. In place of the social games of "Comedies et Proverbs", though, this cycle explores the lives of the emotionally isolated. A Tale of Springtime (1990) and A Tale of Winter (1992) are the more inventive pieces, the latter revisiting Ma Nuit chez Maud's "wager." Just as his oeuvre retraces itself thematically, Rohmer populates it with actors who appear and reappear in unusual ways. The final tale, Autumn Tale (1998), brings together his favorite actresses, Marie Rivière and Béatrice Romand. Like "hiver," it hearkens back to a prior project, A Good Marriage (1982), in examining Romand's quest to find a husband.
Since 1976, Rohmer has made various non-serial releases. Four Adventures of Reinette and Mirabelle (1987) and Rendez-vous in Paris (1995), both composed of vignettes, are tongue-in-cheek morality plays that merit little attention. The lush costume drama The Marquise of O (1976), in contrast, is an excellent study of the absurd formalities of 18th century aristocracy and was recognized with the Grand Prize of the Jury at Cannes. His other period pieces, regrettably, have not been as successful. Perceval le Gallois (1978), while original, is a failed experiment in stagy Arthurian storytelling, and the beautifully dull The Lady and the Duke (2001) is equally unsatisfying for most fans of his oeuvre. Nonetheless, the director has demonstrated incredible consistency, and that he was able to deliver a picture of this caliber so late in his career is astounding. The legacy that this man has bestowed upon us rivals that of any auteur, with arguably as many as ten tours de force over the last four decades. Why, then, is he the least honored among the ranks of the Nouvelle Vague and among all cinematic geniuses?
Stories of Rohmer's idiosyncrasies abound. An ardent environmentalist, he has never driven a car and refuses to ride in taxis. There is no telephone in his home. He delayed the production of Ma Nuit chez Maud for a year, insisting that certain scenes could only be shot on Christmas night. Once, he requested a musical score that could be played at levels inaudible to viewers. He refers to himself as "commercial," yet his movies turn slim profits playing the art house circuit. Normally, these are kinds of anecdotes that would endear a one with the cognoscenti. His most revealing quirk, however, is that he declines interviews and shuns the spotlight. Where Hitchcock, for instance, was always ready to talk shop, Rohmer has let his films speak for themselves. He is not worried about WHAT people think of them but THAT, indeed, they think.
It would be dangerous to supplant the aforementioned "je ne sais quoi" with words. Without demystifying Rohmer's cinema, still there are broad qualities to which one may point. First, it is marked by philosophical and artistic integrity. Long before Krzysztof Kieslowski, Rohmer came up with the concept of the film cycle, and this has permitted him to build on his own work in a unique manner. A devout Catholic, he is interested in the resisting of temptation, and what does not occur in his pieces is just as intriguing as what occurs. Apropos to the mention of his spirituality is his fascination with the interplay between destiny and free will. Some choice is always central to his stories. Yet, while his narrative is devoid of conventionally dramatic events, he shows a fondness for coincidence bordering on the supernatural. In order to maintain verisimilitude, then, he employs more "long shots" and a simpler, more natural editing process than his contemporaries. He makes infrequent use of music and foley, focusing instead on the sounds of voices. Of these voices, where his narrators are male (and it is ostensibly their subjective experience to which we are privy), his women are more intelligent and complex than his men. Finally, albeit deeply contemplative, Rohmer's work is rarely conclusive. Refreshingly un-Hollywood, rather than providing an escape from reality, it compels us to face the world in which we live.- Director
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Maurice Pialat was a French film director. Film critics have noted the naturalist style of his films, and their autobiographical elements.
Pialat obtained his first camera when only 16-years-old, but his early career involved creating documentary short films. His ambition was to become a painter and not a filmmaker. He made his feature film debut at the age of 43 with the drama film "Naked Childhood" (1968), concerning a child of the French foster care system who is moved through a series of foster families. The film also explored aspects of French working-class life in the 1960s, while being apolitical.
Pialat's second feature film was "We Won't Grow Old Together" (1972),concerning a loveless marriage. Lead actor Jean Yanne won the Best Actor Award at the Cannes Film Festival for his role in the film. Pialat's third feature film was the "The Mouth Agape" (1974), depicting in realistic fashion a woman struggling with a terminal illness. The film also dealt with the escapades of the woman's husband and son in their attempts to find new sexual partners. The film was noted for its lack of sentimentality, and incorporated experiences that Pialat had from the death of his own mother.
Pialat's fourth feature film was the teen drama "Graduate First" (1978). It dealt with teenagers from working class families dealing with the end of their school lives, with their limited prospects of passing their final exams and gaining a Baccalauréat academic qualification, and with the ominous specter of high unemployment in northern France in their immediate future.
Pialat's fifth film was "Loulou" (1980), concerning the self-destructive affair between a married woman and a lower-class criminal (the eponymous Loulou) who has just been released from prison. The film dealt with the issues of pregnancy and abortion in a realistic manner. The film was nominated for the Golden Palm award at the Cannes Film Festival.
Pialat's sixth film was "To Our Loves" (1983), and concerned the sexuality of a 15-year-old girl. The film's protagonist Suzanne (played by Sandrine Bonnaire) becomes increasingly promiscuous, as sex is the only pleasure in her life. But at the same time struggles with an inability to feel genuine love for any of her sexual partners, struggles with growing feelings of boredom and frustration about other aspects of her life, and even struggles with suicidal thoughts. The film won the César Award for Best Film, while film critics noted that the film's message was that happiness was rare and sorrow last forever.
Pialat's seventh film was the crime drama "Police" (1985). It concerned a jaded police detective investigating a drug smuggling ring, while being romantically attracted to the girlfriend of a drug smuggler. The film's lead actor Gérard Depardieu won the Best Actor of the Venice Film Festival for this role.
Pialat's eighth film was the romantic drama "Under the Sun of Satan" (1986), an adaptation of the 1926 novel by Georges Bernanos (1888-1948). The film dealt with a Catholic priest who falls in love with a female murderer. The film won the Palme d'Or award at the 1987 Cannes Film Festival, despite being seen as controversial due to its subject matter. It was the first time in 21 years that a French film won the Palme d'Or.
Pialat's ninth film was the biographical film "Van Gogh" (1991), concerning the last months in the life of painter Vincent van Gogh (1853-1890) and dealing with van Gogh's relationship with his few close associates. The film dealt primarily with van Gogh's "difficult personal relationships and declining mental state", and not with his paintings. Film critics commented that it successfully covered the artist's humanity, without being either melodramatic or sensationalist.
Pialat's tenth was "The Son Of..." (1995), concerning the family life of a 4-year-old boy. The titular boy's parents are divorced, and the boy is raised by a single father who has an unsteady love life. The film was poorly received compared to Pialat's previous works, and Pialat had plans to re-edit the film to achieve better results. Pialat's increasingly poor health aborted these plans, and Pialat retired from filmmaking in 1995, at the age of 70.
Pialat died in January, 2003, at the age of 77. His work is considered unique among the French directors, but he has had few imitators. Film critic Kent Jones has commented that Pialat always marched to the beat of a different drummer, and never cared whether anyone marched beside or behind him.- Director
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Kon Ichikawa has been influenced by artists as diverse as Walt Disney and Jean Renoir, and his films cover a wide spectrum of moods, from the comic to the overwhelmingly ironic and even the perverse. Ichikawa began his career as a cartoonist, and this influence is apparent in his skillful use of the widescreen, and in the strong, angular patterns seen in many of his compositions. He has directed Mr. Pu (1953), a popular film based on Junichi Yokoyama's "Mr. Pu" comic strip. At various points in his career Ichikawa has shown that he is capable of appealing to a popular audience without compromising his artistry. A great visual stylist and perfectionist, Ichikawa excels at screen adaptations of literary masterpieces, including Sôseki Natsume's The Heart (1955), Yukio Mishima's Conflagration (1958), Jun'ichirô Tanizaki's Odd Obsession (1959) and I Am a Cat (1975) and Tôson Shimazaki's The Outcast (1962). He has also remade film classics, such as Yutaka Abe's Ashi ni sawatta onna (1926) (Ichikawa's version: 1952) and Teinosuke Kinugasa's Yukinojô henge: Daiippen (1935) (Ichikawa's version: 1963), transposing them to contemporary settings.
The West was first introduced to Ichikawa when his The Burmese Harp (1956) won the San Giorgio Prize at the 1956 Venice Film Festival. His epic documentary Tokyo Olympiad (1965) (released the following year) and Alone on the Pacific (1963) explore, with dignity and imagination, the limits of human endurance. He has also worked in the thriller genre, with The Hole (1957), The Inugami Family (1976) and The Devil's Island (1977). Ichikawa tends to present strongly etched, complex characters: the stuttering acolyte who desires to preserve the "purity" of the Golden Pavilion (ENJO); the elderly husband who resorts to injections and voyeurism in order to remain sexually active (KAGI); the member of a pariah class who tries to deny his identity and to "pass" in regular society (HAKAI). More recently, Actress (1987) is a tribute to the fiercely independent Japanese actress Kinuyo Tanaka, who starred in many of Kenji Mizoguchi's films and was herself a director in later life. On the lighter side, Ichikawa's characters also include a 19th-century cat; a good-hearted, hapless teacher; and a baby who narrates how the world looks from his vantage point. He is especially adept at mixing comedy and tragedy within the same story. Until 1965, Ichikawa's close collaborator was his wife, screenwriter Natto Wada, with whom he produced most of his finest films.- Director
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Claude Chabrol was born on 24 June 1930 in Paris, France. He was a director and writer, known for Le Beau Serge (1958), La Cérémonie (1995) and Story of Women (1988). He was married to Aurore Chabrol, Stéphane Audran and Agnès Goute. He died on 12 September 2010 in Paris, France.- Director
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Born on January 20th of 1944 in Madrid, Spain, José Luis Garci is without a doubt one of the most influential film personalities in the history of film in Spain and perhaps the best known writer in the country. He has left a distinguished talent in his successful movies throughout the years: La Cabina (1972), Las Verdes Praderas (1979), El Crack (1981), Volver a empezar (1982), Canción de cuna (1994), La Herida luminosa (1997), El Abuelo (1998), Tiovivo c. 1950 (2004) and Ninette (2005) among others. Nowadays José Luis Garci lives a quiet life along with his wife, his daughter and friends somewhere in Spain.- Director
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Costa-Gavras was born on 12 February 1933 in Loutra-Iraias, Greece. He is a director and writer, known for Z (1969), Missing (1982) and Amen. (2002). He has been married to Michèle Ray-Gavras since 1968. They have two children.- Director
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Agnès Varda was born on 30 May 1928 in Ixelles, Belgium. She was a director and writer, known for Cléo from 5 to 7 (1962), Vagabond (1985) and Faces Places (2017). She was married to Jacques Demy. She died on 29 March 2019 in Paris, France.- Director
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From Ernst Lubitsch's experiences in Sophien Gymnasium (high school) theater, he decided to leave school at the age of 16 and pursue a career on the stage. He had to compromise with his father and keep the account books for the family tailor business while he acted in cabarets and music halls at night. In 1911 he joined the Deutsches Theater of famous director/producer/impresario Max Reinhardt, and was able to move up to leading acting roles in a short time. He took an extra job as a handyman while learning silent film acting at Berlin's Bioscope film studios. The next year he launched his own film career by appearing in a series of comedies showcasing traditional ethnic Jewish slice-of-life fare. Finding great success in these character roles, Lubitsch turned to broader comedy, then beginning in 1914 started writing and directing his own films.
His breakthrough film came in 1918 with The Eyes of the Mummy (1918) ("The Eyes of the Mummy"), a tragedy starring future Hollywood star Pola Negri. Also that year he made Carmen (1918), again with Negri, a film that was commercially successful on the international level. His work already showed his genius for catching the eye as well as the ear in not only comedy but historical drama. The year 1919 found Lubitsch directing seven films, the two standouts being his lavish Passion (1919) with two of his favorite actors--Negri (yet again) and Emil Jannings. His other standout was the witty parody of the American upper crust, The Oyster Princess (1919) ("The Oyster Princess"). This film was a perfect example of what became known as the Lubitsch style, or the "Lubitsch Touch", as it became known--sophisticated humor combined with inspired staging that economically presented a visual synopsis of storyline, scenes and characters.
His success in Europe brought him to the shores of America to promote The Loves of Pharaoh (1922) ("The Loves of Pharaoh") and he become acquainted with the thriving US film industry. He soon returned to Europe, but came back to the US for good to direct new friend and influential star Mary Pickford in his first American hit, Rosita (1923). The Marriage Circle (1924) began Lubitsch's unprecedented run of sophisticated films that mirrored the American scene (though always relocated to foreign or imaginary lands) and all its skewed panorama of the human condition. There was a smooth transition between his silent films for Warner Bros. and the sound movies--usually at Paramount--now embellished with the flow of speech of Hollywood's greats lending personal nuances to continually heighten the popularity at the box office and the fame of Lubitsch's first-rate versatility in crafting a smart film. There was a mix of pioneering musical films and some drama also through the 1930s. The of those films resulted in Paramount making him its production chief in 1935, so he could produce his own films and supervise production of others. In 1938 he signed a three-year contract with Twentieth Century-Fox.
Certainly two of his most beloved films near the end of his career dealt with the political landscape of the World War II era. He moved to MGM, where he directed Greta Garbo and Melvyn Douglas in Ninotchka (1939), a fast-paced comedy of "decadent" Westerners meeting Soviet "comrades" who were seeking more of life than the mother country could--or would--offer. During the war he directed perhaps his most beloved comedy--controversial to say the least, dark in a tongue-in-cheek sort of way--but certainly a razor-sharp tour de force in smart, precise dialog, staging and story: To Be or Not to Be (1942), produced by his own company, Romaine Film Corp. It was a biting satire of Nazi tyranny that also poked fun at Lubitsch's own theater roots with the problems and bickering--but also the triumph--of a somewhat raggedy acting troupe in Warsaw during the Nazi occupation. Jack Benny's perfect deadpan humor worked well with the zany vivaciousness of Carole Lombard, and a cast of veteran character actors from both Hollywood and Lubitsch's native Germany provided all the chemistry needed to make this a classic comedy, as well as a fierce statement against the perpetrators of war. The most poignant scene was profoundly so, with Felix Bressart--another of Reinhardt's students--as the only Jewish bit player in the company. His supreme hope is a chance to someday play Shylock. He gets his chance as part of a ruse in front of Adolf Hitler's SS bodyguards. The famous soliloquy was a bold declaration to the world of the Axis' brutal inhumanity to man, as in its treatment of and plans for the Jewry of Europe.
Lubitsch had a massive heart attack in 1943 after having signed a producer/director's contract with 20th Century-Fox earlier that year, but completed Heaven Can Wait (1943). His continued efforts in film were severely stymied but he worked as he could. In late 1944 Otto Preminger, another disciple of Reinhardt's Viennese theater work, took over the direction of A Royal Scandal (1945), with Lubitsch credited as nominal producer. March of 1947, the year of his passing, brought a special Academy Award (he was nominated three times) to the fading producer/director for his "25-year contribution to motion pictures." At his funeral, two of his fellow directorial émigrés from Germany put his epitaph succinctly as they left. Billy Wilder noted, "No more Lubitsch." William Wyler answered, "Worse than that - no more Lubitsch films."- Producer
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Park Chan-wook was born on 23 August 1963 in Seoul, South Korea. He is a producer and writer, known for Oldboy (2003), The Handmaiden (2016) and Decision to Leave (2022). He is married to Eun-hee Kim. They have one child.- Writer
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Dario Argento was born on September 7, 1940, in Rome, Italy, the first-born son of famed Italian producer Salvatore Argento and Brazilian fashion model Elda Luxardo. Argento recalls getting his ideas for filmmaking from his close-knit family from Italian folk tales told by his parents and other family members, including an aunt who told him frighting bedtime stories. Argento based most of his thriller movies on childhood trauma, yet his own--according to him--was a normal one. Along with tales spun by his aunt, Argento was impressed by stories from The Grimm Brothers, Hans Christian Andersen and Edgar Allan Poe. Argento started his career writing for various film journal magazines while still in his teens attending a Catholic high school. After graduation, instead of going to college, Argento took a job as a columnist for the Rome daily newspaper "Paese Sera". Inspired by the movies, he later found work as a screenwriter and wrote several screenplays for a number of films, but the most important were his western collaborations, which included Cemetery Without Crosses (1969) and the Sergio Leone masterpiece Once Upon a Time in the West (1968). After its release Argento wrote and directed his first movie, The Bird with the Crystal Plumage (1970), which starred Tony Musante and and British actress Suzy Kendall. It's a loose adoption on Fredric Brown's novel "The Screaming Mimi", which was made for his father's film company. Argento wanted to direct the movie himself because he did not want any other director messing up the production and his screenplay.
After "The Bird With the Crystal Plumage" became an international hit, Argento followed up with two more thrillers, The Cat o' Nine Tails (1971), starring 'Karl Madlen' (qv" and 'James Fransiscus', and Four Flies on Grey Velvet (1971) ("Four Flies On Black Velvet"), both backed by his father Salvatore. Argento then directed the TV drama Testimone oculare (1973) and the historical TV drama The Five Days (1973). He then went back to directing so-called "giallo" thrillers, starting with Deep Red (1975), a violent mystery-thriller starring David Hemmings that inspired a number of international directors in the thriller-horror genre. His next work was Suspiria (1977), a surreal horror film about a witch's coven that was inspired by the Gothic fairy tales of the Grimm Brothers and Hans Christian Anderson, which he also wrote in collaboration with his girlfriend, screenwriter/actress Daria Nicolodi, who acted in "Profondo Rosso" ("Deep Red") and most of Argento's films from then to the late 1980s. Argento advanced the unfinished trilogy with Inferno (1980), before returning to the "giallo" genre with the gory Tenebrae (1982), and then with the haunting Phenomena (1985).
The lukewarm reviews for his films, however, caused Argento to slip away from directing to producing and co-writing two Lamberto Bava horror flicks, Demons (1985) and Demons 2 (1986). Argento returned to directing with the "giallo" thriller Opera (1987), which according to him was "a very unpleasant experience", and no wonder: a rash of technical problems delayed production, the lead actress Vanessa Redgrave dropped out before filming was to begin, Argento's father Salvatore died during filming and his long-term girlfriend Daria broke off their relationship. After the commercial box-office failure of "Opera", Argento temporarily settled in the US, where he collaborated with director George A. Romero on the two-part horror-thriller Two Evil Eyes (1990) (he had previously collaborated with Romero on the horror action thriller Dawn of the Dead (1978)). While still living in America, Argento appeared in small roles in several films and directed another violent mystery thriller, Trauma (1993), which starred his youngest daughter Asia Argento from his long-term relationship with Nicolodi.
Argento returned to Italy in 1995, where he made a comeback in the horror genre with The Stendhal Syndrome (1996) and then with another version of "The Phantom of the Opera", The Phantom of the Opera (1998), both of which starred Asia. Most recently, Argento directed a number of "giallo" mystery thrillers such as Sleepless (2001), The Card Player (2003) and Do You Like Hitchcock? (2005), as well as two gory, supernatural-themed episodes of the USA TV cable anthology series Masters of Horror (2005).
Having always wanted to make a third chapter to his "Three Mothers" horror films, Argento finally completed the trilogy in 2007 with the release of Mother of Tears (2007), which starred Asia Argento as a young woman trying to identify and stop the last surviving evil witch from taking over the world. In addition to his Gothic and violent style of storytelling, "La terza madre" has many references to two of his previous films, "Suspiria" (1997) and "Inferno" (1980), which is a must for fans of the trilogy.
His movies may be regarded by some critics and opponents as cheap and overly violent, but second or third viewings show him to be a talented writer/director with a penchant for original ideas and creative directing.- Writer
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Beginning his film career as a screenwriter, Henri-Georges Clouzot switched over to directing and in 1943 had the distinction of having his film The Raven (1943) banned by both the German forces occupying France and the Free French forces fighting them, but for different reasons. He shot to international fame with The Wages of Fear (1953) and consolidated that success with Diabolique (1955), but continuous ill health caused large gaps in his output, and several projects had to be abandoned (though one, Hell (1994), was subsequently filmed by Claude Chabrol). His films are typically relentless suspense thrillers, similar to Alfred Hitchcock's but with far less light relief.- Director
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Georges Franju is a figure of immense importance in the history of French cinema, not primarily for his films (exceptional though many of these are) but for being the co-founder, with Henri Langlois, of the Cinematheque Française in 1937--France's most famous and important film archive.
He worked primarily as a film archivist until 1949, when he made his solo directorial debut with the shocking yet lyrical slaughterhouse documentary Blood of the Beasts (1949). More documentary shorts followed before his feature debut, Head Against the Wall (1959) in 1958, which established his uniquely poetic and visually striking style (his films were generally characterized by unforgettable images that owed a great deal to early cinema in general and German Expressionism in particular). His reputation was strengthened with the bizarre plastic surgery horror film Eyes Without a Face (1960); Judex (1963), a tribute to French film serial pioneer Louis Feuillade in 1963; and the Jean Cocteau adaptation Thomas the Impostor (1965), though in the last 15 years of his life he was sadly neglected.- Director
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London-born Michael Anderson began his career in films as an office boy at Elstree studios. By 1938, he had progressed up the ladder to become assistant director for distinguished film makers Noël Coward, David Lean and Anthony Asquith. Shortly after, during wartime with the Royal Signals Corps (Army Kinematograph Service), Anderson made the acquaintance of Peter Ustinov. Upon demobilisation, the 24-year old up-and-coming director secured the release from the military of his 'favourite corporal' and mentor to work as first assistant on Secret Flight (1946) and Vice Versa (1948). For Ustinov's third venture, Private Angelo (1949), Anderson both co-directed and co-wrote the screenplay, but the picture that first put him on the map was to be the patriotic wartime drama The Dam Busters (1955), based on true events. Britain's most successful film of 1955, in turn, led to Anderson being hired by Mike Todd to direct the all-star blockbuster Around the World in 80 Days (1956). A hugely popular box-office hit and winner of five Academy Awards, it elevated Anderson into the realm of more ambitious international productions.
His strong visual style -- in no small way complemented by a fruitful and long-standing collaboration with the cinematographer Erwin Hillier -- became ideally suited for suspenseful thrillers and action subjects like Chase a Crooked Shadow (1958), the sub-Hitchcockian psychological whodunnit The Naked Edge (1961) or the underrated maritime drama The Wreck of the Mary Deare (1959) (based on a novel by Hammond Innes and originally intended for Alfred Hitchcock who went on to do North by Northwest (1959) instead). Another little gem is the intricately plotted spy thriller The Quiller Memorandum (1966), tautly directed and noteworthy for supremely well captured Berlin exteriors (a familiarity which stemmed from Anderson having spent some of his early childhood in Berlin and Hillier having worked at Ufa in the 20s before collaborating on Fritz Lang's classic thriller M (1931)). According to Hillier, Anderson also had a reputation for being "superb at handling actors". This is reflected in his films which have often featured big name stars like Gary Cooper, Charlton Heston, Laurence Olivier or Alec Guinness.
