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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.- 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.- Writer
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Originally planning to become a lawyer, Billy Wilder abandoned that career in favor of working as a reporter for a Viennese newspaper, using this experience to move to Berlin, where he worked for the city's largest tabloid. He broke into films as a screenwriter in 1929 and wrote scripts for many German films until Adolf Hitler came to power in 1933. Wilder immediately realized his Jewish ancestry would cause problems, so he emigrated to Paris, then the US. Although he spoke no English when he arrived in Hollywood, Wilder was a fast learner and thanks to contacts such as Peter Lorre (with whom he shared an apartment), he was able to break into American films. His partnership with Charles Brackett started in 1938 and the team was responsible for writing some of Hollywood's classic comedies, including Ninotchka (1939) and Ball of Fire (1941). The partnership expanded into a producer-director one in 1942, with Brackett producing and the two turned out such classics as Five Graves to Cairo (1943), The Lost Weekend (1945) (Oscars for Best Picture, Director and Screenplay) and Sunset Boulevard (1950) (Oscars for Best Screenplay), after which the partnership dissolved. (Wilder had already made one film, Double Indemnity (1944) without Brackett, as the latter had refused to work on a film he felt dealt with such disreputable characters.) Wilder's subsequent self-produced films would become more caustic and cynical, notably Ace in the Hole (1951), though he also produced such sublime comedies as Some Like It Hot (1959) and The Apartment (1960) (which won him Best Picture and Director Oscars). He retired in 1981.- 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).- 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.- 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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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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An important British filmmaker, David Lean was born in Croydon on March 25, 1908 and brought up in a strict Quaker family (ironically, as a child he wasn't allowed to go to the movies). During the 1920s, he briefly considered the possibility of becoming an accountant like his father before finding a job at Gaumont British Studios in 1927. He worked as tea boy, clapper boy, messenger, then cutting room assistant. By 1935, he had become chief editor of Gaumont British News until in 1939 when he began to edit feature films, notably for Anthony Asquith, Paul Czinner and Michael Powell. Amongst films he worked on were Pygmalion (1938), Major Barbara (1941) and One of Our Aircraft Is Missing (1942).
By the end of the 1930s, Lean's reputation as an editor was very well established. In 1942, Noël Coward gave Lean the chance to co-direct with him the war film In Which We Serve (1942). Shortly after, with the encouragement of Coward, Lean, cinematographer Ronald Neame and producer 'Anthony Havelock-Allan' launched a production company called Cineguild. For that firm Lean first directed adaptations of three plays by Coward: the chronicle This Happy Breed (1944), the humorous ghost story Blithe Spirit (1945) and, most notably, the sentimental drama Brief Encounter (1945). Originally a box-office failure in England, "Brief Encounter" was presented at the very first Cannes film festival (1946), where it won almost unanimous praises as well as a Grand Prize.
From Coward, Lean switched to Charles Dickens, directing two well-regarded adaptations: Great Expectations (1946) and Oliver Twist (1948). The latter, starring Alec Guinness in his first major movie role, was criticized by some, however, for potential anti-Semitic inflections. The last two films made under the Cineguild banner were The Passionate Friends (1949), a romance from a novel by H.G. Wells, and the true crime story Madeleine (1950). Neither had a significant impact on critics or audiences.
The Cineguild partnership came to an end after a dispute between Lean and Neame. Lean's first post-Cineguild production was the aviation drama The Sound Barrier (1952), a great box-office success in England and his most spectacular movie so far. He followed with two sophisticated comedies based on theatrical plays: Hobson's Choice (1954) and the Anglo-American co-production Summertime (1955). Both were well received and "Hobson's Choice" won the Golden Bear at the 1954 Berlin film festival.
Lean's next movie was pivotal in his career, as it was the first of those grand-scale epics he would become renowned for. The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957) was produced by Sam Spiegel from a novel by 'Pierre Boulle', adapted by blacklisted writers Michael Wilson and Carl Foreman. Shot in Ceylon under extremely difficult conditions, the film was an international success and triumphed at the Oscars, winning seven awards, most notably best film and director.
Lean and Spiegel followed with an even more ambitious film, Lawrence of Arabia (1962), based on "Seven Pillars of Wisdom", the autobiography of T.E. Lawrence. Starring relative newcomer Peter O'Toole, this film was the first collaboration between Lean and writer Robert Bolt, cinematographer Freddie Young and composer Maurice Jarre. The shooting itself took place in Spain, Morocco and Jordan over a period of 20 months. Initial reviews were mixed and the film was trimmed down shortly after its world première and cut even more during a 1971 re-release. Like its predecessor, it won seven Oscars, once again including best film and director.
The same team of Lean, Bolt, Young and Jarre next worked on an adaptation of Boris Pasternak's novel "Dr. Zhivago" for producer Carlo Ponti. Doctor Zhivago (1965) was shot in Spain and Finland, standing in for revolutionary Russia and, despite divided critics, was hugely successful, as was Jarre's musical score. The film won five Oscars out of ten nominations, but the statuettes for film and director went to The Sound of Music (1965).
Lean's next movie, the sentimental drama Ryan's Daughter (1970), did not reach the same heights. The original screenplay by Robert Bolt was produced by old associate Anthony Havelock-Allan, and Lean once again secured the collaboration of Freddie Young and Maurice Jarre. The shooting in Ireland lasted about a year, much longer than expected. The film won two Oscars; but, for the most part, critical reaction was tepid, sometimes downright derisive, and the general public didn't really respond to the movie.
This relative lack of success seems to have inhibited Lean's creativity for a while. But towards the end of the 1970s, he started to work again with Robert Bolt on an ambitious two-part movie about the Bounty mutiny. The project fell apart and was eventually recuperated by Dino De Laurentiis. Lean was then approached by producers John Brabourne and Richard Goodwin to adapt E.M. Forster's novel "A Passage to India", a book Lean had been interested in for more than 20 years. For the first time in his career; Lean wrote the adaptation alone, basing himself partly on Santha Rama Rau's stage version of the book. Lean also acted as his own editor. A Passage to India (1984) opened to mostly favourable reviews and performed quite well at the box-office. It was a strong Oscar contender, scoring 11 nominations. It settled for two wins, losing the trophy battle to Milos Forman's Amadeus (1984).
Lean spent the last few years of his life preparing an adaptation of Joseph Conrad's meditative adventure novel "Nostromo". He also participated briefly in Richard Harris' restoration of "Lawrence of Arabia" in 1988. In 1990, Lean received the American Film Institute's Life Achievement award. He died of cancer on April 16, 1991 at age 83, shortly before the shooting of "Nostromo" was about to begin.
Lean was known on sets for his extreme perfectionism and autocratic behavior, an attitude that sometimes alienated his cast or crew. Though his cinematic approach, classic and refined, clearly belongs to a bygone era, his films have aged rather well and his influence can still be found in movies like The English Patient (1996) and Titanic (1997). In 1999, the British Film Institute compiled a list of the 100 favorite British films of the 20th century. Five by David Lean appeared in the top 30, three of them in the top five.- Producer
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Francis Ford Coppola was born in 1939 in Detroit, Michigan, but grew up in a New York suburb in a creative, supportive Italian-American family. His father, Carmine Coppola, was a composer and musician. His mother, Italia Coppola (née Pennino), had been an actress. Francis Ford Coppola graduated with a degree in drama from Hofstra University, and did graduate work at UCLA in filmmaking. He was training as assistant with filmmaker Roger Corman, working in such capacities as sound-man, dialogue director, associate producer and, eventually, director of Dementia 13 (1963), Coppola's first feature film. During the next four years, Coppola was involved in a variety of script collaborations, including writing an adaptation of "This Property is Condemned" by Tennessee Williams (with Fred Coe and Edith Sommer), and screenplays for Is Paris Burning? (1966) and Patton (1970), the film for which Coppola won a Best Original Screenplay Academy Award. In 1966, Coppola's 2nd film brought him critical acclaim and a Master of Fine Arts degree. In 1969, Coppola and George Lucas established American Zoetrope, an independent film production company based in San Francisco. The company's first project was THX 1138 (1971), produced by Coppola and directed by Lucas. Coppola also produced the second film that Lucas directed, American Graffiti (1973), in 1973. This movie got five Academy Award nominations, including one for Best Picture. In 1971, Coppola's film The Godfather (1972) became one of the highest-grossing movies in history and brought him an Oscar for writing the screenplay with Mario Puzo The film was a Best Picture Academy Award-winner, and also brought Coppola a Best Director Oscar nomination. Following his work on the screenplay for The Great Gatsby (1974), Coppola's next film was The Conversation (1974), which was honored with the Golden Palm Award at the Cannes Film Festival, and brought Coppola Best Picture and Best Original Screenplay Oscar nominations. Also released that year, The Godfather Part II (1974), rivaled the success of The Godfather (1972), and won six Academy Awards, bringing Coppola Oscars as a producer, director and writer. Coppola then began work on his most ambitious film, Apocalypse Now (1979), a Vietnam War epic that was inspired by Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness (1993). Released in 1979, the acclaimed film won a Golden Palm Award at the Cannes Film Festival, and two Academy Awards. Also that year, Coppola executive produced the hit The Black Stallion (1979). With George Lucas, Coppola executive produced Kagemusha: The Shadow Warrior (1980), directed by Akira Kurosawa, and Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters (1985), directed by Paul Schrader and based on the life and writings of Yukio Mishima. Coppola also executive produced such films as The Escape Artist (1982), Hammett (1982) The Black Stallion Returns (1983), Barfly (1987), Wind (1992), The Secret Garden (1993), etc.
He helped to make a star of his nephew, Nicolas Cage. Personal tragedy hit in 1986 when his son Gio died in a boating accident. Francis Ford Coppola is one of America's most erratic, energetic and controversial filmmakers.- Producer
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Quentin Jerome Tarantino was born in Knoxville, Tennessee. His father, Tony Tarantino, is an Italian-American actor and musician from New York, and his mother, Connie (McHugh), is a nurse from Tennessee. Quentin moved with his mother to Torrance, California, when he was four years old.
In January of 1992, first-time writer-director Tarantino's Reservoir Dogs (1992) appeared at the Sundance Film Festival. The film garnered critical acclaim and the director became a legend immediately. Two years later, he followed up Dogs success with Pulp Fiction (1994) which premiered at the Cannes film festival, winning the coveted Palme D'Or Award. At the 1995 Academy Awards, it was nominated for the best picture, best director and best original screenplay. Tarantino and writing partner Roger Avary came away with the award only for best original screenplay. In 1995, Tarantino directed one fourth of the anthology Four Rooms (1995) with friends and fellow auteurs Alexandre Rockwell, Robert Rodriguez and Allison Anders. The film opened December 25 in the United States to very weak reviews. Tarantino's next film was From Dusk Till Dawn (1996), a vampire/crime story which he wrote and co-starred with George Clooney. The film did fairly well theatrically.
Since then, Tarantino has helmed several critically and financially successful films, including Jackie Brown (1997), Kill Bill: Vol. 1 (2003), Kill Bill: Vol. 2 (2004), Inglourious Basterds (2009), Django Unchained (2012) and The Hateful Eight (2015).- Writer
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Best known for his cerebral, often nonlinear, storytelling, acclaimed Academy Award winner writer/director/producer Sir Christopher Nolan CBE was born in London, England. Over the course of more than 25 years of filmmaking, Nolan has gone from low-budget independent films to working on some of the biggest blockbusters ever made and became one of the most celebrated filmmakers of modern cinema.
At 7 years old, Nolan began making short films with his father's Super-8 camera. While studying English Literature at University College London, he shot 16-millimeter films at U.C.L.'s film society, where he learned the guerrilla techniques he would later use to make his first feature, Following (1998), on a budget of around $6,000. The noir thriller was recognized at a number of international film festivals prior to its theatrical release and gained Nolan enough credibility that he was able to gather substantial financing for his next film.
Nolan's second film was Memento (2000), which he directed from his own screenplay based on a short story by his brother Jonathan Nolan. Starring Guy Pearce, the film brought Nolan numerous honors, including Academy Award and Golden Globe Award nominations for Best Original Screenplay. Nolan went on to direct the critically acclaimed psychological thriller, Insomnia (2002), starring Al Pacino, Robin Williams and Hilary Swank.
The turning point in Nolan's career occurred when he was awarded the chance to revive the Batman franchise in 2005. In Batman Begins (2005), Nolan brought a level of gravitas back to the iconic hero, and his gritty, modern interpretation was greeted with praise from fans and critics alike. Before moving on to a Batman sequel, Nolan directed, co-wrote, and produced the mystery thriller The Prestige (2006), starring Christian Bale and Hugh Jackman as magicians whose obsessive rivalry leads to tragedy and murder.
In 2008, Nolan directed, co-wrote, and produced The Dark Knight (2008). Co-written with by his brother Jonathan, the film went on to gross more than a billion dollars at the worldwide box office. Nolan was nominated for a Directors Guild of America (D.G.A.) Award, Writers Guild of America (W.G.A.) Award and Producers Guild of America (P.G.A.) Award, and the film also received eight Academy Award nominations. The film is widely considered one of the best comic book adaptations of all times, with Heath Ledger's performance as the Joker receiving an extremely high acclaim. Ledger posthumously became the first Academy Award winning performance in a Nolan film.
In 2010, Nolan captivated audiences with the Sci-Fi thriller Inception (2010), starring Leonardo DiCaprio in the lead role, which he directed and produced from his own original screenplay that he worked on for almost a decade. The thought-provoking drama was a worldwide blockbuster, earning more than $800,000,000 and becoming one of the most discussed and debated films of the year, and of all times. Among its many honors, Inception received four Academy Awards and eight nominations, including Best Picture and Best Screenplay. Nolan was recognized by his peers with a W.G.A. Award accolade, as well as D.G.A. and P.G.A. Awards nominations for his work on the film.
As one of the best-reviewed and highest-grossing movies of 2012, The Dark Knight Rises (2012) concluded Nolan's Batman trilogy. Due to his success rebooting the Batman character, Warner Bros. enlisted Nolan to produce their revamped Superman movie Man of Steel (2013), which opened in the summer of 2013. In 2014, Nolan directed, wrote, and produced the Science-Fiction epic Interstellar (2014), starring Matthew McConaughey, Anne Hathaway and Jessica Chastain. Paramount Pictures and Warner Bros. released the film on November 5, 2014, to positive reviews and strong box-office results, grossing over $670 million dollars worldwide.
In July 2017, Nolan released his acclaimed War epic Dunkirk (2017), that earned him his first Best Director nomination at the Academy Awards, as well as winning an additional 3 Oscars. In 2020 he released his mind-bending Sci-Fi espionage thriller Tenet (2020) starring John David Washington in the lead role. Released during the COVID-19 pandemic, the movie grossed relatively less than Nolan's previous blockbusters, though it did do good numbers compared to other movies in that period of time. Hailed as Nolan's most complex film yet, the film was one of Nolan's less-acclaimed films at the time, yet slowly built a fan-base following in later years.
In July 2023, Nolan released his highly acclaimed biographic drama Oppenheimer (2023) starring Nolan's frequent collaborator Cillian Murphy- in the lead role for the first time in a Nolan film. The movie was a cultural phenomenon that on top of grossing almost 1 billion dollars at the Worldwide Box office, also swept the 2023/2024 award-season and gave Nolan his first Oscars, BAFTAs, Golden Globes, D.G.A. and P.G.A. Awards, as well as a handful of regional critics-circles awards and a W.G.A. nomination. Cillian's performance as quantum physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer was highly acclaimed as well, and became the first lead performance in a Nolan film to win the Academy Award.
During 2023, Nolan also received a fellowship from the British Film Institute (BFI). In March 2024, it was announced that Nolan is to be knighted by King Charles III and from now on will go by the title 'Sir Christopher Nolan'.
Nolan resides in Los Angeles, California with his wife, Academy Award winner producer Dame Emma Thomas, and their children. Sir Nolan and Dame Thomas also have their own production company, Syncopy.- 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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Denis Villeneuve is a French Canadian film director and writer. He was born in 1967, in Trois-Rivières, Québec, Canada. He started his career as a filmmaker at the National Film Board of Canada. He is best known for his feature films Arrival (2016), Sicario (2015), Prisoners (2013), Enemy (2013), and Incendies (2010). He is married to Tanya Lapointe.- 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.- 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.- Animation Department
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Hayao Miyazaki is one of Japan's greatest animation directors. The entertaining plots, compelling characters, and breathtaking visuals in his films have earned him international renown from critics as well as public recognition within Japan.
Miyazaki started his career in 1963 as an animator at the studio Toei Douga studio, and was subsequently involved in many early classics of Japanese animation. From the beginning, he commanded attention with his incredible drawing ability and the seemingly endless stream of movie ideas he proposed.
In 1971, he moved to the A Pro studio with Isao Takahata. In 1973, he moved to Nippon Animation, where he was heavily involved in the World Masterpiece Theater TV animation series for the next 5 years. In 1978, he directed his first TV series, Future Boy Conan (1978). Then, he moved to Tokyo Movie Shinsha in 1979 to direct his first movie, the classic Lupin III: The Castle of Cagliostro (1979). In 1984, he released Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind (1984), which was based on the manga of the same title he had started 2 years before. The success of the film led to the establishment of a new animation studio, Studio Ghibli. Since then, he has since directed, written, and produced many other films with Takahata. More recently, he has produced with Toshio Suzuki. All enjoyed critical and box office success, in particular Princess Mononoke (1997). It received the Japanese equivalent of the Academy Award for Best Film and was the highest-grossing (about USD $150 million) domestic film in Japan's history at the time of its release.
In addition to animation, he also draws manga. His major work was Nausicaä, an epic tale he worked on intermittently from 1982 to 1984 while he was busy making animated films. Another manga Hikotei Jidai, later evolved into Porco Rosso (1992).- 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.- Writer
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Martin McDonagh was born on 26 March 1970 in Camberwell, London, England, UK. He is a writer and director, known for In Bruges (2008), Seven Psychopaths (2012) and Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri (2017).- 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.- Producer
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As a director, screenwriter, and producer, four-time Academy Award nominee Michael Mann has established himself as one of the most innovative and influential filmmakers in American cinema. After writing and directing the Primetime Emmy Award-winning television movie The Jericho Mile (1979), Mann made his feature-film directorial debut with Thief (1981), followed by executive producing the television series Miami Vice (1984). He went on to direct Manhunter (1986), The Last of the Mohicans (1992), Heat (1995), and The Insider (1999), Ali (2001), Collateral (2004), a film adaptation of Miami Vice (2006), Public Enemies (2009), and Blackhat (2015).
