Nominated for both an Academy Award for scriptwriting and a National Book Award, John Sayles has written screenplays, teleplays, short stories, and novels and has worked as a script doctor for a virtual who's who of Hollywood film and television talent. He has acted in films and on stage and even directed a music video for Bruce Springsteen.

In making movies, Sayles has handled subjects as diverse as seventies activists in The Return of the Secaucus Seven (1980); a 1920s Appalachian miners' strike in Matewan (1987); the 1919 Black Sox scandal in Eight Men Out...

Robert Altman is one of the most inventive, unpredictable, and hotly debated American filmmakers of the past thirty years. His movies include popular hits (M.A.S.H., Nashville), critical successes (Thieves Like Us, The Long Goodbye, Short Cuts), and outright disasters (Beyond Therapy). Through triumph and tribulation alike, Altman has never lost the experimental spirit that brought him into feature filmmaking after twenty years of refining his talent on industrial movies and TV episodes. He also has maintained a gregarious, often garrulous nature, rarely missing an opportunity to discuss...

Collected here are forty years of the thoughts of one of the most influential filmmakers of our time. Although the winner of nine Academy Awards for his The Last Emperor, Bernardo Bertolucci may ultimately be best remembered for his Last Tango in Paris, which Pauline Kael called the most erotic film ever made.

This volume gives a privileged view of Bertolucci's career from the days of his first radical experiments to the present, when he has become an elder statesman of world cinema. Half of these twenty-three interviews appear in English for the first time. The conversations resonate...

Deeply rooted in the soil and culture of his native Greece, in its history, and in its contemporary political upheavals, Theo Angelopoulos (b. 1935) has chosen to make all his films, without exception, at home. Like Ingmar Bergman before him, he proved once again that the truer a film artist is to himself and his background, the more relevant he is to the rest of the world. During the past thirty years as he has developed his own very personal thematic language, he has become one of the most distinctively original filmmakers in the world today.

This collection of interviews follows his...

Although Ingmar Bergman (1918-2007) holds an undisputed place in the pantheon of major filmmakers, mention of his name unjustly evokes images of monolithic gloom and despair. All of his pictures, including his comedies, deal seriously with faith, morality, and mortality, but audiences and critics too often neglect the extraordinary wit and vitality that can be found in Wild Strawberries, Scenes from a Marriage, Fanny and Alexander, and many others.

In Ingmar Bergman: Interviews, the director discusses various stages of his career and the many facets of his...

For investing movies with an image of style and glamour George Cukor (1899--1983) is considered one of the founding fathers of the Golden Age of Hollywood. The roll call of the great films he made and the stars he directed validates his rank as one of cinema's greatest moviemakers.

-The only really important thing I have to say about George Cukor, - Katharine Hepburn proclaimed, -is that all the other directors I have worked with starred themselves. But George 'starred' the actor. He didn't want people to say, 'this great director.' He wanted them to say 'this great actor.' -...

This is the first collection of interviews with John Ford (1895--1973), whom many aficionados of fine films consider not only the major American filmmaker but also one of the most extraordinary American artists of the twentieth century.

Among the world's filmmakers who have been devotees of Ford's work are Jean-Luc Godard, Ingmar Bergman, Akira Kurosawa, Martin Scorsese, George Lucas, Wim Wenders, and Orson Welles, who, when asked from whom he learned how to make Citizen Kane, exclaimed -John Ford, John Ford, John Ford -

And yet, Ford, unquestionably a giant of...

Thrust into the international spotlight in 1966 when The Hunt, his critique of the Franco regime, won the Silver Bear at Berlin, Spanish filmmaker Carlos Saura (b. 1932) has remained an abiding presence and frequent victor at worldwide cinema competitions ever since.

Best known in the United States for his Flamenco trilogy--Blood Wedding, Carmen, and A Love Bewitched--he also received Oscar nominations for Mama Turns a Hundred, Carmen, and Tango. Saura's movies are frequently ambiguous, sometimes controversial, and always narratively...

In full command of both Hollywood stylistics and camp aesthetics, Spain's Pedro Almodovar (b. 1951) has become a master of the audacious and the unorthodox, of the permissive and the polemical.

Pedro Almodovar: Interviews documents the 22-year-long cinematic career of the most internationally celebrated Spanish art-film director since Luis Bunuel. Many of these interviews, from French, Italian, and Spanish periodicals, appear for the first time in English.

Almodovar's early cinematic ventures in Super 8 and 16mm in the 1970s marked and memorialized the rise...

In this collection of interviews, Robert Aldrich (1918-1983) tells fascinating stories of making motion pictures with such film legends as Burt Lancaster, Lee Marvin, Jack Palance, Robert Mitchum, Bette Davis, Joan Crawford, James Stewart, Charles Bronson, Eddie Albert, and Burt Reynolds. As he speaks of them, of his on-going battles with censors, and of his audacious but failed attempt to create his own studio, he talks bluntly, sometimes ferociously, about struggling to make movies that accented his uncompromising view of life.

Among Aldrich's interviewers are...