Moving into science fiction, Anderson made style triumph over content with his (for the time) expensively made dystopian thriller Logan's Run (1976). Though not a big success with critics, the picture won at the box office and helped MGM out of its financial doldrums. Also in this genre, but with less distinction, Anderson directed Millennium (1989) and a miniseries, The Martian Chronicles (1980). A foray into the world of comic strip heroes, Doc Savage: The Man of Bronze (1975), proved to be one of his rare failures. His more recent work of note has included the Gemini Award-winning TV movie Young Catherine (1991), based on the early life of Russia's Catherine the Great. Vanessa Redgrave, who played Empress Elizabeth, was also nominated for a Primetime Emmy in the Supporting Actress category.
In 1957, Anderson received the Silver Medallion for outstanding work from the Screen Director's Guild of America and was in 2012 also honoured with a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Directors Guild of Canada. A Canadian resident since the 1970s, Anderson passed away at his home on the Canadian Sunshine Coast in British Columbia on April 25 2018 at the age of 98.- Director
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Mark Robson studied political science and economics at the University of California. He then took a law course at Pacific Coast University, and, at one time, also attended the U.S. Naval Academy in Annapolis. Ultimately, his interests led him elsewhere, since he ended up in the movie business as a part-time assistant set dresser in the property department of 20th Century Fox. Asking studio boss Darryl F. Zanuck for a promotion turned out to be a bad move, since he was promptly fired. Playing golf with RKO executive Herman Zobel, conversely, opened the door to a position at the studio's film library, where he was to earn a meager 66 cents per hour. Undeterred, Robson eventually moved up to the position of assistant editor and worked (uncredited) on Orson Welles' s Citizen Kane (1941) and The Magnificent Ambersons (1942) for $1.25 per hour, but slaving over a gruelling 110 to 120 hour-week. When "Ambersons" and Journey Into Fear (1943) ran into production difficulties, Welles and his Mercury Group fell out of favour at RKO and Robson was re-assigned by Lou L. Ostrow to a B-unit, headed by Val Lewton.
Within the relaxed atmosphere of Lewton's company, Robson was employed as full-time editor between 1941 and 1943. He became noted for his outstanding work on Cat People (1942). In one famous scene, he originated a technique called 'the bus', abruptly cutting from the face of a person in terror (in this case Simone Simon) to a bus stopping violently with hissing airbrakes, thus effectively jolting the audience in their seats. The 'bus', of course, could be substituted for any other sudden event, intended as a red herring in order to shock the viewer. It is still a widely used practice today, particularly in horror movies or thrillers.
After editing I Walked with a Zombie (1943) and The Leopard Man (1943), Robson was promoted by Lewton to director as a replacement for Jacques Tourneur. Robson's first film was The Seventh Victim (1943), a tale of Satanists operating in Greenwich Village. This was followed by three more entries in Lewton's series of low budget horror thrillers: The Ghost Ship (1943), Isle of the Dead (1945) and Bedlam (1946). All of these modest ventures recouped their investment fourfold. In the long run, however, it was not enough to save struggling RKO. Robson lost his job and found himself on the bread line for the next two years. In 1949, he was head-hunted by independent producer Stanley Kramer to direct the boxing drama Champion (1949), starring Kirk Douglas as a callous boxing champ on his way to the top. This prestige production marked the turning point in Robson's career. Bosley Crowther, the leading New York Times reviewer, praised the director for providing "a wealth of pictorial interest and exciting action of a graphic, colourful sort" (NY Times, April 11 1949). Robson made another film for Kramer, Home of the Brave (1949), which dealt with the results of racial prejudice.
Suddenly finding himself much in demand, Robson worked briefly under contract for Samuel Goldwyn, before launching the second phase of his career as a director of big budget commercial hits, among them the charismatic The Bridges at Toko-Ri (1954); another hard-hitting tale of corruption in the world of boxing, The Harder They Fall (1956); the stylishly-made small-town melodrama Peyton Place (1957); and the unabashedly sentimental, romanticised 'true-life' story of an English missionary in China, The Inn of the Sixth Happiness (1958) (filmed in North Wales !). One of his best later films was the Paul Newman thriller The Prize (1963), directed by Robson in a style entirely reminiscent of Alfred Hitchcock, filled with rollicking action and witty dialogue. That same year, Robson established his own production company, Red Lion. He made several patchy films under this banner, including a stodgy, fictionalised account of the Ghandi assassination Nine Hours to Rama (1963); and a dull, forgettable anti-war drama, Lost Command (1966). The lurid, but slickly-made melodrama Valley of the Dolls (1967) rekindled Robson's career, which was rounded out with the all-star blockbuster disaster movie Earthquake (1974), filmed in 'Sensurround' for greater impact. A massive box-office hit, it eventually grossed in excess of 80 million dollars. Robson died of a heart attack just weeks after completing work on the action thriller Avalanche Express (1979).- Director
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Fritz Lang was born in Vienna, Austria, in 1890. His father managed a construction company. His mother, Pauline Schlesinger, was Jewish but converted to Catholicism when Lang was ten. After high school, he enrolled briefly at the Technische Hochschule Wien and then started to train as a painter. From 1910 to 1914, he traveled in Europe, and he would later claim, also in Asia and North Africa. He studied painting in Paris from 1913-14. At the start of World War I, he returned to Vienna, enlisting in the army in January 1915. Severely wounded in June 1916, he wrote some scenarios for films while convalescing. In early 1918, he was sent home shell-shocked and acted briefly in Viennese theater before accepting a job as a writer at Erich Pommer's production company in Berlin, Decla. In Berlin, Lang worked briefly as a writer and then as a director, at Ufa and then for Nero-Film, owned by the American Seymour Nebenzal. In 1920, he began a relationship with actress and writer Thea von Harbou (1889-1954), who wrote with him the scripts for his most celebrated films: Dr. Mabuse, the Gambler (1922), Die Nibelungen: Siegfried (1924), Metropolis (1927) and M (1931) (credited to von Harbou alone). They married in 1922 and divorced in 1933. In that year, Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels offered Lang the job of head of the German Cinema Institute. Lang--who was an anti-Nazi mainly because of his Catholic background--did not accept the position (it was later offered to and accepted by filmmaker Leni Riefenstahl) and, after secretly sending most of his money out of the country, fled Germany to Paris. After about a year in Paris, Lang moved to the United States in mid-1934, initially under contract to MGM. Over the next 20 years, he directed numerous American films. In the 1950s, in part because the film industry was in economic decline and also because of Lang's long-standing reputation for being difficult with, and abusive to, actors, he found it increasingly hard to get work. At the end of the 1950s, he traveled to Germany and made what turned out to be his final three films there, none of which were well received.
In 1964, nearly blind, he was chosen to be president of the jury at the Cannes Film Festival. He was an avid collector of primitive art and habitually wore a monocle, an affectation he picked up during his early days in Vienna. After his divorce from von Harbou, he had relationships with many other women, but from about 1931 to his death in 1976, he was close to Lily Latte, who helped him in many ways.- Actor
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Born in Lódz, Poland, in 1938. Director, playwright, scriptwriter, and actor. Graduated in ethnology, literature and history from Warsaw University in 1959. Graduated from Lódz Film Academy in directing in 1962. Feature debut: _Identification Marks - None_ (Rysopis, 1964, scr., dir, act.), awarded in Warsaw 1964 and Arnhem 1965. Other films: _Walkover_ (Walkower, 1965, scr., act.), awarded in Mannheim; _The Barrier_ (Bariera, 1966, scr.), awarded in Bergamo 1966 and Valladolid 1968; _Le Depart_ (1967, scr., belg. prod.), Grand Prix in Wets Berlin); _Dialogue 20-40-60_ (Dialog 20-40-60, 1968, scr. - Polish part of "The Twenty Years Olds", czech. prod.); _Hands Up!_ (Rece do gory!, 1967)- Director
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Masaki Kobayashi was born on 14 February 1916 in Hokkaido, Japan. He was a director and writer, known for Harakiri (1962), Samurai Rebellion (1967) and The Human Condition III: A Soldier's Prayer (1961). He died on 4 October 1996 in Tokyo, Japan.- Producer
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Aki Kaurismäki did a wide variety of jobs including postman, dish-washer and film critic, before forming a production and distribution company, Villealfa (in homage to Jean-Luc Godard's Alphaville (1965)) with his older brother Mika Kaurismäki, also a film-maker. Both Aki and Mika are prolific film-makers, and together have been responsible for one-fifth of the total output of the Finnish film industry since the early 1980s, though Aki's work has found more favour abroad. His films are very short (he says a film should never run longer than 90 minutes, and many of his films are nearer 70), eccentric parodies of various genres (road movies, film noir, rock musicals), populated by lugubrious hard-drinking Finns and set to eclectic soundtracks, typically based around '50s rock'n'roll.
In the 1990s he has made films in Britain (I Hired a Contract Killer (1990)) and France (The Bohemian Life (1992)).- Director
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Okamoto belonged to what one colleague called "the generation where most of them got killed": the leagues of university graduates who were drafted into and sacrificed to the last years of Japan's war in the South Pacific. Okamoto was drafted during the very worst of it, in 1943, but almost alone among his colleagues managed to survive. The experience helped shape his outlook on the nature of human conflict in general, and the Japanese war in particular: among his earliest successes (which led to a series) was Dokuritsugu Gurentai (1959), an acerbic story of island-bound soldiers that helped make Okamoto's reputation. Okamoto also made a name for himself as a director of equally cynical gangster pictures at Toho, including Boss of the Underworld (1959) and The Age of Assassins (1967). Kihachi Okamoto began his filmic training in 1945 under such estimable teachers as directors Mikio Naruse, Senkichi Taniguchi. and Ishiro Honda.- Writer
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After training as a painter (he storyboards his films as full-scale paintings), Kurosawa entered the film industry in 1936 as an assistant director, eventually making his directorial debut with Sanshiro Sugata (1943). Within a few years, Kurosawa had achieved sufficient stature to allow him greater creative freedom. Drunken Angel (1948) was the first film he made without extensive studio interference, and marked his first collaboration with Toshirô Mifune. In the coming decades, the two would make 16 movies together, and Mifune became as closely associated with Kurosawa's films as was John Wayne with the films of Kurosawa's idol, John Ford. After working in a wide range of genres, Kurosawa made his international breakthrough film Rashomon (1950) in 1950. It won the top prize at the Venice Film Festival, and first revealed the richness of Japanese cinema to the West. The next few years saw the low-key, touching Ikiru (1952) (Living), the epic Seven Samurai (1954), the barbaric, riveting Shakespeare adaptation Throne of Blood (1957), and a fun pair of samurai comedies Yojimbo (1961) and Sanjuro (1962). After a lean period in the late 1960s and early 1970s, though, Kurosawa attempted suicide. He survived, and made a small, personal, low-budget picture with Dodes'ka-den (1970), a larger-scale Russian co-production Dersu Uzala (1975) and, with the help of admirers Francis Ford Coppola and George Lucas, the samurai tale Kagemusha: The Shadow Warrior (1980), which Kurosawa described as a dry run for Ran (1985), an epic adaptation of Shakespeare's "King Lear." He continued to work into his eighties with the more personal Dreams (1990), Rhapsody in August (1991) and Madadayo (1993). Kurosawa's films have always been more popular in the West than in his native Japan, where critics have viewed his adaptations of Western genres and authors (William Shakespeare, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Maxim Gorky and Evan Hunter) with suspicion - but he's revered by American and European film-makers, who remade Rashomon (1950) as The Outrage (1964), Seven Samurai (1954), as The Magnificent Seven (1960), Yojimbo (1961), as A Fistful of Dollars (1964) and The Hidden Fortress (1958), as Star Wars: Episode IV - A New Hope (1977).- Director
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Hideo Gosha was born on 26 February 1929 in Akasaka, Tokyo, Japan (undisclosed). He was a director and writer, known for The Steel Edge of Revenge (1969), Yôkirô (1983) and Onimasa (1982). He died on 30 August 1992.- Director
- Second Unit Director or Assistant Director
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Kenji Misumi was born on March 2, 1921 in Kyoto, Japan. Misumi was the illegitimate child of a geisha mother and originally wanted to be a painter, but his father disapproved. Kenji attended Ritsumeikan University in Kyoto, Japan. During this time Misumi met future Daiei studio head Kan Kikuchi, who gave Misumi a business card for a prominent studio executive. Kenji began his career at Daiei as a gofer before going on to become an assistant director. Moreover, after World War II Misumi spent about four years as an inmate at a prison of war camp in Siberia. Kenji directed his first film for Daiei in 1956 and worked profusely as a contract director for Daiei until the studio went bankrupt in 1971. In the wake of Daiei's collapse Misumi went on to direct several more movies that include four out of six entries in the hugely popular and successful "Lone Wolf and Cub" series. He died at age 54 on September 24, 1975.- Actor
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For more than three decades, Henry King was the most versatile and reliable (not to mention hard-working) contract director on the 20th Century-Fox lot. His tenure lasted from 1930 to 1961, spanning most of Hollywood's "golden" era. King was renowned as a specialist in literary adaptations (A Bell for Adano (1945), The Sun Also Rises (1957)) and for his nostalgic depictions of rural or small-town America (Margie (1946)). Much of his work was characterized by an uncomplicated approach and a vivid visual style rather than cinematic tricks or technical individuality. For the most part it was his meticulous attention to detail, and his reliance on superior plots and good acting, that got the job done. King was, above all, an astute judge of talent. He introduced Ronald Colman to American audiences in The White Sister (1923), drawing a mustache on the actor's clean-shaven face with a retouching pencil--the real thing later becoming a Colman trademark. King discovered Gary Cooper and cast him in a leading dramatic role in his outdoor western The Winning of Barbara Worth (1926), over the initial objections of producer Samuel Goldwyn who thought Coop was just another "damn cowboy". Goldwyn quickly changed his mind after seeing the rushes. Other King discoveries included the lovely Jean Peters (in Captain from Castile (1947)) and Tyrone Power, whom he actively promoted to the point of badgering studio boss Darryl F. Zanuck to star him in Lloyd's of London (1936). Power subsequently became one of Fox's most popular stars.
All in all, not bad for a guy who had left school at 15 to work for the Norfolk & Western Railroad. After enduring the machine shops for a few years, King found more suitable employment as an apprentice actor with the touring Empire Stock Company, where he often performed song-and-dance routines in blackface. During his travels he befriended comedy actress Pearl White. While accompanying her on a visit to the Lubin film studio in Philadelphia in 1913, he was somehow talked into trying out as an actor. Before long King found himself cast as assorted western villains in scores of one-reelers. Moving to California the following year, he graduated to romantic leads in full-length feature films with the Balboa Amusement Company, often co-starring opposite popular child actress Marie Osborne. King's directing career began in 1915 and gathered momentum after he joined The American Film Manufacturing Company, and, subsequently, Thomas H. Ince. His first success was the army comedy 23 1/2 Hours' Leave (1919). By 1921 King fronted his own production company, Inspiration Pictures, releasing through First National. The rustic southern drama Tol'able David (1921) was his next critically acclaimed picture, but not until joining Goldwyn at United Artists (1925-30) did he manage to turn out a consistent string of hits, including The White Sister (1923) and Romola (1924)--both shot on location in Italy--and the archetypal tearjerker Stella Dallas (1925). For King, the transition to sound pictures was a mere formality.
In 1930 King qualified for his pilot's license and began busily scouting locations from the air, earning him the sobriquet "The Flying Director". When not airborne or on the golf course (his other passion), he demonstrated his amazing versatility with box-office hits across a wide variety of genres: striking and colorful swashbucklers (The Black Swan (1942)); romantic or religious melodramas--their sentimentality well-tempered so they never seemed maudlin--such as (The Song of Bernadette (1943) and Love Is a Many-Splendored Thing (1955)); epics (In Old Chicago (1938), with its splendid recreation of the 1871 great fire, the entire enterprise filmed at a staggering cost of $1.8 million); popular musicals (Alexander's Ragtime Band (1938), Carousel (1956)); psychological war drama (Twelve O'Clock High (1949)); and uncompromisingly tough, offbeat westerns (The Gunfighter (1950) and the underrated The Bravados (1958)). The latter three all starred King's preferred leading actor, Gregory Peck. Peck was also on hand for The Snows of Kilimanjaro (1952), reputedly Ernest Hemingway's favorite among all his filmed adaptations. Of course, King also had his occasional failures. Topping that list was Zanuck's pet project, the biopic Wilson (1944). Overly serious to the point of being dour, its pacifist message was lost to an audience in the middle of a world war. King's other notable dud, near the end of his career, was Beloved Infidel (1959). Badly miscast, the film chronicling the affair between F. Scott Fitzgerald and Hollywood gossip columnist Sheilah Graham was played out, inaccurately, as a genteel and overly glossy romance.
Though nominated for two Academy Awards for Best Director, King failed to snag the coveted trophy. However, he did win a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Directors Guild of America in 1956. More importantly, perhaps, he seems to have enjoyed his work, stating in a 1978 interview, "I've had more fun directing pictures than most people have playing games" (New York Times, July 1 1982).- Director
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The great San Francisco earthquake and fire of 1906 was a tragedy for Mervyn LeRoy. While he and his father managed to survive, they lost everything they had. To make money, LeRoy sold newspapers and entered talent contests as a singer. When he entered vaudeville, his act was "LeRoy and Cooper--Two Kids and a Piano". After the act broke up he contacted his cousin, Jesse L. Lasky, and went to work in Hollywood. He worked in the costume department, the film lab and as a camera assistant before becoming a comedy gag writer and part-time actor in silent films. His next step was as a director, and his first effort was No Place to Go (1927). He scored an unqualified hit with Harold Teen (1928). Earning $1,000 per week by the end of that year, he was nicknamed "The Boy Wonder" of Warner Bros., where his pictures were profitable lightweights. His motto, to paraphrase William Shakespeare, was "Good stories make good movies." LeRoy rounded out the decade assigned to more lightweights, such as Naughty Baby (1928) (his first talkie), Hot Stuff (1929), Little Johnny Jones (1929) and a primitive but rather inventive musical talkie, Broadway Babies (1929), all of which proved that he was equally adept at constructing a musical as any other genre he worked in.
In the depths of the Depression there was considerable disagreement within the studio on whether audiences wanted escapism or stories addressing issues pertaining to the stark realities of the day. LeRoy sided with studio exec Darryl F. Zanuck's tilt toward realism and threw himself into his next assignment--Little Caesar (1931). This smash hit started the gangster craze and LeRoy gained a reputation as a top dramatic director (although his follow-up assignment was Show Girl in Hollywood (1930)). During the 1930s several of his films dealt with social issues, usually through the eyes of the underdog, the best example of that being I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang (1932). However, as one of Warner's war horses in its stable of contract directors, he was also assigned more digestible fare. He followed his landmark gangster picture with Gold Diggers of 1933 (1933), although it could be argued that it also contained a remarkable degree of social consciousness. Upon the death of Irving Thalberg LeRoy was picked as head of production at MGM. He produced (and partly directed, without credit) that studio's classic The Wizard of Oz (1939), although it was not a classic at the box office when first released. Its poor reception convinced LeRoy to quit producing pictures and go back to directing them. He always had a good relationship with actors and had discovered a number of people who would go on to become major stars, such as Clark Gable (who was rejected for a role in "Little Caesar" by Jack L. Warner over LeRoy's objections), Loretta Young, Robert Mitchum and Lana Turner.
LeRoy turned out numerous hits for MGM in the 1940s, such as Johnny Eager (1941), Random Harvest (1942) and one of the best patriotic films of the period, Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo (1944). He spent a year at RKO at the end of the war as a producer and director, but quickly returned to MGM, where he remained until 1954. The collapse of the studio system in the 1950s required him to re-assume a producer's role; along with other Hollywood players of the day, he formed his own production company, which set up camp at Warner Bros., and he produced and directed a number of films for that studio based on successful stage plays. LeRoy had a reputation for taking on different types of films, and he seldom did the same type of picture twice, turning out comedies, dramas, fantasies and musicals. His output declined in the 1960s and he took a working retirement in 1965, disgruntled at the direction the film industry had taken. He was sorely tempted to tackle Pierre Boulle's Planet of the Apes (1968), but declined, deciding that the requirement to put up his own money was too risky for a man in his mid-60s. His last directorial effort was assisting old friend John Wayne for certain scenes in The Green Berets (1968). He took a figurehead position at Mego International in the 1970s and talked of producing westerns, but nothing came of it. However, as talented and successful as LeRoy was as a director over his long career, and considering the number of classic films he was responsible for, the one thing he never managed to successfully get was an Oscar for Best Director. The man who joked he never made a total flop died in 1987.- Director
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George Cukor was an American film director of Hungarian-Jewish descent, better known for directing comedies and literary adaptations. He once won the Academy Award for Best Director, and was nominated other four times for the same Award.
In 1899, George Dewey Cukor was born on the Lower East Side of New York City. His parents were assistant district attorney Viktor Cukor and Helén Ilona Gross. His middle name "Dewey" honored Admiral George Dewey who was considered a war hero for his victory in the Battle of Manila Bay, in 1898.
As a child, Cukor received dancing lessons, and soon fell in love with the theater, appearing in several amateur plays. In 1906, he performed in a recital with David O. Selznick (1902-1965), who would later become a close friend.
As a teenager, Cukor often visited the New York Hippodrome, a well-known Manhattan theater. He often cut classes while attending high school, in order to attend afternoon matinees. He later took a job as a supernumerary with the Metropolitan Opera, and at times performed there in black-face.
Cukor graduated from the DeWitt Clinton High School in 1917. His father wanted him to follow a legal career, and had his son enrolled City College of New York. Cukor lost interest in his studies and dropped out of college in 1918. He then took a job as an assistant stage manager and bit player for a touring production of the British musical "The Better 'Ole". The musical was an adaptation of the then-popular British comic strip "Old Bill" by Bruce Bairnsfather (1887-1959).
In 1920, Cukor became the stage manager of the Knickerbocker Players, a theatrical troupe. In 1921, Cukor became the general manager of the Lyceum Players, a summer stock company. In 1925, Cukor was one of the co-founders the C.F. and Z. Production Company. With this theatrical company, Cukor started working as a theatrical director. He made his Broadway debut as a director with the play "Antonia" by Melchior Lengyel (1880-1974).
The C.F. and Z. Production Company was eventually renamed the Cukor-Kondolf Stock Company, and started recruiting up-and-coming theatrical talents. Cukor's theatrical troupe included at various times Louis Calhern, Ilka Chase, Bette Davis, Douglass Montgomery, Frank Morgan, Reginald Owen, Elizabeth Patterson, and Phyllis Povah.
Cukor attained great critical acclaim in 1926 for directing "The Great Gatsby", an adaptation of a then-popular novel by F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896-1940). He directed six more Broadway productions until 1929. At the time, Hollywood film studios were recruiting New York theater talent for sound films, and Cukor was hired by Paramount Pictures. He started as an apprentice director before the studio lent him to Universal Pictures. His first notable film work was serving as a dialogue director for "All Quiet on the Western Front" (1930).