As a producer, Mann's work includes Martin Scorsese's The Aviator (2004), Hancock (2008), Texas Killing Fields (2011), and the HBO series Luck (2011) and Witness (2012). He has been a member of the Directors Guild of America since 1977 and has served on the DGA's National Board.- Producer
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Described by film producer Michael Deeley as "the very best eye in the business", director Ridley Scott was born on November 30, 1937 in South Shields, Tyne and Wear. His father was an officer in the Royal Engineers and the family followed him as his career posted him throughout the United Kingdom and Europe before they eventually returned to Teesside. Scott wanted to join the British Army (his elder brother Frank had already joined the Merchant Navy) but his father encouraged him to develop his artistic talents instead and so he went to West Hartlepool College of Art and then London's Royal College of Art where he helped found the film department.
In 1962, he joined the BBC as a trainee set designer working on several high profile series. He attended a trainee director's course while he was there and his first directing job was on an episode of the popular BBC police series Z Cars (1962), Error of Judgement (1965). More TV work followed until, frustrated by the poor financial rewards at the BBC, he went into advertising. With his younger brother, Tony Scott, he formed the advertising production company RSA (Ridley Scott Associates) in 1967 and spent the next 10 years making some of the best known and best loved TV adverts ever shown on British television, including a series of ads for Hovis bread set to the music of Dvorak's New World Symphony which are still talked about today ("'e were a great baker were our dad.")
He began working with producer David Puttnam in the 1970s developing ideas for feature films. Their first joint endeavor, The Duellists (1977) won the Jury Prize for Best First Work at Cannes in 1977 and was nominated for the Palm d'Or, more than successfully launching Scott's feature film career. The success of Star Wars: Episode IV - A New Hope (1977) inspired Scott's interest in making science fiction and he accepted the offer to direct Dan O'Bannon's low budget science fiction horror movie Alien (1979), a critical and commercial success that firmly established his worldwide reputation as a movie director.
Blade Runner (1982) followed in 1982 to, at best, a lukewarm reception from public and critics but in the years that followed, its reputation grew - and Scott's with it - as one of the most important sci-fi movies ever made. Scott's next major project was back in the advertising world where he created another of the most talked-about advertising spots in broadcast history when his "1984"-inspired ad for the new Apple Macintosh computer was aired during the Super Bowl on January 22, 1984. Scott's movie career has seen a few flops (notably Legend (1985) and 1492: Conquest of Paradise (1992)), but with successes like Thelma & Louise (1991), Gladiator (2000) and Black Hawk Down (2001) to offset them, his reputation remains solidly intact.
Ridley Scott was awarded Knight Bachelor of the Order of the British Empire at the 2003 Queen's New Year Honours for his "substantial contribution to the British film industry". On July 3, 2015, he was awarded an honorary doctorate by the Royal College of Art in a ceremony at the Royal Albert Hall in London. He was awarded the BAFTA Fellowship in 2018. BAFTA described him as "a visionary director, one of the great British film-makers whose work has made an indelible mark on the history of cinema. Forty years since his directorial debut, his films continue to cross the boundaries of style and genre, engaging audiences and inspiring the next generation of film talent."- Producer
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Samuel Alexander Mendes was born on August 1, 1965 in Reading, England, UK to parents James Peter Mendes, a retired university lecturer, and Valerie Helene Mendes, an author who writes children's books. Their marriage didn't last long, James divorced Sam's mother in 1970 when Sam was just 5-years-old. Sam was educated at Cambridge University and joined the Chichester Festival Theatre following his graduation in 1987. Afterwards, he directed Judi Dench in "The Cherry Orchard", for which he won a Critics Circle Award for Best Newcomer. He then joined the Royal Shakespeare Company, where he directed such productions as "Troilus and Cressida" with Ralph Fiennes and "Richard III". In 1992, he became artistic director of the reopened Donmar Warehouse in London, where he directed such productions as "The Glass Menagerie" and the revival of the musical "Cabaret", which earned four Tony Awards including one for Best Revival of a Musical. He also directed "The Blue Room" starring Nicole Kidman. In 1999, he got the chance to direct his first feature film, American Beauty (1999). The movie earned 5 Academy Awards including Best Picture and Best Director for Mendes, which is a rare feat for a first-time film director.- 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
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John McTiernan was born on 8 January 1951 in Albany, New York, USA. He is a director and producer, known for Die Hard (1988), Rollerball (2002) and Last Action Hero (1993). He has been married to Gail Sistrunk since 2012. He was previously married to Kate Harrington, Donna Dubrow and Carol Land.- Producer
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Joel Daniel Coen is an American filmmaker who regularly collaborates with his younger brother Ethan. They made Raising Arizona, Barton Fink, Fargo, The Big Lebowski, True Grit, O Brother Where Art Thou?, Burn After Reading, A Serious Man, Inside Llewyn Davis, Hail Caesar and other projects. Joel married actress Frances McDormand in 1984 and had an adopted son.- Director
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Jonathan Demme was born on 22 February 1944 in Baldwin, Long Island, New York, USA. He was a director and producer, known for The Silence of the Lambs (1991), Rachel Getting Married (2008) and Philadelphia (1993). He was married to Joanne Howard and Evelyn Purcell. He died on 26 April 2017 in Manhattan, New York City, New York, USA.- Producer
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David Fincher was born in 1962 in Denver, Colorado, and was raised in Marin County, California. When he was 18 years old he went to work for John Korty at Korty Films in Mill Valley. He subsequently worked at ILM (Industrial Light and Magic) from 1981-1983. Fincher left ILM to direct TV commercials and music videos after signing with N. Lee Lacy in Hollywood. He went on to found Propaganda in 1987 with fellow directors Dominic Sena, Greg Gold and Nigel Dick. Fincher has directed TV commercials for clients that include Nike, Coca-Cola, Budweiser, Heineken, Pepsi, Levi's, Converse, AT&T and Chanel. He has directed music videos for Madonna, Sting, The Rolling Stones, Michael Jackson, Aerosmith, George Michael, Iggy Pop, The Wallflowers, Billy Idol, Steve Winwood, The Motels and, most recently, A Perfect Circle.
As a film director, he has achieved huge success with Se7en (1995), Fight Club (1999) and, Panic Room (2002).- Director
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Anderson was born in 1970. He was one of the first of the "video store" generation of film-makers. His father was the first man on his block to own a V.C.R., and from a very early age Anderson had an infinite number of titles available to him. While film-makers like Spielberg cut their teeth making 8 mm films, Anderson cut his teeth shooting films on video and editing them from V.C.R. to V.C.R.
Part of Anderson's artistic D.N.A. comes from his father, who hosted a late night horror show in Cleveland. His father knew a number of oddball celebrities such as Robert Ridgely, an actor who often appeared in Mel Brooks' films and would later play "The Colonel" in Anderson's Boogie Nights (1997). Anderson was also very much shaped by growing up in "The Valley", specifically the suburban San Fernando Valley of greater Los Angeles. The Valley may have been immortalized in the 1980s for its mall-hopping "Valley Girls", but for Anderson it was a slightly seedy part of suburban America. You were close to Hollywood, yet you weren't there. Would-bes and burn-outs populated the area. Anderson's experiences growing up in "The Valley" have no doubt shaped his artistic self, especially since three of his four theatrical features are set in the Valley.
Anderson got into film-making at a young age. His most significant amateur film was The Dirk Diggler Story (1988), a sort of mock-documentary a la This Is Spinal Tap (1984), about a once-great pornography star named Dirk Diggler. After enrolling in N.Y.U.'s film program for two days, Anderson got his tuition back and made his own short film, Cigarettes & Coffee (1993). He also worked as a production assistant on numerous commercials and music videos before he got the chance to make his first feature, something he liked to call Sydney, but would later become known to the public as Hard Eight (1996). The film was developed and financed through The Sundance Lab, not unlike Quentin Tarantino's Reservoir Dogs (1992). Anderson cast three actors whom he would continue working with in the future: Altman veteran Philip Baker Hall, the husky and lovable John C. Reilly and, in a small part, Philip Seymour Hoffman, who so far has been featured in all four of Anderson's films. The film deals with a guardian angel type (played by Hall) who takes down-on-his-luck Reilly under his wing. The deliberately paced film featured a number of Anderson trademarks: wonderful use of source light, long takes and top-notch acting. Yet the film was reedited (and retitled) by Rysher Entertainment against Anderson's wishes. It was admired by critics, but didn't catch on at the box office. Still, it was enough for Anderson to eventually get his next movie financed. "Boogie Nights" was, in a sense, a remake of "The Dirk Diggler Story", but Anderson threw away the satirical approach and instead painted a broad canvas about a makeshift family of pornographers. The film was often joyous in its look at the 1970s and the days when pornography was still shot on film, still shown in theatres, and its actors could at least delude themselves into believing that they were movie stars. Yet "Boogie Nights" did not flinch at the dark side, showing a murder and suicide, literally in one (almost) uninterrupted shot, and also showing the lives of these people deteriorate, while also showing how their lives recovered.
Anderson not only worked with Hall, Reilly and Hoffman again, he also worked with Julianne Moore, Melora Walters, William H. Macy and Luis Guzmán. Collectively, Anderson had something that was rare in U.S. cinema: a stock company of top-notch actors. Aside from the above mentioned, Anderson also drew terrific performances from Burt Reynolds and Mark Wahlberg, two actors whose careers were not exactly going full-blast at the time of "Boogie Nights", but who found themselves to be that much more employable afterwards.
The success of "Boogie Nights" gave Anderson the chance to really go for broke in Magnolia (1999), a massive mosaic that could dwarf Altman's Nashville (1975) in its number of characters.
Anderson was awarded a "Best Director" award at Cannes for Punch-Drunk Love (2002).- Director
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Sidney Lumet was a master of cinema, best known for his technical knowledge and his skill at getting first-rate performances from his actors -- and for shooting most of his films in his beloved New York. He made over 40 movies, often complex and emotional, but seldom overly sentimental. Although his politics were somewhat left-leaning and he often treated socially relevant themes in his films, Lumet didn't want to make political movies in the first place. Born on June 25, 1924, in Philadelphia, the son of actor Baruch Lumet and dancer Eugenia Wermus Lumet, he made his stage debut at age four at the Yiddish Art Theater in New York. He played many roles on Broadway in the 1930s and also in the film ...One Third of a Nation... (1939). After starting an off-Broadway acting troupe in the late 1940s, he became the director of many television shows in the 1950s. Lumet made his feature film directing debut with 12 Angry Men (1957), which won the Golden Bear at the Berlin Film Festival and earned three Academy Award nominations. The courtroom drama, which takes place almost entirely in a jury room, is justly regarded as one of the most auspicious directorial debuts in film history. Lumet got the chance to direct Marlon Brando in The Fugitive Kind (1960), an imperfect, but powerful adaptation of Tennessee Williams' "Orpheus Descending". The first half of the 1960s was one of Lumet's most artistically successful periods. Long Day's Journey Into Night (1962), a masterful, brilliantly photographed adaptation of the Eugene O'Neill play, is one of several Lumet films about families. It earned Katharine Hepburn, Ralph Richardson, Dean Stockwell and Jason Robards deserved acting awards in Cannes and Hepburn an Oscar nomination. The alarming Cold War thriller Fail Safe (1964) unfairly suffered from comparison to Stanley Kubrick's equally great satire Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1964), which was released shortly before. The Pawnbroker (1964), arguably the most outstanding of the great movies Lumet made in this phase, tells the story of a Holocaust survivor who lives in New York and can't overcome his experiences in the Nazi concentration camps. Rod Steiger's unforgettable performance in the title role earned an Academy Award nomination. Lumet's intense character study The Hill (1965) about inhumanity in a military prison camp was the first of five films he did with Sean Connery. After the overly talky but rewarding drama The Group (1966) about young upper-class women in the 1930s, and the stylish spy thriller The Deadly Affair (1967), the late 1960s turned out to be a lesser phase in Lumet's career. He had a strong comeback with the box-office hit The Anderson Tapes (1971). The Offence (1973) was commercially less successful, but artistically brilliant - with Connery in one of his most impressive performances. The terrific cop thriller Serpico (1973), the first of his films about police corruption in New York City, became one of his biggest critical and financial successes. Al Pacino's fascinating portrayal of the real-life cop Frank Serpico earned a Golden Globe and the movie earned two Academy Award nominations (it is worth noting that Lumet's feature films of the 1970s alone earned 30 Oscar nominations, winning six times). The love triangle Lovin' Molly (1974) was not always convincing in its atmospheric details, but Lumet's fine sense of emotional truth and a good Blythe Danner keep it interesting. The adaptation of Agatha Christie's Murder on the Orient Express (1974), an exquisitely photographed murder mystery with an all-star cast, was a big success again. Lumet's complex crime thriller Dog Day Afternoon (1975), which Pauline Kael called "one of the best "New York" movies ever made", gave Al Pacino the opportunity for a breathtaking, three-dimensional portrayal of a bisexual man who tries to rob a bank to finance his lover's sex-change operation. Lumet's next masterpiece, Network (1976), was a prophetic satire on media and society. The film version of Peter Shaffer's stage play Equus (1977) about a doctor and his mentally confused patient was also powerful, not least because of the energetic acting by Richard Burton and Peter Firth. After the enjoyable musical The Wiz (1978) and the interesting but not easily accessible comedy Just Tell Me What You Want (1980), Sidney Lumet won the New York Film Critics Circle Award for his outstanding direction of Prince of the City (1981), one of his best and most typical films. It's about police corruption, but hardly a remake of Serpico (1973). Starring a powerful Treat Williams, it's an extraordinarily multi-layered film. In his highly informative book "Making Movies" (1995), Lumet describes the film in the following way: "When we try to control everything, everything winds up controlling us. Nothing is what it seems." It's also a movie about values, friendship and drug addiction and, like "Serpico", is based on a true story. In Deathtrap (1982), Lumet successfully blended suspense and black humor. The Verdict (1982) was voted the fourth greatest courtroom drama of all time by the American Film Institute in 2008. A few minor inaccuracies in legal details do not mar this study of an alcoholic lawyer (superbly embodied by Paul Newman) aiming to regain his self-respect through a malpractice case. The expertly directed movie received five Academy Award nominations. Lumet's controversial drama Daniel (1983) with Timothy Hutton, an adaptation of E.L. Doctorow's "The Book of Daniel" about two young people whose parents were executed during the McCarthy Red Scare hysteria in the 1950s for alleged espionage, is one of his underrated achievements. His later masterpiece Running on Empty (1988) has a similar theme, portraying a family which has been on the run from the FBI since the parents (played by Christine Lahti and Judd Hirsch) committed a bomb attack on a napalm laboratory in 1971 to protest the war in Vietnam. The son (played by River Phoenix in an extraordinarily moving, Oscar-nominated performance) falls in love with a girl and wishes to stay with her and study music. Naomi Foner's screenplay won the Golden Globe. Other Lumet movies of the 1980s are the melancholic comedy drama Garbo Talks (1984); the occasionally clichéd Power (1986) about election campaigns; the all too slow thriller The Morning After (1986) and the amusing gangster comedy Family Business (1989). With Q&A (1990) Lumet returned to the genre of the New York cop thriller. Nick Nolte shines in the role of a corrupt and racist detective in this multi-layered, strangely underrated film. Sadly, with the exception of Night Falls on Manhattan (1996), an imperfect but fascinating crime drama in the tradition of his own previous genre works, almost none of Lumet's works of the 1990s did quite get the attention they deserved. The crime drama A Stranger Among Us (1992) blended genres in a way that did not seem to match most viewers' expectations, but its contemplations about life arouse interest. The intelligent hospital satire Critical Care (1997) was unfairly neglected as well. The courtroom thriller Guilty as Sin (1993) was cold but intriguing. Lumet's Gloria (1999) remake seemed unnecessary, but he returned impressively with the underestimated courtroom comedy Find Me Guilty (2006) and the justly acclaimed crime thriller Before the Devil Knows You're Dead (2007). In 2005, Sidney Lumet received a well-deserved honorary Academy Award for his outstanding contribution to filmmaking. Sidney Lumet tragically died of cancer in 2011.- Writer
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James Francis Cameron was born on August 16, 1954 in Kapuskasing, Ontario, Canada. He moved to the United States in 1971. The son of an engineer, he majored in physics at California State University before switching to English, and eventually dropping out. He then drove a truck to support his screenwriting ambition. He landed his first professional film job as art director, miniature-set builder, and process-projection supervisor on Roger Corman's Battle Beyond the Stars (1980) and had his first experience as a director with a two week stint on Piranha II: The Spawning (1982) before being fired.
He then wrote and directed The Terminator (1984), a futuristic action-thriller starring Arnold Schwarzenegger, Michael Biehn and Linda Hamilton. It was a low budget independent film, but Cameron's superb, dynamic direction made it a surprise mainstream success and it is now regarded as one of the most iconic pictures of the 1980s. After this came a string of successful, bigger budget science-fiction action films such as Aliens (1986), The Abyss (1989) and Terminator 2: Judgment Day (1991). In 1990, Cameron formed his own production company, Lightstorm Entertainment. In 1997, he wrote and directed Titanic (1997), a romance epic about two young lovers from different social classes who meet on board the famous ship. The movie went on to break all box office records and earned eleven Academy Awards. It became the highest grossing movie of all time until 12 years later, Avatar (2009), which invented and pioneered 3D film technology, and it went on to beat "Titanic", and became the first film to cost two billion dollars until 2019 when Marvel took the record.
James Cameron is now one of the most sought-after directors in Hollywood. He was formerly married to producer Gale Anne Hurd, who produced several of his films. In 2000, he married actress Suzy Amis, who appeared in Titanic, and they have three children.- Actor
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His father, Richard Head Welles, was a well-to-do inventor, his mother, Beatrice (Ives) Welles, a beautiful concert pianist; Orson Welles was gifted in many arts (magic, piano, painting) as a child. When his mother died in 1924 (when he was nine) he traveled the world with his father. He was orphaned at 15 after his father's death in 1930 and became the ward of Dr. Maurice Bernstein of Chicago. In 1931, he graduated from the Todd School in Woodstock, Illinois. He turned down college offers for a sketching tour of Ireland. He tried unsuccessfully to enter the London and Broadway stages, traveling some more in Morocco and Spain, where he fought in the bullring.
