Kategoria BISAC: Performing Arts >> Individual Director

Not since Martin Scorsese with Mean Streets in the mid-1970s has a young American filmmaker made such an instant impact on international cinema as Quentin Tarantino. In many ways, Tarantino is the paradigmatic 1990s success story: from high school dropout, toiling anonymously in a California video store, taking acting lessons, to world acclaim, with Pulp Fiction as the Grand Prix winner at Cannes.

With his first film, Reservoir Dogs, the then 29-year-old became an inspiration for filmmakers even younger than himself on how to produce stylish, subterranean cinema....

British filmmaker Mike Leigh began his career in the 1970s as a playwright and theater director. Later he made a number of films of varying lengths for British television and then moved into feature film production. Although well established in the U. K., he slowly gained a reputation in the United States, where, at first, his work was known to a relatively small number of filmgoers and critics. Such major films as High Hopes and Life Is Sweet attracted little attention in America. With the release of Secrets and Lies, however, the audience for Leigh's films increased dramatically.

Mike...

In outstanding films that are sharply focused on unusual women Jane Campion has gained worldwide admiration and respect. This New Zealand director first attracted international attention with her 1989 film Sweetie, an acerbic study of two sisters in a wildly dysfunctional family. She followed this in 1990 with the television miniseries An Angel at My Table, based on the autobiography of New Zealand author Janet Frame. Subsequently released in theatres, the film chronicles the early trials of the young writer. Poor, timid, and physically awkward, Frame was misdiagnosed as...

Steven Spielberg has become a brand name and a force that extends far beyond the movie screen. Phrases like "phone home" and the music score from Jaws are now part of our cultural script, appearing in commercials, comedy routines, and common conversation.

Yet few scholars have devoted time to studying Spielberg's vast output of popular films despite the director's financial and aesthetic achievements. Spanning twenty-five years of Spielberg's career, Steven Spielberg: Interviews explores the issues, the themes, and the financial considerations surrounding his work. The...

A director, producer, and writer, George Lucas is the power behind -The Force.- The son of a conservative small-town businessman, he grew up to become arguably the most identifiable and popular filmmaker in the history of the medium. Yet unlike his more publicly engaged contemporaries, Lucas rarely grants reporters an audience.

This first book of Lucas's interviews affords fans and students of film and science fiction a rare opportunity. Editor Sally Kline collects conversations from the reticent director spanning Lucas's entire career, from the making of his first film, 1971's...

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...

This book brings together an exceptional array of interviews, profiles, and press conferences tracing the half century that Orson Welles (1915- 1985) was in the public eye. Originally published or broadcast between 1938 and 1989 in worldwide locations, these pieces confirm that Welles's career was multidimensional and thoroughly inter-woven with Welles's persona.

Several of them offer vivid testimony to his grasp on the public imagination in Welles's heyday, including accounts of his War of the Worlds broadcast. Some interviews appear in English for the first time. Two...

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...

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...

Andrei Tarkovsky (1932-1986) was one of Russia's most influential and renowned filmmakers, despite an output of only seven feature films in twenty years. Revered by such filmmaking giants as Ingmar Bergman and Akira Kurosawa, Tarkovsky is famous for his use of long takes, languid pacing, dreamlike metaphorical imagery, and meditations on spirituality and the human soul. His Andrei Roublev, Solaris, and The Mirror are considered landmarks of postwar Russian cinema.

Andrei Tarkovsky: Interviews is the first English-language collection of interviews with and...

Amid extraordinary controversy at the Academy Awards ceremony in 1999, Elia Kazan was belatedly presented a Lifetime Achievement Award for his distinguished career as a director of American films. Despite the protests regarding his -friendly- testimony at the HUAC hearings in 1952, there was never any question that Kazan's cinematic accomplishments merited the long-overdue award. Few would dispute his being one of the great creative artists of the twentieth century.-

Born an Anatolian Greek in Istanbul in 1909, Kazan emigrated with his parents from Turkey to the United States when he was...

From his first feature film, Fear and Desire (1953), to his final, posthumously released Eyes Wide Shut (1999), Stanley Kubrick excelled at probing the dark corners of human consciousness. In doing so, he adapted such popular novels as The Killing, Lolita, A Clockwork Orange, and The Shining and selected a wide variety of genres for his films -- black comedy (Dr. Strangelove), science fiction (2001: A Space Odyssey), and war (Paths of Glory and Full Metal Jacket). Because he was peerless in unveiling the intimate...

Throughout his career Oliver Stone (b. 1946) has broken traditions and challenged audiences with a series of daring, angry, violent, and often confrontational films. Politically charged movies such as Nixon (1995), JFK (1991), and Wall Street (1987), and his Vietnam trilogy of Platoon (1986), Born on the 4th of July (1989), and Heaven and Earth (1993) provoke and enrage critics and audiences from all ideological walks. In a short time, Stone has established himself as one of the most admired and most reviled directors in American cinema.

Ranging...

Perhaps the most gifted and invigorating of the American independent film directors of the past two decades, Jim Jarmusch (b. 1953) has presented moviegoers with his uniquely personal vision, from his first feature film, Permanent Vacation (1980), to his latest, Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai (1999).

As the interviews in this volume reveal, Jarmusch has always been interested in mixing very different cultural ingredients to form something uncategorizably new in films that transcend the boundaries between high and low cultures. Jarmusch half-mockingly described...

This collection of interviews provides a revealing self-portrait of Martin Ritt (1914-1990), America's preeminent maker of social films and one of the most sensitive portraitists of the rural South.

Ritt's Hollywood career began in 1958 with Edge of the City and ended in 1990 with the release of Stanley and Iris. In all, he directed twenty-six movies, including some of Hollywood's most enduring films--Hud, Hombre, The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, The Brotherhood, The Molly Maguires, The Front, and Norma Rae.

Although he...

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...

Brian De Palma (b. 1940) isn't your average Hollywood director.

For years he reigned as the "master of the macabre," the man who massacred the class of '76 in Carrie and stalked Angie Dickinson in Dressed to Kill. By the mid-1980s De Palma found himself assaulting his audience and critics, daring them to watch a chainsaw enter a man's skull in Scarface and a power drill disembowel a defenseless woman in Body Double.

What drove De Palma to such extremes? In the late 1960s, he wanted to be the next Jean-Luc Godard and revolutionize American cinema. Instead,...

With six entries at the Cannes Film Festival thus far, Lars von Trier has been a Cannes award winner four times. Without question, he is the most intriguing film director to emerge in Denmark since the days of his great mentor in spirit Carl Theodor Dreyer. A relentless visionary, von Trier (b. 1956) has succeeded not only in realizing his projects but also in managing to gather substantial audiences to his films. Breaking the Waves (1996) made him a well-known figure to American audiences, as did Dancer in the Dark (2000), winner of the Palme d'Or at...