After returning to Paramount Pictures, he worked as aco-director. His first solo directorial effort was "Tarnished Lady" (1931), and at that time he earned a weekly salary of $1500. Cukor co-directed the film "One Hour with You" (1932) with Ernst Lubitsch, but Lubitsch demanded sole directorial credit. Cukor filed a legal suit but eventually had to settle for a credit as the film's assistant director. He left Paramount in protest, and took a new job with RKO Studios.
During the 1930s, Cukor was entrusted with directing films for RKO's leading actresses. He worked often with Katharine Hepburn (1907-2003), although not always with box-office success. He did direct such box office hits as "Little Women" (1933) and "Holiday" (1938), but also notable flops such as "Sylvia Scarlett" (1935).
In 1936, Cukor was assigned to work on the film adaptation of the blockbuster novel "Gone with the Wind" by Margaret Mitchell. He spent the next two years preoccupied with the film's pre-production, and with supervising screen tests for actresses seeking to play leading character Scarlett O'Hara. Cukor reportedly favored casting either Katharine Hepburn or Paulette Goddard for the role. Producer David O. Selznick refused to cast either one, since Hepburn was coming off a string of flops and was viewed as "box office poison," while Goddard was rumored to have had a scandalous affair with Charlie Chaplin (1889-1977) and her reputation suffered for it.
Cukor did not get to direct "Gone with the Wind", as Selznick decided to assign the directing duties to Victor Fleming (1889-1949). Cukor's involvement with the film was limited to coaching actresses Vivien Leigh (1913-1967) and Olivia de Havilland (1916-). Similarly, the very same year, Cukor also failed to receive a directing credit for "The Wizard of Oz" (1939), though he was responsible for several casting and costuming decisions for this iconic classic.
In this same period, Cukor did direct an all-female cast in "The Women" (1939), as well as Greta Garbo's final motion picture performance in "Two-Faced Woman" (1941). Then his film career was interrupted by World War II, as he joined the Signal Corps in 1942. Given his experience as a film director, Cukor was soon assigned to producing training and instructional films for army personnel. He wanted to gain an officer's commission, but was denied promotion above the rank of private. Cukor suspected that rumors of his homosexuality were the reason he never received the promotion.
During the 1940s, Cukor had a number of box-office hits, such "A Woman's Face" (1941) and "Gaslight" (1944). He forged a working alliance with screenwriters Garson Kanin and Ruth Gordon, and the trio collaborated on seven films between 1947-1954.
Until the early 1950s, most of his Cukor's films were in black-and-white, and his first film in Technicolor was "A Star Is Born" (1954), with Judy Garland as the leading actress. Casting the male lead for the film proved difficult, as several major stars were either not interested in the role or were considered unsuitable by the studio. Cukor had to settle for James Mason as the male lead, but the film was highly successful and received 6 Academy Award nominations. But Cukor was not nominated for directing.
He had a handful of critical successes over the following years, such as Les Girls (1957) and "Wild Is the Wind" (1957), and also helmed the unfinished "Something's Got to Give" (1962), which had a troubled production and went at least $2 million over budget before it was terminated.
Cukor had a comeback with the critically and commercially successful "My Fair Lady," one of the highlights of his career., for which he won both an Academy Award and a Golden Globe Award for Best Director, along with the Directors Guild of America Award. However, his career very quickly slowed down, and the aging Cukor was infrequently involved with new projects.
Cukor's most notable film in the 1970s was the fantasy The Blue Bird (1976) , which was the first joint Soviet-American production. It was a box-office flop, though it received a nomination for the Saturn Award for Best Fantasy Film and was groundbreaking for its time. Cukor's swan song was "Rich and Famous" (1981), depicting the relationship of two women over a period of several decades., played by co-stars Jacqueline Bisset and Candice Bergen, Cukor's final pair of leading ladies.
He retired as a director at the age of 82, and died a year later of a heart attack in 1983. At the time of his death, his net worth was estimated to be $2,377,720. He was buried at the Forest Lawn Memorial Park in Glendale, CA. Cukor was buried next to his long-time platonic friend Frances Howard (1903-1976), the wife of legendary studio mogul Samuel Goldwyn.- Director
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Victor Fleming entered the film business as a stuntman in 1910, mainly doing stunt driving - which came easy to him, as he had been a mechanic and professional race-car driver. He became interested in working on the other side of the camera, and eventually got a job as a cameraman on many of the films of Douglas Fairbanks. He soon began directing, and his first big hit was The Virginian (1929). It was the movie that turned Gary Cooper into a star (a fact Cooper never forgot; he and Fleming remained friends for life). Fleming's star continued to rise during the '30s, and he was responsible for many of the films that would eventually be considered classics, such as Red Dust (1932), Bombshell (1933), Treasure Island (1934), and the two films that were the high marks of his career: Gone with the Wind (1939) and The Wizard of Oz (1939). Ironically Fleming was brought in on both pictures to replace other directors and smooth out the troubled productions, a feat he accomplished masterfully. His career took somewhat of a downturn in the '40s, and most of his films, with the exception of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1941), weren't particularly successful. He ended his career with the troubled production Joan of Arc (1948), which turned out to be a major critical and financial failure.- Director
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Hiroshi Teshigahara was born the son of Sofu Teshigahara who was the founder of the Sogetsu School of Ikebana (flower arrangement). In 1950, he graduated from the Tokyo National University of Fine Arts and Music in oil painting. In 1958, he became the director of Sogetsu Art Centre and took a leading role in avant-garde activities in many fields of art. Beginning in 1980, acting as movie director, he was the Iemoto (Headmaster) of the Sogetsu School of Ikebana.- Writer
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French director François Truffaut began to assiduously go to the movies at age seven. He was also a great reader but not a good pupil. He left school at 14 and started working. In 1947, aged 15, he founded a film club and met André Bazin, a French critic, who became his protector. Bazin helped the delinquent Truffaut and also when he was put in jail because he deserted the army. In 1953 Truffaut published his first movie critiques in "Les Cahiers du Cinema." In this magazine Truffaut, and some of his friends as passionate as he was, became defenders of what they call the "author policy". In 1954, as a test, Truffaut directed his first short film. Two years afterwords he assisted Roberto Rossellini with some later abandoned projects.
The year 1957 was an important one for him: he married Madeleine Morgenstern, the daughter of an important film distributor, and founded his own production company, Les Films du Carrosse; named after Jean Renoir's The Golden Coach (1952). He also directed The Mischief Makers (1957), considered the real first step of his cinematographic work. His other big year was 1959: the huge success of his first full-length film, The 400 Blows (1959), was the beginning of the New Wave, a new way of making movies in France. This was also the year his first daughter, Laura Truffaut, was born.
From 1959 until his death, François Truffaut's life and films are mixed up. Let's only note he had two other daughters Eva Truffaut (b. 1961) and Josephine (b. 1982, with French actress Fanny Ardant). Truffaut was the most popular and successful French film director ever. His main themes were passion, women, childhood and faithfulness.- Director
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Louis Malle, the descendant of a French nobleman who made a fortune in beet sugar during the Napoleonic Wars, created films that explored life and its meaning. Malle's family discouraged his early interest in film but, in 1950, allowed him to enter the Institute of Advanced Cinematographic Studies in Paris. His résumé showed that he had worked as an assistant to film maker Robert Bresson when Malle was hired by underwater explorer Jacques-Yves Cousteau to be a camera operator on the Calypso. Cousteau soon promoted him to be co-director of The Silent World (1956) ("The Silent World"). Years later, Cousteau called Malle the best underwater cameraman he ever had. Malle's third film, The Lovers (1958) ("The Lovers"), starring Jeanne Moreau broke taboos against on screen eroticism. In 1968 the U.S. Supreme Court reversed the obscenity conviction of an Ohio theater that had exhibited "Les Amants." A director during the Nouvelle Vague, New Wave" of 1950s and 1960s (though technically not considered a Nouvelle Vague auteur), he also made films on the other side of the Atlantic, starting with Pretty Baby (1978), the film that made Brooke Shields an international superstar. The actress who played a supporting role in that film was given a starring role in Malle's next American film, Atlantic City (1980). That promising actress was Susan Sarandon.
In one of his later French films, Goodbye, Children (1987), Malle was able to find catharsis for an experience that had haunted him since the German occupation of France in World War II. At age 12, he was sent to a Catholic boarding school near Paris that was a refuge for several Jewish students, one of them was Malle's rival for academic honors and his friend. A kitchen worker at the school with a grudge became an informant. The priest who was the principal was arrested and the Jewish students were sent off to concentration camps.
In his final film, Vanya on 42nd Street (1994), Malle again penetrated the veil between life and art as theater people rehearse Anton Chekhov's "Uncle Vanya." In that film, Malle worked again with theater director Andre Gregory and actor-playwright Wallace Shawn, the conversationalists of My Dinner with Andre (1981). Malle was married to Candice Bergen, and he succumbed to lymphoma in 1995.- Director
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Born in New York and raised in Queens, John Frankenheimer wanted to become a professional tennis player. He loved movies and his favorite actor was Robert Mitchum. He decided he wanted to be an actor but then he applied for and was accepted in the Motion Picture Squadron of the Air Force where he realized his natural talent to handle a camera. After his military discharge he began a TV career in 1953 convincing CBS to hire him as an assistant director, which consisted mainly working as a cameraman at that time. He eventually started to direct the show he was working on as an assistant director. Frankenheimer still didn't want to direct films. He liked to direct live television, and he would have continued to do it if the profession itself hadn't cease to exist. He first turned to the big screen with The Young Stranger (1957) which he hated to do because he thought he didn't understand movies and wasn't used to work with only one camera. Disappointed his with first feature film experience he returned to his successful television career directing a total of 152 live television shows between 1954 and 1960. He took another chance to move to the cinema industry, working with Burt Lancaster in The Young Savages (1961) ending up becoming a successful filmmaker best known by expressing on films his views on important social and philosophical topics.- Director
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Larisa Shepitko was born on 6 January 1938 in Bakhmut, Ukrainian SSR, USSR [now Bakhmut, Donetsk Oblast, Ukraine]. She was a director and writer, known for The Ascent (1977), Heat (1963) and You and Me (1971). She was married to Elem Klimov. She died on 2 July 1979 in near Redkino, Kalinin Oblast, Russian SFSR, USSR.- Writer
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Blake Edwards' stepfather's father J. Gordon Edwards was a silent screen director, and his stepfather Jack McEdward was a stage director and movie production manager. Blake acted in a number films, beginning with Ten Gentlemen from West Point (1942) and wrote a number of others, beginning with Panhandle (1948) and including six for director Richard Quine. He created the popular TV series Peter Gunn (1958), Mr. Lucky (1959) and Dante (1960). He directed a diverse body of films, from comedies to dramas to war films to westerns, including such pictures as Operation Petticoat (1959), Breakfast at Tiffany's (1961), Experiment in Terror (1962), Days of Wine and Roses (1962), The Pink Panther (1963) and A Shot in the Dark (1964). After The Great Race (1965) he began fighting with studios. In England he surfaced again with The Return of the Pink Panther (1975), then went back to Hollywood and a real hit, 10 (1979). Victor/Victoria (1982) won him French and Italian awards for Best Foreign Film.- Director
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Clarence Leon Brown was the son of Larkin Harry and Catherine Ann (Gaw) Brown of Clinton, Massachusetts. His family moved to Knoxville, Tennessee, when he was 12 years old. He graduated from Knoxville High School in 1905 and from the University of Tennessee with a B.A. in mechanical and electrical engineering in 1912. After graduation Brown settled in Alabama, where he operated a Stevens Duryea dealership called the Brown Motor Car Co. He soon tired of the car business and, fascinated by the movies, moved to New Jersey to study with French director Maurice Tourneur at Peerless Productions in Fort Lee.
During his career Brown directed or produced more than 50 widely-acclaimed full-length films--many during his long association with prestigious MGM--and worked with many of the industry's most illustrious performers. He also maintained close ties with the University of Tennessee, donating the money necessary to construct the institution's Clarence Brown Theatre during the 1970s and an additional $12 million after his death.- Director
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- Editorial Department
Don Siegel was educated at Cambridge University, England. In Hollywood from the mid-'30s, he began his career as an editor and second unit director. In 1945 he directed two shorts (Hitler Lives (1945) and Star in the Night (1945)) which both won Academy Awards. His first feature as a director was 1946's The Verdict (1946). He made his reputation in the early and mid-'50s with a series of tightly made, expertly crafted, tough but intelligent "B" pictures (among them The Lineup (1958), Riot in Cell Block 11 (1954), Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956)), then graduated to major "A" films in the 1960s and early 1970s. He made several "side trips" to television, mostly as a producer. Siegel directed what is generally considered to be Elvis Presley's best picture, Flaming Star (1960). He had a long professional relationship and personal friendship with Clint Eastwood, who has often said that everything he knows about filmmaking he learned from Don Siegel.- Writer
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Although his name is often linked to that of the "movie brat" generation (Steven Spielberg, Martin Scorsese, Francis Ford Coppola, George Lucas, Brian De Palma, etc.) Paul Schrader's background couldn't have been more different than theirs. His strict Calvinist parents refused to allow him to see a film until he was 18. Although he more than made up for lost time when studying at Calvin College, Columbia University and UCLA's graduate film program, his influences were far removed from those of his contemporaries--Robert Bresson, Yasujirô Ozu and Carl Theodor Dreyer (about whom he wrote a book, "Transcendental Style in Film") rather than Saturday-morning serials. After a period as a film critic (and protégé of Pauline Kael), he began writing screenplays, hitting the jackpot when he and his brother, Leonard Schrader (a Japanese expert), were paid the then-record sum of $325,000, thus establishing his reputation as one of Hollywood's top screenwriters, which was consolidated when Martin Scorsese filmed Schrader's script Taxi Driver (1976), written in the early 1970s during a bout of drinking and depression. The success of the film allowed Schrader to start directing his own films, which have been notable for their willingness to take stylistic and thematic risks while still working squarely within the Hollywood system. The most original of his films (which he and many others regard as his best) was the Japanese co-production Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters (1985).- Director
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Roman Polanski is a Polish film director, producer, writer and actor. Having made films in Poland, Britain, France and the USA, he is considered one of the few truly international filmmakers. Roman Polanski was born in Paris in 1933.
His parents returned to Poland from France in 1936, three years before World War II began. On Germany's invasion in 1939, as a family of mostly Jewish heritage, they were all sent to the Krakow ghetto. His parents were then captured and sent to two different concentration camps: His father to Mauthausen-Gusen in Austria, where he survived the war, and his mother to Auschwitz where she was murdered. Roman witnessed his father's capture and then, at only 7, managed to escape the ghetto and survive the war, at first wandering through the Polish countryside and pretending to be a Roman-Catholic kid visiting his relatives. Although this saved his life, he was severely mistreated suffering nearly fatal beating which left him with a fractured skull.
Local people usually ignored the cinemas where German films were shown, but Polanski seemed little concerned by the propaganda and often went to the movies. As the war progressed, Poland became increasingly war-torn and he lived his life as a tramp, hiding in barns and forests, eating whatever he could steal or find. Still under 12 years old, he encountered some Nazi soldiers who forced him to hold targets while they shot at them. At the war's end in 1945, he reunited with his father who sent him to a technical school, but young Polanski seemed to have already chosen another career. In the 1950s, he took up acting, appearing in Andrzej Wajda's A Generation (1955) before studying at the Lodz Film School. His early shorts such as Two Men and a Wardrobe (1958), Le gros et le maigre (1961) and Mammals (1962), showed his taste for black humor and interest in bizarre human relationships. His feature debut, Knife in the Water (1962), was one of the first Polish post-war films not associated with the war theme. It was also the first movie from Poland to get an Oscar nomination for best foreign film. Though already a major Polish filmmaker, Polanski chose to leave the country and headed to France. While down-and-out in Paris, he befriended young scriptwriter, Gérard Brach, who eventually became his long-time collaborator. The next two films, Repulsion (1965) and Cul-de-sac (1966), made in England and co-written by Brach, won respectively Silver and then Golden Bear awards at the Berlin International Film Festival. In 1968, Polanski went to Hollywood, where he made the psychological thriller, Rosemary's Baby (1968). However, after the brutal murder of his wife, Sharon Tate, by the Manson Family in 1969, the director decided to return to Europe. In 1974, he again made a US release - it was Chinatown (1974).
It seemed the beginning of a promising Hollywood career, but after his conviction for the sodomy of a 13-year old girl, Polanski fled from he USA to avoid prison. After Tess (1979), which was awarded several Oscars and Cesars, his works in 1980s and 1990s became intermittent and rarely approached the caliber of his earlier films. It wasn't until The Pianist (2002) that Polanski came back to full form. For that movie, he won nearly all the most important film awards, including the Oscar for Best Director, Cannes Film Festival's Palme d'Or, the BAFTA and Cesar Award.
He still likes to act in the films of other directors, sometimes with interesting results, as in A Pure Formality (1994).- Director
- Producer
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Wong Kar-wai (born 17 July 1956) is a Hong Kong Second Wave filmmaker, internationally renowned as an auteur for his visually unique, highly stylised, emotionally resonant work, including Ah fei zing zyun (1990), Dung che sai duk (1994), Chung Hing sam lam (1994), Do lok tin si (1995), Chun gwong cha sit (1997), 2046 (2004) and My Blueberry Nights (2007), Yi dai zong shi (2013). His film Fa yeung nin wa (2000), starring Maggie Cheung and Tony Leung, garnered widespread critical acclaim. Wong's films frequently feature protagonists who yearn for romance in the midst of a knowingly brief life and scenes that can often be described as sketchy, digressive, exhilarating, and containing vivid imagery. Wong was the first Chinese director to win the Best Director Award of Cannes Film Festival (for his work Chun gwong cha sit in 1997). Wong was the President of the Jury at the 2006 Cannes Film Festival, which makes him the only Chinese person to preside over the jury at the Cannes Film Festival. He was also the President of the Jury at the 63rd Berlin International Film Festival in February 2013. In 2006, Wong accepted the National Order of the Legion of Honour: Knight (Highest Degree) from the French Government. In 2013, Wong accepted Order of Arts and Letters: Commander (Highest Degree) by the French Minister of Culture.- Director
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Robert Earl Wise was born on September 10, 1914 in Winchester, Indiana, the youngest of three sons of Olive R. (Longenecker) and Earl Waldo Wise, a meat packer. His parents were both of Pennsylvania Dutch (German) descent. At age nineteen, the avid moviegoer came into the film business through an odd job at RKO Radio Pictures. A head sound effects editor at the studio recognized Wise's talent, and made Wise his protégé. Around 1941, Orson Welles was in need of an editor for Citizen Kane (1941), and Wise did a splendid job. Welles really liked his work and ideas. Wise started as a director with some B-movies, and his career went on quickly, and he made many classic movies. His last theatrical film, Rooftops (1989), proved that he was a filmmaker still in full command of his craft in his 80s. The carefully composed images, tight editing, and unflagging pace make one wish that Wise had not stayed away from the camera for very long. Robert Wise died of heart failure on September, 14, 2005, just four days after his 91st birthday.- Director
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Lasse Hallström inherited his enthusiasm for film from his father, who was an amateur filmmaker. In high school he made his first short film, which was released on Swedish television. Hallström then began working as a director, cameraman and editor for Swedish television. He also made music videos and worked with the cult band "ABBA", for whom he directed the 1977 film "ABBA: The Movie". He moved from television to film and directed Swedish productions such as "A Lover And His Lass" (1974), "Der Gockel" and "Happy We". By the mid-1980s he had long since established himself in his homeland and made his international breakthrough as an author and director in 1985 with "My Life as a Dog" (1985). In his warm-hearted film, Hallström tells the story of a twelve-year-old boy in the 1950s. Audiences and critics worldwide were thrilled and Hallström received Oscar nominations for Best Director and Best Screenplay.
The members of the "New York Film Critics Circle" named the production "Best Foreign Film." Hallström then brought the successful Astrid Lindgren stories "We Children from Bullerbü" (1986) and "News from Us Children from Bullerbü" (1986) to the screen. In 1991 he worked with Holly Hunter and Richard Dreyfuss on his first American film, "A Charming Disgust." This was followed in 1993 by the hit film "Gilbert Grape - Somewhere in Iowa", for which Hallström was director and producer. The film starred Johnny Depp, Juliette Lewis and the young Leonardo DiCaprio, who received an Oscar nomination for Best Supporting Actor for his role as a disabled boy. Hallström himself was nominated for an Oscar for Best Director for Gilbert Grape: Somewhere in Iowa. In 1994 he married the actress Lena Olin; together they became parents of two children.
After the failure of "The Power of Love" (1995) with Julia Roberts, Lasse Hallström returned to his strengths and delivered the drama "God's Work and the Devil's Contribution" in 1999. The critics were once again full of praise and Hallström was pleased to receive another Oscar nomination. The subtle comedy "Chocolat" (2000) with Juliette Binoche, Judy Dench and Johnny Depp was his next work, which was nominated for five "Oscars" in 2001. In 2002, Hallström's tragicomedy "Ship Reports" was released in German cinemas. With "An Untamed Life" from 2005, he brought a drama to cinemas that not only shined with its plot, but also with excellent actors such as Robert Redford, Morgan Freeman and Jennifer Lopez. Hallström settled privately in the USA and Sweden. In 2018 he directed the American fantasy film "The Nutcracker and the Four Realms".- Director
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Jean-Pierre Jeunet is a self-taught director who was very quickly interested by cinema, with a predilection for a fantastic cinema where form is as important as the subject. Thus he started directing TV commercials and video clips (such as Julien Clerc in 1984). At the same time he met designer/drawer Marc Caro with whom he made two short animation movies: L'évasion (1978) and Le manège (1979), the latter winning a César for the best short movie. After these two successful movies Jeunet and Caro spent more than one year together by making every detail (scenario, costumes, production design) of their third short movie: The Bunker of the Last Gunshots (1981). This movie combined sci-fi and heroic-fantasy in a visually delirious story of the rising paranoia among soldiers trapped underground. With that movie they garnered several festival prizes in France. (This movie also marked their first collaboration with Gilles Adrien who later wrote the story of their two feature movies with them). After that Jeunet directed two other short movies without the help of Caro: Pas de repos pour Billy Brakko (1983), then Foutaises (1989) with Dominique Pinon who became another regular collaborator of Jeunet. All Jeunet's short movies won a lot of awards in France but also overseas and he won a second César with Foutaises (1989).
In 1991, Jeunet and Caro took their first steps in a feature movie: Delicatessen (1991). It was such a success that it won 4 Césars including the awards for the best new director(s) and the best scenario. For this movie Jeunet and Caro divided responsibilities with the former guiding the actors and the latter coordinating the artistic elements. And Jeunet showed again his liking to have Dominique Pinon, of course, but also Rufus, Jean-Claude Dreyfus and Ticky Holgado who appeared again in Jeunet's next movies, or Maurice Lamy who already had a little role in Foutaises (1989). The success of Delicatessen (1991) even surprised Jeunet and Caro themselves but they took advantage of that in order to finally make their almost 10 year-old project! This project took more than 4 more years to be carried out but the movie turned out enormous: The City of Lost Children (1995) was a black tale and was so innovative at this period that they needed to create new software for the special effects (mostly made by Pitof). Jeunet and Caro kept the same responsibilities as in Delicatessen (1991) and the movie also combined different international skills: US actor Ron Perlman, Chilean-born actor Daniel Emilfork, Iranian cinematographer Darius Khondji (who was already in the crew of Delicatessen (1991)), Americo-Italian composer Angelo Badalamenti and French fashion-designer Jean-Paul Gaultier for the costumes. While the film was supposed to be suitable for children, some considered it "dark", to which Jeunet and Caro replied that it was no more "dark" than Pinocchio (1940) or Bambi (1942).