Recommendations by Thornton Wilder and Alexander Woollcott got him into Katharine Cornell's road company, with which he made his New York debut as Tybalt in 1934. The same year, he married, directed his first short, and appeared on radio for the first time. He began working with John Houseman and formed the Mercury Theatre with him in 1937. In 1938, they produced "The Mercury Theatre on the Air", famous for its broadcast version of "The War of the Worlds" (intended as a Halloween prank). His first film to be seen by the public was Citizen Kane (1941), a commercial failure losing RKO $150,000, but regarded by many as the best film ever made. Many of his subsequent films were commercial failures and he exiled himself to Europe in 1948.
In 1956, he directed Touch of Evil (1958); it failed in the United States but won a prize at the 1958 Brussels World's Fair. In 1975, in spite of all his box-office failures, he received the American Film Institute's Lifetime Achievement Award, and in 1984, the Directors Guild of America awarded him its highest honor, the D.W. Griffith Award. His reputation as a filmmaker steadily climbed thereafter.- Producer
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Self-taught writer-director Richard Stuart Linklater was born in Houston, Texas, to Diane Margaret (Krieger), who taught at a university, and Charles W. Linklater III. Richard was among the first and most successful talents to emerge during the American independent film renaissance of the 1990s. Typically setting each of his movies during one 24-hour period, Linklater's work explored what he dubbed "the youth rebellion continuum," focusing in fine detail on generational rites and mores with rare compassion and understanding while definitively capturing the 20-something culture of his era through a series of nuanced, illuminating ensemble pieces which introduced any number of talented young actors into the Hollywood firmament. Born in Houston, Texas, Linklater suspended his educational career at Sam Houston State University in 1982, to work on an offshore oil rig in the Gulf of Mexico. He subsequently relocated to the state's capital of Austin, where he founded a film society and began work on his debut film, 1987's It's Impossible to Learn to Plow by Reading Books (1988). Three years later he released the sprawling Slacker (1990), an insightful, virtually plotless look at 1990s youth culture that became a favorite on the festival circuit prior to earning vast acclaim at Sundance in 1991. Upon its commercial release, the movie, made for less than $23,000, became the subject of considerable mainstream media attention, with the term "slacker" becoming a much-overused catch-all tag employed to affix a name and identity to America's disaffected youth culture.- 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.- Producer
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A whiz-kid with special effects, Robert is from the Spielberg camp of film-making (Steven Spielberg produced many of his films). Usually working with writing partner Bob Gale, Robert's earlier films show he has a talent for zany comedy (Romancing the Stone (1984), 1941 (1979)) and special effect vehicles (Who Framed Roger Rabbit (1988) and Back to the Future (1985)). His later films have become more serious, with the hugely successful Tom Hanks vehicle Forrest Gump (1994) and the Jodie Foster film Contact (1997), both critically acclaimed movies. Again, these films incorporate stunning effects. Robert has proved he can work a serious story around great effects.- Music Department
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John Howard Carpenter was born in Carthage, New York, to mother Milton Jean (Carter) and father Howard Ralph Carpenter. His family moved to Bowling Green, Kentucky, where his father, a professor, was head of the music department at Western Kentucky University. He attended Western Kentucky University and then USC film school in Los Angeles. He began making short films in 1962, and won an Academy Award for Best Live-Action Short Subject in 1970, for The Resurrection of Broncho Billy (1970), which he made while at USC. Carpenter formed a band in the mid-1970s called The Coupe de Villes, which included future directors Tommy Lee Wallace and Nick Castle. Since the 1970s, he has had numerous roles in the film industry including writer, actor, composer, producer, and director. After directing Dark Star (1974), he has helmed both classic horror films like Halloween (1978), The Fog (1980), and The Thing (1982), and noted sci-fi tales like Escape from New York (1981) and Starman (1984).- Producer
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One of the most influential personalities in the history of cinema, Steven Spielberg is Hollywood's best known director and one of the wealthiest filmmakers in the world. He has an extraordinary number of commercially successful and critically acclaimed credits to his name, either as a director, producer or writer since launching the summer blockbuster with Jaws (1975), and he has done more to define popular film-making since the mid-1970s than anyone else.
Steven Allan Spielberg was born in 1946 in Cincinnati, Ohio, to Leah Frances (Posner), a concert pianist and restaurateur, and Arnold Spielberg, an electrical engineer who worked in computer development. His parents were both born to Russian Jewish immigrant families. Steven spent his younger years in Haddon Township, New Jersey, Phoenix, Arizona, and later Saratoga, California. He went to California State University Long Beach, but dropped out to pursue his entertainment career. Among his early directing efforts were Battle Squad (1961), which combined World War II footage with footage of an airplane on the ground that he makes you believe is moving. He also directed Escape to Nowhere (1961), which featured children as World War Two soldiers, including his sister Anne Spielberg, and The Last Gun (1959), a western. All of these were short films. The next couple of years, Spielberg directed a couple of movies that would portend his future career in movies. In 1964, he directed Firelight (1964), a movie about aliens invading a small town. In 1967, he directed Slipstream (1967), which was unfinished. However, in 1968, he directed Amblin' (1968), which featured the desert prominently, and not the first of his movies in which the desert would feature. Amblin' also became the name of his production company, which turned out such classics as E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial (1982). Spielberg had a unique and classic early directing project, Duel (1971), with Dennis Weaver. In the early 1970s, Spielberg was working on TV, directing among others such series as Rod Serling's Night Gallery (1969), Marcus Welby, M.D. (1969) and Murder by the Book (1971). All of his work in television and short films, as well as his directing projects, were just a hint of the wellspring of talent that would dazzle audiences all over the world.
Spielberg's first major directorial effort was The Sugarland Express (1974), with Goldie Hawn, a film that marked him as a rising star. It was his next effort, however, that made him an international superstar among directors: Jaws (1975). This classic shark attack tale started the tradition of the summer blockbuster or, at least, he was credited with starting the tradition. His next film was the classic Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977), a unique and original UFO story that remains a classic. In 1978, Spielberg produced his first film, the forgettable I Wanna Hold Your Hand (1978), and followed that effort with Used Cars (1980), a critically acclaimed, but mostly forgotten, Kurt Russell/Jack Warden comedy about devious used-car dealers. Spielberg hit gold yet one more time with Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981), with Harrison Ford taking the part of Indiana Jones. Spielberg produced and directed two films in 1982. The first was Poltergeist (1982), but the highest-grossing movie of all time up to that point was the alien story E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial (1982). Spielberg also helped pioneer the practice of product placement. The concept, while not uncommon, was still relatively low-key when Spielberg raised the practice to almost an art form with his famous (or infamous) placement of Reese's Pieces in "E.T." Spielberg was also one of the pioneers of the big-grossing special-effects movies, like "E.T." and "Close Encounters", where a very strong emphasis on special effects was placed for the first time on such a huge scale. In 1984, Spielberg followed up "Raiders" with Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom (1984), which was a commercial success but did not receive the critical acclaim of its predecessor. As a producer, Spielberg took on many projects in the 1980s, such as The Goonies (1985), and was the brains behind the little monsters in Gremlins (1984). He also produced the cartoon An American Tail (1986), a quaint little animated classic. His biggest effort as producer in 1985, however, was the blockbuster Back to the Future (1985), which made Michael J. Fox an instant superstar. As director, Spielberg took on the book The Color Purple (1985), with Whoopi Goldberg and Oprah Winfrey, with great success. In the latter half of the 1980s, he also directed Empire of the Sun (1987), a mixed success for the occasionally erratic Spielberg. Success would not escape him for long, though.
The late 1980s found Spielberg's projects at the center of pop-culture yet again. In 1988, he produced the landmark animation/live-action film Who Framed Roger Rabbit (1988). The next year proved to be another big one for Spielberg, as he produced and directed Always (1989) as well as Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade (1989), and Back to the Future Part II (1989). All three of the films were box-office and critical successes. Also, in 1989, he produced the little known comedy-drama Dad (1989), with Jack Lemmon and Ted Danson, which got mostly mixed results. Spielberg has also had an affinity for animation and has been a strong voice in animation in the 1990s. Aside from producing the landmark "Who Framed Roger Rabbit", he produced the animated series Tiny Toon Adventures (1990), Animaniacs (1993), Pinky and the Brain (1995), Freakazoid! (1995), Pinky, Elmyra & the Brain (1998), Family Dog (1993) and Toonsylvania (1998). Spielberg also produced other cartoons such as The Land Before Time (1988), We're Back! A Dinosaur's Story (1993), Casper (1995) (the live action version) as well as the live-action version of The Flintstones (1994), where he was credited as "Steven Spielrock". Spielberg also produced many Roger Rabbit short cartoons, and many Pinky and the Brain, Animaniacs and Tiny Toons specials. Spielberg was very active in the early 1990s, as he directed Hook (1991) and produced such films as the cute fantasy Joe Versus the Volcano (1990) and An American Tail: Fievel Goes West (1991). He also produced the unusual comedy thriller Arachnophobia (1990), Back to the Future Part III (1990) and Gremlins 2: The New Batch (1990). While these movies were big successes in their own right, they did not quite bring in the kind of box office or critical acclaim as previous efforts. In 1993, Spielberg directed Jurassic Park (1993), which for a short time held the record as the highest grossing movie of all time, but did not have the universal appeal of his previous efforts. Big box-office spectacles were not his only concern, though. He produced and directed Schindler's List (1993), a stirring film about the Holocaust. He won best director at the Oscars, and also got Best Picture. In the mid-90s, he helped found the production company DreamWorks, which was responsible for many box-office successes.
As a producer, he was very active in the late 90s, responsible for such films as The Mask of Zorro (1998), Men in Black (1997) and Deep Impact (1998). However, it was on the directing front that Spielberg was in top form. He directed and produced the epic Amistad (1997), a spectacular film that was shorted at the Oscars and in release due to the fact that its release date was moved around so much in late 1997. The next year, however, produced what many believe was one of the best films of his career: Saving Private Ryan (1998), a film about World War Two that is spectacular in almost every respect. It was stiffed at the Oscars, losing best picture to Shakespeare in Love (1998).
Spielberg produced a series of films, including Evolution (2001), The Haunting (1999) and Shrek (2001). he also produced two sequels to Jurassic Park (1993), which were financially but not particularly critical successes. In 2001, he produced a mini-series about World War Two that definitely *was* a financial and critical success: Band of Brothers (2001), a tale of an infantry company from its parachuting into France during the invasion to the Battle of the Bulge. Also in that year, Spielberg was back in the director's chair for A.I. Artificial Intelligence (2001), a movie with a message and a huge budget. It did reasonably at the box office and garnered varied reviews from critics.
Spielberg has been extremely active in films there are many other things he has done as well. He produced the short-lived TV series SeaQuest 2032 (1993), an anthology series entitled Amazing Stories (1985), created the video-game series "Medal of Honor" set during World War Two, and was a starting producer of ER (1994). Spielberg, if you haven't noticed, has a great interest in World War Two. He and Tom Hanks collaborated on Shooting War: World War II Combat Cameramen (2000), a documentary about World War II combat photographers, and he produced a documentary about the Holocaust called Eyes of the Holocaust (2000). With all of this to Spielberg's credit, it's no wonder that he's looked at as one of the greatest ever figures in entertainment.- Producer
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Stanley Kramer was born on 29 September 1913 in Hell's Kitchen [now Clinton], Manhattan, New York City, New York, USA. He was a producer and director, known for Judgment at Nuremberg (1961), Guess Who's Coming to Dinner (1967) and Inherit the Wind (1960). He was married to Karen Sharpe, Anne P. Kramer and Marilyn Erskine. He died on 19 February 2001 in Woodland Hills, Los Angeles, California, USA.- 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.- 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.- Producer
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Jared Lawrence Hess and Jerusha Elizabeth Hess (née Demke; born May 12, 1980) are husband-and-wife American filmmakers best known for their work on Napoleon Dynamite (2004), Nacho Libre (2006) and Gentlemen Broncos (2009), all of which they co-wrote and which were directed by Jared (Nacho Libre was co-written with Mike White). They also produced music videos for The Postal Service's third single, "We Will Become Silhouettes", and The Killers' Christmas charity single "Boots".- Director
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Milos Forman was born Jan Tomas Forman in Caslav, Czechoslovakia, to Anna (Svabova), who ran a summer hotel, and Rudolf Forman, a professor. During World War II, his parents were taken away by the Nazis, after being accused of participating in the underground resistance. His father died in Mittelbau-Dora, a sub camp of Buchenwald, and his mother died in Auschwitz, at which Milos became an orphan very early on. He studied screen-writing at the Prague Film Academy (F.A.M.U.). In his Czechoslovakian films, Black Peter (1964), Loves of a Blonde (1965), and The Firemen's Ball (1967), he created his own style of comedy. During the invasion of his country by the troops of the Warsaw pact in the summer of 1968, to stop the Prague spring, he left Europe for the United States. In spite of difficulties, he filmed Taking Off (1971) there and achieved his fame later with One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (1975) adapted from the novel of Ken Kesey, which won five Oscars, including one for best direction. Other important films of Milos Forman were the musical Hair (1979) and his biography of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Amadeus (1984), which won eight Oscars.- Writer
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The illegitimate son of a Danish farmer and his Swedish housekeeper, Carl Theodor Dreyer was born in Copenhagen on the 3th of February, 1889. He spent his early years in various foster homes before being adopted by the Dreyers at the age of two. Contrary to popular belief (perhaps nourished by the fact that his films often deal with religious themes) Dreyer did not receive a strict Lutheran upbringing, but was raised in a household that embraced modern ideas: in his spare time the adoptive father was an avid photographer, and the Dreyers voted for The Danish Social Democrates. When he was baptized the reasoning was culturally, not religiously motivated. Dreyer's childhood was an unhappy one. He did not feel his adoptive parents' love (especially the mother), and longed for his biological mother, whom he never knew.
After working as a journalist, he entered the film industry, and advanced from reading scripts to directing films himself. In the silent era his output was large, but it quickly diminished with the arrival of the talkie. In his lifetime he was recognized as being a fanatical perfectionist amongst producers, and thus difficult to work with. His career was dogged by problems with the financing of his films, which led to large gaps in his output - and after the critics, too, denounced Vampyr (1932), he returned to journalism in 1932, and became a cinema manager in 1952 - though he still made features up to the mid- 1960s, a few years before his death. His films are typically slow, intense studies of human psychology, usually of people undergoing extreme personal or religious crises. He is now regarded as the greatest director ever to emerge from Denmark.- Writer
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Satoshi Kon was born in 1963. He studied at the Musashino College of the Arts. He began his career as a Manga artist. He then moved to animation and worked as a background artist on many films (including Roujin Z (1991) by 'Katsuhiro Otomo'). Then, in 1995, he wrote an episode of the anthology film Memories (1995) (this Episode was "Magnetic Rose"). In 1997, he directed his first feature film: the excellent Perfect Blue (1997). In 2001, he finished work on his second feature film, Millennium Actress (2001) (aka Millennium Actress).- 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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Brian De Palma is one of the well-known directors who spear-headed the new movement in Hollywood during the 1970s. He is known for his many films that go from violent pictures, to Hitchcock-like thrillers. Born on September 11, 1940, De Palma was born in Newark, New Jersey in an Italian-American family. Originally entering university as a physics student, De Palma became attracted to films after seeing such classics as Citizen Kane (1941). Enrolling in Sarah Lawrence College, he found lasting influences from such varied teachers as Alfred Hitchcock and Andy Warhol.
At first, his films comprised of such black-and-white films as To Bridge This Gap (1969). He then discovered a young actor whose fame would influence Hollywood forever. In 1968, De Palma made the comedic film Greetings (1968) starring Robert De Niro in his first ever credited film role. The two followed up immediately with the films The Wedding Party (1969) and Hi, Mom! (1970).
After making such small-budget thrillers such as Sisters (1972) and Obsession (1976), De Palma was offered the chance to direct a film based on Stephen King's classic novel "Carrie". The story deals with a tormented teenage girl who finds she has the power of telekinesis. The film starred Sissy Spacek, Piper Laurie and John Travolta, and was for De Palma, a chance to try out the split screen technique for which he would later become famous.
Carrie (1976) was a massive success, and earned the two lead females (Laurie and Spacek) Oscar nominations. The film was praised by most critics, and De Palma's reputation was now permanently secured. He followed up this success with the horror film The Fury (1978), the comedic film Home Movies (1979) (both these films featured Kirk Douglas), the crime thriller Dressed to Kill (1980) starring Michael Caine and Angie Dickinson, and another crime thriller entitled Blow Out (1981) starring John Travolta.
His next major success was the controversial, ultra-violent film Scarface (1983). Written by Oliver Stone and starring Al Pacino, the film concerned Cuban immigrant Tony Montana's rise to power in the United States through the drug trade. While being a critical failure, the film was a major success commercially.
Moving on from Scarface (1983), De Palma made two more movies before landing another one of his now-classics: The Untouchables (1987), starring old friend Robert De Niro in the role of Chicago gangster Al Capone. Also starring in the film were Kevin Costner as the man who commits himself to bring Capone down, and Sean Connery, an old policeman who helps Costner's character to form a group known as the Untouchables. The film was one of De Palma's most successful films, earning Connery an Oscar, and gave Ennio Morricone a nomination for Best Score.
After The Untouchables (1987), De Palma made the Vietnam film Casualties of War (1989) starring Michael J. Fox and Sean Penn. The film focuses on a new soldier who is helpless to stop his dominating sergeant from kidnapping a Vietnamese girl with the help of the coerced members of the platoon. The film did reasonably well at the box office, but it was his next film that truly displayed the way he could make a hit and a disaster within a short time. The Bonfire of the Vanities (1990) starred a number of well-known actors such as Bruce Willis and Morgan Freeman, however it was still a commercial flop and earned him two Razzie nominations.
But the roller coaster success that De Palma had gotten so far did not let him down. He made the horror film Raising Cain (1992), and the criminal drama Carlito's Way (1993) starring Al Pacino and Sean Penn. The latter film is about a former criminal just released from prison that is trying to avoid his past and move on. It was in the year 1996 that brought one of his most well-known movies. This was the suspense-filled Mission: Impossible (1996) starring Tom Cruise and Jon Voight.
Following up this film was the interesting but unsuccessful film Snake Eyes (1998) starring Nicolas Cage as a detective who finds himself in the middle of a murder scene at a boxing ring. De Palma continued on with the visually astounding but equally unsuccessful film Mission to Mars (2000) which earned him another Razzie nomination. He met failure again with the crime thriller Femme Fatale (2002), the murder conspiracy The Black Dahlia (2006), and the controversial film Redacted (2007) which deals with individual stories from the war in Iraq.