But these critics didn't stop the movie from being successful and when the movie gained them further attention, it was only a matter of time before Hollywood called them. Thus in 1997, Jeunet left France to make a temporary career in the USA for the fourth installment of the 'Alien' series: Alien: Resurrection (1997). Marc Caro followed him just as a design supervisor but Jeunet brought with him a little army' of his usual collaborators (mostly French): actors Dominique Pinon and Ron Perlman, but also Pitof, Darius Khondji or editor Hervé Schneid, and for the first time Alain Carsoux who was responsible of the special effects of Jeunet's next film. In 2000, after two collaborations with Caro and one in the US, Jeunet came back to France in order to make a more personal movie, even if Guillaume Laurant wrote the story with him. Thus he used a lot of different details he wrote everywhere during his life (and also recycled things he'd already done, e.g. in Foutaises (1989)) and shot his story mostly in the Parisian suburb of Montmartre where he lives. Then the result was Amélie (2001) starring Audrey Tautou and Mathieu Kassovitz. With this movie Jeunet made the biggest worldwide success of French cinema history. A real magical potion, which won innumerable awards in the whole world including 4 Césars (therefore Jeunet won his fifth and sixth Césars!).
Jeunet eventually decided to adapt Sébastien Japrisot's book A Very Long Engagement (2004) for which he called Audrey Tautou and Dominique Pinon again, but also many other famous French actors and Jodie Foster. It had one of the most important budgets in French film history and eventually had a good international success and many nominations and awards.- Director
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Hungarian-born Karoly Vidor spent the First World War as a lieutenant in the Austro-Hungarian infantry. Following the armistice, he made his way to Berlin and worked for the German film company Ufa, as editor and assistant director. In 1924, he emigrated to the U.S. and, for several years, earned his living as a singer in Broadway choruses and (at one time) with a Wagnerian troupe. While little detail is extant of this period in his career, it enabled him to accumulate the means with which to finance his own project: an experimental short film entitled The Bridge (1929). On the strength of this, he was signed by MGM to co-direct his first feature film The Mask of Fu Manchu (1932). For the remainder of the decade, Vidor worked with relatively undistinguished material at various studios, notably RKO (1935) and Paramount (1936-37). In 1939, he joined Columbia, where he remained under contract until 1948.
Vidor's career is something of an enigma. Never a particularly prolific filmmaker, his output has been variable. It includes a good-looking, but decidedly stodgy romance, The Swan (1956) (starring Grace Kelly in her penultimate screen role); and the interminably dull remake of A Farewell to Arms (1957). On the other side of the ledger is the lavish showbiz biopic of singer Ruth Etting, Love Me or Leave Me (1955), for which Vidor elicited powerhouse performances from his stars Doris Day and James Cagney. Frank Sinatra, also, gave one of his best performances as nightclub entertainer Joe E. Lewis, descending into alcoholism in The Joker Is Wild (1957). Other Vidor standouts are Ladies in Retirement (1941), a gothic Victorian thriller, tautly directed and maintaining its suspense, despite a relatively claustrophobic setting (among the cast, as Lucy the maid, was actress Evelyn Keyes, who became Vidor's third wife in 1944). Finally, two Rita Hayworth vehicles, the breezy musical Cover Girl (1944), and Vidor's principal masterpiece, the archetypal film noir Gilda (1946). This cleverly plotted, morally ambiguous tale of intrigue and ménage-a-trois was one of Columbia's biggest money-earners to date.
Some of the wittier dialogue in "Gilda" was voiced in re-takes, long after primary filming had been completed. The same applies to the two main musical numbers, the show-stopping "Put the Blame on Mame", and "Amado Mio". Yet, under Vidor's direction, all the dramatic and musical elements blended perfectly. The film has an undeniably electric atmosphere, largely due to the chemistry between the three leads. When the same material was later re-worked as Affair in Trinidad (1952) (with a bigger budget), that chemistry was notably absent.
In 1948, Vidor fell out with studio boss Harry Cohn, taking him to court for alleged verbal abuse and exploitation. He wanted out of his contract. Having just married Doris Warner, daughter of Warner Brothers president Harry M. Warner, Vidor sensed opportunities in working at a more prestigious studio. Cohn wasn't going to let him go quietly. It was pretty much all over, when actor Steven Geray testified, that he had himself been on the receiving end of invective at the hands of Vidor on the set of "Gilda". Glenn Ford, who thought Vidor opportunistic, then went on the stand, relating, that Cohn routinely used foul language on everyone around him, rather than aiming at any individual in particular. The fact that Vidor was not the easiest man to get along with, became evident during filming of the Liszt biopic Song Without End (1960). Both his stars (Dirk Bogarde and Capucine) found him to be ill-tempered and erratic. However, since Vidor died before the film was completed (George Cukor taking over), other factors may have played a part. In the final analysis, for "Gilda" alone, Charles Vidor deserves a niche in Hollywood heaven.- Director
- Second Unit Director or Assistant Director
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Robert Aldrich entered the film industry in 1941 when he got a job as a production clerk at RKO Radio Pictures. He soon worked his way up to script clerk, then became an assistant director, a production manager and an associate producer. He began writing and directing for TV series in the early 1950s, and directed his first feature in 1953 (Big Leaguer (1953)). Soon thereafter he established his own production company and produced most of his own films, collaborating in the writing of many of them. Among his best-known pictures are Kiss Me Deadly (1955), What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? (1962) and the muscular WW II mega-hit The Dirty Dozen (1967).- Director
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Robert Siodmak (8 August 1900 - 10 March 1973) was a German-born, American film director. He is best remembered as a thriller specialist and for a series of stylish, unpretentious Hollywood films noirs he made in the 1940s.
Siodmak (pronounced SEE-ODD-MACK) was born in Dresden, Germany, the son of Rosa Philippine (née Blum) and Ignatz Siodmak. His parents were both from Jewish families in Leipzig (the myth of his American birth in Memphis, Tennessee was necessary for him to obtain a visa in Paris during World War II). He worked as a stage director and a banker before becoming editor and scenarist for Curtis Bernhardt in 1925 (Bernhardt would direct a film of Siodmak's story "Conflict" in 1945). At twenty-six he was hired by his cousin, producer Seymour Nebenzal, to assemble original silent movies from stock footage of old films. Siodmak worked at this for two years before he persuaded Nebenzal to finance his first feature, the silent chef d'oeuvre, "Menschen am Sonntag" ("People on Sunday") in1929. The script was co-written by Billy Wilder and Siodmak's brother Curt Siodmak, later the screenwriter of "The Wolf Man" (1941). It was the last German silent and also included such future Hollywood artists as Fred Zinnemann, Edgar G. Ulmer, and Eugen Schufftan. His next film--the first at UFA to use sound--was the 1930 comedy "Abschied" for writers Emeric Pressburger and Irma von Cube, followed by "Der Mann, der seinen Mörder sucht," another comedy, yet quite different and unusual, a likely product of Billy Wilder's imagination (remade a noir, "DOA," in 1950). But in his next film, the crime thriller "Stürme der Leidenschaft," with Emil Jannings and Anna Sten, Siodmak found a style that would become his own.
With the rise of Nazism and following an attack in the press by Hitler's minister of propaganda Joseph Goebbels in 1933 after viewing "Brennendes Geheimnis" ("The Burning Secret"), Siodmak left Germany for Paris. His creativity flourished, as he worked for the next six years in a variety of film genres, from comedy ("Le sexe fable" and "La Vie Parisienne" ) to musical ("La crise est finie," with Danielle Darrieux) to drama ("Mister Flow," "Cargaison blanche," "Mollenard"--compare Gabrielle Dorziat's shrewish wife with that of Rosalind Ivan's in "The Suspect"--and the superb "Pièges," with Maurice Chevalier and Erich Von Stroheim). While in France, he was well on his way to becoming successor to Rene Clair, until Hitler again forced him out. Siodmak arrived in Hollywood in 1939, where he made 23 movies, many of them widely popular thrillers and crime melodramas, which critics today regard as classics of film noir.
Beginning in 1941, he first turned out several B-films and programmers for various studios before he gained a seven-year contract with Universal Studios in 1943. The best of those early films are the thriller "Fly by Night" in 1942, with Richard Carlson and Nancy Kelly, and in 1943 the touching weepie "Someone to Remember," with Mable Paige in a signature role. As house director, his services were often used to salvage troublesome productions at the studio. On Mark Hellinger's production "Swell Guy" (1946), for instance, Siodmak was brought in to replace Frank Tuttle only six days after completing work on "The Killers." Siodmak worked steadily while under contract, overshadowed by high profile directors, like Alfred Hitchcock, with whom he had been often compared by the press.
At Universal, Siodmak made yet another B-film, "Son of Dracula"(1943), the third and best in a trilogy of Dracula movies (based on his brother Curt's original story). His second feature, and first A-film, was the Maria Montez/Jon Hall vehicle, "Cobra Woman" (1944), made in garish Technicolor (Montez's cobra dance alone is worth the price of admission).
His first all-out noir was "Phantom Lady" (1944), for staff producer Joan Harrison, Universal's first female executive and Alfred Hitchcock's former secretary and script assistant. A classic, however flawed, it showcased Siodmak's skill with camera and editing to dazzling effect, but no more so than in the iconic jam-session sequence with Elisha Cook Jr. in throes on the drums. Following the critical success of "Phantom Lady," Siodmak directed "Christmas Holiday" (1944) with Deanna Durbin and Gene Kelly (Hans J. Salter received an Oscar nomination for best music). Beginning with this film, his work in Hollywood attained the stylistic and thematic characteristics that are evident in his later noirs. "Christmas Holiday," adapted from a W. Somerset Maugham novel by Herman J. Mankiewicz, was Durbin's most successful feature, which she considered her only good film (and that Mankiewicz said was among his work in the 40s of which he was most proud). Siodmak's use of black-and-white cinematography and urban landscapes, together with his light-and-shadow designs, formed the basic structure of classic noir films. In fact, he often collaborated with cinematographers, such as Nicholas Musuraca, Elwood Bredell, and Franz Planer, to achieve in his films the Expressionist look he had cultivated in his early years at UFA (for "Christmas Holiday," he instructed Bredell in the use of deep-focus photography, which Gregg Toland had perfected for "Citizen Kane"). During Siodmak's tenure, Universal made the most of the noir style in "The Suspect," "The Strange Affair of Uncle Harry" and "The Dark Mirror," but the capstone was "The Killers" in 1946, Burt Lancaster's film debut and Ava Gardner's first dramatic, featured role. A critical and financial success, it earned Siodmak his only Oscar nomination for direction in Hollywood (his German production "The Devil Strikes at Night" ("Nachts, wenn der Teufel kam"), based on the true story of serial killer Bruno Lüdke, was nominated for Best Foreign Language Film in 1957). While still under contract at Universal, Siodmak worked on loan out to RKO for the thriller "The Spiral Staircase," which he edited freely, without taking screen credit. For 20th Century Fox and producer Darryl F. Zanuck, he directed, partly on location in New York City, the crime noir "Cry of the City" in 1948, and in 1949 for MGM he tackled its lux production "The Great Sinner," but the prolix script proved unmanageable for Siodmak who relinquished direction to the dependable and bland Mervyn LeRoy. On loan out to Paramount in 1949, he made for producer Hal B. Wallis his penultimate American noir "The File on Thelma Jordan," with Barbara Stanwyck at her most fatal--and sympathetic. That she can be both is owed entirely to Siodmak who saw in this film a thematic link with "The Suspect" and "The Strange Affair of Uncle Harry," with the failed lovers of these films and significantly their tragic conclusions (ten years later he addressed the same theme in "The Rough and the Smooth"). Perhaps his finest American noir--although not his last--is "Criss Cross" that was to reunite him not only with Lancaster, but also "The Killers" producer Mark Hellinger, who died suddenly before production began in 1949. Working without the hands-on control of Hellinger again, Siodmak was able to make this film his own as he could not the earlier film. Yvonne De Carlo's working-class femme fatal (a high mark in her career) completes the deadly triangle, along with Lancaster and Dan Duryea: the archetype of doomed attraction central to all Siodmak's noirs, but the one he could fully express to its nihilistic conclusion.
Siodmak immersed himself in the creative process and genuinely loved working with actors; in fact, he was considered an actor's director, discovering Burt Lancaster, Ernest Borgnine, Tony Curtis, Debra Paget, Maria Schell, Mario Adorf, and skillfully directing actresses, such as Ava Gardner, Olivia de Havilland, Dorothy McGuire, Yvonne de Carlo, Barbara Stanwyck, Geraldine Fitzgerald, and Ella Raines.[1]
He directed Charles Laughton (a close friend) and George Sanders, actors with indelible personas, and got from both perhaps the unlikeliest, most natural and under-played performances of their careers. He managed with Lancaster to capture a youthful vulnerability--despite the actor's age (he was 33)--that, watching him in "The Killers," surprises us even today. He accomplished the impossible and got a believable, dramatic performance from Gene Kelly who never before or since looked so (intentionally) frightening on screen. But above all, it must be acknowledged, he made audiences sit up and notice Ava Gardner and her potential to ruin men.
Before leaving Hollywood for Europe in 1952, following the problematic production "The Crimson Pirate" for Warner Bros. and producer Harold Hecht, his third and last film with Burt Lancaster (Siodmak dubbed the chaotic experience "The Hecht Follies"), Siodmak had directed some of the era's best films noirs (twelve in all), more than any other director who worked in that style. However, his identification with film noir, generally unpopular with American audiences, may have been more of a curse than a blessing.
He often expressed his desire to make pictures "of a different type and background" than the ones he had been making for ten years. Nevertheless, he ended his Universal contract with one last noir, the disappointing "Deported" (1951) which he filmed partly abroad (Siodmak was among the first refugee directors to return to Europe after making American films). The story is loosely based on the deportation of gangster Charles "Lucky" Luciano. Siodmak had hoped Loretta Young would star, but settled for the Swedish actress Marta Toren.
Those "different type" of films he had made--"The Great Sinner" (1949) for MGM, "Time Out of Mind" (1947) for Universal (which Siodmak also produced), "The Whistle at Eaton Falls" (1951) for Columbia Pictures (Ernest Borgnine's debut and Dorothy Gish's return to the screen)--all proved ill-suited to his noir sensibilities (although in 1952 "The Crimson Pirate," despite the difficult production, was a surprising and pleasing departure--in fact, Lancaster believed it was inspiration for the tongue-in-cheek style of the James Bond films).
The five months he collaborated with Budd Schulberg on a screenplay tentatively titled "A Stone in the River Hudson," an early version of "On the Waterfront," was also a major disappointment for Siodmak. In 1954 he sued producer Sam Spiegel for copyright infringement. Siodmak was awarded $100,000, but no screen credit. His contribution to the original screenplay has never been acknowledged.
Siodmak's return to Europe in 1954 with a Grand Prize nomination at the Cannes Film Festival for his remake of Jacques Feyder's "Le grand jeu" proved a misstep, despite its stars, Gina Lollobrigida (two of them) and Arletty in the role originated by Françoise Rosay, Feyder's wife. In 1955, Siodmak returned to the Federal Republic of Germany to make "Die Ratten," with Maria Schell and Curd Jurgens, winning the Golden Berlin Bear at the 1955 Berlin Film Festival. It was the first in a series of films critical of his homeland, during and after Hitler, which included the remarkable "Nachts, wenn der Teufel kam," both thriller and social artifact of Germany under Nazi rule, shot in documentary style reminiscent of "Menschen am Sontag" and "Whistle at Eaton Falls," and in 1960, "Mein Schulfreund," an absurdist comedy, dark and strange, with Heinz Ruhmann as a postal worker attempting to reunite with childhood friend Hermann Goering. Between these films, and "Mein Vater, der Schauspieler" in 1956, with O. W. Fischer (the German Rock Hudson), he took a detour into Douglas Sirk territory with the sordid melodrama, "Dorothea Angermann" in 1959, featuring Germany's star Ruth Leuwerik. Later the same year he left Germany for Great Britain to film "The Rough and the Smooth," with Nadja Tiller and Tony Britton, yet another noir, but much meaner and gloomier than anything he had made in America (compare its downbeat ending with that of "The File on Thelma Jordan"). He followed with "Katia" also in 1959, a tale of Czarist Russia, with twenty-one-year-old Romy Schneider, mistakenly titled in America "The Magnificent Sinner," recalling--unfavorably--Siodmak's other costume melodrama. In 1961, "L'affaire Nina B," with Pierre Brasseur and Nadja Tiller (again), returned Siodmak to familiar ground in a slick, black-and-white thriller about a pay-for-hire Nazi hunter, which could be argued was the start of the many spy themed films so popular in the 1960s. In 1962, the entertaining "Escape from East Berlin," with Don Murray and Christine Kaufman, had all the characteristic style of a Siodmak thriller, but was one that he later dismissed as something he had made for "little kids in America." His work in Germany returned to programmers like those that had begun his career in Hollywood 23 years earlier. From 1964-1965, he made a series of films with former Tarzan Lex Barker: "Der Schut," "Der Schatz der Azteken," and "Die Pyramide des Sonnengottes," all taken from the western, adventure novels of Karl May and made for little kids in both Germany and America.
His return to Hollywood film-making in 1967 to make the wide-screen western "Custer of the West" was another disappointment (it had been a project originally intended for Akira Kurosawa). With Robert Shaw in the title role and his wife Mary Ure as Mrs. Custer, it is the oddest of the Custer film biographies, yet interesting in its contemporary portrayal of Custer's anti-social individualism.
He ended his career with a six-hour, two-part toga and chariot epic, "Kampf um Rom" (1968), a more campy work (perhaps intentionally) than "Cobra Woman" had been. There was a brief and profitable foray into television in Great Britain with the series "O.S.S." (1957-58). Siodmak was last seen publicly in an interview for Swiss television at his home in Ascona in 1971. He died alone in 1973 in Locarno, seven weeks after his wife's death.
The British Film Institute ran a retrospective of his career in April and May of 2015.- Writer
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Ernst Ingmar Bergman was born July 14, 1918, the son of a priest. The film and T.V. series, The Best Intentions (1992) is biographical and shows the early marriage of his parents. The film Sunday's Children (1992) depicts a bicycle journey with his father. In the miniseries Private Confessions (1996) is the trilogy closed. Here, as in 'Den Goda Viljan' Pernilla August play his mother. Note that all three movies are not always full true biographical stories. He began his career early with a puppet theatre which he, his sister and their friends played with. But he was the manager. Strictly professional he begun writing in 1941. He had written a play called 'Kaspers död' (A.K.A. 'Kaspers Death') which was produced the same year. It became his entrance into the movie business as Stina Bergman (not a close relative), from the company S.F. (Swedish Filmindustry), had seen the play and thought that there must be some dramatic talent in young Ingmar. His first job was to save other more famous writers' poor scripts. Under one of that script-saving works he remembered that he had written a novel about his last year as a student. He took the novel, did the save-poor-script job first, then wrote a screenplay on his own novel. When he went back to S.F., he delivered two scripts rather than one. The script was Torment (1944) and was the fist Bergman screenplay that was put into film (by Alf Sjöberg). It was also in that movie Bergman did his first professional film-director job. Because Alf Sjöberg was busy, Bergman got the order to shoot the last sequence of the film. Ingmar Bergman is the father of Daniel Bergman, director, and Mats Bergman, actor at the Swedish Royal Dramatic Theater. Ingmar Bergman was also C.E.O. of the same theatre between 1963-1966, where he hired almost every professional actor in Sweden. In 1976 he had a famous tax problem. Bergman had trusted other people to advise him on his finances, but it turned out to be very bad advice. Bergman had to leave the country immediately, and so he went to Germany. A few years later he returned to Sweden and made his last theatrical film Fanny and Alexander (1982). In later life he retired from movie directing, but still wrote scripts for film and T.V. and directed plays at the Swedish Royal Dramatic Theatre for many years. He died peacefully in his sleep on July 30, 2007.- Director
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Robert Altman was born on February 20th, 1925 in Kansas City, Missouri, to B.C. (an insurance salesman) and Helen Altman. He entered St. Peters Catholic school at the age six, and spent a short time at a Catholic high school. From there, he went to Rockhurst High School. It was then that he started exploring the art of exploring sound with the cheap tape recorders available at the time. He was then sent to Wentworth Military Academy in Lexington, Missouri where he attended through Junior College. In 1945, he enlisted in the US Army Air Forces and became a copilot of a B-24. After his discharge from the military, he became fascinated by movies and he and his first wife, LaVonne Elmer, moved to Hollywood, where Altman tried acting (appearing in the film The Secret Life of Walter Mitty (1947)), songwriting (he wrote a musical intended for Broadway, "The Rumors are Flying"), and screen-writing (he co-wrote the screenplay for the film Bodyguard (1948) and wrote the story (uncredited) for Christmas Eve (1947)), but he could not get a foot hold in Tinseltown. After a brief fling as publicity director with a company in the business of tattooing dogs, Altman finally gave up and returned to his hometown of Kansas City, where he decided he wanted to do some serious work in filmmaking. An old friend of his recommended him to a film production company in Kansas City, the Calvin Co., who hired him in 1950. After a few months of work in writing scripts and editing films, Altman began directing films at Calvin. It was here (while working on documentaries, employee training films, industrial and educational films and advertisements) that he learned much about film making. All in all, Altman pieced together sixty to sixty-five short films for Calvin on every subject imaginable, from football to car crashes, but he kept grasping for more challenging projects. He wrote the screenplay for the Kansas City-produced feature film Corn's-A-Poppin' (1955), he produced and directed several television commercials including one with the Eileen Ford Agency, he co-created and directed the TV series The Pulse of the City (1953) which ran for one season on the independent Dumont network, and he even had a formative crack at directing local community theater. His big-screen directorial debut came while still at Calvin with The Delinquents (1957) and, by 1956, he left the Calvin Co., and went to Hollywood to direct Alfred Hitchcock's TV show. From here, he went on to direct a large number of television shows, until he was offered the script for M*A*S*H (1970) in 1969. He was hardly the producer's first choice - more than fifteen other directors had already turned it down. This wasn't his first movie, but it was his first success. After that, he had his share of hits and misses, but The Player (1992) and, more recently, Gosford Park (2001) were particularly well-received.- Writer
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Luc Besson spent the first years of his life following his parents, scuba diving instructors, around the world. His early life was entirely aquatic. He already showed amazing creativity as a youth, writing early drafts of The Big Blue (1988) and The Fifth Element (1997), as an adolescent bored in school. He planned on becoming a marine biologist specializing in dolphins until a diving accident at age 17 which rendered him unable to dive any longer. He moved back to Paris, where he was born, and only at age 18 did he first have an urban life or television. He realized that film was a medium which he could combine all his interests in various arts together, so he began taking odd jobs on various films. He moved to America for three years, then returned to France and formed Les Films de Loups - his own production company, which later changed its name to Les Films de Dauphins. He is now able to dive again.- Director
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Wim Wenders is an Oscar-nominated German filmmaker who was born Ernst Wilhelm Wenders on August 14, 1945 in Düsseldorf, which then was located in the British Occupation Zone of what became the Bundesrepublik Deutschland (Federal Republic of Germany, known colloquially as West Germany until reunification). At university, Wenders originally studied to become a physician before switching to philosophy before terminating his studies in 1965. Moving to Paris, he intended to become a painter.
He fell in love with the cinema but failed to gain admission to the French national film school. He supported himself as an engraver while attending movie houses. Upon his return to West Germany in 1967, he was employed by United Artists at its Düsseldorf office before he was accepted by the University of Television and Film Munich school for its autumn 1967 semester, where he remained until 1970. While attending film school, he worked as a newspaper film critic. In addition to shorts, he made a feature film as part of his studies, Summer in the City (1971).
Wenders gained recognition as part of the German New Wave of the 1970s. Other directors that were part of the New German Cinema were Rainer Werner Fassbinder and Werner Herzog. His second feature, a film made from Peter Handke's novel The Goalie's Anxiety at the Penalty Kick (1972), brought him acclaim, as did Alice in the Cities (1974) and Kings of the Road (1976). It was his 1977 feature The American Friend (1977) ("The American Friend"), starring Dennis Hopper as Patricia Highsmith's anti-hero Tom Ripley, that represented his international breakthrough. He was nominated for the Palme d'Or at the 1977 Cannes Film Festival for "The American Friend", which was cited as Best Foreign Film by the National Board of Review in the United States.
Francis Ford Coppola, as producer, gave Wenders the chance to direct in America, but Hammett (1982) (1982) was a critical and commercial failure. However, his American-made Paris, Texas (1984) (1984) received critical hosannas, winning three awards at Cannes, including the Palme d'Or, and Wenders won a BAFTA for best director. "Paris, Texas" was a prelude to his greatest success, 1987's Wings of Desire (1987) ("Wings of Desire"), which he made back in Germany. The film brought him the best director award at Cannes and was a solid hit, even spawning an egregious Hollywood remake.
Wenders followed it up with a critical and commercial flop in 1991, Until the End of the World (1991) ("Until the End of the World"), though Faraway, So Close! (1993) won the Grand Prize of the Jury at Cannes. Still, is reputation as a feature film director never quite recovered in the United States after the bomb that was "Until the End of the World." Since the mid-1990s, Wenders has distinguished himself as a non-fiction filmmaker, directing several highly acclaimed documentaries, most notably Buena Vista Social Club (1999) and Pina (2011), both of which brought him Oscar nominations.- Director
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He, along with the other members of the "Compass Players" including Elaine May, Paul Sills, Byrne Piven, Joyce Hiller Piven and Edward Asner helped start the famed "Second City Improv" company. They used the games taught to them by fellow cast mate, Paul Sills 's mother, Viola Spolin. He later worked in legitimate theater as an actor before entering into a very successful comedy duo with Elaine May. The two were known as "the world's fastest humans".- Writer
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Born in Lvov, Ukraine; then he moved with his father Miroslaw Zulawski to Czechoslovakia and later to Poland. In the late 1950s, he studied cinema in France. In the 1960s, he was an assistant of the famous Polish film director Andrzej Wajda. His feature debut The Third Part of the Night (1971) was an adaptation of his father's novel. His second feature The Devil (1972) was prohibited in Poland, and Zulawski went to France. After the success of his French debut That Most Important Thing: Love (1975) in 1975, he returned to Poland where he spent two years in making On the Silver Globe (1988). The work on this film was brutally interrupted by the authorities. After that, Zulawski moved to France where became known for his highly artistic, controversial, and very violent films. Zulawski is well known for his ability to discover and "rediscover" actresses. Romy Schneider, Isabelle Adjani and Sophie Marceau played their best parts in his films.- Writer
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Born in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, on February 11, 1909, Joseph Leo Mankiewicz first worked for the movies as a translator of intertitles, employed by Paramount in Berlin, the UFA's American distributor at the time (1928). He became a dialoguist, then a screenwriter on numerous Paramount productions in Hollywood, most of them Jack Oakie vehicles. Still in his 20s, he produced first-class MGM films, including The Philadelphia Story (1940). Having left Metro after a dispute with studio chief Louis B. Mayer over Judy Garland, he then worked for Darryl F. Zanuck at 20th Century-Fox, producing The Keys of the Kingdom (1944), when Ernst Lubitsch's illness first brought him to the director's chair for Dragonwyck (1946). Mankiewicz directed 20 films in a 26-year period, successfully attempted every kind of movie from Shakespeare adaptation to western, from urban sociological drama to musical, from epic film with thousands of extras to a two-character picture. A Letter to Three Wives (1949) and All About Eve (1950) brought him wide recognition along with two Academy Awards for each as a writer and a director, seven years after his elder brother Herman J. Mankiewicz won Best Screenplay for Citizen Kane (1941). His more intimate films like The Ghost and Mrs. Muir (1947), The Barefoot Contessa (1954)--his only original screenplay--and The Honey Pot (1967) are major artistic achievements as well, showing Mankiewicz as a witty dialoguist, a master in the use of flashback and a talented actors' director (he favored English actors and had in Rex Harrison a kind of alter-ego on the screen).- Writer
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The comic genius Jacques Tati was born Taticheff, descended from a noble Russian family. His grandfather, Count Dimitri, had been a general in the Imperial Army and had served as military attaché to the Russian Embassy in Paris. His father, Emmanuel Taticheff, was a well-to-do picture framer who conducted his business in the fashionable Rue de Castellane and had taken a Dutch-Italian woman, Marcelle Claire van Hoof, as his wife. To Emmanuel's lasting dismay, Jacques had no intention of following in the family trade of framing and restoration. Instead, he went on to pursue an education (specialising in arts and engineering) at the military academy of Lycée de Saint Germain-en-laye. After graduating, his main preoccupation became sports. He already boxed and played tennis and was introduced to rugby during a sojourn in London. Back in Paris, he joined the Racing Club de France (1925-30), and for some time seriously contemplated a career as a professional rugby player. However, Jacques also had an uncanny talent for pantomime, imitating athletes at his school to the amusement of classmates and teachers. By the time he had reached the age of 24, encouraged by his success as an entertainer in the annual revue of the Racing Club, he suddenly decided to combine his two passions and, without further ado, entered the world of show business.
From 1931, Jacques toured the Parisian music halls, theatres and circuses with his impersonations, acrobatics, drunk waiter and comic tennis routines (the latter would be famously re-enacted by his alter ego, Monsieur Hulot). He had by this time changed his name to 'Tati' in order to accommodate theatre bills.The French magazine "Le Jour" was among the first to acknowledge his growing popularity, describing Jacques as "a clown of great talent". At the same time, he made his screen debut in a series of short featurettes, tailored to show off his practised gags, notably Oscar, champion de tennis (1932) and Watch Your Left (1936) ("Watch your left", a very funny boxing sketch). The Second World War, military service and inherent strictures resulting from the German occupation put a temporary halt to his career. Then, in 1946, through a friend, the writer-director Claude Autant-Lara, Jacques obtained a small role in the whimsical fantasy Sylvie et le fantôme (1946), about a girl (Odette Joyeux) in love with a ghost (Tati).
The small township of Sainte-Sévère, where Tati had taken refuge during the occupation, served as inspiration for his first film, initially conceived as a one-reeler entitled "L'Ecole des facteurs" (School for Postmen). Unable to find widespread distribution, Tati decided to re-shoot the bucolic comedy --with himself in the central role -- as a feature film, using the villagers as extras and filming everything on location. And thus, Jour de Fête (1949) and Francois the village postman came into being. However, the film was soon overshadowed by his next enterprise and a critic of the satirical publication Le Canard Enchainé even proposed to fight a duel with anyone who would prefer "Jour de Fete" to Monsieur Hulot's Holiday (1953)!
With "Holiday", Tati reinvented the visual comedy of the silent era in a style not dissimilar to that of Max Linder. There is hardly any dialogue, except for background chatter, but natural and human noises are enhanced whenever required for the desired comic effect. The film is almost plotless, essentially comprised of a series of vignettes (to the recurring musical motif of Alain Romans's breezy 1952 composition "Quel temps fait-il à Paris?") at a seaside resort frequented by assorted holiday makers. All are stereotypical of their respective social class, as are the villagers themselves. Their inability to escape social conditioning and the stress they endure in the process of 'enjoying themselves' are observed with a keen satirical eye through their interaction with each other. At the centre is the ever-present character of the bumbling Monsieur Hulot, who arrives in a rickety 1924 Amilcar. Tall and reedy, clad in a poplin coat, wearing a crumpled hat, striped socks, trousers which are patently too short, rolled umbrella, a pipe firmly clenched between his teeth and perambulating with an odd stiff-legged gait, Hulot cuts an ungainly, yet hilarious figure. Well-meaning though he is, he invariably leaves disaster in his wake and departs the scene quickly as things go wrong, letting others sort out the mess. "Holiday" is more than just a brilliant collection of sight gags, but also an ironic observation of the foibles of human nature. Tati acknowledged the influence of both Buster Keaton and W.C. Fields in the creation of Hulot. Very much like Keaton or Charles Chaplin, he was also a consummate perfectionist who micro-managed each scene with unerring precision. Comedy for Tati was a serious business.
In Tati's subsequent ventures, Hulot became relegated from being the focus of the story to merely subordinate to its concept. As just one of many characters, Hulot weaves in and out of My Uncle (1958) and Playtime (1967), his simple, old-fashioned world contrasted sharply against the coldness of mechanisation, obsessive consumerism and the growing uniformity of houses and cities. "Playtime", shot in 70mm, took six years to make and required the creation of a massive glass and concrete high-rise set with myriad corridors and cubicles (dubbed 'Tativille' and built at a cost of $800,000) which raised the picture's total budget to $3 million and left Tati bankrupt. His next project, Trafic (1971), a satire of modern man's love of cars, failed to recoup these losses. Creditors impounded Tati's films, which were not re-released until 1977, when a canny Parisian distributor expunged his outstanding debts. Throughout his career, Tati remained obdurately committed to his artistic integrity and to his independence as a film maker. He was one of few directors who consistently employed non-professional actors. He turned down offers from Hollywood for a 15-minute series of television comedies, following the success of "Mon Oncle". He summed it all up by declaring "I could have satisfied the producers of the world by making a whole series of little Hulot films, and I would have made a lot of money. But I would not have been able to do what I like - work freely". (NY Times, November 6, 1982)- Writer
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The father of cinematic Surrealism and one of the most original directors in the history of the film medium, Luis Buñuel was given a strict Jesuit education (which sowed the seeds of his obsession with both religion and subversive behavior), and subsequently moved to Madrid to study at the university there, where his close friends included Salvador Dalí and Federico García Lorca.
After moving to Paris, Buñuel did a variety of film-related odd jobs in Paris, including working as an assistant to director Jean Epstein. With financial assistance from his mother and creative assistance from Dalí, he made his first film, the 17-minute Un chien andalou (1929), in 1929, and immediately catapulted himself into film history thanks to its shocking imagery (much of which - like the sliced eyeball at the beginning - still packs a punch even today). It made a deep impression on the Surrealist Group, who welcomed Buñuel into their ranks.
The following year, sponsored by wealthy art patrons, he made his first feature, the scabrous witty and violent L'Age d'Or (1930), which mercilessly attacked the church and the middle classes, themes that would preoccupy Buñuel for the rest of his career. That career, though, seemed almost over by the mid-1930s, as he found work increasingly hard to come by and after the Spanish Civil War he emigrated to the US where he worked for the Museum of Modern Art and as a film dubber for Warner Bros.
Moving to Mexico in the late 1940s, he teamed up with producer Óscar Dancigers and after a couple of unmemorable efforts shot back to international attention with the lacerating study of Mexican street urchins in The Young and the Damned (1950), winning him the Best Director award at the Cannes Film Festival.
But despite this new-found acclaim, Buñuel spent much of the next decade working on a variety of ultra-low-budget films, few of which made much impact outside Spanish-speaking countries (though many of them are well worth seeking out). But in 1961, General Franco, anxious to be seen to be supporting Spanish culture invited Buñuel back to his native country - and Bunuel promptly bit the hand that fed him by making Viridiana (1961), which was banned in Spain on the grounds of blasphemy, though it won the Palme d'Or at the Cannes Film Festival.
This inaugurated Buñuel's last great period when, in collaboration with producer Serge Silberman and writer Jean-Claude Carrière he made seven extraordinary late masterpieces, starting with Diary of a Chambermaid (1964). Although far glossier and more expensive, and often featuring major stars such as Jeanne Moreau and Catherine Deneuve, the films showed that even in old age Buñuel had lost none of his youthful vigour.
After saying that every one of his films from Belle de Jour (1967) onwards would be his last, he finally kept his promise with That Obscure Object of Desire (1977), after which he wrote a memorable (if factually dubious) autobiography, in which he said he'd be happy to burn all the prints of all his films- a classic Surrealist gesture if ever there was one.
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Giuseppe Tornatore was born on 27 May 1956 in Bagheria, Sicily, Italy. He is a director and writer, known for The Best Offer (2013), Cinema Paradiso (1988) and The Legend of 1900 (1998). He is married to Roberta Pacetti.- Actor
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Oscar-winning director John Schlesinger, who was born in London, on February 16, 1926, was the eldest child in a solidly middle-class Jewish family. Berbard Schlesinger, his father, was a pediatrician, and his mother, Winifred, was a musician. He served in the Army in the Far East during World War II. While attending Balliol College at Oxford, Schlesinger was involved with the Undergraduate Dramatic Society and developed an interest in photography. While at Oxford, he made his first short film, "Black Legend," in 1948. He took his degree in 1950 after reading English literature and then went into television. From 1958 through 1961, he made documentaries for the British Broadcasting Corp.
His 1960 documentary, Terminus (1961), which was sponsored by British-Transport, won him a British Academy Award and the Gold Lion at the Venice Film Festival. He made the transition to feature films in 1962, with the "kitchen sink" drama A Kind of Loving (1962), which got him noticed on both sides of the Atlantic. His next film, the Northern comedy Billy Liar (1963), was a success and began his association with actress Julie Christie, who had a memorable turn in the film. Christie won the Best Actress Academy Award and international superstardom and Schlesinger his first Oscar nomination as Best Director with his next film, the watershed Darling (1965), which dissected Swinging London. Subsequently, Schlesinger and Christie collaborated on Far from the Madding Crowd (1967), an adaptation of Thomas Hardy's classic novel, in 1967. The movie was not a success with critics or at the box office at the time, though its stature has grown over time. His next film, Midnight Cowboy (1969), earned him a place in cinema history, as it was not only a huge box office hit but also widely acclaimed as a contemporary classic. It won the Oscar for Best Picture and garnered Schlesinger an Oscar for Best Director.
Schlesinger earned his third, and last, Oscar nomination for the highly acclaimed Sunday Bloody Sunday (1971). He continued to operate at a high state of aesthetic and critical achievement with The Day of the Locust (1975), Marathon Man (1976) and Yanks (1979), but his 1981 comedy, Honky Tonk Freeway (1981), was one of the notable flops of its time, bringing in only $2 million on a $24-million budget when breakeven was calculated as three times negative cost. Although Schlesinger continued to work steadily as a director in movies and TV, he never again tasted the sweet fruits of success that he had for more than a decade, beginning in the mid-'60s.
Schlesinger's artistic fulfillment increasingly came from directing for the stage and, specifically, opera. He directed William Shakespeare's "Timon of Athens" for the Royal Shakespeare Company (RSC) in 1964, and after his movie career faded, he directed plays, musicals, and opera productions. After Laurence Olivier was eased out of the National Theatre in 1973, Schlesinger was named an associate director of the NT under Olivier's successor, Sir Peter Hall of the RSC.
Schlesinger suffered a stroke in December 2000. His life partner, Michael Childers, took him off life support, and he died the following day, July 24, 2003, in Palm Springs, Claifornia. He was 77 years old.- Actor
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Peter Bogdanovich was conceived in Europe but born in Kingston, New York. He is the son of immigrants fleeing the Nazis, Herma (Robinson) and Borislav Bogdanovich, a painter and pianist. His father was a Serbian Orthodox Christian, and his mother was from a wealthy Austrian Jewish family. Peter originally was an actor in the 1950s, studying his craft with legendary acting teacher Stella Adler and appearing on television and in summer stock. In the early 1960s he achieved notoriety for programming movies at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City. An obsessive cinema-goer, sometimes seeing up to 400 movies a year in his youth, Bogdanovich prominently showcased the work of American directors such as John Ford, about whom he subsequently wrote a book based on the notes he had produced for the MOMA retrospective of the director, and the then-underappreciated Howard Hawks. Bogdanovich also brought attention to such forgotten pioneers of American cinema as Allan Dwan.
Bogdanovich was influenced by the French critics of the 1950s who wrote for Cahiers du Cinema, especially critic-turned-director François Truffaut. Before becoming a director himself, he built his reputation as a film writer with articles in Esquire Magazine. In 1968, following the example of Cahiers du Cinema critics Truffaut, Jean-Luc Godard, Claude Chabrol and Éric Rohmer who had created the Nouvelle Vague ("New Wave") by making their own films, Bogdanovich became a director. Working for low-budget schlock-meister Roger Corman, Bogdanovich directed the critically praised Targets (1968) and the not-so-critically praised Voyage to the Planet of Prehistoric Women (1968), a film best forgotten.
Turning back to journalism, Bogdanovich struck up a lifelong friendship with the legendary Orson Welles while interviewing him on the set of Mike Nichols' film adaptation of Catch-22 (1970) from the novel by Joseph Heller. Subsequently, Bogdanovich has played a major role in elucidating Welles and his career with his writings on the great actor-director, most notably his book "This is Orson Welles" (1992). He has steadily produced invaluable books about the cinema, especially "Who the Devil Made It: Conversations with Legendary Film Directors," an indispensable tome that establishes Bogdanovich, along with Kevin Brownlow, as one of the premier English-language chroniclers of cinema.
The 32-year-old Bogdanovich was hailed by a critics as a Wellesian wunderkind when his most famous film, The Last Picture Show (1971) was released. The film received eight Academy Award nominations, including Bogdanovich as Best Director, and won two of them, for Cloris Leachman and "John Ford Stock Company" veteran Ben Johnson in the supporting acting categories. Bogdanovich, who had cast 19-year-old model Cybill Shepherd in a major role in the film, fell in love with the young beauty, an affair that eventually led to his divorce from the film's set designer Polly Platt, his longtime artistic collaborator and the mother of his two children.
Bogdanovich followed up The Last Picture Show (1971) with a major hit, What's Up, Doc? (1972), a screwball comedy heavily indebted to Hawks' Bringing Up Baby (1938) and His Girl Friday (1940), starring Barbra Streisand and 'Ryan O'Neal'. Despite his reliance on homage to bygone cinema, Bogdanovich had solidified his status as one of a new breed of A-list directors that included Academy Award winners Francis Ford Coppola and William Friedkin, with whom he formed The Directors Company. The Directors Company was a generous production deal with Paramount Pictures that essentially gave the directors carte blanche if they kept within strict budget limitations. It was through this entity that Bogdanovich's next big hit, the critically praised Paper Moon (1973), was produced.
Paper Moon (1973), a Depression-era comedy starring Ryan O'Neal that won his ten-year-old daughter Tatum O'Neal an Oscar as Best Supporting Actress, proved to be the highwater mark of Bogdanovich's career. Forced to share the profits with his fellow directors, Bogdanovich became dissatisfied with the arrangement. The Directors Company subsequently produced only two more films, Francis Ford Coppola's critically acclaimed The Conversation (1974) which was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Picture of 1974 and garnered Coppola an Oscar nod for Best Director, and Bogdanovich's Daisy Miller (1974), a film that had a quite different critical reception.
An adaptation of the Henry James novella, Daisy Miller (1974) spelled the beginning of the end of Bogdanovich's career as a popular, critically acclaimed director. The film, which starred Bogdanovich's lover Cybill Shepherd as the title character, was savaged by critics and was a flop at the box office. Bogdanovich's follow-up, At Long Last Love (1975), a filming of the Cole Porter musical starring Cybill Shepherd, was derided by some critics as one of the worst films ever made, noted as such in Harry Medved and Michael Medved's book "The Golden Turkey Awards: Nominees and Winners, the Worst Achievements in Hollywood History" (1980). The film also was a box office bomb despite featuring Burt Reynolds, a hotly burning star who would achieve super-nova status at the end of the 1970s.
Bogdanovich insisted on filming the musical numbers for At Long Last Love (1975) live, a process not used since the early days of the talkies, when sound engineer Douglas Shearer developed lip-synching at Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. The decision was widely ridiculed, as none of the leading actors were known for their singing abilities (Bogdanovich himself had produced a critically panned album of Cybill Shepherd singing Cole Porter songs in 1974). The public perception of Bogdanovich became that of an arrogant director hamstrung by his own hubris.
Trying to recapture the lightning in the bottle that was his early success, Bogdanovich once again turned to the past, his own and that of cinema, with Nickelodeon (1976). The film, a comedy recounting the earliest days of the motion picture industry, reunited Ryan O'Neal and 'Tatum O'Neal' from his last hit, Paper Moon (1973) with Burt Reynolds. Counseled not to use the unpopular (with both audiences and critics) Cybill Shepherd in the film, Bogdanovich instead used newcomer Jane Hitchcock as the film's ingénue. Unfortunately, the magic of Paper Moon (1973) was not be repeated and the film died at the box office. Jane Hitchcock, Bogdanovich's discovery, would make only one more film before calling it quits.
After a three-year hiatus, Bogdanovich returned with the critically and financially underwhelming Saint Jack (1979) for Hugh Hefner's Playboy Productions Inc. Bogdanovich's long affair with Cybill Shepherd had ended in 1978, but the production deal making Hugh Hefner the film's producer was part of the settlement of a lawsuit Shepherd had filed against Hefner for publishing nude photos of her pirated from a print of The Last Picture Show (1971) in Playboy Magazine. Bogdanovich then launched the film that would be his career Waterloo, They All Laughed (1981), a low-budget ensemble comedy starring Audrey Hepburn and the 1980 Playboy Playmate of the Year, Dorothy Stratten. During the filming of the picture, Bogdanovich fell in love with Stratten, who was married to an emotionally unstable hustler, Paul Snider, who relied on her financially. Stratten moved in with Bogdanovich, and when she told Snider she was leaving him, he shot and killed her, then committed suicide.
They All Laughed (1981) could not attract a distributor due to the negative publicity surrounding the Stratten murder, despite it being one of the few films made by the legendary Audrey Hepburn after her provisional retirement in 1967 (the film would prove to be Hepburn's last starring role in a theatrically released motion picture). The heartbroken Bogdanovich bought the rights to the negative so that it would be seen by the public, but the film had a limited release, garnered weak reviews and cost Bogdanovich millions of dollars, driving the emotionally devastated director into bankruptcy.