Brian De Palma may be down for the moment, but if his box office history has taught us anything, it is that he always returns with a major success that is remembered for years and years afterwards.- Writer
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Nancy Jane Meyers is an American filmmaker. She has written, produced, and directed many critically and commercially successful films including Private Benjamin (1980), Irreconcilable Differences (1984), Baby Boom (1987), Father of the Bride (1991), Father of the Bride Part II (1995), The Parent Trap (1998), What Women Want (2000), Something's Gotta Give (2003), The Holiday (2006), It's Complicated (2009), and The Intern (2015).- Writer
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Three-time Oscar nominee Frank Darabont was born in a refugee camp in 1959 in Montbeliard, France, the son of Hungarian parents who had fled Budapest during the failed 1956 Hungarian revolution. Brought to America as an infant, he settled with his family in Los Angeles and attended Hollywood High School. His first job in movies was as a production assistant on the 1981 low-budget film, Hell Night (1981), starring Linda Blair. He spent the next six years working in the art department as a set dresser and in set construction while struggling to establish himself as a writer. His first produced writing credit (shared) was on the 1987 film, A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors (1987), directed by Chuck Russell. Darabont is one of only six filmmakers in history with the unique distinction of having his first two feature films receive nominations for the Best Picture Academy Award: 1994's The Shawshank Redemption (1994) (with a total of seven nominations) and 1999's The Green Mile (1999) (four nominations). Darabont himself collected Oscar nominations for Best Adapted Screenplay for each film (both based on works by Stephen King), as well as nominations for both films from the Director's Guild of America, and a nomination from the Writers Guild of America for The Shawshank Redemption (1994). He won the Humanitas Prize, the PEN Center USA West Award, and the Scriptor Award for his screenplay of "The Shawshank Redemption". For "The Green Mile", he won the Broadcast Film Critics prize for his screenplay adaptation, and two People's Choice Awards in the Best Dramatic Film and Best Picture categories. The Majestic (2001), starring Jim Carrey, was released in December 2001. He executive-produced the thriller, Collateral (2004), for DreamWorks, with Michael Mann directing and Tom Cruise starring. Future produced-by projects include "Way of the Rat" at DreamWorks with Chuck Russell adapting and directing the CrossGen comic book series and "Back Roads", a Tawni O'Dell novel, also at DreamWorks, with Todd Field attached to direct. Darabont and his production company, "Darkwoods Productions", have an overall deal with Paramount Pictures.- Producer
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Bryan Singer is an American film director and producer who got his start writing and co-directing the short film Lions Den with his classmates while he attended USC. He was hired by 20th Century Fox to direct X-Men, which helped kick-start the superhero renaissance. He later directed three sequels. He went to direct Superman Returns, a revival of the Superman film series starring Brandon Routh. He also directed Valkyrie, Bohemian Rhapsody and Jack the Giant Slayer.- Producer
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Darren Aronofsky was born February 12, 1969, in Brooklyn, New York. Growing up, Darren was always artistic: he loved classic movies and, as a teenager, he even spent time doing graffiti art. After high school, Darren went to Harvard University to study film (both live-action and animation). He won several film awards after completing his senior thesis film, "Supermarket Sweep", starring Sean Gullette, which went on to becoming a National Student Academy Award finalist. Aronofsky didn't make a feature film until five years later, in February 1996, where he began creating the concept for Pi (1998). After Darren's script for Pi (1998) received great reactions from friends, he began production. The film re-teamed Aronofsky with Gullette, who played the lead. This went on to further successes, such as Requiem for a Dream (2000), The Wrestler (2008) and Black Swan (2010). Most recently, he completed the films Noah (2014) and Mother! (2017).- Producer
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Born in Puducherry, India, and raised in the posh suburban Penn Valley area of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, M. Night Shyamalan is a film director, screenwriter, producer, and occasional actor, known for making movies with contemporary supernatural plots.
He is the son of Jayalakshmi, a Tamil obstetrician and gynecologist, and Nelliate C. Shyamalan, a Malayali doctor. His passion for filmmaking began when he was given a Super-8 camera at age eight, and even at that young age began to model his career on that of his idol, Steven Spielberg. His first film, Praying with Anger (1992), was based somewhat on his own trip back to visit the India of his birth. He raised all the funds for this project, in addition to directing, producing and starring in it. Wide Awake (1998), his second film, he wrote and directed, and shot it in the Philadelphia-area Catholic school he once attended--even though his family was of a different religion, they sent him to that school because of its strict discipline.
Shyamalan gained international recognition when he wrote and directed 1999's The Sixth Sense (1999), which was a commercial success and later nominated for six Academy Awards, including Best Picture, Best Director and Best Original Screenplay. Shyamalan team up again with Bruce Willis in the film Unbreakable (2000), released in 2000, which he also wrote and directed.
His major films include the science fiction thriller Signs (2002), the psychological thriller The Village (2004), the fantasy thriller Lady in the Water (2006), The Happening (2008), The Last Airbender (2010), After Earth (2013), and the horror films The Visit (2015) and Split (2016).- Director
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Born in 1954 in Pingtung, Taiwan, Ang Lee has become one of today's greatest contemporary filmmakers. Ang graduated from the National Taiwan College of Arts in 1975 and then came to the U.S. to receive a B.F.A. Degree in Theatre/Theater Direction at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and a Masters Degree in Film Production at New York University. At NYU, he served as Assistant Director on Spike Lee's student film, Joe's Bed-Stuy Barbershop: We Cut Heads (1983). After Lee wrote a couple of screenplays, he eventually appeared on the film scene with Pushing Hands (1991), a dramatic-comedy reflecting on generational conflicts and cultural adaptation, centering on the metaphor of the grandfather's Tai-Chi technique of "Pushing Hands". The Wedding Banquet (1993) (aka The Wedding Banquet) was Lee's next film, an exploration of cultural and generational conflicts through a homosexual Taiwanese man who feigns a marriage in order to satisfy the traditional demands of his Taiwanese parents. It garnered Golden Globe and Oscar nominations, and won a Golden Bear at the Berlin Film Festival. The third movie in his trilogy of Taiwanese-Culture/Generation films, all of them featuring his patriarch figure Sihung Lung, was Eat Drink Man Woman (1994) (aka Eat Drink Man Woman), which received a Best Foreign Film Oscar nomination. Lee followed this with Sense and Sensibility (1995), his first Hollywood-mainstream movie. It acquired a Best Picture Oscar nomination, and won Best Adapted Screenplay, for the film's screenwriter and lead actress, Emma Thompson. Lee was also voted the year's Best Director by the National Board of Review and the New York Film Critics Circle. Lee and frequent collaborator James Schamus next filmed The Ice Storm (1997), an adaptation of Rick Moody's novel involving 1970s New England suburbia. The movie acquired the 1997 Best Screenplay at Cannes for screenwriter James Schamus, among other accolades. The Civil War drama Ride with the Devil (1999) soon followed and received critical praise, but it was Lee's Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (2000) (aka Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon) that is considered one of his greatest works, a sprawling period film and martial-arts epic that dealt with love, loyalty and loss. It swept the Oscar nominations, eventually winning Best Foreign Language Film, as well as Best Director at the Golden Globes, and became the highest grossing foreign-language film ever released in America. Lee then filmed the comic-book adaptation, Hulk (2003) - an elegantly and skillfully made film with nice action scenes. Lee has also shot a short film - Chosen (2001) (aka Hire, The Chosen) - and most recently won the 2005 Best Director Academy Award for Brokeback Mountain (2005), a film based on a short story by Annie Proulx. In 2012 Lee directed Life of Pi which earned 11 Academy Award nominations and went on to win the Academy Award for Best Director. In 2013 Ang Lee was selected as a member of the main competition jury at the 2013 Cannes Film Festival.- Director
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Alejandro González Iñárritu (ih-nyar-ee-too), born August 15th, 1963, is a Mexican film director.
González Iñárritu is the first Mexican director to be nominated for the Academy Award for Best Director and by the Directors Guild of America for Best Director. He is also the first Mexican-born director to have won the Prix de la mise en scene or best director award at Cannes (2006), the second one being Carlos Reygadas in 2012. His six feature films, 'Amores Perros' (2000), '21 Grams' (2003), 'Babel' (2006), 'Biutiful' (2010), 'Birdman' (2014) and 'The Revenant' (2015), have gained critical acclaim world-wide including two Academy Award nominations.
Alejandro González Iñárritu was born in Mexico City.
Crossing the Atlantic Ocean on a cargo ship at the ages of seventeen and nineteen years, González Iñárritu worked his way across Europe and Africa. He himself has noted that these early travels as a young man have had a great influence on him as a film-maker. The setting of his films have often been in the places he visited during this period.
After his travels, González Iñárritu returned to Mexico City and majored in communications at Universidad Iberoamericana. In 1984, he started his career as a radio host at the Mexican radio station WFM, a rock and eclectic music station. In 1988, he became the director of the station. Over the next five years, González Iñárritu spent his time interviewing rock stars, transmitting live concerts, and making WFM the number one radio station in Mexico. From 1987 to 1989, he composed music for six Mexican feature films. He has stated that he believes music has had a bigger influence on him as an artist than film itself.
In the nineties, González Iñárritu created Z films with Raul Olvera in Mexico. Under Z Films, he started writing, producing and directing short films and advertisements. Making the final transition into T.V Film directing, he studied under well-known Polish theatre director Ludwik Margules, as well as Judith Weston in Los Angeles.
In 1995, González Iñárritu wrote and directed his first T.V pilot for Z Films, called Detras del dinero, -"Behind the Money", starring Miguel Bosé. Z Films went on to be one of the biggest and strongest film production companies in Mexico, launching seven young directors in the feature film arena. In 1999, González Iñárritu directed his first feature film Amores perros, written by Guillermo Arriaga. Amores perros explored Mexican society in Mexico City told via three intertwining stories. In 2000, Amores perros premiered at the Cannes Film Festival and won the Critics Weeks Grand Prize. It also introduced audiences for the first time to Gael García Bernal. Amores perros went on to be nominated for Best Foreign Film at the Academy Awards.
After the success of Amores Perros, González Iñárritu and Guillermo Arriaga revisited the intersecting story structure of Amores perros in González Iñárritu's second film, 21 Grams. The film starred Benicio del Toro, Naomi Watts and Sean Penn, and was presented at the Venice Film Festival, winning the Volpi Cup for actor Sean Penn. At the 2004 Academy Awards, Del Toro and Watts received nominations for their performances.
In 2005 González Iñárritu embarked on his third film, Babel, set in 4 countries on 3 continents, and in 4 different languages. Babel consists of four stories set in Morocco, Mexico, the United States, and Japan. The film stars Brad Pitt, Cate Blanchett and Adriana Barraza. The majority of the rest of the cast, however, was made up of non-professional actors and some new actors, such as Rinko Kikuchi. It was presented at Cannes 2006, where González Iñárritu earned the Best Director Prize (Prix de la mise en scène). Babel was released in November 2006 and received seven nominations at the 79th Annual Academy Awards, including Best Picture and Best Director. González Iñárritu is the first Mexican director nominated for a DGA award and for an Academy Award. Babel went on to win Best Motion Picture in the drama category at the Golden Globe Awards on January 15, 2007. Gustavo Santaolalla won the Academy Award that year for Best Original Score. After Babel, Alejandro and his writing partner Guillermo Arriaga professionally parted ways, following González Iñárritu barring Arriaga from the set during filming (Arriaga told the LA Times in 2009 "It had to come to an end, but I still respect González Iñárritu").
In 2008 and 2009, González Iñárritu directed and produced Biutiful, starring Javier Bardem, written by González Iñárritu, Armando Bo, and Nicolas Giacobone. The film premiered at the Cannes Film Festial on May 17, 2010. Bardem went on to win Best Actor (shared with Elio Germano for La nostra vita) at Cannes. Biutiful is González Iñárritu's first film in his native Spanish since his debut feature Amores perros. For the second time in his career his film was nominated for Best Foreign Language Film at the 83rd Academy Awards. It was also nominated for the 2011 Golden Globes in the category of Best Foreign Film, for the 2011 BAFTA awards in the category of Best Film Not in the English Language and Best Actor. Javier Bardem's performance was also nominated for Academy Award for Best Actor.
In 2014, González Iñárritu directed Birdman, starring Michael Keaton, Naomi Watts, Edward Norton, Emma Stone, Zach Galifianakis, and Andrea Riseborough. The film is Iñárritu's first comedy. Birdman is about an actor who played an iconic superhero, and who tries to revive his career by doing a play based on the Raymond Carver short story What We Talk About When We Talk About Love. The film was released on October 17, 2014.
In April 2014, it was announced that González Iñárritu's next film as a director will be The Revenant, which he co-wrote with Mark L. Smith. It is based on the novel of same name by Michael Punke. The film stars Leonardo DiCaprio, Tom Hardy and Will Poulter with shooting began in September 2014, for a December 25, 2015 release.The Revenant is being filmed in Alberta and B.C. with production scheduled to wrap in February 2015. The film will be a 19th Century period piece, and is described as a "gritty thriller" about a fur trapper who seeks revenge against a group of men who robbed and abandoned him after he was mauled by a grizzly bear.
From 2001 to 2011, González Iñárritu directed several short films.
In 2001, he directed an 11 minute film segment for 11.09.01- which is composed of several short films that explore the effects of the 9/11 terrorist attacks from different points of view around the world.
In 2007, he made ANNA which screened at the 2007 Cannes Film Festival inside Chacun son cinéma. It was part of the 60th anniversary of the film festival and it was a series of shorts by 33 world-renown film directors.
In 2012, he made the experimental short film Naran Ja: One Act Orange Dance - inspired by L.A Dance Project's premiere performance. The short features excerpts of the new choreography Benjamin Millepied crafted for Moving Parts. The story takes place in a secluded, dusty space and centers around LADP dancer Julia Eichten.
In 2001/2002, González Iñárritu directed "Powder Keg", an episode for the BMW film series The Hire, starring Clive Owen as the driver.
In 2010, González Iñárritu directed Write the Future, a football-themed commercial for Nike ahead of the 2010 FIFA World Cup, which went on to win Grand Prix at the Cannes Lions advertising festival.
In 2012, he directed Procter and Gamble's "Best Job" commercial spot for the 2012 Olympic Ceremonies. It went on to win the Best Primetime Commercial Emmy at Creative Arts Emmy Awards.- Writer
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Woody Allen was born on November 30, 1935, as Allen Konigsberg, in The Bronx, NY, the son of Martin Konigsberg and Nettie Konigsberg. He has one younger sister, Letty Aronson. As a young boy, he became intrigued with magic tricks and playing the clarinet, two hobbies that he continues today.
Allen broke into show business at 15 years when he started writing jokes for a local paper, receiving $200 a week. He later moved on to write jokes for talk shows but felt that his jokes were being wasted. His agents, Charles Joffe and Jack Rollins, convinced him to start doing stand-up and telling his own jokes. Reluctantly he agreed and, although he initially performed with such fear of the audience that he would cover his ears when they applauded his jokes, he eventually became very successful at stand-up. After performing on stage for a few years, he was approached to write a script for Warren Beatty to star in: What's New Pussycat (1965) and would also have a moderate role as a character in the film. During production, Woody gave himself more and better lines and left Beatty with less compelling dialogue. Beatty inevitably quit the project and was replaced by Peter Sellers, who demanded all the best lines and more screen-time.
It was from this experience that Woody realized that he could not work on a film without complete control over its production. Woody's theoretical directorial debut was in What's Up, Tiger Lily? (1966); a Japanese spy flick that he dubbed over with his own comedic dialogue about spies searching for the secret recipe for egg salad. His real directorial debut came the next year in the mockumentary Take the Money and Run (1969). He has written, directed and, more often than not, starred in about a film a year ever since, while simultaneously writing more than a dozen plays and several books of comedy.
While best known for his romantic comedies Annie Hall (1977) and Manhattan (1979), Woody has made many transitions in his films throughout the years, transitioning from his "early, funny ones" of Bananas (1971), Love and Death (1975) and Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex * But Were Afraid to Ask (1972); to his more storied and romantic comedies of Annie Hall (1977), Manhattan (1979) and Hannah and Her Sisters (1986); to the Bergmanesque films of Stardust Memories (1980) and Interiors (1978); and then on to the more recent, but varied works of Crimes and Misdemeanors (1989), Husbands and Wives (1992), Mighty Aphrodite (1995), Celebrity (1998) and Deconstructing Harry (1997); and finally to his films of the last decade, which vary from the light comedy of Scoop (2006), to the self-destructive darkness of Match Point (2005) and, most recently, to the cinematically beautiful tale of Vicky Cristina Barcelona (2008). Although his stories and style have changed over the years, he is regarded as one of the best filmmakers of our time because of his views on art and his mastery of filmmaking.- Producer
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Sir Peter Jackson made history with The Lord of the Rings trilogy, becoming the first person to direct three major feature films simultaneously. The Fellowship of the Ring, The Two Towers and The Return of the King were nominated for and collected a slew of awards from around the globe, with The Return of the King receiving his most impressive collection of awards. This included three Academy Awards® (Best Adapted Screenplay, Best Director and Best Picture), two Golden Globes (Best Director and Best Motion Picture-Drama), three BAFTAs (Best Adapted Screenplay, Best Film and Viewers' Choice), a Directors Guild Award, a Producers Guild Award and a New York Film Critics Circle Award.
As a follow up to The Lord of the Rings trilogy, in 2005, Jackson directed, wrote, and produced King Kong, for Universal Pictures. The film grossed over $500 million and won three Oscars®.
Jackson previously received widespread acclaim for his 1994 feature Heavenly Creatures, which received an Academy Award® nomination for Best Screenplay. Other film credits include The Frighteners, starring Michael J. Fox; the adult puppet feature Meet the Feebles; and Braindead, which won 16 international science fiction awards, including the Saturn. Jackson also co-directed the television documentary Forgotten Silver, which also hit the film festival circuit.
Jackson directed the Academy Award®-nominated The Lovely Bones, an adaptation of the acclaimed best-selling novel by Alice Sebold and produced the worldwide sci-fi hit District 9. He was a producer on Steven Spielberg's The Adventures of Tintin: The Secret of the Unicorn in 2011, with two more films set to come out in the future.
His most recent films include producer of 2018's action film Mortal Engines, based on a post-apocalyptic world where cities ride on wheels and consume each other to survive. Following Mortal Engines, he produced They Shall Not Grow Old, a documentary on World War I with never-before-seen footage. BAFTA nominated the film for Best Documentary, and it won the award for Outstanding Achievement in Sound Editing from the Motion Picture Sound Editors.