Bogdanovich turned back to his first avocation, writing, to pen a memoir of his dead love, "The Killing of the Unicorn: Dorothy Stratten (1960-1980)" that was published in 1984. The book was a riposte to Teresa Carpenter's "Death of a Playmate" article written for The Village Voice that had won the 1981 Pulitzer Prize. Carpenter had lambasted Bogdanovich and Hugh Hefner, claiming that Stratten was as much a victim of them as she was of Paul Snider. The article served as the basis of Bob Fosse's film Star 80 (1983), in which Bogdanovich was portrayed as the fictional director "Aram Nicholas".
Bogdanovich's career as a noted director was over, and though he achieved modest success with Mask (1985), his sequel to his greatest success The Last Picture Show (1971), Texasville (1990), was a critical and box office disappointment. He directed two more theatrical films in 1992 and 1993, but their failure kept him off the big screen until 2001's The Cat's Meow (2001). Returning once again to a reworking of the past, this time the alleged murder of director Thomas H. Ince by Welles' bete noir William Randolph Hearst, The Cat's Meow (2001) was a modest critical success but a flop at the box office. In addition to helming some television movies, Bogdanovich has returned to acting, with a recurring guest role on the cable television series The Sopranos (1999) as Dr. Jennifer Melfi's analyst.
Bogdanovich's personal reputation suffered from gossip about his 13-year marriage to Dorothy Stratten's 19-year-old-kid sister Louise Stratten, who was 29 years his junior. Some gossip held that Bogdanovich's behavior was akin to that of the James Stewart character in Alfred Hitchcock's necrophiliac masterpiece Vertigo (1958), with the director trying to remold Stratten into the image of her late sister. The marriage ended in divorce in 2001.
Now in his early eighties, Bogdanovich has arguably imitated his hero Orson Welles, but in an unintended fashion, as filmmaker who never regained the acclaim bestowed on their first major success. However, unlike the widely acclaimed master Welles, the orbit of Bogdanovich's reputation has never recovered from the apogee it reached briefly in the early 1970s.
There has been speculation that Peter Bogdanovich's ruin as a director was guaranteed when he ditched his wife and artistic collaborator Polly Platt for Cybill Shepherd. Platt had worked with Bogdanovich on all his early successes, and some critics believe that the controlling artistic consciousness on The Last Picture Show (1971) was Platt's. Parting company with Platt after Paper Moon (1973), Bogdanovich promptly slipped from the heights of a wunderkind to a has-been pursuing epic folly, as evidenced by Daisy Miller (1974) and At Long Last Love (1975).
In 1998 the National Film Preservation Board of the Library of Congress named The Last Picture Show (1971) to the National Film Registry, an honor awarded only to the most culturally significant films.- Producer
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Alan J. Pakula was an American film director, writer and producer. He was nominated for three Academy Awards: Best Picture for To Kill a Mockingbird (1962), Best Director for All the President's Men (1976) and Best Adapted Screenplay for Sophie's Choice (1982).
He also directed Presumed Innocent (1990), The Pelican Brief (1993) and The Devil's Own (1997), his last film.
From October 19, 1963, until 1971, Pakula was married to actress Hope Lange. He was married to his second wife, Hannah Pakula from 1973 until his death in 1998.
Pakula died on November 19, 1998, in a car accident, he was 70 years old.- Director
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Mikhail Kalatozov was born on 28 December 1903 in Tiflis, Russian Empire [now Tbilisi, Republic of Georgia]. He was a director and cinematographer, known for The Cranes Are Flying (1957), True Friends (1954) and Zagovor obrechyonnykh (1950). He died on 27 March 1973 in Moscow, RSFSR, USSR [now Russia].- Writer
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Chris Marker was born on 29 July 1921 in Neuilly-sur-Seine, Hauts-de-Seine, France. He was a writer and director, known for 12 Monkeys (1995), Sans Soleil (1983) and Third Side of the Coin (1960). He died on 29 July 2012 in Paris, France.- Writer
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The name "Melville" is not immediately associated with film. It conjures up images of white whales and crackbrained captains, of naysaying notaries and soup-spilling sailors. It is the countersign to a realm of men and their deeds, both heroic and villainous. It is the American novel, with its Ishmaels and its Claggarts a challenge to the European canon. It is Herman Melville. And yet, for over three decades, it was also worn by one of the French cinema's brightest lights, Jean-Pierre Melville, whose art was as revolutionary as that of the eponymous author.
Jean-Pierre Grumbach was born on October 20, 1917, to a family of Alsatian Jews. In his youth he studied in Paris, where he was first exposed to great films, among them Robert J. Flaherty's and W.S. Van Dyke's silent documentary White Shadows in the South Seas (1928). It left so deep a mark upon the pubescent Grumbach that he became a regular at the cinema, an obsession that would benefit him in adulthood. His own earliest efforts, 16mm home movies, were made with a camera given to him by his father in this period. In 1937, however, his career was forestalled when he began obligatory service in the French army. He was still in uniform when the Nazis invaded in 1940; under the nom de guerre of Melville, he aided the Resistance and was eventually forced to flee to England. There he joined the Free French forces and took part in the Allies' liberation of continental Europe. After the war, despite a desire to revert to Grumbach, he found that pseudonym had stuck.
Eager to earn his place in the movie industry, Melville applied to the French Technicians' Union but was denied membership. Undaunted by what he regarded as party politics, he set up his own production company in 1946 and started releasing films outside the system. The first, a low-budget short titled 24 Hours in the Life of a Clown (1946), was a success, inspired by his boyhood love for the circus. His feature-length debut, The Silence of the Sea (1949), was highly innovative. An intimate piece on the horrors of World War II, it starred unknown actors and was filmed by a skeleton crew. Its schedule was unusual: It was shot over 27 days in the course of a year. Its production was unusual: it incorporated "on-location" scenes--rarities in that era--done without vital permits. Its provenance was unusual: it was adapted from a book before the author's consent was obtained. Above all, its style was unusual. Its dark, claustrophobic sets and bottom-lit close-ups signaled a departure from the highly cultured cinema of René Clair, Marcel Pagnol, Abel Gance and Jacques Feyder. It was neither comedietta nor costume drama nor avant-garde "cinéma pur." Where its roots may have been in Jean Renoir's The Grand Illusion (1937), it was clearly something new.
Over the following 12 years Melville continued to create films that would influence the auteurs of La Nouvelle Vague (i.e., the French New Wave.) In 1950 he collaborated with Jean Cocteau on an unsatisfying version of The Terrible Children (1950), the tale of a strange, incestuous relationship between siblings. When You Read This Letter (1953), with French and Italian backing, was his first commercial project. While it was unprofitable, the fee he received allowed him to establish a studio outside of Paris. His next work, Bob the Gambler (1956), featured Roger Duchesne, a popular leading man of the 1930s who had drifted into the underworld during the war. As such, he was a uniquely apt choice for the role of the fashionable, self-immolating Bob. His supporting cast included Daniel Cauchy as toadying sidekick Paolo and newcomer Isabelle Corey as the temptress Anne. Although the picture was not a hit, it was a favorite of the aficionados that frequented Henri Langlois' Cinémathèque Français. Among them were the young savants Jean-Luc Godard and François Truffaut, the latter of whom used Guy Decomble of "Bob le flambeur" in his The 400 Blows (1959) that ushered in the "New Wave" era. They adored the hip, new rendering of a tired scenario, much of it shot in the streets with hidden cameras. They viewed it as fresh and daring, a "freeing up" through the rejection of high-minded literary adaptations and the embracing of pop culture. Simply put, Melville refused to play by the rules, and they followed suit.
In retrospect, "Bob le flambeur" seems straightforward: A reformed mobster turned high-stakes gambler comes out of retirement to pull one last job. Its genius lies in its simplicity. Melville admired American culture, as his alias indicated. He drove around Paris in an enormous Cadillac, sporting a Stetson hat and aviator sunglasses. He drank Coca-Cola and listened to American radio. The works of American directors John Ford and Howard Hawks were appealing to him, as they were ageless sagas of heroes and villains. Melville strove to build his own pantheon by blending the American ethos with his postwar sensibilities. As he perceived it, it was America that had valiantly rescued France from German occupation. Still, for a young man with Alsatian roots, the line separating good guys and bad guys had been breached, and one can see this disillusionment from The Silence of the Sea (1949) onward. Thus, while he borrowed from the American noir's revolt against the dichotomous Hollywood creations of the 1930s, the artist was forging his own apocryphal brand of dark tragedy. In his paradigm, a criminal could be a kind of hero within his milieu, so long as he stuck by his word and his allegiances. It was his personal style and his adherence to the code of honor that defined a "good guy"; obversely, it was his faith in others that was his downfall. It is a universe without the possibility for salvation, in which love and friendship are brief interludes in the cat-and-mouse games that lead to certain destruction. In that sense, Bob is a crucial link between Julien Duvivier's Pépé le Moko (1937) and Godard's Breathless (1960), in which Melville gave a brilliant cameo performance.
Jean-Pierre Melville is often regarded as the godfather of the Nouvelle Vague. Nonetheless, it is worth mentioning that had it not been for his aforementioned passion for American film, he might have shown us a very different "Bob le flambeur". Originally conceived as a hard-boiled gangster flick about the step-by-step plotting of a heist, Melville was forced to rethink its narrative after watching John Huston's remarkably similar The Asphalt Jungle (1950). It was only then that he had the idea to turn Bob into the comedy of manners that so delighted the cinephiles of the day. For this and other debts of gratitude, his next picture, Two Men in Manhattan (1959), was "a love letter to New York" and the America he revered. It was also his third straight box-office flop, however, and it caused Melville to break away from a New Wave movement that he felt catered to the cognoscenti. He later said, "If . . . I have consented to pass for their adopted father for a while, I do not wish it anymore, and I have put some distance in between us."
The first step in this split came with Léon Morin, Priest (1961), a wartime piece about a priest's endeavors to bring redemption to the inhabitants of a small town. Produced by Carlo Ponti, it was a big-budget affair with Jean-Paul Belmondo and Emmanuelle Riva, both household names by then. On the strength of its favorable reception, Melville released four consecutive cops-and-robbers movies, the most notable of which were The Informer (1962) and The Samurai (1967). Belmondo again headlined in "Le Doulous", not as a clergyman but as the fingerman Silien, whose loyalty to his old mob cronies entangles him in a web of intrigue and disaster. During the making of "Le Samouraï", a hauntingly minimalist film about a doomed assassin, Melville's studio burned to the ground and the project was completed in rented facilities. Regardless, it was a critical and commercial success. Presenting Alain Delon as ultra-cool assassin Jef Costello, it was considered one of the most meticulously-crafted pictures in the history of the cinema. Delon would later star in a second masterpiece, The Red Circle (1970), featuring the ultimate onscreen jewel heist. His Charles Bronson-cum-Jack Lord sang-froid toughness served as a counterpoint in Melville's oeuvre to the lighter and less predictable Belmondo. Another memorable production was Army of Shadows (1969), an austere portrait of perfidy within the ranks of the French Resistance.
It is trite to say that a particular artist is "not for everyone." In Melville's case, this statement could not be more fitting. Despite a round belly and an unattractive face, he was a notorious womanizer, and his chauvinism is painfully obvious in his movies. They are cynical, male-driven works in which women are devoid of nobility, merely functioning as beautiful chess pieces. His men also lack spiritual depth, diligently playing out their roles toward the final showdown. A "profound moment" inevitably occurs before a mirror, a cliché for which many critics do not share the creator's enthusiasm. As a result of these peccadilloes, as well as its lack of back-stories and character motivations, Melville's later output has been accused of stiffness, with its wooden troupe of cops, crooks and general mauvais sujets. Further, well-structured plots notwithstanding, Melville films are methodically paced with tremendous attention paid to time and place. Hollywoodphiles often find them slow, with an overemphasis on tone and style.
Some have gone as far as to claim that the réalizateur's genius was outstripped by his importance to the development of the medium. They look to him as a sort of Moses figure, helping to guide the Nouvelle Vague to the promised land without partaking in its fruits. At his death by heart attack in 1973, the 55-year-old had directed just 14 projects, at least six of which are acknowledged classics. Aside from Godard and Truffaut, luminaries such as John Woo, Quentin Tarantino, Michael Mann, Volker Schlöndorff, Johnnie To and Martin Scorsese have pointed to him as an key influence. If a man's legacy is best measured not only by its quality but by the respect of his colleagues, Jean-Pierre Melville's contribution to cinema surely ranks with the greatest.- Actor
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Vittorio De Sica grew up in Naples, and started out as an office clerk in order to raise money to support his poor family. He was increasingly drawn towards acting, and made his screen debut while still in his teens, joining a stage company in 1923. By the late 1920s he was a successful matinee idol of the Italian theatre, and repeated that achievement in Italian movies, mostly light comedies. He turned to directing in 1940, making comedies in a similar vein, but with his fifth film The Children Are Watching Us (1943), he revealed hitherto unsuspected depths and an extraordinarily sensitive touch with actors, especially children. It was also the first film he made with the writer Cesare Zavattini with whom he would subsequently make Shoeshine (1946) and Bicycle Thieves (1948), heartbreaking studies of poverty in postwar Italy which won special Oscars before the foreign film category was officially established. After the box-office disaster of Umberto D. (1952), a relentlessly bleak study of the problems of old age, he returned to directing lighter work, appearing in front of the camera more frequently. Although Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow (1963) won him another Oscar, it was generally accepted that his career as one of the great directors was over. However, just before he died he made The Garden of the Finzi-Continis (1970), which won him yet another Oscar, and his final film A Brief Vacation (1973). He died following the removal of a cyst from his lungs.- Director
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Jules Dassin was an Academy Award-nominated director, screenwriter and actor best known for his films Rififi (1955), Never on Sunday (1960), and Topkapi (1964).
He was born Julius Samuel Dassin on 18 December 1911, in Middletown, Connecticut, USA. He was one of eight children of Russian-Jewish immigrants, Samuel Dassin and Berthe Vogel. Young Dassin grew up in Harlem, and he attended Morris High School in the Bronx, graduating in 1929. After taking acting classes in Europe, he returned to New York. In 1934, he became and actor with the ARTEF Players (Arbeter Teater Farband), and was a member of the troupe until 1939. Dassin played character roles in Yiddish, mainly in the plays by Sholom Aleichem. But upon discovering "that an actor I was not," he switched to directing and writing. At that time, he joined the Communist Party of the United States, but left the party in 1939, he said, disillusioned after the Soviet Union signed a pact with Adolf Hitler.
Dassin came to Hollywood in 1940, and was an apprentice to directors Alfred Hitchcock and Garson Kanin. In 1941, he made his directorial debut at MGM with adaptation of a story by Edgar Allan Poe. Dassin's best directorial works for Hollywood include such criminal dramas as Brute Force (1947) starring Burt Lancaster; The Naked City (1948), one of the first police dramas shot on the streets of New York; and Night and the City (1950) starring Richard Widmark as a hustler in London who is caught up in his own schemes. While he was assigned by producer Darryl F. Zanuck to make the film, Dassin was accused of affiliation with the Communist Party in his past. Zanuck advised Dassin to "shoot the expensive scenes first, to hook the studio" so the film was finished and released in 1951. Dassin was reported to HUAC in a 1951 testimony by directors Edward Dmytryk and Frank Tuttle. That was enough to sink his career in Hollywood. Dassin was subpoenaed by HUAC in 1952 and eventually became blacklisted after refusing to testify before the House Un-American Activities Committee.
He left the United States for France in 1953 and struggled during his first years in Paris. He was not fluent in French, and his connections were limited. However, Dassin's low-budget film, Rififi (1955), famous for its long heist sequence that was free of dialog, won him the Best Director Award at the 1955 Cannes Film Festival. There, he met the Greek actress Melina Mercouri. Later, Dassin co-starred opposite Mercouri in his film Never on Sunday (1960), which won the Best Film Award at Cannes in 1960. At that time, the anti-Communist witch hunt in America was fading, and Dassin was accepted again. He received two Academy Award-nominations for directing and screen-writing for Topkapi (1964), starring Mercouri, Maximilian Schell, and Peter Ustinov. Dassin also served as member of jury at the Cannes and several other international film festivals.
Jules Dassin was married twice. He had three children with his first wife, violinist Beatrice Launer. His son, Joe Dassin, was a popular French singer in the 1960s and '70s, with such hits as "Bip Bip," "L'Eté Indien" and "Aux Champs-Èlysées." In 1966, Jules Dassin married Mercouri, an ardent anti-fascist who lost her Greek citizenship for opposing the junta, and the couple was living in Manhattan, remaining very active in their efforts to restore democracy in Greece during the dictatorship of the Colonels. After 1974, the couple returned to Greece, Mercouri became a member of the Greek Parliament, and Culture Minister of Greece. While living in Athens, Dassin was active in the effort to bring the 2500-year-old Elgin marbles of the Parthenon back to Athens from their current location at the British Museum in London. In this and other humanitarian causes, Dassin followed the last will of his late wife.
Jules Dassin died of complications caused by a flu, on April 1, 2008, at age 96, at Hygeia Hospital in Athens, Greece. He is survived by two daughters and grandchildren.- Writer
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Abbas Kiarostami was born in Tehran, Iran, in 1940. He graduated from university with a degree in fine arts before starting work as a graphic designer. He then joined the Center for Intellectual Development of Children and Young Adults, where he started a film section, and this started his career as a filmmaker at the age of 30. Since then he has made many movies and has become one of the most important figures in contemporary Iranian film. He is also a major figure in the arts world, and has had numerous gallery exhibitions of his photography, short films and poetry. He is an iconic figure for what he has done, and he has achieved it all by believing in the arts and the creativity of his mind.- Director
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Nagisa Oshima's career extends from the initiation of the "Nuberu bagu" (New Wave) movement in Japanese cinema in the late 1950s and early 1960s, to the contemporary use of cinema and television to express paradoxes in modern society. After an early involvement with the student protest movement in Kyoto, Oshima rose rapidly in the Shochiku company from the status of apprentice, in 1954, to that of director. By 1960, he had grown disillusioned with the traditional studio production policies and broke away from Shochiku to form his own independent production company, Sozosha, in 1965. With other Japanese New Wave filmmakers, like Masahiro Shinoda, Shôhei Imamura and Yoshishige Yoshida, Oshima reacted against the humanistic style and subject matter of directors like Yasujirô Ozu, Kenji Mizoguchi and Akira Kurosawa, as well as against established left-wing political movements. Oshima has been primarily concerned with depicting the contradictions and tensions of postwar Japanese society. His films tend to expose contemporary Japanese materialism, while also examining what it means to be Japanese in the face of rapid industrialization and Westernization. Many of Oshima's earlier films, such as A Town of Love and Hope (1959) and The Sun's Burial (1960), feature rebellious, underprivileged youths in anti-heroic roles. The film for which he is probably best-known in the West, In the Realm of the Senses (1976), centers on an obsessive sexual relationship. Like several other Oshima works, it gains additional power by being based on an actual incident. Other important Oshima films include Death by Hanging (1968), an examination of the prejudicial treatment of Koreans in Japan; Boy (1969), which deals with the cruel use of a child for extortion purposes, and with the child's subsequent escapist fantasies; The Man Who Left His Will on Film (1970), about another ongoing concern of Oshima's, the art of filmmaking itself; and The Ceremony (1971), which presents a microcosmic view of Japanese postwar history through the lives of one wealthy family. In recent years, Oshima has repeatedly turned to sources outside Japan for the production of his films. This was the case with In the Realm of the Senses (1976) and Max My Love (1986). It is less well-known in the West that Oshima has also been a prolific documentarist, film theorist and television personality. He is the host of a long-running television talk show, "The School for Wives", in which female participants (kept anonymous by a distorting glass) present their personal problems, to which he responds from offscreen.- Director
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Jean-Luc Godard was born in Paris on December 3, 1930, the second of four children in a bourgeois Franco-Swiss family. His father was a doctor who owned a private clinic, and his mother came from a preeminent family of Swiss bankers. During World War II Godard became a naturalized citizen of Switzerland and attended school in Nyons, Switzerland. His parents divorced in 1948, at which time he returned to Paris to attend the Lycée Rohmer. In 1949 he studied at the Sorbonne to prepare for a degree in ethnology. However, it was during this time that he began attending with François Truffaut, Jacques Rivette, and Éric Rohmer.
In 1950 Godard, with Rivette and Rohmer, founded "Gazette du cinéma", which published five issues between May and November. He wrote a number of articles for the journal, often using the pseudonym "Hans Lucas". After Godard worked on and financed two films by Rivette and Rohmer, Godard's family cut off their financial support in 1951, and he resorted to a Bohemian lifestyle that included stealing food and money when necessary. In January 1952 he began writing film criticism for "Les cahiers du cinéma". Later that year he traveled to North and South America with his father and attempted to make his first film (of which only a tracking shot from a car was ever accomplished).
In 1953 he returned to Paris briefly before securing a job as a construction worker on a dam project in Switzerland. With the money from the job, he made a short film in 1954 about the building of the dam called Operation Concrete (1958). Later that year his mother was killed in a motor scooter accident in Switzerland. In 1956 Godard began writing again for "Les cahiers du cinéma" as well as for the journal "Arts". In 1957 Godard worked as the press attache for "Artistes Associés", and made his first French film, All Boys Are Called Patrick (1959).
In 1958 he shot Charlotte and Her Boyfriend (1958), his homage to Jean Cocteau. Later that year he took unused footage of a flood in Paris shot by Truffaut and edited it into a film called A Story of Water (1961), which was an homage to Mack Sennett. In 1959 he worked with Truffaut on the weekly publication "Temps de Paris". Godard wrote a gossip column for the journal, but also spent much time writing scenarios for films and a body of critical writings which placed him firmly in the forefront of the "nouvelle vague" aesthetic, precursing the French New Wave.
It was also in that year Godard began work on Breathless (1960). In 1960 he married Anna Karina in Switzerland. In April and May he shot The Little Soldier (1963) in Geneva and was preparing the film for a fall release in Paris. However, French censors banned it due to its references to the Algerian war, and it was not shown until 1963. In March 1960 Breathless (1960) premiered in Paris. It was hugely successful both with the film critics and at the box office, and became a landmark film in the French New Wave with its references to American cinema, its jagged editing and overall romantic/cinephilia approach to filmmaking. The film propelled the popularity of male lead Jean-Paul Belmondo with European audiences.
In 1961 Godard shot A Woman Is a Woman (1961), his first film using color widescreen stock. Later that year he participated in the collective effort to remake the film The Seven Deadly Sins (1962), which was heralded as an important project in artistic collaboration. In 1962 Godard shot Vivre sa vie (1962) in Paris, his first commercial success since "Breathless". Later that year he shot a segment entitled "Le Nouveau Monde" for the collective film Ro.Go.Pa.G. (1963), another important work in the history of collaborative multiple-authored art.