Jackson's next project is the music documentary The Beatles: Get Back, which he directed and produced, due to be released August, 2021.
Jackson works closely with partner Dame Fran Walsh, with whom he shares his writing and producing credits, as well as a family. Jackson has a special interest in WWI memorabilia and is the proud owner of several aircraft from that era.- Director
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Spike Lee was born Shelton Jackson Lee on March 20, 1957, in Atlanta, Georgia. At a very young age, he moved from pre-civil rights Georgia, to Brooklyn, New York. Lee came from artistic, education-grounded background; his father was a jazz musician, and his mother, a schoolteacher. He attended school in Morehouse College in Atlanta and developed his film making skills at Clark Atlanta University. After graduating from Morehouse, Lee attended the Tisch School of Arts graduate film program. He made a controversial short, The Answer (1980), a reworking of D.W. Griffith's The Birth of a Nation (1915), a ten-minute film. Lee went on to produce a 45-minute film Joe's Bed-Stuy Barbershop: We Cut Heads (1983) which won a student Academy Award. In 1986, Spike Lee made the film, She's Gotta Have It (1986), a comedy about sexual relationships. The movie was made for $175,000, and earned $7 million at the box office, which launched his career and allowed him to found his own production company, 40 Acres and a Mule Filmworks. His next movie was School Daze (1988), which was set at a historically black school, focused mostly on the conflict between the school and the Fraternities, of which he was a strong critic, portraying them as materialistic, irresponsible, and uncaring. With his School Daze (1988) profits, Lee went on to make his landmark film, Do the Right Thing (1989), a movie based specifically his own neighborhood in Brooklyn, New York. The movie portrayed the racial tensions that emerge in the Bed-Stuy neighborhood on one very hot day. The movie garnered Oscar nominations for Best Original Screenplay, for Danny Aiello for supporting actor, and sparked a debate on racial relations. Lee went on to produce and direct the jazz biopic Mo' Better Blues (1990), the first of many Spike Lee films to feature Denzel Washington, including the biography of Malcolm X (1992), in which Washington portrayed the civil rights leader. The movie was a success, and garnered an Oscar nomination for Washington. The pair would work together again on He Got Game (1998), an excursion into the collegiate world showing the darker side of college athletic recruiting, as well as the 2006 film Inside Man (2006). Spike Lee's role as a documentarian has expanded over the years, highlighted by his participation in Lumière and Company (1995), the Oscar-nominated 4 Little Girls (1997), to his Peabody Award-winning biographical adaptation of Black Panther leader in A Huey P. Newton Story (2001), through his 2005 Emmy Award-winning examination of post-Katrina New Orleans in When the Levees Broke: A Requiem in Four Acts (2006) and its follow-up five years later If God Is Willing and da Creek Don't Rise (2010). Through his production company 40 Acres and A Mule Filmworks, Lee continues to create and direct both independent films and projects for major studios, as well as working on story development, creating an internship program for aspiring filmmakers, releasing music, and community outreach and support. He is married to Tonya Lewis Lee, and they have two sons, Satchel and Jackson.- Writer
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Guillermo del Toro was born October 9, 1964 in Guadalajara, Jalisco, Mexico. Raised by his Catholic grandmother, del Toro developed an interest in filmmaking in his early teens. Later, he learned about makeup and effects from the legendary Dick Smith (The Exorcist (1973)) and worked on making his own short films. At the age of 21, del Toro executive produced his first feature, Dona Herlinda and Her Son (1985). Del Toro spent almost 10 years as a makeup supervisor, and formed his own company, Necropia in the early 1980s. He also produced and directed Mexican television programs at this time, and taught film.
Del Toro got his first big break when Cronos (1992) won nine Ariel Awards (the Mexican equivalent of the Oscars), then went on to win the International Critics Week Prize at Cannes. Following this success, del Toro made his first Hollywood film, Mimic (1997), starring Mira Sorvino.
Del Toro had some unfortunate experiences working with a demanding Hollywood studio on Mimic (1997), and returned to Mexico to form his own production company, The Tequila Gang.
Next for del Toro, was The Devil's Backbone (2001), a Spanish Civil War ghost story. The film was hailed by critics and audiences alike, and del Toro decided to give Hollywood another try. In 2002, he directed the Wesley Snipes vampire sequel, Blade II (2002).
On a roll, Del Toro followed up Blade II (2002) with another successful comic-book inspired film, Hellboy (2004), starring one of Del Toro's favorite actors, Ron Perlman.
Del Toro is divorced, has a daughter and a son and lives in Los Angeles and Toronto.- Director
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John Ford came to Hollywood following one of his brothers, an actor. Asked what brought him to Hollywood, he replied "the train". He became one of the most respected directors in the business, in spite of being known for his westerns, which were not considered "serious" film. He won six Oscars, counting (he always did) the two that he won for his WWII documentary work. He had one wife; a son and daughter; and a grandson, Dan Ford who wrote a biography on his famous grandfather.- Actor
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Clinton Eastwood Jr. was born May 31, 1930 in San Francisco, to Clinton Eastwood Sr., a bond salesman and later manufacturing executive for Georgia-Pacific Corporation, and Ruth Wood (née Margret Ruth Runner), a housewife turned IBM clerk. He grew up in nearby Piedmont. At school Clint took interest in music and mechanics, but was an otherwise bored student; this resulted in being held back a grade. In 1949, the year he is said to have graduated from high school, his parents and younger sister Jeanne moved to Seattle. Clint spent a couple years in the Pacific Northwest himself, operating log broncs in Springfield, Oregon, with summer gigs life-guarding in Renton, Washington. Returning to California in 1951, he did a two-year stint at Fort Ord Military Reservation and later enrolled at L.A. City College, but dropped out to pursue acting.
During the mid-1950s he landed uncredited bit parts in such B-films as Revenge of the Creature (1955) and Tarantula (1955) while digging swimming pools and driving a garbage truck to supplement his income. In 1958, he landed his first consequential acting role in the long-running TV show Rawhide (1959) with Eric Fleming. Although only a secondary player the first seven seasons, he was promoted to series star when Fleming departed--both literally and figuratively--in its final year, along the way becoming a recognizable face to television viewers around the country.
Eastwood's big-screen breakthrough came as The Man with No Name in Sergio Leone's trilogy of excellent spaghetti westerns: A Fistful of Dollars (1964), For a Few Dollars More (1965), and The Good, the Bad and the Ugly (1966). The movies were shown exclusively in Italy during their respective copyright years with Enrico Maria Salerno providing the voice of Eastwood's character, finally getting American distribution in 1967-68. As the last film racked up respectable grosses, Eastwood, 37, rose from a barely registering actor to sought-after commodity in just a matter of months. Again a success was the late-blooming star's first U.S.-made western, Hang 'Em High (1968). He followed that up with the lead role in Coogan's Bluff (1968) (the loose inspiration for the TV series McCloud (1970)), before playing second fiddle to Richard Burton in the World War II epic Where Eagles Dare (1968) and Lee Marvin in the bizarre musical Paint Your Wagon (1969). In Two Mules for Sister Sara (1970) and Kelly's Heroes (1970), Eastwood leaned in an experimental direction by combining tough-guy action with offbeat humor.
1971 proved to be his busiest year in film. He starred as a sleazy Union soldier in The Beguiled (1971) to critical acclaim, and made his directorial debut with the classic erotic thriller Play Misty for Me (1971). His role as the hard edge police inspector in Dirty Harry (1971), meanwhile, boosted him to cultural icon status and helped popularize the loose-cannon cop genre. Eastwood put out a steady stream of entertaining movies thereafter: the westerns Joe Kidd (1972), High Plains Drifter (1973) and The Outlaw Josey Wales (1976) (his first of six onscreen collaborations with then live-in love Sondra Locke), the Dirty Harry sequels Magnum Force (1973) and The Enforcer (1976), the action-packed road adventures Thunderbolt and Lightfoot (1974) and The Gauntlet (1977), and the prison film Escape from Alcatraz (1979). He branched out into the comedy genre in 1978 with Every Which Way But Loose (1978), which became the biggest hit of his career up to that time; taking inflation into account, it still is. In short, The Eiger Sanction (1975) notwithstanding, the 1970s were nonstop success for Eastwood.
Eastwood kicked off the 1980s with Any Which Way You Can (1980), the blockbuster sequel to Every Which Way but Loose. The fourth Dirty Harry film, Sudden Impact (1983), was the highest-grossing film of the franchise and spawned his trademark catchphrase: "Make my day." He also starred in Bronco Billy (1980), Firefox (1982), Tightrope (1984), City Heat (1984), Pale Rider (1985) and Heartbreak Ridge (1986), all of which were solid hits, with Honkytonk Man (1982) being his only commercial failure of the period. In 1988, he did his fifth and final Dirty Harry movie, The Dead Pool (1988). Although it was a success overall, it did not have the box office punch the previous films had. About this time, with outright bombs like Pink Cadillac (1989) and The Rookie (1990), it seemed Eastwood's star was declining as it never had before. He then started taking on low-key projects, directing Bird (1988), a biopic of Charlie Parker that earned him a Golden Globe, and starring in and directing White Hunter Black Heart (1990), an uneven, loose biopic of John Huston (both films had a limited release).
Eastwood bounced back big time with his dark western Unforgiven (1992), which garnered the then 62-year-old his first ever Academy Award nomination (Best Actor), and an Oscar win for Best Director. Churning out a quick follow-up hit, he took on the secret service in In the Line of Fire (1993), then accepted second billing for the first time since 1970 in the interesting but poorly received A Perfect World (1993) with Kevin Costner. Next was a love story, The Bridges of Madison County (1995), where Eastwood surprised audiences with a sensitive performance alongside none other than Meryl Streep. But it soon became apparent he was going backwards after his brief revival. Subsequent films were credible, but nothing really stuck out. Absolute Power (1997) and Space Cowboys (2000) did well enough, while True Crime (1999) and Blood Work (2002) were received badly, as was Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil (1997), which he directed but didn't appear in.
Eastwood surprised again in the mid-2000s, returning to the top of the A-list with Million Dollar Baby (2004). Also starring Hilary Swank and Morgan Freeman, the hugely successful drama won four Academy Awards, including Best Picture and Best Director for Eastwood. He scored his second Best Actor nomination, too. His next starring vehicle, Gran Torino (2008), earned almost $30 million in its opening weekend and was his highest grosser unadjusted for inflation. 2012 saw him in a rare lighthearted movie, Trouble with the Curve (2012), as well as a reality show, Mrs. Eastwood & Company (2012).
Between acting jobs, he chalked up an impressive list of credits behind the camera. He directed Mystic River (2003) (in which Sean Penn and Tim Robbins gave Oscar-winning performances), Flags of Our Fathers (2006), Letters from Iwo Jima (2006) (nominated for the Best Picture Oscar), Changeling (2008) (a vehicle for Angelina Jolie), Invictus (2009) (again with Freeman), Hereafter (2010), J. Edgar (2011), Jersey Boys (2014), American Sniper (2014) (2014's top box office champ), Sully (2016) (starring Tom Hanks as hero pilot Chesley Sullenberger) and The 15:17 to Paris (2018). Back on screens after a considerable absence, he played an unlikely drug courier in The Mule (2018), which reached the top of the box office with a nine-figure gross, then directed Richard Jewell (2019). At age 91, Eastwood made history as the oldest actor to star above the title in a movie with the release of Cry Macho (2021).
Away from the limelight, Eastwood has led an aberrant existence and is described by biographer Patrick McGilligan as a cunning manipulator of the media. His convoluted slew of partners and children are now somewhat factually acknowledged, but for the first three decades of his celebrity, his personal life was kept top secret, and several of his families were left out of the official narrative. The actor refuses to disclose his exact number of offspring even to this day. He had a longtime relationship with similarly abstruse co-star Locke (who died aged 74 in 2018, though for her entire public life she masqueraded about being younger), and has fathered at least eight children by at least six different women in an unending string of liaisons, many of which overlapped. He has been married only twice, however, with a mere three of his progeny coming from those unions.
His known children are: Laurie Murray (b. 1954), whose mother is unidentified; Kimber Eastwood (b. 1964) with stuntwoman Roxanne Tunis; Kyle Eastwood (b. 1968) and Alison Eastwood (b. 1972) with his first ex-wife, Margaret Neville Johnson; Scott Eastwood (b. 1986) and Kathryn Eastwood (b. 1988) with stewardess Jacelyn Reeves; Francesca Eastwood (b. 1993) with actress Frances Fisher; and Morgan Eastwood (b. 1996) with his second ex-wife, Dina Eastwood. The entire time that he lived with Locke she was legally married to sculptor Gordon Anderson.
Eastwood has real estate holdings in Bel-Air, La Quinta, Carmel-by-the-Sea, Cassel (in remote northern California), Idaho's Sun Valley and Kihei, Hawaii.- Writer
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Guy Ritchie was born in Hatfield, Hertfordshire, UK on September 10, 1968. After watching Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969) as a child, Guy realized that what he wanted to do was make films. He never attended film school, saying that the work of film school graduates was boring and unwatchable. At 15 years old, he dropped out of school and in 1995, got a job as a runner, ultimately starting his film career. He quickly progressed and was directing music promos for bands and commercials by 1995.
The profits that he made from directing these promos was invested into writing and making the film The Hard Case (1995), a 20-minute short film that is also the prequel to his debut feature Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels (1998). Sting's wife, Trudie Styler, saw The Hard Case (1995) and invested in the feature film. Once completed, 10 British distributors turned the film down before it eventually was released in the UK in 1998 and in the US in 1999; the film put Ritchie on the map as one of the hottest rising filmmakers of the time, and launched the careers of actors Jason Statham, Jason Flemyng, and Vinnie Jones, among others.
Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels (1998) was followed by Snatch (2000), this time with a bigger budget and a few more familiar faces such as Brad Pitt, Dennis Farina, Benicio Del Toro alongside returning actors Jason Statham, Vinnie Jones and Jason Flemyng. At the end of 2000, Ritchie married the pop superstar Madonna in Scotland, and proceeded to work with his famous wife on a variety of film and video projects, including the short Star (2001), made for BMW and co-starring Clive Owen, and the controversial video "What It Feels Like for a Girl," which was called out for its violence. In 2002, the couple embarked on a remake of the 1974 Lina Wertmüller film Swept Away (2002); the new film was a critical and commercial flop, winning five Razzie Awards. Ritchie followed up with the Vegas heist film Revolver (2005), which was panned, but won favor with the crime thriller RocknRolla (2008), which featured a game, energetic cast and brought American attention to rising stars Gerard Butler and Tom Hardy.
The next year saw the release of Sherlock Holmes (2009), starring Robert Downey Jr. in the title role and Jude Law as his cohort Dr. Watson. The film received mostly good reviews but, more important for Ritchie's career, was a solid blockbuster hit that grossed more than $520 million dollars worldwide and spawned a sequel, Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows (2011). Ritchie is tentatively scheduled to direct an adaptation of Robert Louis Stevenson's Treasure Island.
Ritchie has two sons with Madonna: Rocco, born in 2000, and an adopted son, David, born in 2005. In late 2008, the couple confirmed reports that they were splitting up, and agreed to a divorce settlement that was finalized in December of that year. In September 2011, Ritchie's girlfriend, model Jacqui Ainsley, gave birth to a son, Rafael, and in July 2012 the couple announced they were expecting their second child.- Producer
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Alfonso Cuarón Orozco was born on November 28th 1961 in Mexico City, Mexico. From an early age, he yearned to be either a film director or an astronaut. However, he did not want to enter the army, so he settled for directing. He didn't receive his first camera until his twelfth birthday, and then immediately started to film everything he saw, showing it afterwards to everyone. In his teen years, films were his hobby. Sometimes he said to his mother he would go to a friend's home, when in fact he would go to the cinema. His ambition was to know every theatre in the city. Near his house there were two studios, Studios Churubusco and Studios 212. After finishing school, Cuarón decided to study cinema right away. He tried to study at C.C.C. (Centro de Capacitación Cinematográfica) but wasn't accepted because at that time they weren't accepting students under twenty-four years old. His mother didn't support that idea of cinema, so he studied philosophy in the morning and in the afternoon he went to the C.U.E.C. (Centro Universitario de Estudios Cinematográficos). During that time he met many people who would later become his collaborators and friends. One of them was Luis Estrada. Cuaron also became good friends with Carlos Marcovich and Emmanuel Lubezki. Luis Estrada directed a short called "Vengance is Mine", on which Alfonso and Emmanuel collaborated. The film was in English, a fact which bothered many teachers of the C.U.E.C. such as Marcela Fernández Violante. The disagreement caused such arguments that in 1985, Alfonso was expelled from the university.
During his time studying at C.U.E.C. he met Mariana Elizondo, and with her he had his first son, Jonás Cuarón. After Alfonso was expelled, he thought he could never be a director and so went on to work in a Museum so he could sustain his family. One day, José Luis García Agraz and Fernando CáMara went to the museum and made an offer to Cuarón. They asked him to work as cable person in "La víspera (1982)", a job which was to prove to be his salvation. After that he was assistant director in Garcia Agraz's "Nocaut (1984)", as well as numerous other films.
He was also second unit director in "Gaby: A True Story (1987)", and co-wrote and directed some episodes in the series "A Hora Marcada (1967)". One New Year's Eve, he decided he would not continue to be an assistant director, and with his brother Carlos started writing what would be his first feature film: "Love in the Time of Hysteria (1991)" (Love in the time of Hysteria). After the screenplay was written, the problem became how to get financial backing for the movie. I.M.C.I.N.E. (Instituto Mexicano de Cinematografia), which supports movies financially, had already decided which projects it would support that year, much to Alfonso's initial chagrin. However, the director of one of those already-chosen projects was unable to direct it, so his project was canceled, and "Sólo con tu pareja" took its place. Despite this being chosen, there was a lot of tension between Alfonso and the I.M.C.I.N.E. executives. Nevertheless, after the movie was finished, it was a huge success. In Toronto festival the films won many awards, and Alfonso started to be noticed by Hollywood producers. Sydney Pollack was the first one to invite him to shoot in Hollywood. He proposed a feature film to be directed by Alfonso, but the project didn't work and was canceled. Alfonso moved to Los Angeles without anything concrete, and stayed with some friends, as he had no money. Soon after that, Pollack called him again to direct an episode called "Murder, Obliquely (1993)" of the series "Fallen Angels (1993)", that was the first job he had in U.S., and also the first time he worked with Alan Rickman.
After a while, and no real directing jobs, Alfonso wanted to direct something as he needed money. He finally signed a contract with Warner Brothers to direct the film Addicted to Love (1995). However, one night, he read the screenplay for another film, A Little Princess (1995) and fell in love with it. He talked to Warner Brothers and after some meetings he gave up directing "Addicted to Love" in order to do "A Little Princess". Even thought it wasn't a great box office success, the film received two nominations for the Oscars, and won many other awards. After "A Little Princess" Alfonso developed a project with Richard Gere starring. The project was canceled, but Cuarón got an offer from Twentieth Century Fox to direct the modern adaptation of the Charles Dickens' classic Great Expectations (1998). He initially didn't want to direct it but the studio insisted, and in the end he accepted it. The experience was very painful and difficult for him mainly because there was never a definitive screenplay.
He then reunited with producer Jorge Vergara and founded both Anhelo Productions and Moonson Productions. Anhelo's first picture was also Alfonso's next film, the erotic road movie "And Your Mother Too (2001)", which was a huge success. During the promotion of the film in Venice, Alfonso met the cinema critic Annalisa Bugliani. They started dating and married that same year. "Children of Men (2006)" was to be Alfonso's next film, a futuristic, dystopian story. During the pre-production of the film, Warner Brothers invited Alfonso to direct the third Harry Potter film, "Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban (2004)", an offer which he accepted after some consideration. The film would prove to be the greatest box office success of his career.
In 2003, he had a daughter named Bu Cuaron, and in February 2005 another son, called Olmo Teodoro Cuarón. Alfonso Cuarón signed a three-year first-look deal with Warner Brothers, which allowed his films to be distributed world-wide. He directed one five-minute segment of the anthology film Paris, I Love You (2006) with Nick Nolte and Ludivine Sagnier. His next project, the futuristic film Children of Men (2006) with Clive Owen, Julianne Moore and Michael Caine premiered at the Venice Film Festival in 2006 having been nominated for three Academy Awards. After his youngest son was diagnosed with autism and the divorce from Annalisa Bugliani he took a break from directing and settled in London where he plans to work on his next projects.
In 2013, Alfonso directed the space thriller Gravity (2013), which would go win 7 academy awards.
Alfonso is the only filmmaker to have ever won twice for a clean sweep for the awards, for "Gravity" and "Roma", for Best Director at the Oscars, Golden Globes, BAFTAs, and DGA Awards.- Director
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Oliver Stone has become known as a master of controversial subjects and a legendary film maker. His films are filled with a variety of film angles and styles, he pushes his actors to give Oscar-worthy performances, and despite his failures, has always returned to success.
William Oliver Stone was born in New York City, to Jacqueline (Goddet) and Louis Stone, a stockbroker. His American father was from a Jewish family (from Germany and Eastern Europe), and his mother, a war bride, was French (and Catholic). After dropping out of Yale University, he became a soldier in the Vietnam War. Serving in two different regiments (including 1rst Cavalry), he was introduced to The Doors, drugs, Jefferson Airplane, and other things that defined the sixties. For his actions in the war, he was awarded a Bronze Star for Gallantry and a Purple Heart. Returning from the war, Stone did not return to graduate from Yale. His first film was a student film entitled Last Year in Viet Nam (1971), followed by the gritty horror film Seizure (1974) for which he also wrote the screenplay. The next seven years saw him direct two films: Mad Man of Martinique (1979) and The Hand (1981), starring Michael Caine. He also wrote many screenplays for films such as Midnight Express (1978), Conan the Barbarian (1982), and Scarface (1983). Stone won his first Oscar for Midnight Express (1978), but his fame was just beginning to show.
1986 was the year that brought him much fame to the U.S.A. and the world. He directed the political film Salvador (1986) starring Oscar-nominated James Woods. However, his big hit was the Vietnam war film Platoon (1986) starring Charlie Sheen,Willem Dafoe, Tom Berenger, and Francesco Quinn. Berenger and Dafoe received Oscar nominations for their roles as the polar opposite sergeants who each influence the tour of duty of Chris Taylor (Sheen). Stone won his first Oscar for directing this film, which won Best Picture and was a hit at the box office. After Platoon (1986), Stone followed up with the critically acclaimed Wall Street (1987). The movie, starring Charlie Sheen and Michael Douglas, focuses on the business world of tycoons and stock brokers. The film was well received and won an Oscar for Douglas' portrayal of the villainous Gordon Gekko. Stone returned immediately the following year with Talk Radio (1988), which talked of a foul-mouthed radio host (played by Eric Bogosian) who never fails to talk about the serious issues. Although it was not as successful as his last three films, Stone did not slow down at all. He directed Tom Cruise into an Oscar-nominated role in Born on the Fourth of July (1989).
The movie talked about the return of an embittered, crippled Vietnam soldier from the war. Although it failed to win Best Picture or Best Actor, Oliver Stone won an Academy Award for Directing, his third win to date. After Born on the Fourth of July (1989), Stone took a hand in producing several movies, including the Academy Award-winning film Reversal of Fortune (1990). He returned to the director's chair in 1991, once again with two films. Val Kilmer starred as the legendary and controversial Jim Morrison in Stone's psychedelic film The Doors (1991).
Despised by former Doors member Ray Manzarek, the film is nevertheless a wonderful achievement, with Kilmer pulling off an almost flawless impersonation of Morrison. Regardless of opinion, The Doors (1991) was overshadowed by Stone's colossal film JFK (1991), which Stone himself considers the best of his films. In Stone's movie, Jim Garrison tackles the conspiracy behind the murder of America's president John F. Kennedy. The large cast featured such well-known names as Kevin Costner, Tommy Lee Jones, John Candy, Joe Pesci, Donald Sutherland, and Walter Matthau. This film represented a change in Stone's works, because it was with this film that he really began to explore the different camera styles and combining them together to create a multi-dimensional way of showing a movie. JFK (1991), as with Platoon (1986) and Born on the Fourth of July (1989), earned eight Oscar nominations and was one of Stone's most successful films. However, he failed to win a third Oscar for Best Director.
After this film, Stone directed his third Vietnam film to date. Heaven & Earth (1993) was a film about the war from the viewpoint of a Vietnamese girl, and also co-starred Tommy Lee Jones (who had received an Oscar nomination for JFK (1991)). Despite its new woman's perspective and several positive reviews, it was a box office failure. Stone was unfazed; his next film is perhaps his most notorious film to date. Adapting a screenplay by Quentin Tarantino, Stone made Natural Born Killers (1994) starring Woody Harrelson, Juliette Lewis, Tom Sizemore and Rodney Dangerfield in his only dramatic performance. The film was received well at the box office, while review were very mixed. Because of the violence that people claimed was inspired by the film, it was compared to Stanley Kubrick's A Clockwork Orange (1971). As usual, Stone was at the center of controversial subjects; his next film Nixon (1995) was no exception. The film focused on the life of President Richard Nixon, played by Anthony Hopkins, while featuring another well-known cast, including Joan Allen in the role of Nixon's wife. Both went on to receive Oscar nominations, while Stone received his sixth Oscar nomination for Screenwriting. The film got mixed reviews, and failed to recoup its budget.
Aside from directing, Stone has worked as a producer on several different films. There was, of course, the successful film Reversal of Fortune (1990), which won Jeremy Irons an Oscar and also nominated the director for an Oscar. There was also the highly praised and successful emotional drama The Joy Luck Club (1993) which centered around four Chinese immigrant women whose relationships with their daughters is affected by their own lives. Another highly praised Oscar nominated film was Milos Forman's classic film The People vs. Larry Flynt (1996) starring Woody Harrelson, Edward Norton, and Courtney Love. Whether the crime/action film The Corruptor (1999) or the brilliant war epic Savior (1998), Stone has worked in a variety of film genres.
Stone had directed ten films in nine years; now however, he began to slow down. He directed the film U Turn (1997) starring Sean Penn and Jennifer Lopez. As with Natural Born Killers (1994), it was a dark and twisted satire on violence, but did not have the same success as the former. Stone was set to direct several projects in the late 90's but they fell through and were not made. However, success came back to Stone in the Al Pacino film Any Given Sunday (1999). This sports movie centered on the life behind the game of football, and it starred an impressive cast that included frequent Stone collaborators James Woods and John C. McGinley. This film was one of his most successful box office films, and put him back on track.
The following years brought Stone no new theatrical films, though he did make three fascinating TV documentaries. Two of them, 'Looking for Fidel' and Comandante (2003) were interviews of Cuban dictator Fidel Castro, while 'Persona Non Grata' was an interview of several Palestinian leaders. Stone was also set to direct American Psycho (2000) with Leonardo DiCaprio and Beyond Borders (2003), starring Angelina Jolie and at the time, Ralph Fiennes. However, Stone dropped out of both projects, as did a number of the actors mentioned. Finally, five years after Any Given Sunday (1999), Stone directed a film he'd long wanted to make; the colossal epic Alexander (2004). Starring Colin Farrell as the Macedonian leader, Stone attempted to capture the essence of Alexander the Great through his conquests of the known world. The film focused on Alexander's relationships with his parents (a brilliant performance by Val Kilmer and a less impressive one by Angelina Jolie) and his relationships with his wife and childhood friend/ gay lover (played by Rosario Dawson and Jared Leto respectively).
Alexander (2004) was a critical failure, and failed to win back its budget domestically. Despite being one of 2004's highest grossing films internationally, and recouping its budget through DVD sales, Stone's pet project was heavily criticized. Despite a far superior version (Alexander Revisited) being released on DVD, the film's reputation remains low by the majority. Stone was personally stung at these attacks, but managed to rebound, if mildly, with his hopeful film World Trade Center (2006). The film centers on two firefighters trapped in the rubble of the twin towers. It received good reviews, and allowed Oliver to step forward from his failure towards the possibility of more films.
In late 2007, besides a number of projects Stone was set to direct "Pinkville", which would have been his fourth Vietnam film to date. It was set to star a large number of well known actors such as Bruce Willis, Toby Jones, Channing Tatum, Michael Pitt, Woody Harrelson, and Michael Peña. However, a week before shooting was to begin, the Writer's Strike was started, and the finance for the film was cut, using the strike as an excuse. After Willis backed out of the project, it was eventually scuttled, much like Stone's early productions of Platoon (1986) and Born on the Fourth of July (1989). Stone turned to another project he had worked on with former Wall Street (1987) collaborator Stanley Weiser. The project was W. (2008), a biography on president George W. Bush. Stone initially cast Christian Bale in the role of Bush but the actor dropped out at the last minute. Josh Brolin was cast, and this followed with a large cast of well known Oscar nominated character actors such as Richard Dreyfuss, James Cromwell, and Ellen Burstyn. The film was made in a record four months, starting in June and released in October. The film opened to mixed reviews, and though film's budget was recouped, it was not a financial hit.
Stone then made the documentary South of the Border (2009), a documentary which focused on bringing to light the positive aspects of the left-wing governments in South America, particularly Hugo Chavez in Venezuela. Stone was much less critical than usual, instead making the documentary as a response to the harsh reputation that Chavez has in the States. The documentary was poorly received in the States. Stone also began work on Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps (2010). Starring Michael Douglas, Shia LaBeouf, Josh Brolin, Carey Mulligan, and Eli Wallach, the film focuses on the 2008 economic crisis, and the return of Gordon Gekko from prison. The film was screened at Cannes to positive reception, and hailed as Stone's triumphant return. After this, Stone made a film adaptation of "Savages", a novel by Don Winslow . The movie follows two highly successful marijuana growers (Taylor Kitsch and Aaron Taylor-Johnson ), whose shared girlfriend (Blake Lively) is kidnapped by a Mexican cartel and held for ransom. The movie also starred Salma Hayek, Benicio Del Toro, John Travolta, and Emile Hirsch. The film was a return to the tense action and violence of Stone's earlier films, though it polarized many audience members due to the colorful narrations of Lively's vapid and naive character, as well as the film's ending.
After completing the ambitious and well-received television project The Untold History of the United States (2012), as well as a documentary on Hugo Chavez, Stone finally returned to feature films with Snowden (2016). Based on the life of American whistle blower Edward Snowden, Stone's film depicted his awakening to the truth behind the massive surveillances conducted by the NSA, and his attempt to warn the general public of what they did not know. The film was done independently, financed by Europeans on a low budget. It was also a return to form for Stone in a way that had not been seen since "Alexander". Joseph Gordon-Levitt, delivered a very strong performance as Snowden, with the supporting cast including Shailene Woodley, Rhys Ifans, Melissa Leo, Timothy Olyphant, and Nicolas Cage. Sadly, the film received a mixed response from critics, and was a box office disappointment.
Since then, Stone has returned to television for his next two projects. One is a series of interviews with Russian leader Vladimir Putin, and the other is directing a new fictional series based on the abusive Guantanamo prison. It will be his first venture into fictional television.
Oliver Stone is a three-time Oscar winner, and although he has mostly been stung by critics of his films, he remains a well-known name today in the film industry. The films he directed have been nominated for 31 Academy Awards, including eight for acting, six for screen writing, and three for directing. There is no denying that Stone has cemented himself a position among the legends of Hollywood.- Producer
- Writer
- Director
Rian Johnson was born in Maryland and at a young age his family moved to San Clemente, California, where he was raised. After graduating from high school, he went on to attend the University of Southern California School of Cinematic Arts. His first feature film, Brick (2005), was released in 2005 and was the metaphorical building block that launched his career. He is a director, writer, and musician, among other areas of expertise.
His second feature, The Brothers Bloom (2008), proved his ability to tell an exciting story with A-list actors, and the visionary Looper (2012) cemented him as a modern science-fiction icon. Among his highest-rated work are three episodes of the critically acclaimed Breaking Bad (2008). His filmography made him a strong candidate to write and direct Star Wars: Episode VIII - The Last Jedi (2017), the penultimate episode of the 'Star Wars' series. Lucasfilm was pleased with his work and announced that we would write and direct a 'Star Wars' trilogy separate from the main Skywalker story.- Director
- Writer
- Producer
One of seven children, Frank Capra was born on May 18, 1897, in Bisacquino, Sicily. On May 10, 1903, his family left for America aboard the ship Germania, arriving in New York on May 23rd. "There's no ventilation, and it stinks like hell. They're all miserable. It's the most degrading place you could ever be," Capra said about his Atlantic passage. "Oh, it was awful, awful. It seems to always be storming, raining like hell and very windy, with these big long rolling Atlantic waves. Everybody was sick, vomiting. God, they were sick. And the poor kids were always crying."
The family boarded a train for the trip to California, where Frank's older brother Benjamin was living. On their journey, they subsisted on bread and bananas, as their lack of English made it impossible for them to ask for any other kind of foodstuffs. On June 3, the Capra family arrived at the Southern Pacific station in Los Angeles, at the time, a small city of approximately 102,000 people. The family stayed with Capra's older brother Benjamin, and on September 14, 1903, Frank began his schooling at the Castelar Elementary school.
In 1909, he entered Los Angeles' Manual Arts High School. Capra made money selling newspapers in downtown L.A. after school and on Saturdays, sometimes working with his brother Tony. When sales were slow, Tony punched Frank to attract attention, which would attract a crowd and make Frank's papers sell quicker. Frank later became part of a two-man music combo, playing at various places in the red light district of L.A., including brothels, getting paid a dollar per night, performing the popular songs. He also worked as a janitor at the high school in the early mornings. It was at high school that he became interested in the theater, typically doing back-stage work such as lighting.
Capra's family pressured him to drop out of school and go to work, but he refused, as he wanted to partake fully of the American Dream, and for that he needed an education. Capra later reminisced that his family "thought I was a bum. My mother would slap me around; she wanted me to quit school. My teachers would urge me to keep going....I was going to school because I had a fight on my hands that I wanted to win."
Capra graduated from high school on January 27, 1915, and in September of that year, he entered the Throop College of Technology (later the California Institute of Technology) to study chemical engineering. The school's annual tuition was $250, and Capra received occasional financial support from his family, who were resigned to the fact they had a scholar in their midst. Throop had a fine arts department, and Capra discovered poetry and the essays of Montaigne, which he fell in love with, while matriculating at the technical school. He then decided to write.
"It was a great discovery for me. I discovered language. I discovered poetry. I discovered poetry at Caltech, can you imagine that? That was a big turning point in my life. I didn't know anything could be so beautiful." Capra penned "The Butler's Failure," about an English butler provoked by poverty to murder his employer, then to suicide."
Capra was singled out for a cash award of $250 for having the highest grades in the school. Part of his prize was a six-week trip across the U.S. and Canada. When Capra's father, Turiddu, died in 1916, Capra started working at the campus laundry to make money.
After the U.S. Congress declared War on Germany on April 6, 1917, Capra enlisted in the Army, and while he was not a naturalized citizen yet, he was allowed to join the military as part of the Coastal Artillery. Capra became a supply officer for the student soldiers at Throop, who have been enrolled in a Reserve Officers Training Corps program. At his enlistment, Capra discovered he was not an American citizen; he became naturalized in 1920.
On September 15, 1918, Capra graduated from Throop with his bachelor's degree, and was inducted into the U.S. Army on October 18th and shipped out to the Presidio at San Francisco. An armistice ending the fighting of World War One would be declared in less than a month. While at the Presidio, Capra became ill with the Spanish influenza that claimed 20 million lives worldwide. He was discharged from the Army on December 13th and moved to his brother Ben's home in L.A. While recuperating, Capra answered a cattle call for extras for John Ford's film "The The Outcasts of Poker Flat (1919) (Capra, cast as a laborer in the Ford picture, introduced himself to the film's star, Harry Carey. Two decades later, Capra, designated the #1 director in Hollywood by "Time" magazine, would cast Carey and his movie actress wife Olive in Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (1939) for which Carey won a Best Supporting Actor Oscar nomination).
While living at his mother's house, Capra took on a wide variety of manual laboring jobs, including errand boy and ditch digger, even working as an orange tree pruner at 20 cents a day. He continued to be employed as an extra at movie studios and as a prop buyer at an independent studio at Sunset Boulevard and Gower Street, which later became the home of Columbia Pictures, where Capra would make his reputation as the most successful movie director of the 1930s. Most of his time was spent unemployed and idle, which gave credence to his family's earlier opposition to him seeking higher education. Capra wrote short stories but was unable to get them published. He eventually got work as a live-in tutor for the son of "Lucky" Baldwin, a rich gambler. (He later used the Baldwin estate as a location for Dirigible (1931)).