In 1963 Godard completed a film in homage to Jean Vigo entitled The Carabineers (1963), which was a resounding failure with the public and stirred furious controversy with film critics. Also that year he worked on a couple of collective films: The World's Most Beautiful Swindlers (1964) (from which Godard's sequence was later cut) and Six in Paris (1965). In 1964 Godard and his wife Anna Karina formed their own production company, Anouchka Films. They shot a film called A Married Woman (1964), which censors forced them to re-edit due to a topless sunbathing scene shot by Jacques Rozier. The censors also made Godard change the title to "Une femme marié" so as to not give the impression that this "scandalous" woman was the typical French wife. Later in the year, two French television programs were produced in devotion to Godard's work.
In the spring of 1965 Godard shot Alphaville (1965) in Paris; in the summer he shot Pierrot the Fool (1965) in Paris and the south of France. Shortly thereafter he and Anna Karina separated. Following their divorce, Godard shot Made in U.S.A (1966), "Deux ou trois choses que je sais d'elle (1966)", "L'amour en l'an 2000" (1966) (a sequel to "Alphaville" shot as a sketch for the collective film "L'amour travers les ages" (1966)).
In 1967 Godard shot The Chinese (1967) in Paris with Anne Wiazemsky, who was the granddaughter of French novelist François Mauriac. During the making of the film Godard and Wiazemsky were married in Paris. Later in the year he was prevented from traveling to North Vietnam for the shooting of a sequence for the collective film Far from Vietnam (1967). He instead shot the sequence in Paris, entitled "Camera-Oeil". Also during 1967 Godard participated (as the only Frenchman) on an Italian collective film called Love and Anger (1969).
In 1968 Godard was commissioned by French television to make Joy of Learning (1969). However, television producers were so outraged by the product Godard produced that they refused to show it. In May of that year Henri Langlois was fired by the head of the French Jean-Pierre Gorin to form the Dziga-Vertov group, infuriating Godard. He became increasingly concerned with socialist solutions to an idealist cinema, especially in providing the proletariat with the means of production and distribution. Along with other militantly political filmmakers in the Dziga-Vertov group, Godard published a series of 'Ciné-Tracts' outlining these viewpoints. In the summer of 1968 Godard traveled to New York City and Berkeley, California, to shoot the film "One American Movie", which was never completed. In September he made a trip to Canada to start another film called "Communication(s)", which also went unfinished, and then made a visit to Cuba before returning to France.
In 1969 Godard traveled to England, where he made the film See You at Mao (1970) for BBC Weekend Television, but the network later refused to show it. In the late spring he traveled with the Dziga-Vertov group to Prague to secretly shoot the film "Pravda". Later that year he shot Lotte in Italia (1971) ("Struggle for Italy") for Italian television. It was never shown, either.
In 1970 Godard traveled to Lebanon to shoot a film for the Palestinian Liberation Organization entitled "Jusque à la victoire" (1970) ("Until Victory"). Later that year he traveled to dozens of American universities trying to raise money for the film. In spite of his efforts, it was never released.- Director
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Dziga Vertov was born on 2 January 1896 in Bialystok, Grodno Governorate, Russian Empire [now Podlaskie, Poland]. He was a director and writer, known for Man with a Movie Camera (1929), Three Songs About Lenin (1934) and The Sixth Part of the World (1926). He was married to Elizaveta Svilova. He died on 12 February 1954 in Moscow, RSFSR, USSR [now Russia].- Director
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Moved to New York City at the age of seventeen from Akron, Ohio. Graduated from Columbia University with a B.A. in English, class of '75. Without any prior film experience, he was accepted into the Tisch School of the Arts, New York.- Writer
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Acclaimed and highly discussed filmmaker Neil LaBute has made himself a force to be reckoned with and a name to watch. With his true-to-life cynical and self-absorbed characters and all-too-true social themes, he has firmly established himself as an unforgiving judge of the ugliest side of human nature.
LaBute was originally a playwright. He attended Brigham Young University and took theater as his major. Many say that Pulitzer-Prize winner David Mamet was a strong influence on him. He chose to attack subjects that many people don't really want to talk about and showed the way that people really talk among themselves. His first stage piece, an off-off-Broadway play which was entitled "Filthy Talk for Troubled Times", debuted in 1989 and it featured two men just sitting around a bar and making small talk and ridiculing women, minorities, homosexuals and their ways, in a manner not unlike the conversations in his In the Company of Men (1997). The foul-mouthed play was, not unsurprisingly, a hit with the critics.
After LaBute graduated from the University of Kansas and New York University, he got a scholarship to London's Royal Court Theatre in the US in Chicago, Los Angeles and New York City. Then he got into cinema. He made his films like his plays: showing characters just sitting and talking and revealing how evil, scared, ignorant, arrogant, emotionally wounded, delusional, disillusioned and cynical they are.
LaBute made his first major mark with the low-budget (and frighteningly realistic) cautionary fable In the Company of Men (1997), about two sexist male office co-workers fed up with what they believe is the way women have taken over American society and how it is no longer a man's world. They set out to find a vulnerable woman - one looking for male attention - and wine her, dine her, then cruelly dump her, just to gain some "dignity" for their gender. Shot for $25,000 in less than two weeks, the film won the Sundance Filmmaker's trophy, awards for LaBute's screenplay and the star Aaron Eckhart's performance as a heartless and misogynist creep with ambition and cockiness to spare.
His next movie and sophomore cinema effort, Your Friends and Neighbors (1998), was considerably less well-received (a casualty of what is often referred to as "the sophomore jinx"). The film was about a group of six very different, but misanthropic people (three men and three women) connected by their relationships; when unhappy in them, they begin to shamelessly lie and cheat on one another with their lovers, and even with their friends. The movie got some strong reviews, but other reviewers felt LaBute was pretty much repeating himself. The prevailing attitude seeming to be that this time he had made an entire movie with all of its characters being nothing but villains, so why should anyone care about or want these six unlikable people to ever find happiness?
Nurse Betty (2000) was LaBute's next directorial effort, from a script he didn't write himself. It was was a radical departure from LaBute's other work, about a sweet-natured waitress obsessed with a particular soap opera and especially the show's star, George McCord (Greg Kinnear). The film received the Cannes Film Festival's Best Screenplay trophy for its authors. Renée Zellweger was honored with a Golden Globe Award. LaBute had finally made a good-nature, mainstream film, and a damn good one, but he didn't spend ALL his time basking - he had put out several other things that year, such as a TV movie based on his "Bash" plays and another original work entitled Tumble (2000), none of which got wide recognition.
In 2002 LaBute got himself noticed again with another less-caustic movie - a costume period piece called Possession (2002), based on the best-selling novel, which many believed to be about his love for early English culture. It starred LaBute stalwart Eckhart and Gwyneth Paltrow, who specializes in having the most authentic sounding British accent around. It wasn't a huge box-office success, but it did have many fervent admirers.
In 2003 LaBute brought to the screen another adaptation of his own work, a play he wrote and directed and had performed in England. He brought his original cast (Paul Rudd, Rachel Weisz, Gretchen Mol and Frederick Weller) back to appear in this one. It was entitled The Shape of Things (2003), about how a seductive art student, named Evelyn, takes Paul, a nerdy, insecure, out-of-shape guy, and begins molding him to look more and more desirable, much to the confusion of his friends. He enjoys being desirable, but is unaware of where all this remodeling will lead as Evelyn gets more and more possessive and controlling.
With pieces like "In the Company of Men" and Your Friends and Neighbors (1998), LaBute has proven that he has his hand on the pulse and minds of everyday and ordinary people (not heroes or villains), just average people who sound and behave horribly for no reason, and you cringe all the more because you know and identify with those characters. With "Nurse Betty" and "Possession", however, LaBute has shown that he has more than just one really incredibly note. He's no one-hit wonder. Here is a man whose entire body of work should be watched and studied by all.- Producer
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Of the ten films that Hsiao-Hsien Hou directed between 1980 and 1989, seven received best film or best director awards from prestigious international films festivals in Venice, Berlin, Hawaii, and the Festival of the Three Continents in Nantes. In a 1988 worldwide critics' poll, Hou was championed as "one of the three directors most crucial to the future of cinema."
Hou's birthplace, a county in Kuangtung Province, had been well-known as an intellectual center in China. In 1948, his family moved to Taiwan and, like all children raised there, he went through an extremely demanding educational system. In 1969, he studied film at the National Taiwan Arts Academy. After graduation in 1972, he worked briefly as a salesman. Later he began his film career as a scriptwriter and assistant director.
Hou's films are often concerned with his experiences of growing up in rural Taiwan in the 1950s and 1960s. The 1950s marked a time in which refugee families from the mainland were struggling painfully for survival, while the 1960s saw the beginning of the most significant social change in modern Taiwan. The economic boom of that period meant the beginning of Western-style industrialization and urbanization. The normal frustrations of growing up were aggravated by these complicated changes, and Hou's films are intimate expressions of those experiences.
His emotionally charged work is replete with highly nostalgic images and beautiful compositions; their power lies in his total identification with the past and the fate of families who suffered through difficult times. His stories, often written in collaboration with scriptwriters T'ien-wen Chu and Nien-Jen Wu, depict the complex intertwining of the different strands that shape the lives of individuals. In a poetic yet relaxed style, they reflect a deep sympathy and a profound humanism.- Second Unit Director or Assistant Director
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Sergio Leone was virtually born into the cinema - he was the son of Roberto Roberti (A.K.A. Vincenzo Leone), one of Italy's cinema pioneers, and actress Bice Valerian. Leone entered films in his late teens, working as an assistant director to both Italian directors and U.S. directors working in Italy (usually making Biblical and Roman epics, much in vogue at the time). Towards the end of the 1950s he started writing screenplays, and began directing after taking over The Last Days of Pompeii (1959) in mid-shoot after its original director fell ill. His first solo feature, The Colossus of Rhodes (1961), was a routine Roman epic, but his second feature, A Fistful of Dollars (1964), a shameless remake of Akira Kurosawa's Yojimbo (1961), caused a revolution. It was the first Spaghetti Western, and shot T.V. cowboy Clint Eastwood to stardom (Leone wanted Henry Fonda or Charles Bronson but couldn't afford them). The two sequels, For a Few Dollars More (1965) and The Good, the Bad and the Ugly (1966), were shot on much higher budgets and were even more successful, though his masterpiece, Once Upon a Time in the West (1968), in which Leone finally worked with Fonda and Bronson, was mutilated by Paramount Pictures and flopped at the U.S. box office. He directed Duck, You Sucker! (1971) reluctantly (as producer he hired Peter Bogdanovich to direct but he left before shooting began), and turned down offers to direct The Godfather (1972) in favor of his dream project, which became Once Upon a Time in America (1984). He died in 1989 after preparing an even more expensive Soviet co-production on the World War II siege of Leningrad.- Director
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Alfred Joseph Hitchcock was born in Leytonstone, Essex, England. He was the son of Emma Jane (Whelan; 1863 - 1942) and East End greengrocer William Hitchcock (1862 - 1914). His parents were both of half English and half Irish ancestry. He had two older siblings, William Hitchcock (born 1890) and Eileen Hitchcock (born 1892). Raised as a strict Catholic and attending Saint Ignatius College, a school run by Jesuits, Hitch had very much of a regular upbringing. His first job outside of the family business was in 1915 as an estimator for the Henley Telegraph and Cable Company. His interest in movies began at around this time, frequently visiting the cinema and reading US trade journals.
Hitchcock entering the film industry in 1919 as a title card designer. It was there that he met Alma Reville, though they never really spoke to each other. It was only after the director for Always Tell Your Wife (1923) fell ill and Hitchcock was named director to complete the film that he and Reville began to collaborate. Hitchcock had his first real crack at directing a film, start to finish, in 1923 when he was hired to direct the film Number 13 (1922), though the production wasn't completed due to the studio's closure (he later remade it as a sound film). Hitchcock didn't give up then. He directed The Pleasure Garden (1925), a British/German production, which was very popular. Hitchcock made his first trademark film in 1927, The Lodger: A Story of the London Fog (1927) . In the same year, on the 2nd of December, Hitchcock married Alma Reville. They had one child, Patricia Hitchcock who was born on July 7th, 1928. His success followed when he made a number of films in Britain such as The Lady Vanishes (1938) and Jamaica Inn (1939), some of which also gained him fame in the USA.
In 1940, the Hitchcock family moved to Hollywood, where the producer David O. Selznick had hired him to direct an adaptation of 'Daphne du Maurier''s Rebecca (1940). After Saboteur (1942), as his fame as a director grew, film companies began to refer to his films as 'Alfred Hitchcock's', for example Alfred Hitcock's Psycho (1960), Alfred Hitchcock's Family Plot (1976), Alfred Hitchcock's Frenzy (1972).
Hitchcock was a master of pure cinema who almost never failed to reconcile aesthetics with the demands of the box-office.
During the making of Frenzy (1972), Hitchcock's wife Alma suffered a paralyzing stroke which made her unable to walk very well. On March 7, 1979, Hitchcock was awarded the AFI Life Achievement Award, where he said: "I beg permission to mention by name only four people who have given me the most affection, appreciation, and encouragement, and constant collaboration. The first of the four is a film editor, the second is a scriptwriter, the third is the mother of my daughter Pat, and the fourth is as fine a cook as ever performed miracles in a domestic kitchen and their names are Alma Reville." By this time, he was ill with angina and his kidneys had already started to fail. He had started to write a screenplay with Ernest Lehman called The Short Night but he fired Lehman and hired young writer David Freeman to rewrite the script. Due to Hitchcock's failing health the film was never made, but Freeman published the script after Hitchcock's death. In late 1979, Hitchcock was knighted, making him Sir Alfred Hitchcock. On the 29th April 1980, 9:17AM, he died peacefully in his sleep due to renal failure. His funeral was held in the Church of Good Shepherd in Beverly Hills. Father Thomas Sullivan led the service with over 600 people attended the service, among them were Mel Brooks (director of High Anxiety (1977), a comedy tribute to Hitchcock and his films), Louis Jourdan, Karl Malden, Tippi Hedren, Janet Leigh and François Truffaut.- Director
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With Sidste omgang (1993) (Last Round), his graduation short from The National Film School of Denmark, Thomas Vinterberg got an early taste of critical success. He received the Jury's and Producers' Awards at the International Student Film Fest in Munich and won the 1st Prize at the Tel Aviv Film Fest. Popular success followed with his breakthrough short fiction film, Drengen der gik baglæns (1995), about a boy, who - after the death of his brother - discovers he can turn back time by walking backwards. This poetic short film was followed the reckless and fast-paced thriller, The Biggest Heroes (1996).
Vinterberg is one of the founding "brothers" of dogme95, a set of rules dedicated to reintroducing the element of risk in filmmaking. The Celebration (1998) was not only his first Dogme95 project it was also his first international success. With this movie he "penetrated a layer of evil and abomination [he'd] never been to before" (according to an interview by Bo Green Jensen for Weekend Avisen). The story revolves around Family patriarch Helge Klingenfeldt Hansen, celebrating his 60th birthday. In a speech the eldest son addresses his father, supposedly to honor him, only to reveal the father's darkest secret. Among other international prizes, Vinterberg received the Prix du Jury of the Cannes International Film Festival.
His feature, It's All About Love (2003), is a departure from the dogme95 project. It is the story of John (Joaquin Phoenix) and Elena (Claire Danes), whose marriage has fallen apart. Their troubled relationship is reflected in their surroundings as Vinterberg attempts to create a parallel between the chaos of the world and the chaos inside the characters.
Back in his homeland, Thomas Vinterberg nevertheless sticks to the English language. His Dear Wendy (2005), written by Lars von Trier, is a fierce attack against America's obsession with weapons. In 2007, Vinterberg returns to Danish with When a Man Comes Home (2007) whose subject (a singer comes home to the town he left behind) is appropriate to the circumstances. Vinterberg strikes hard with his next two works, Submarino (2010), the gloomy story of two brothers who try to cope with their depressing everyday lives and The Hunt (2012), the shocking tale of a man who falls prey to a madding crowd. It was no surprise to anyone that his next project was a new adaptation of a Thomas Hardy novel with Far from the Madding Crowd (2015).- Writer
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Born in precisely the kind of small-town American setting so familiar from his films, David Lynch spent his childhood being shunted from one state to another as his research scientist father kept getting relocated. He attended various art schools, married Peggy Lynch and then fathered future director Jennifer Lynch shortly after he turned 21. That experience, plus attending art school in a particularly violent and run-down area of Philadelphia, inspired Eraserhead (1977), a film that he began in the early 1970s (after a couple of shorts) and which he would work on obsessively for five years. The final film was initially judged to be almost unreleasable weird, but thanks to the efforts of distributor Ben Barenholtz, it secured a cult following and enabled Lynch to make his first mainstream film (in an unlikely alliance with Mel Brooks), though The Elephant Man (1980) was shot through with his unique sensibility. Its enormous critical and commercial success led to Dune (1984), a hugely expensive commercial disaster, but Lynch redeemed himself with the now classic Blue Velvet (1986), his most personal and original work since his debut. He subsequently won the top prize at the Cannes Film Festival with the dark, violent road movie Wild at Heart (1990), and achieved a huge cult following with his surreal TV series Twin Peaks (1990), which he adapted for the big screen, though his comedy series On the Air (1992) was less successful. He also draws comic strips and has devised multimedia stage events with regular composer Angelo Badalamenti. He had a much-publicized affair with Isabella Rossellini in the late 1980s.- Director
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He grew up in Versailles with a family who was very influenced by pop music. When he was young, Gondry wanted to be a painter or an inventor. In the 80s he entered in an art school in Paris where he could develop his graphic skills and where he also met friends with whom he created a pop-rock band called Oui-Oui. The band released 2 albums ('Chacun tout le monde' and 'Formidable') and several singles until their separation in 1992. Gondry was the drummer of the band and also directed their video clips in which it was possible to see his strange world, influenced by the 60s and by his childhood. One of his videos was shown on MTV and when Björk saw it, she asked him to make her first solo video for 'Human Behaviour'. The partnership is famous: Gondry directed five other Björk's videos, benefiting by the huge budgets. This led to commissions for other artists around the world, including Massive Attack. He also made a lot of commercials for Gap, Smirnoff, Air France, Nike, Coca Cola, Adidas, Polaroid and Levi - the latter making him the most highly-awarded director for a one-off commercial.
Hollywood became interested in Gondry's success and he directed his first feature movie Human Nature (2001), adapting a Charlie Kaufman's scenario, which was shown in the 2001 Cannes Festival. Although it wasn't a big success, this film allowed him to direct Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004), for which he again collaborated with Charlie Kaufman. The movie became a popular independent film and he and his co-writers won an Oscar for it.- Actor
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David Cronenberg, also known as the King of Venereal Horror or the Baron of Blood, was born in Toronto, Ontario, Canada, in 1943. His father, Milton Cronenberg, was a journalist and editor, and his mother, Esther (Sumberg), was a piano player. After showing an inclination for literature at an early age (he wrote and published eerie short stories, thus following his father's path) and for music (playing classical guitar until he was 12), Cronenberg graduated from the University of Toronto with a degree in Literature after switching from the science department. He reached the cult status of horror-meister with the gore-filled, modern-vampire variations of Shivers (1975) and Rabid (1977), following an experimental apprenticeship in independent film-making and in Canadian television programs.
Cronenberg gained popularity with the head-exploding, telepathy-based Scanners (1981) after the release of the much underrated, controversial, and autobiographical The Brood (1979). Cronenberg become a sort of a mass media guru with Videodrome (1983), a shocking investigation of the hazards of reality-morphing television and a prophetic critique of contemporary aesthetics. The issues of tech-induced mutation of the human body and topics of the prominent dichotomy between body and mind were back again in The Dead Zone (1983) and The Fly (1986), both bright examples of a personal film-making identity, even if both films are based on mass-entertainment materials: the first being a rendition of a Stephen King best-seller, the latter a remake of a famous American horror movie.
With Dead Ringers (1988) and Naked Lunch (1991), the Canadian director, no more a mere genre movie-maker but a fully realized auteur, got the acclaim of international critics. Such profound statements on modern humanity and ever-changing society are prominent in the provocative Crash (1996) and in the virtual reality essay of eXistenZ (1999), both of which well fared at the Cannes and Berlin Film Festivals. In the last two film projects Spider (2002) and A History of Violence (2005), Cronenberg avoids expressing his teratologic and oneiric expressionism in favor of a more psychological exploration of human contradictions and idiosyncrasies.- Producer
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Jason Reitman is a Canadian filmmaker and producer who notably directed Ghostbusters: Afterlife, Juno, Thank You for Smoking, Up in the Air, Young Adult and Tully. He produced Chloe and Jennifer's Body, two films that advanced Amanda Seyfried's career for adult oriented roles. He is the son of Ivan Reitman, who directed the first two Ghostbusters films and Twins.- Writer
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Bong Joon-ho is a South Korean filmmaker. The recipient of three Academy Awards, his filmography is characterized by emphasis on social themes, genre-mixing, black humor, and sudden tone shifts. He first became known to audiences and achieved a cult following with his directorial debut film, the black comedy Barking Dogs Never Bite (2000), before achieving both critical and commercial success with his subsequent films: the crime thriller Memories of Murder (2003), the monster film The Host (2006), the science fiction action film Snowpiercer (2013), and the black comedy thriller Parasite (2019), all of which are among the highest-grossing films in South Korea, with Parasite also being the highest-grossing South Korean film in history.
All of Bong's films have been South Korean productions, although both Snowpiercer and Okja (2017) are mostly in the English language. Two of his films have screened in competition at the Cannes Film Festival-Okja in 2017 and Parasite in 2019; the latter earned the Palme d'Or, which was a first for a South Korean film. Parasite also became the first South Korean film to receive Academy Award nominations, with Bong winning Best Picture, Best Director, and Best Original Screenplay, making Parasite the first film not in English to win Best Picture. In 2017, Bong was included on Metacritic's list of the 25 best film directors of the 21st century. In 2020, Bong was included in Time's annual list of 100 Most Influential People and Bloomberg 50.- Director
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Kim Ji-woon was born in Seoul, South Korea. He began his career as an actor before becoming a stage director with productions such as "Hot Sea" in 1994 and "Movie, Movie" in 1995. He then began scripting for films, his first work, 97's "Wonderful Seasons" won Best Screenplay award at Korea's Premier Scenario contest, whilst his follow up The Quiet Family (1998) became not only his directorial debut, but also the source material for Takashi Miike's remake The Happiness of the Katakuris (2001) in 2001.
With an official selection at the Berlin International Film Festival and Best Film award at the Fantasport Film Festival for "A Quiet Family", his next film, 2000's The Foul King (2000), was an instant domestic hit, maintaining the #1 spot for over 6 months, with over 2 million admissions, it was also a worldwide festival crowd-pleaser. The short Coming Out (2000) and his contribution to 3 Extremes II (2002) (alongside segments from Peter Ho-Sun Chan and Nonzee Nimibutr) followed and then he made the 2003 horror A Tale of Two Sisters (2003).
He is a fan of film-noir and claims that many of his films contain elements of noir, often mixed with black comedy. His movie A Bittersweet Life (2005) his full on film-noir gangster thriller masterwork.- Writer
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A true master of his craft, Michael Haneke is one of the greatest film artists working today and one who challenges his viewers each year and work goes by, with films that reflect real portions of life in realistic, disturbing and unforgettable ways. One of the most genuine filmmakers of the world cinema, Haneke wrote and directed films in several languages: French, German and English, working with a great variety of actors, such as Juliette Binoche, Isabelle Huppert, Jean-Louis Trintignant, Toby Jones, Ülrich Muhe, Arno Frisch and the list goes on.
This grand figure from Austrian cinema was born in Germany on 23 March 1942, from a German father and an Austrian mother, with both parents being from the artistic world working as actors, a career that Michael also tried but without much success. At the University of Vienna he studied drama, philosophy and psychology, and after graduation he went on to become a film critic and TV editor. His career behind camera started with After Liverpool (1974), which he wrote and directed. He went on to direct five more TV films and two episodes from the miniseries "Lemminge" (1979)_.
The years spent on television works prompted him to finally direct his first cinema feature, during his early 40's, which is somewhat unusual for film directors. But it was worth waiting. In The Seventh Continent (1989), Haneke establishes the foundation of what his future cinema would be about: a cinema that doesn't provides answers but one that dares to throw more and more questions, a cinema that reflects and analyses the human condition in its darkest and unexpected ways outside of any Hollywood formula. Films that exist to confront audiences and not comfort them. In it, Haneke deals with the duality of social values vs. internal values while exposing an apparent perfect family that runs into physical and material disintegration for reasons unknown. It was the first time a film of his was sent to the Cannes Film Festival (out of competition lineup) but he managed to cause some commotion in the audience with polemic scenes that were meant to extract all possible reactions from the crowd.
His next ventures at the decade's turn was in dealing with disturbed youth and the alienation they have in separating reality from fiction, trying to intersect both to drastic results. In Benny's Video (1992), it's the disturbing story of a teen boy who experiences killing for the first time capturing the murder on tape, impressed by the power of detachment that films and videos can cause to people; and later on the highly controversial Funny Games (1997), where two teens hold a family hostage to play sadistic games just for their own sick amusement. The film cemented Haneke's name as one of the greatest authors of his generation but sparkled a great debate with its themes of violence, sadism and the influence those things have in audiences. At the 1997's Cannes Film Festival, it was the film that had the most walk-out's by the audience. In between both films, he released 71 Fragments of a Chronology of Chance (1994) and Kafka's The Castle (1997), the latter being one of the rare times when Haneke developed an adapted work.
In the 2000's, he strongly continued in producing more outstanding works prone to debate and reflection in what would become his most prolific decade with the following films: Code Unknown (2000), The Piano Teacher (2001), Time of the Wolf (2003), Caché (2005), an American remake shot-by shot of Funny Games (2007) and The White Ribbon (2009). His study about romance versus masochism in The Piano Teacher (2001) was an intense work, with powerful performances by Isabelle Huppert and Benoit Magimel, that the Cannes jury in the year were so impressed that Haneke managed to actually reverse their award rules where it was decided that film entries at the festival couldn't win more than one main award (the two lead actors won awards and Haneke got the Grand Prize of the Jury, just lost the Palme d'Or). With The White Ribbon (2009), an enigmatic black-and-white masterpiece following the inception of Nazism in this pre WWI and WWII story focusing on repressed children living in this small village where strange events happen all the time and without any possible reasoning, Haneke conquered the world and audiences with an artistic and daring work that won his first Palme d'Or a Golden Globe as Best Foreign Language Film and received an Oscar nomination for the same category plus the cinematography work of Christian Berger.
2012 was the year that marked his supremacy in the film world with the release of the bold and beautiful Amour (2012), a love story with powerful real drama and one where Haneke removed most of his usual dark characteristics to present more quiet and calm elements without losing input in creating controversy. The touching story of George and Anne provided one the greatest moments of that year and earned Haneke his second and consecutive Palme d'Or at Cannes and his first Oscar nominations for Best Direction and Best Original Screenplay - and it was one of the several nominees for Best Picture Oscar, winning as Best Foreign Language Film.
After abandoning a flash-mob film project, he returned to the screen with Happy End (2017), a film dealing with the refugee crisis in Europe and again he debuted his film at Cannes, receiving mildly positive reviews.
Besides his film work, Haneke also directs theatre productions, from drama to opera, from Così fan tutte to Don Giovanni.- Additional Crew
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Seijun Suzuki was born in Nihonbashi, Tôkyô, on May 24, 1923. In 1943, he entered the army to fight at the front. In 1946, he enrolled in the film department of the Kamakura Academy and passed the assistant director's exam. For the next few years, he worked as an assistant director at several studios. In 1958, he directed his first film, Victory Is Ours (1956), and from then on he directed three to four films each year. With Branded to Kill (1967), he came into conflict with Hori Kyusaku, who was the president of Nikkatsu Studios at the time. Because of this, he was forced to work in television the next ten years. In 1977, A Tale of Sorrow (1977), his return to theatrically-released films, was released.- Director
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Takashi Miike was born in the small town of Yao on the outskirts of Osaka, Japan. His main interest growing up was motorbikes, and for a while he harbored ambitions to race professionally. At the age of 18 he went to study at the film school in Yokohama founded by renowned director Shôhei Imamura, primarily because there were no entrance exams. By his own account Miike was an undisciplined student and attended few classes, but when a local TV company came scouting for unpaid production assistants, the school nominated the one pupil who never showed up: Miike. He spent almost a decade working in television, in many different roles, before becoming an assistant director in film to, amongst others, his old mentor Imamura. The "V-Cinema" (Direct to Video) boom of the early 1990s was to be Miike's break into directing his own films, as newly formed companies hired eager young filmmakers willing to work cheap and crank out low-budget action movies. Miike's first theatrically distributed film was Shinjuku Triad Society (1995) (Shinjuku Triad Society), and from then on he alternated V-Cinema films with higher-budgeted pictures. His international breakthrough came with Audition (1999) (Audition), and since then he has an ever expanding cult following in the west. A prolific director, Miike has directed (at the time of this writing) 60+ films in his 13 years as director, his films being known for their explicit and taboo representations of violence and sex, as seen in such works as Bijitâ Q (2001) (Visitor Q), Ichi the Killer (2001) (Ichi The Killer) and the Dead or Alive Trilogy: Dead or Alive (1999), Dead or Alive 2: Birds (2000) and Dead or Alive: Final (2002).- Director
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Marcel Carné, the son of a cabinet maker, entered the movies as the assistant of Jacques Feyder. At the age of 25 he directed his first movie Jenny (1936). Colaborating with the writer Jacques Prévert, the decorator Alexandre Trauner, the musician and composer Maurice Jaubert and the actor Jean Gabin he became the great director of the pre-war era of the French cinema with the poetic realism style (e.g. Hotel du Nord (1938)). During the occupation of France by Nazi-Germany he worked in the zone of the government of Vichy making Children of Paradise (1945), a clear anti-Nazi parable and all time classic of French cinema. After having been confronted with a purge trial he went on filming but none of his later movies could catch up with his former works.- Director
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Peter Weir was born on 21 August 1944 in Sydney, New South Wales, Australia. He is a director and writer, known for Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World (2003), The Way Back (2010) and Witness (1985). He has been married to Wendy Stites since 1966. They have two children.- Writer
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Son of the famous Impressionist painter Pierre Auguste, he had a happy childhood. Pierre Renoir was his brother, and Claude Renoir was his nephew. After the end of World War I, where he won the Croix de Guerre, he moved from scriptwriting to filmmaking. He married Catherine Hessling, for whom he began to make movies; he wanted to make a star of her. They separated in 1930, although he remained married to her until 1943. His next partner was Marguerite Renoir, whom he never married, although she took his name. He left France in 1941 during the German invasion of France during World War II and became a naturalized US citizen.- Actor
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Erich von Stroheim was born Erich Oswald Stroheim in 1885, in Vienna, Austria, to Johanna (Bondy), from Prague, and Benno Stroheim, a hatter from Gleiwitz, Germany (now Gliwice, Poland). His family was Jewish.
After spending some time working in his father's hat factory, he emigrated to America around 1909. Working in various jobs he arrived in Hollywood in 1914 and got work in D.W. Griffiths' company as a bit player. America's entry into WW1 enabled him to play sadistic monocled German officers but these roles dried up when the war ended. He turned to writing and directing but his passion for unnecessary detail such as Austrian guards wearing correct and expensively acquired regulation underwear which was never seen in 'Foolish Wives' caused the budget to reach a reported $1 million. Although the film became a hit the final edit was given to others resulting in a third of his footage being cut. Irving Thalberg fired him from 'Merry Go Round' which was completed by Rupert Julien. He then started on 'Greed', which when completed was unreleasable being 42 reels with a running time of 7 hours. It was eventually cut down to 10 reels which still had a striking effect on audiences. 'The Wedding March' was so long that even in it's unfinished state it was released as two separate films in Europe. Gloria Swanson fired him from her production of 'Queen Kelly' when with no sign of the film nearing completion the costs had risen to twice the budget partly due to him re-shooting scenes that had already been passed by the Hays office. She then had to spend a further $200,000 putting the footage into releasable state. It was the end for him as a director, but he made a reasonable success as an actor in the talkies.- Director
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F.W. Murnau was a German film director. He was greatly influenced by Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Shakespeare and Ibsen plays he had seen at the age of 12, and became a friend of director Max Reinhardt. During World War I he served as a company commander at the eastern front and was in the German air force, surviving several crashes without any severe injuries.
One of Murnau's acclaimed works is the 1922 film Nosferatu, an adaptation of Bram Stoker's Dracula. Although not a commercial success due to copyright issues with Stoker's novel, the film is considered a masterpiece of Expressionist film.
He later emigrated to Hollywood in 1926, where he joined the Fox Studio and made three films: Sunrise (1927), 4 Devils (1928) and City Girl (1930). The first of these three is widely regarded as one of the greatest films ever made.
In 1931 Murnau travelled to Bora Bora to make the film Tabu (1931) with documentary film pioneer Robert J. Flaherty, who left after artistic disputes with Murnau, who had to finish the movie on his own. A week prior to the opening of the film Tabu, Murnau died in a Santa Barbara hospital from injuries he had received in an automobile accident that occurred along the Pacific Coast Highway near Rincon Beach, southeast of Santa Barbara. Only 11 people attended his funeral. Among them were Robert J. Flaherty, Emil Jannings, Greta Garbo and Fritz Lang, who delivered the eulogy.
Of the 21 films Murnau directed, eight are considered to be completely lost.
In July 2015 Murnau's grave was broken into, the remains disturbed and the skull removed by persons unknown. Wax residue was reportedly found at the site, leading some to speculate that candles had been lit, perhaps with an occult or ceremonial significance. As this disturbance was not an isolated incident, the cemetery managers are considering sealing the grave.- Writer
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Director and screenwriter Philip Kaufman was born in Chicago, Illinois. He attended the University of Chicago and later Harvard Law School. He won the Prix de la Nouvelle Critique at Cannes in 1965 for his film Goldstein (1964). He was the screenwriter for The Outlaw Josey Wales (1976) and was to direct it but was replaced as director by Clint Eastwood, owing to their love triangle with the late Sondra Locke. Kaufman's first hit as director was Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1978), a remake of Don Siegel's 1956 sci-fi classic (in fact, Siegel has a cameo in it as a cab driver), and later, Kaufman was nominated for an Oscar for Best Screenplay on Material from Another Medium in 1988 for The Unbearable Lightness of Being (1988). Kaufman's steamy Henry & June (1990) was the first film released by a major studio to be rated NC-17, which created much controversy.- Director
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Stanley Kubrick was born in Manhattan, New York City, to Sadie Gertrude (Perveler) and Jacob Leonard Kubrick, a physician. His family were Jewish immigrants (from Austria, Romania, and Russia). Stanley was considered intelligent, despite poor grades at school. Hoping that a change of scenery would produce better academic performance, Kubrick's father sent him in 1940 to Pasadena, California, to stay with his uncle, Martin Perveler. Returning to the Bronx in 1941 for his last year of grammar school, there seemed to be little change in his attitude or his results. Hoping to find something to interest his son, Jack introduced Stanley to chess, with the desired result. Kubrick took to the game passionately, and quickly became a skilled player. Chess would become an important device for Kubrick in later years, often as a tool for dealing with recalcitrant actors, but also as an artistic motif in his films.
Jack Kubrick's decision to give his son a camera for his thirteenth birthday would be an even wiser move: Kubrick became an avid photographer, and would often make trips around New York taking photographs which he would develop in a friend's darkroom. After selling an unsolicited photograph to Look Magazine, Kubrick began to associate with their staff photographers, and at the age of seventeen was offered a job as an apprentice photographer.
In the next few years, Kubrick had regular assignments for "Look", and would become a voracious movie-goer. Together with friend Alexander Singer, Kubrick planned a move into film, and in 1950 sank his savings into making the documentary Day of the Fight (1951). This was followed by several short commissioned documentaries (Flying Padre (1951), and (The Seafarers (1953), but by attracting investors and hustling chess games in Central Park, Kubrick was able to make Fear and Desire (1952) in California.
Filming this movie was not a happy experience; Kubrick's marriage to high school sweetheart Toba Metz did not survive the shooting. Despite mixed reviews for the film itself, Kubrick received good notices for his obvious directorial talents. Kubrick's next two films Killer's Kiss (1955) and The Killing (1956) brought him to the attention of Hollywood, and in 1957 he directed Kirk Douglas in Paths of Glory (1957). Douglas later called upon Kubrick to take over the production of Spartacus (1960), by some accounts hoping that Kubrick would be daunted by the scale of the project and would thus be accommodating. This was not the case, however: Kubrick took charge of the project, imposing his ideas and standards on the film. Many crew members were upset by his style: cinematographer Russell Metty complained to producers that Kubrick was taking over his job. Kubrick's response was to tell him to sit there and do nothing. Metty complied, and ironically was awarded the Academy Award for his cinematography.
Kubrick's next project was to direct Marlon Brando in One-Eyed Jacks (1961), but negotiations broke down and Brando himself ended up directing the film himself. Disenchanted with Hollywood and after another failed marriage, Kubrick moved permanently to England, from where he would make all of his subsequent films. Despite having obtained a pilot's license, Kubrick was rumored to be afraid of flying.
Kubrick's first UK film was Lolita (1962), which was carefully constructed and guided so as to not offend the censorship boards which at the time had the power to severely damage the commercial success of a film. Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1964) was a big risk for Kubrick; before this, "nuclear" was not considered a subject for comedy. Originally written as a drama, Kubrick decided that too many of the ideas he had written were just too funny to be taken seriously. The film's critical and commercial success allowed Kubrick the financial and artistic freedom to work on any project he desired. Around this time, Kubrick's focus diversified and he would always have several projects in various stages of development: "Blue Moon" (a story about Hollywood's first pornographic feature film), "Napoleon" (an epic historical biography, abandoned after studio losses on similar projects), "Wartime Lies" (based on the novel by Louis Begley), and "Rhapsody" (a psycho-sexual thriller).
The next film he completed was a collaboration with sci-fi author Arthur C. Clarke. 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) is hailed by many as the best ever made; an instant cult favorite, it has set the standard and tone for many science fiction films that followed. Kubrick followed this with A Clockwork Orange (1971), which rivaled Lolita (1962) for the controversy it generated - this time not only for its portrayal of sex, but also of violence. Barry Lyndon (1975) would prove a turning point in both his professional and private lives. His unrelenting demands of commitment and perfection of cast and crew had by now become legendary. Actors would be required to perform dozens of takes with no breaks. Filming a story in Ireland involving military, Kubrick received reports that the IRA had declared him a possible target. Production was promptly moved out of the country, and Kubrick's desire for privacy and security resulted in him being considered a recluse ever since.
Having turned down directing a sequel to The Exorcist (1973), Kubrick made his own horror film: The Shining (1980). Again, rumors circulated of demands made upon actors and crew. Stephen King (whose novel the film was based upon) reportedly didn't like Kubrick's adaptation (indeed, he would later write his own screenplay which was filmed as The Shining (1997).)
Kubrick's subsequent work has been well spaced: it was seven years before Full Metal Jacket (1987) was released. By this time, Kubrick was married with children and had extensively remodeled his house. Seen by one critic as the dark side to the humanist story of Platoon (1986), Full Metal Jacket (1987) continued Kubrick's legacy of solid critical acclaim, and profit at the box office.
In the 1990s, Kubrick began an on-again/off-again collaboration with Brian Aldiss on a new science fiction film called "Artificial Intelligence (AI)", but progress was very slow, and was backgrounded until special effects technology was up to the standard the Kubrick wanted.
Kubrick returned to his in-development projects, but encountered a number of problems: "Napoleon" was completely dead, and "Wartime Lies" (now called "The Aryan Papers") was abandoned when Steven Spielberg announced he would direct Schindler's List (1993), which covered much of the same material.
While pre-production work on "AI" crawled along, Kubrick combined "Rhapsody" and "Blue Movie" and officially announced his next project as Eyes Wide Shut (1999), starring the then-married Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman. After two years of production under unprecedented security and privacy, the film was released to a typically polarized critical and public reception; Kubrick claimed it was his best film to date.
Special effects technology had matured rapidly in the meantime, and Kubrick immediately began active work on A.I. Artificial Intelligence (2001), but tragically suffered a fatal heart attack in his sleep on March 7th, 1999.
After Kubrick's death, Spielberg revealed that the two of them were friends that frequently communicated discreetly about the art of filmmaking; both had a large degree of mutual respect for each other's work. "AI" was frequently discussed; Kubrick even suggested that Spielberg should direct it as it was more his type of project. Based on this relationship, Spielberg took over as the film's director and completed the last Kubrick project.
How much of Kubrick's vision remains in the finished project -- and what he would think of the film as eventually released -- will be the final great unanswerable mysteries in the life of this talented and private filmmaker.- Producer
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Martin Charles Scorsese was born on November 17, 1942 in Queens, New York City, to Catherine Scorsese (née Cappa) and Charles Scorsese, who both worked in Manhattan's garment district, and whose families both came from Palermo, Sicily. He was raised in the neighborhood of Little Italy, which later provided the inspiration for several of his films. Scorsese earned a B.S. degree in film communications in 1964, followed by an M.A. in the same field in 1966 at New York University's School of Film. During this time, he made numerous prize-winning short films including The Big Shave (1967), and directed his first feature film, Who's That Knocking at My Door (1967).
He served as assistant director and an editor of the documentary Woodstock (1970) and won critical and popular acclaim for Mean Streets (1973), which first paired him with actor and frequent collaborator Robert De Niro. In 1976, Scorsese's Taxi Driver (1976), also starring De Niro, was awarded the Palme d'Or at the Cannes Film Festival, and he followed that film with New York, New York (1977) and The Last Waltz (1978). Scorsese directed De Niro to an Oscar-winning performance as boxer Jake LaMotta in Raging Bull (1980), which received eight Academy Award nominations, including Best Picture and Best Director, and is hailed as one of the masterpieces of modern cinema. Scorsese went on to direct The Color of Money (1986), The Last Temptation of Christ (1988), Goodfellas (1990), Cape Fear (1991), The Age of Innocence (1993), Casino (1995) and Kundun (1997), among other films. Commissioned by the British Film Institute to celebrate the 100th anniversary of the birth of cinema, Scorsese completed the four-hour documentary, A Personal Journey with Martin Scorsese Through American Movies (1995), co-directed by Michael Henry Wilson.
His long-cherished project, Gangs of New York (2002), earned numerous critical honors, including a Golden Globe Award for Best Director; the Howard Hughes biopic The Aviator (2004) won five Academy Awards, in addition to the Golden Globe and BAFTA awards for Best Picture. Scorsese won his first Academy Award for Best Director for The Departed (2006), which was also honored with the Director's Guild of America, Golden Globe, New York Film Critics, National Board of Review and Critic's Choice awards for Best Director, in addition to four Academy Awards, including Best Picture. Scorsese's documentary of the Rolling Stones in concert, Shine a Light (2008), followed, with the successful thriller Shutter Island (2010) two years later. Scorsese received his seventh Academy Award nomination for Best Director, as well as a Golden Globe Award, for Hugo (2011), which went on to win five Academy Awards.
Scorsese also serves as executive producer on the HBO series Boardwalk Empire (2010) for which he directed the pilot episode. Scorsese's additional awards and honors include the Golden Lion from the Venice Film Festival (1995), the AFI Life Achievement Award (1997), the Honoree at the Film Society of Lincoln Center's 25th Gala Tribute (1998), the DGA Lifetime Achievement Award (2003), The Kennedy Center Honors (2007) and the HFPA Cecil B. DeMille Award (2010). Scorsese and actor Leonardo DiCaprio have worked together on five separate occasions: Gangs of New York (2002), The Aviator (2004), The Departed (2006), Shutter Island (2010) and The Wolf of Wall Street (2013).- Director
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Yorgos Lanthimos was born in Athens, Greece. He studied directing for Film and Television at the Stavrakos Film School in Athens. He has directed a number of dance videos in collaboration with Greek choreographers, in addition to TV commercials, music videos, short films and theater plays. Kinetta, his first feature film, played at Toronto and Berlin film festivals to critical acclaim. His second feature Dogtooth, won the "Un Certain Regard prize" at the 2009 Cannes film festival, followed by numerous awards at festivals worldwide. It was nominated for a Best Foreign Language Film Academy Award (Oscar) in 2011. Alps won the "Osella for best screenplay" at the 2011 Venice film festival and Best Film at the Sydney film festival in 2012. His first English language film The Lobster was presented in Competition at the 68th Cannes Film Festival. Moreover, "The Lobster" was nominated for the (Oscar about the) Best Original Screenplay by the Academy and won Best Screenplay and Best Costume Design at the European Film Awards of 2015. His fifth project "The Killing of a Sacred Deer" was also presented in Competition at the 70th Cannes Film Festival where it won the award for the best Screenplay. Lanthimos's last film "The Favorite" is a historical Drama about the British Queen Anne.- Additional Crew
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The most famous Soviet film-maker since Sergei Eisenstein, Andrei Tarkovsky (the son of noted poet Arseniy Tarkovsky) studied music and Arabic in Moscow before enrolling in the Soviet film school VGIK. He shot to international attention with his first feature, Ivan's Childhood (1962), which won the top prize at the Venice Film Festival. This resulted in high expectations for his second feature Andrei Rublev (1966), which was banned by the Soviet authorities for two years. It was shown at the 1969 Cannes Film Festival at four o'clock in the morning on the last day, in order to prevent it from winning a prize - but it won one nonetheless, and was eventually distributed abroad partly to enable the authorities to save face. Solaris (1972), had an easier ride, being acclaimed by many in Europe and North America as the Soviet answer to Kubrick's '2001' (though Tarkovsky himself was never too fond of his own film nor Kubrick's), but he ran into official trouble again with Mirror (1975), a dense, personal web of autobiographical memories with a radically innovative plot structure. Stalker (1979) had to be completely reshot on a dramatically reduced budget after an accident in the laboratory destroyed the first version, and after Nostalghia (1983), shot in Italy (with official approval), Tarkovsky defected to Europe. His last film, The Sacrifice (1986) was shot in Sweden with many of Ingmar Bergman's regular collaborators, and won an almost unprecedented four prizes at the Cannes Film Festival. He died of lung cancer at the end of the year. Two years later link=Sergei Parajanov dedicated his film Ashik Kerib to Tarkovsky.