Smitten by the movie bug, in August of that year, Capra, former actor W. M. Plank, and financial backer Ida May Heitmann incorporated the Tri-State Motion Picture Co. in Nevada. Tri-State produced three short films in Nevada in 1920, Don't Change Your Husband (1919), The Pulse of Life (1917), and The Scar of Love (1920), all directed by Plank, and possibly based on story treatments written by Capra. The films were failures, and Capra returned to Los Angeles when Tri-State broke up. In March 1920, Capra was employed by CBC Film Sales Co., the corporate precursor of Columbia Films, where he also worked as an editor and director on a series called "Screen Snapshots." He quit CBC in August and moved to San Francisco, but the only jobs he could find were that of bookseller and door-to-door salesman. Once again seeming to fulfill his family's prophecy, he turned to gambling, and also learned to ride the rails with a hobo named Frank Dwyer. There was also a rumor that he became a traveling salesman specializing in worthless securities, according to a "Time" magazine story "Columbia's Gem" (August 8, 1938 issue, V.32, No. 6).
Still based in San Francisco in 1921, producer Walter Montague hired Capra for $75 per week to help direct the short movie The Ballad of Fisher's Boarding House (1922), which was based on a poem by Rudyard Kipling. Montague, a former actor, had the dubious idea that foggy San Francisco was destined to become the capital of movies, and that he could make a fortune making movies based on poems. Capra helped Montague produced the one-reeler, which was budgeted at $1,700 and subsequently sold to the Pathe Exchange for $3,500. Capra quit Montague when he demanded that the next movie be based upon one of his own poems.
Unable to find another professional filmmaking job, Capra hired himself out as a maker of shorts for the public-at-large while working as an assistant at Walter Ball's film lab. Finally, in October 1921, the Paul Gerson Picture Corp. hired him to help make its two-reel comedies, around the time that he began dating the actress Helen Edith Howe, who would become his first wife. Capra continued to work for both Ball and Gerson, primarily as a cutter. On November 25, 1923, Capra married Helen Howell, and the couple soon moved to Hollywood.
Hal Roach hired Capra as a gag-writer for the "Our Gang" series in January, 1924. After writing the gags for five "Our Gang" comedies in seven weeks, he asked Roach to make him a director. When Roach refused (he somewhat rightly felt he had found the right man in director Bob McGowan), Capra quit. Roach's arch rival Mack Sennett subsequently hired him as a writer, one of a six-man team that wrote for silent movie comedian Harry Langdon, the last major star of the rapidly disintegrating Mack Sennett Studios, and reigning briefly as fourth major silent comedian after Charles Chaplin, Buster Keaton, and Harold Lloyd. Capra began working with the Harry Langdon production unit as a gag writer, first credited on the short Plain Clothes (1925).
As Harry Langdon became more popular, his production unit at Sennett had moved from two- to three-reelers before Langdon, determined to follow the example of Chaplin, Keaton, and Lloyd, went into features. After making his first feature-length comedy, His First Flame (1927) for Sennett, Langdon signed a three-year contract with Sol Lesser's First National Pictures to annually produce two feature-length comedies at a fixed fee per film. For a multitude of reasons Mack Sennett was never able to retain top talent. On September 15, 1925, Harry Langdon left Sennett in an egotistical rage, taking many of his key production personnel with him. Sennett promoted Capra to director but fired him after three days in his new position. In addition to the Langdon comedies, Capra had also written material for other Sennett films, eventually working on twenty-five movies.
After being sacked by Sennett, Capra was hired as a gag-writer by Harry Langdon, working on Langdon's first First National feature-length film, Tramp, Tramp, Tramp (1926). The movie was directed by Harry Edwards who had directed all of Harry Langdon's films at Sennett. His first comedy for First National, Tramp, Tramp, Tramp (1926) did well at the box office, but it had ran over budget, which came out of Langdon's end. Harry Edwards was sacked, and for his next picture, The Strong Man (1926), Langdon promoted Capra to director, boosting his salary to $750 per week. The movie was a hit, but trouble was brewing among members of the Harry Langdon company. Langdon was increasingly believing his own press.
His marriage with Helen began to unravel when it is discovered that she had a life-threatening ectopic pregnancy that had to be terminated. In order to cope with the tragedy, Capra became a work-a-holic while Helen turned to drink. The deterioration of his marriage was mirrored by the disintegration of his professional relationship with Harry Langdonduring the making of the new feature, Long Pants (1927).
The movie, which was released in March 1927, proved to be Capra's last with Harry Langdon, as the comedian soon sacked Capra after its release. Capra later explained the principle of Langdon comedies to James Agee, "It is the principal of the brick: If there was a rule for writing Langdon material, it was this: his only ally was God. Harry Langdon might be saved by a brick falling on a cop, but it was verboten that he in any way motivated the bricks fall."
During the production of Long Pants (1926), Capra had a falling out with Langdon. Screenwriter Arthur Ripley's dark sensibility did not mesh well with that of the more optimistic Capra, and Harry Langdon usually sided with Ripley. The picture fell behind schedule and went over budget, and since Langdon was paid a fixed fee for each film, this represented a financial loss to his own Harry Langdon Corp. Stung by the financial set-back, and desiring to further emulate the great Chaplin, Harry Langdon made a fateful decision: He fired Capra and decided to direct himself. (Langdon's next three movies for First National were dismal failures, the two surviving films being very dark and grim black comedies, one of which, The Chaser (1928), touched on the subject of suicide. It was the late years of the Jazz Age, a time of unprecedented prosperity and boundless bonhomie, and the critics, and more critically, the ticket-buying public, rejected Harry. In 1928, First National did not pick up his contract. The Harry Langdon Corp. soon went bankrupt, and his career as the "fourth major silent comedian" was through, just as sound was coming in.)
In April of 1927, Capra and his wife Helen split up, and Capra went off to New York to direct For the Love of Mike (1927) for First National, his first picture with Claudette Colbert. The director and his star did not get along, and the film went over budget. Subsequently, First National refused to pay Capra, and he had to hitchhike back to Hollywood. The film proved to be Capra's only genuine flop.
By September 1927, he was back working as a writer for Mack Sennett, but in October, he was hired as a director by Columbia Pictures President and Production Chief Harry Cohn for $1,000. The event was momentous for both of them, for at Columbia Capra would soon become the #1 director in Hollywood in the 1930s, and the success of Capra's films would propel the Poverty Row studio into the major leagues. But at first, Cohn was displeased with him. When viewing the first three days of rushes of his first Columbia film, That Certain Thing (1928), Cohn wanted to fire him as everything on the first day had been shot in long shot, on the second day in medium shot, and on the third day in close-ups.
"I did it that way for time," Capra later recalled. "It was so easy to be better than the other directors, because they were all dopes. They would shoot a long shot, then they would have to change the setup to shoot a medium shot, then they would take their close-ups. Then they would come back and start over again. You lose time, you see, moving the cameras and the big goddamn lights. I said, 'I'll get all the long shots on that first set first, then all the medium shots, and then the close-ups.' I wouldn't shoot the whole scene each way unless it was necessary. If I knew that part of it was going to play in long shot, I wouldn't shoot that part in close-up. But the trick was not to move nine times, just to move three times. This saved a day, maybe two days."
Cohn decided to stick with Capra (he was ultimately delighted at the picture and gave Capra a $1,500 bonus and upped his per-picture salary), and in 1928, Cohn raised his salary again, now to to $3,000 per picture after he made several successful pictures, including Submarine (1928). The Younger Generation (1929), the first of a series of films with higher budgets to be directed by Capra, would prove to be his first sound film, when scenes were reshot for dialogue. In the summer of that year, he was introduced to a young widow, Lucille Warner Reyburn (who became Capra's second wife Lou Capra). He also met a transplanted stage actress, Barbara Stanwyck, who had been recruited for the talkie but had been in three successive unsuccessful films and wanted to return to the New York stage. Harry Cohn wanted Stanwyck to appear in Capra's planned film, Ladies of Leisure (1930), but the interview with Capra did not go well, and Capra refused to use her.
Stanwyck went home crying after being dismissed by Capra, and her husband, a furious Frank Fay, called Capra up. In his defense, Capra said that Stanwyck didn't seem to want the part. According to Capra's 1961 autobiography, "The Name Above the Title," Fay said, "Frank, she's young, and shy, and she's been kicked around out here. Let me show you a test she made at Warner's." After viewing her Warners' test for The Noose (1928), Capra became enthusiastic and urged Cohn to sign her. In January of 1930, Capra began shooting Ladies of Leisure (1930) with Stanwyck in the lead. The movies the two made together in the early '30s established them both on their separate journeys towards becoming movieland legends. Though Capra would admit to falling in love with his leading lady, it was Lucille Warner Reyburn who became the second Mrs. Capra.
"You're wondering why I was at that party. That's my racket. I'm a party girl. Do you know what that is?"
Stanwyck played a working-class "party girl" hired as a model by the painter Jerry, who hails from a wealthy family. Capra had written the first draft of the movie before screenwriter Jo Swerling took over. Swerling thought the treatment was dreadful. According to Capra, Swerling told Harry Cohn, when he initially had approached about adapting the play "Ladies of the Evening" into Capra's next proposed film, "I don't like Hollywood, I don't like you, and I certainly don't like this putrid piece of gorgonzola somebody gave me to read. It stunk when Belasco produced it as Ladies of Leisure (1930), and it will stink as Ladies of Leisure, even if your little tin Jesus does direct it. The script is inane, vacuous, pompous, unreal, unbelievable and incredibly dull."
Capra, who favored extensive rehearsals before shooting a scene, developed his mature directorial style while collaborating with Stanwyck, a trained stage actress whose performance steadily deteriorated after rehearsals or retakes. Stanwyck's first take in a scene usually was her best. Capra started blocking out scenes in advance, and carefully preparing his other actors so that they could react to Stanwyck in the first shot, whose acting often was unpredictable, so they wouldn't foul up the continuity. In response to this semi-improvisatory style, Capra's crew had to boost its level of craftsmanship to beyond normal Hollywood standards, which were forged in more static and prosaic work conditions. Thus, the professionalism of Capra's crews became better than those of other directors. Capra's philosophy for his crew was, "You guys are working for the actors, they're not working for you."
After "Ladies of Leisure," Capra was assigned to direct Platinum Blonde (1931) starring Jean Harlow. The script had been the product of a series of writers, including Jo Swerling (who was given credit for adaptation), but was polished by Capra and Robert Riskin (who was given screen credit for the dialogue). Along with Jo Swerling, Riskin would rank as one of Capra's most important collaborators, ultimately having a hand in 13 movies. (Riskin wrote nine screenplays for Capra, and Capra based four other films on Riskin's work.)
Riskin created a hard-boiled newspaperman, Stew Smith for the film, a character his widow, the actress Fay Wray, said came closest to Riskin of any character he wrote. A comic character, the wise-cracking reporter who wants to lampoon high society but finds himself hostage to the pretensions of the rich he had previously mocked is the debut of the prototypical "Capra" hero. The dilemma faced by Stew, akin to the immigrant's desire to assimilate but being rejected by established society, was repeated in Mr. Deeds Goes to Town (1936) and in Meet John Doe (1941).
Capra, Stanwyck, Riskin and Jo Swerling all were together to create Capra's next picture, The Miracle Woman (1931), a story about a shady evangelist. With John Meehan, Riskin wrote the play that the movie is based on, "Bless You, Sister," and there is a possibly apocryphal story that has Riskin at a story conference at which Capra relates the treatment for the proposed film. Capra, finished, asked Riskin for his input, and Riskin replied, "I wrote that play. My brother and I were stupid enough to produce it on Broadway. It cost us almost every cent we had. If you intend to make a picture of it, it only proves one thing: You're even more stupid than we were."
Jo Swerling adapted Riskin's play, which he and his brother Everett patterned after Sinclair Lewis' "Elmer Gantry." Like the Lewis novel, the play focuses on the relationship between a lady evangelist and a con man. The difference, though, is that the nature of the relationship is just implied in Riskin's play (and the Capra film). There is also the addition of the blind war-vet as the moral conscience of the story; he is the pivotal character, whereas in Lewis' tale, the con artist comes to have complete control over the evangelist after eventually seducing her. Like some other Capra films, The Miracle Woman (1931) is about the love between a romantic, idealizing man and a cynical, bitter woman. Riskin had based his character on lady evangelist Uldine Utley, while Stanwyck based her characterization on Aimee Semple McPherson.
Recognizing that he had something in his star director, Harry Cohn took full advantage of the lowly position his studio had in Hollywood. Both Warner Brothers and mighty MGM habitually lent Cohn their troublesome stars -- anyone rejecting scripts or demanding a pay raise was fodder for a loan out to Cohn's Poverty Row studio. Cohn himself was habitually loathe to sign long-term stars in the early 1930s (although he made rare exceptions to Peter Lorre and The Three Stooges) and was delighted to land the talents of any top flight star and invariably assigned them to Capra's pictures. Most began their tenure in purgatory with trepidation but left eagerly wanting to work with Capra again.
In 1932, Capra decided to make a motion picture that reflected the social conditions of the day. He and Riskin wrote the screenplay for American Madness (1932), a melodrama that is an important precursor to later Capra films, not only with It's a Wonderful Life (1946) which shares the plot device of a bank run, but also in the depiction of the irrationality of a crowd mentality and the ability of the individual to make a difference. In the movie, an idealistic banker is excoriated by his conservative board of directors for making loans to small businesses on the basis of character rather than on sounder financial criteria. Since the Great Depression is on, and many people lack collateral, it would be impossible to productively lend money on any other criteria than character, the banker argues. When there is a run on the bank due to a scandal, it appears that the board of directors are rights the bank depositors make a run on the bank to take out their money before the bank fails. The fear of a bank failure ensures that the failure will become a reality as a crowd mentality takes over among the clientèle. The board of directors refuse to pledge their capital to stave off the collapse of the bank, but the banker makes a plea to the crowd, and just like George Bailey's depositors in It's a Wonderful Life (1946), the bank is saved as the fears of the crowd are ameliorated and businessmen grateful to the banker pledge their capital to save the bank. The board of directors, impressed by the banker's character and his belief in the character of his individual clients (as opposed to the irrationality of the crowd), pledge their capital and the bank run is staved off and the bank is saved.
In his biography, "The Name Above the Picture," Capra wrote that before American Madness (1932), he had only made "escapist" pictures with no basis in reality. He recounts how Poverty Row studios, lacking stars and production values, had to resort to "gimmick" movies to pull the crowds in, making films on au courant controversial subjects that were equivalent to "yellow journalism."
What was more important than the subject and its handling was the maturation of Capra's directorial style with the film. Capra had become convinced that the mass-experience of watching a motion picture with an audience had the psychological effect in individual audience members of slowing down the pace of a film. A film that during shooting and then when viewed on a movieola editing device and on a small screen in a screening room among a few professionals that had seemed normally paced became sluggish when projected on the big screen. While this could have been the result of the projection process blowing up the actors to such large proportions, Capra ultimately believed it was the effect of mass psychology affecting crowds since he also noticed this "slowing down" phenomenon at ball games and at political conventions. Since American Madness (1932) dealt with crowds, he feared that the effect would be magnified.
He decided to boost the pace of the film, during the shooting. He did away with characters' entrances and exits that were a common part of cinematic "grammar" in the early 1930s, a survival of the "photoplays" days. Instead, he "jumped" characters in and out of scenes, and jettisoned the dissolves that were also part of cinematic grammar that typically ended scenes and indicated changes in time or locale so as not to make cutting between scenes seem choppy to the audience. Dialogue was deliberately overlapped, a radical innovation in the early talkies, when actors were instructed to let the other actor finish his or her lines completely before taking up their cue and beginning their own lines, in order to facilitate the editing of the sound-track. What he felt was his greatest innovation was to boost the pacing of the acting in the film by a third by making a scene that would normally play in one minute take only 40 seconds.
When all these innovations were combined in his final cut, it made the movie seem normally paced on the big screen, though while shooting individual scenes, the pacing had seemed exaggerated. It also gave the film a sense of urgency that befitted the subject of a financial panic and a run on a bank. More importantly, it "kept audience attention riveted to the screen," as he said in his autobiography. Except for "mood pieces," Capra subsequently used these techniques in all his films, and he was amused by critics who commented on the "naturalness" of his direction.
Capra was close to completely establishing his themes and style. Justly accused of indulging in sentiment which some critics labeled "Capra-corn," Capra's next film, Lady for a Day (1933) was an adaptation of Damon Runyon's 1929 short story "Madame La Gimp" about a nearly destitute apple peddler whom the superstitious gambler Dave the Dude (portrayed by Warner Brothers star Warren William) sets up in high style so she and her daughter, who is visiting with her finance, will not be embarrassed. Dave the Dude believes his luck at gambling comes from his ritualistically buying an apple a day from Annie, who is distraught and considering suicide to avoid the shame of her daughter seeing her reduced to living on the street. The Dude and his criminal confederates put Annie up in a luxury apartment with a faux husband in order to establish Annie in the eyes of her daughter as a dignified and respectable woman, but in typical Runyon fashion, Annie becomes more than a fake as the masquerade continues.
Robert Riskin wrote the first four drafts of Lady for a Day (1933), and of all the scripts he worked on for Capra, the film deviates less from the script than any other. After seeing the movie, Runyon sent a telegraph to Riskin praising him for his success at elaborating on the story and fleshing out the characters while maintain his basic story. Lady for a Day (1933) was the favorite Capra film of John Ford, the great filmmaker who once directed the unknown extra. The movie cost $300,000 and was the first of Capra's oeuvre to attract the attention of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences, getting a Best Director nomination for Capra, plus nods for Riskin and Best Actress. The movie received Columbia's first Best Picture nomination, the studio never having attracted any attention from the Academy before Lady for a Day (1933). (Capra's last film was the flop remake of Lady for a Day (1933) with Bette Davis and Glenn Ford, Pocketful of Miracles (1961))
Capra reunited with Stanwyck and produced his first universally acknowledged classic, The Bitter Tea of General Yen (1932), a film that now seems to belong more to the oeuvre of Josef von Sternberg than it does to Frank Capra. With "General Yen," Capra had consciously set out to make a movie that would win Academy Awards. Frustrated that the innovative, timely, and critically well-received American Madness (1932) had not received any recognition at the Oscars (particularly in the director's category in recognition of his innovations in pacing), he vented his displeasure to Columbia boss Cohn.
"Forget it," Cohn told Capra, as recounted in his autobiography. "You ain't got a Chinaman's chance. They only vote for that arty junk."
Capra set out to boost his chances by making an arty film featuring a "Chinaman" that confronted that major taboo of American cinema of the first half of the century, miscegenation.
In the movie, the American missionary Megan Davis is in China to marry another missionary. Abducted by the Chinese Warlord General Yen, she is torn away from the American compound that kept her isolated from the Chinese and finds herself in a strange, dangerous culture. The two fall in love despite their different races and life-views. The film ran up against the taboo against miscegenation embedded in the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors Association's Production Code, and while Megan merely kisses General Yen's hand in the picture, the fact that she was undeniably in love with a man from a different race attracted the vituperation of many bigots.
Having fallen for Megan, General Yen engenders her escape back to the Americans before willingly drinking a poisoned cup of tea, his involvement with her having cost him his army, his wealth, and now his desire to live. The Bitter Tea of General Yen (1932) marks the introduction of suicide as a Capra theme that will come back repeatedly, most especially in George Bailey's breakdown on the snowy bridge in It's a Wonderful Life (1946).
Despair often shows itself in Capra films, and although in his post-"General Yen" work, the final reel wraps things up in a happy way, until that final reel, there is tragedy, cynicism, heartless exploitation, and other grim subject matter that Capra's audiences must have known were the truth of the world, but that were too grim to face when walking out of a movie theater. When pre-Code movies were rediscovered and showcased across the United States in the 1990s, they were often accompanied by thesis about how contemporary audiences "read" the films (and post-1934 more Puritanical works), as the movies were not so frank or racy as supposed. There was a great deal of signaling going on which the audience could read into, and the same must have been true for Capra's films, giving lie to the fact that he was a sentimentalist with a saccharine view of America. There are few films as bitter as those of Frank Capra before the final reel.
Despair was what befell Frank Capra, personally, on the night of March 16, 1934, which he attended as one of the Best Director nominees for Lady for a Day (1933). Capra had caught Oscar fever, and in his own words, "In the interim between the nominations and the final voting...my mind was on those Oscars." When Oscar host Will Rogers opened the envelope for Best Director, he commented, "Well, well, well. What do you know. I've watched this young man for a long time. Saw him come up from the bottom, and I mean the bottom. It couldn't have happened to a nicer guy. Come on up and get it, Frank!"
Capra got up to go get it, squeezing past tables and making his way to the open dance floor to accept his Oscar. "The spotlight searched around trying to find me. 'Over here!' I waved. Then it suddenly swept away from me -- and picked up a flustered man standing on the other side of the dance floor - Frank Lloyd!"
Frank Lloyd went up to the dais to accept HIS Oscar while a voice in back of Capra yelled, "Down in front!"
Capra's walk back to his table amidst shouts of "Sit down!" turned into the "Longest, saddest, most shattering walk in my life. I wished I could have crawled under the rug like a miserable worm. When I slumped in my chair I felt like one. All of my friends at the table were crying."
That night, after Lloyd's Cavalcade (1933), beat Lady for a Day (1933) for Best Picture, Capra got drunk at his house and passed out. "Big 'stupido,'" Capra thought to himself, "running up to get an Oscar dying with excitement, only to crawl back dying with shame. Those crummy Academy voters; to hell with their lousy awards. If ever they did vote me one, I would never, never, NEVER show up to accept it."
Capra would win his first of three Best Director Oscars the next year, and would show up to accept it. More importantly, he would become the president of the Academy in 1935 and take it out of the labor relations field a time when labor strife and the formation of the talent guilds threatened to destroy it.
The International Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences had been the brainchild of Louis B. Mayer in 1927 (it dropped the "International" soon after its formation). In order to forestall unionization by the creative talent (directors, actors and screenwriters) who were not covered by the Basic Agreement signed in 1926, Mayer had the idea of forming a company union, which is how the Academy came into being. The nascent Screen Writers Union, which had been created in 1920 in Hollywood, had never succeeded in getting a contract from the studios. It went out of existence in 1927, when labor relations between writers and studios were handled by the Academy's writers' branch.
The Academy had brokered studio-mandated pay-cuts of 10% in 1927 and 1931, and massive layoffs in 1930 and 1931. With the inauguration of President Franklin D. Roosevelt on March 4, 1933, Roosevelt took no time in attempting to tackle the Great Depression. The day after his inauguration, he declared a National Bank Holiday, which hurt the movie industry as it was heavily dependent on bank loans. Louis B. Mayer, as president of the Association of Motion Picture Producers, Inc. (the co-equal arm of the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors Association charged with handling labor relations) huddled with a group from the Academy (the organization he created and had long been criticized for dominating, in both labor relations and during the awards season) and announced a 50% across-the-board pay cut. In response, stagehands called a strike for March 13th, which shut down every studio in Hollywood.
After another caucus between Mayer and the Academy committee, a proposal for a pay-cut on a sliding-scale up to 50% for everyone making over $50 a week; which would only last for eight weeks, was inaugurated. Screen writers resigned en masse from the Academy and joined a reformed Screen Writers Guild, but most employees had little choice and went along with it. All the studios but Warner Bros. and Sam Goldwyn honored the pledge to restore full salaries after the eight weeks, and Warners production chief Darryl F. Zanuck resigned in protest over his studio's failure to honor its pledge. A time of bad feelings persisted, and much anger was directed towards the Academy in its role as company union.
The Academy, trying to position itself as an independent arbiter, hired the accounting firm of Price Waterhouse for the first time to inspect the books of the studios. The audit revealed that all the studios were solvent, but Harry Warner refused to budge and Academy President 'Conrad Nagel' resigned, although some said he was forced out after a vote of no-confidence after arguing Warner's case. The Academy announced that the studio bosses would never again try to impose a horizontal salary cut, but the usefulness of the Academy as a company union was over.
Under Roosevelt's New Deal, the self-regulation imposed by the National Industrial Relations Act (signed into law on June 16th) to bring business sectors back to economic health was predicated upon cartelization, in which the industry itself wrote its own regulatory code. With Hollywood, it meant the re-imposition of paternalistic labor relations that the Academy had been created to wallpaper over. The last nail in the company union's coffin was when it became public knowledge that the Academy appointed a committee to investigate the continued feasibility of the industry practice of giving actors and writers long-term contracts. High salaries to directors, actors, and screen writers was compensation to the creative people for producers refusing to ceded control over creative decision-making. Long-term contracts were the only stability in the Hollywood economic set-up up creative people,. Up to 20%-25% of net earnings of the movie industry went to bonuses to studio owners, production chiefs, and senior executives at the end of each year, and this created a good deal of resentment that fueled the militancy of the SWG and led to the formation of the Screen Actors Guild in July 1933 when they, too, felt that the Academy had sold them out.
The industry code instituted a cap on the salaries of actors, directors, and writers, but not of movie executives; mandated the licensing of agents by producers; and created a reserve clause similar to baseball where studios had renewal options with talent with expired contracts, who could only move to a new studio if the studio they had last been signed to did not pick up their option.
The SWG sent a telegram to FDR in October 1933 denouncing this policy, arguing that the executives had taken millions of dollars of bonuses while running their companies into receivership and bankruptcy. The SWG denounced the continued membership of executives who had led their studios into financial failure remaining on the corporate boards and in the management of the reorganized companies, and furthermore protested their use of the NIRA to write their corrupt and failed business practices into law at the expense of the workers.
There was a mass resignation of actors from the Academy in October 1933, with the actors switching their allegiance to SAG. SAG joined with the SWG to publish "The Screen Guilds Magazine," a periodical whose editorial content attacked the Academy as a company union in the producers' pocket. SAG President Eddie Cantor, a friend of Roosevelt who had bee invited to spend the Thanksgiving Day holiday with the president, informed him of the guild's grievances over the NIRA code. Roosevelt struck down many of the movie industry code's anti-labor provisions by executive order.
The labor battles between the guilds and the studios would continue until the late 1930s, and by the time Frank Capra was elected president of the Academy in 1935, the post was an unenviable one. The Screen Directors Guild was formed at King Vidor's house on January 15, 1936, and one of its first acts was to send a letter to its members urging them to boycott the Academy Awards ceremony, which was three days away. None of the guilds had been recognized as bargaining agents by the studios, and it was argued to grace the Academy Awards would give the Academy, a company union, recognition. Academy membership had declined to 40 from a high of 600, and Capra believed that the guilds wanted to punish the studios financially by depriving them of the good publicity the Oscars generated.
But the studios couldn't care less. Seeing that the Academy was worthless to help them in its attempts to enforce wage cuts, it too abandoned the Academy, which it had financed. Capra and the Board members had to pay for the Oscar statuettes for the 1936 ceremony. In order to counter the boycott threat, Capra needed a good publicity gimmick himself, and the Academy came up with one, voting D.W. Griffith an honorary Oscar, the first bestowed since one had been given to Charles Chaplin at the first Academy Awards ceremony.
The Guilds believed the boycott had worked as only 20 SAG members and 13 SWG members had showed up at the Oscars, but Capra remembered the night as a victory as all the winners had shown up. However, 'Variety' wrote that "there was not the galaxy of stars and celebs in the director and writer groups which distinguished awards banquets in recent years." "Variety" reported that to boost attendance, tickets had been given to secretaries and the like. Bette Davis and Victor McLaglen had showed up to accept their Oscars, but McLaglen's director and screenwriter, John Ford and Dudley Nichols, both winners like McLaglen for The Informer (1935), were not there, and Nichols became the first person to refuse an Academy Award when he sent back his statuette to the Academy with a note saying he would not turn his back on his fellow writers in the SWG. Capra sent it back to him. Ford, the treasurer of the SDG, had not showed up to accept his Oscar, he explained, because he wasn't a member of the Academy. When Capra staged a ceremony where Ford accepted his award, the SDG voted him out of office.
To save the Academy and the Oscars, Capra convinced the board to get it out of the labor relations field. He also democratized the nomination process to eliminate studio politics, opened the cinematography and interior decoration awards to films made outside the U.S., and created two new acting awards for supporting performances to win over SAG.
By the 1937 awards ceremony, SAG signaled its pleasure that the Academy had mostly stayed out of labor relations by announcing it had no objection to its members attending the awards ceremony. The ceremony was a success, despite the fact that the Academy had to charge admission due to its poor finances. Frank Capra had saved the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, and he even won his second Oscar that night, for directing Mr. Deeds Goes to Town (1936). At the end of the evening, Capra announced the creation of the Irving Thalberg Memorial Award to honor "the most consistent high level of production achievement by an individual producer." It was an award he himself was not destined to win.
By the 1938 awards, the Academy and all three guilds had buried the hatchet, and the guild presidents all attended the ceremony: SWG President Dudley Nichols, who finally had accepted his Oscar, SAG President Robert Montgomery, and SDG President King Vidor. Capra also had introduced the secret ballot, the results of which were unknown to everyone but the press, who were informed just before the dinner so they could make their deadlines. The first Irving Thalberg Award was given to long-time Academy supporter and anti-Guild stalwart Darryl F. Zanuck by Cecil B. DeMille, who in his preparatory remarks, declared that the Academy was "now free of all labor struggles."
But those struggles weren't over. In 1939, Capra had been voted president of the SDG and began negotiating with AMPP President 'Joseph Schenck', the head of 20th Century-Fox, for the industry to recognize the SDG as the sole collective bargaining agent for directors. When Schenck refused, Capra mobilized the directors and threatened a strike. He also threatened to resign from the Academy and mount a boycott of the awards ceremony, which was to be held a week later. Schenck gave in, and Capra won another victory when he was named Best Director for a third time at the Academy Awards, and his movie, You Can't Take It with You (1938), was voted Best Picture of 1938.
The 1940 awards ceremony was the last that Capra presided over, and he directed a documentary about them, which was sold to Warner Bros' for $30,000, the monies going to the Academy. He was nominated himself for Best Director and Best Picture for Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (1939), but lost to the Gone with the Wind (1939) juggernaut. Under Capra's guidance, the Academy had left the labor relations field behind in order to concentrated on the awards (publicity for the industry), research and education.
"I believe the guilds should more or less conduct the operations and functions of this institution," he said in his farewell speech. He would be nominated for Best Director and Best Picture once more with It's a Wonderful Life (1946) in 1947, but the Academy would never again honor him, not even with an honorary award after all his service. (Bob Hope, in contrast, received four honorary awards, including a lifetime membership in 1945, and the Jean Hersholt Humanitarian award in 1960 from the Academy.) The SDG (subsequently renamed the Directors Guild of America after its 1960 with the Radio and Television Directors Guild and which Capra served as its first president from 1960-61), the union he had struggled with in the mid-1930s but which he had first served as president from 1939 to 1941 and won it recognition, voted him a lifetime membership in 1941 and a Lifetime Achievement Award in 1959.
Whenever Capra convinced studio boss Harry Cohn to let him make movies with more controversial or ambitious themes, the movies typically lost money after under-performing at the box office. The Bitter Tea of General Yen (1932) and Lost Horizon (1937) were both expensive, philosophically minded pictures that sought to reposition Capra and Columbia into the prestige end of the movie market. After the former's relative failure at the box office and with critics, Capra turned to making a screwball comedy, a genre he excelled at, with It Happened One Night (1934). Bookended with You Can't Take It with You (1938), these two huge hits won Columbia Best Picture Oscars and Capra Best Director Academy Awards. These films, along with Mr. Deeds Goes to Town (1936), Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (1939), and It's a Wonderful Life (1946) are the heart of Capra's cinematic canon. They are all classics and products of superb craftsmanship, but they gave rise to the canard of "Capra-corn." One cannot consider Capra without taking into account The Bitter Tea of General Yen (1932), American Madness (1932), and Meet John Doe (1941), all three dark films tackling major issues, Imperialism, the American plutocracy, and domestic fascism. Capra was no Pollyanna, and the man who was called a "dago" by Mack Sennett and who went on to become one of the most unique, highly honored and successful directors, whose depictions of America are considered Americana themselves, did not live his cinematic life looking through a rose-colored range-finder
In his autobiography "The Name Above the Title," Capra says that at the time of American Madness (1932), critics began commenting on his "gee-whiz" style of filmmaking. The critics attacked "gee whiz" cultural artifacts as their fabricators "wander about wide-eyed and breathless, seeing everything as larger than life." Capra's response was "Gee whiz!"
Defining Hollywood as split between two camps, "Mr. Up-beat" and "Mr. Down-beat," Capra defended the up-beat gee whiz on the grounds that, "To some of us, all that meets the eye IS larger than life, including life itself. Who ca match the wonder of it?"
Among the artists of the "Gee-Whiz:" school were Ernest Hemingway, Homer, and Paul Gauguin, a novelist who lived a heroic life larger than life itself, a poet who limned the lives of gods and heroes, and a painter who created a mythic Tahiti, the Tahiti that he wanted to find. Capra pointed to Moses and the apostles as examples of men who were larger than life. Capra was proud to be "Mr. Up-beat" rather than belong to "the 'ashcan' school" whose "films depict life as an alley of cats clawing lids off garbage cans, and man as less noble than a hyena. The 'ash-canners,' in turn, call us Pollyannas, mawkish sentimentalists, and corny happy-enders."
What really moves Capra is that in America, there was room for both schools, that there was no government interference that kept him from making a film like American Madness (1932). (While Ambassador to the Court of St. James, Joseph P. Kennedy had asked Harry Cohn to stop exporting Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (1939) to Europe as it portrayed American democracy so negatively.) About Mr. Up-beat and Mr-Downbeat and "Mr. In-between," Capra says, "We all respect and admire each other because the great majority freely express their own individual artistry unfettered by subsidies or strictures from government, pressure groups, or ideologists."
In the period 1934 to 1941, Capra the created the core of his canon with the classics It Happened One Night (1934), Mr. Deeds Goes to Town (1936), You Can't Take It with You (1938), Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (1939) and Meet John Doe (1941), wining three Best Director Oscars in the process. Some cine-historians call Capra the great American propagandist, he was so effective in creating an indelible impression of America in the 1930s. "Maybe there never was an America in the thirties," John Cassavetes was quoted as saying. "Maybe it was all Frank Capra."
After the United States went to war in December 1941, Frank Capra rejoined the Army and became an actual propagandist. His "Why We Fight" series of propaganda films were highly lauded for their remarkable craftsmanship and were the best of the U.S. propaganda output during the war. Capra's philosophy, which has been variously described as a kind of Christian socialism (his films frequently feature a male protagonist who can be seen a Christ figure in a story about redemption emphasizing New Testament values) that is best understood as an expression of humanism, made him an ideal propagandist. He loved his adopted country with the fervor of the immigrant who had realized the American dream. One of his propaganda films, The Negro Soldier (1944), is a milestone in race relations.
Capra, a genius in the manipulation of the first form of "mass media," was opposed to "massism." The crowd in a Capra film is invariably wrong, and he comes down on the side of the individual, who can make a difference in a society of free individuals. In an interview, Capra said he was against "mass entertainment, mass production, mass education, mass everything. Especially mass man. I was fighting for, in a sense, the preservation of the liberty of the individual person against the mass."
Capra had left Columbia after "Mr. Smith" and formed his own production company. After the war, he founded Liberty Films with John Ford and made his last masterpiece, It's a Wonderful Life (1946). Liberty folded prior to its release (another Liberty film, William Wyler's masterpiece, The Best Years of Our Lives (1946) was released through United Artists). Though Capra received his sixth Oscar nomination as best director, the movie flopped at the box office, which is hard to believe now that the film is considered must-see viewing each Christmas. Capra's period of greatness was over, and after making three under-whelming films from 1948 to '51 (including a remake of his earlier Broadway Bill (1934)), Capra didn't direct another picture for eight years, instead making a series of memorable semi-comic science documentaries for television that became required viewing for most 1960's school kids. His last two movies, A Hole in the Head (1959) and Pocketful of Miracles (1961) his remake of Lady for a Day (1933) did little to enhance his reputation.
But a great reputation it was, and is. Capra's films withstood the test of time and continue to be as beloved as when they were embraced by the movie-going "masses" in the 1930s. It was the craftsmanship: Capra was undeniably a master of his medium. The great English novelist Graham Greene, who supported himself as a film critic in the 1930s, loved Capra's films due to their sense of responsibility and of common life, and due to his connection with his audience. (Capra, according to the 1938 "Time" article, believed that what he liked would be liked by moviegoers). In his review of Mr. Deeds Goes to Town (1936), Greene elucidated the central theme of Capra's movies: "Goodness and simplicity manhandled in a deeply selfish and brutal world."
But it was Capra's great mastery over film that was the key to his success. Comparing Capra to Dickens in a not wholly flattering review of You Can't Take It with You (1938), Green found Capra "a rather muddled and sentimental idealist who feels -- vaguely -- that something is wrong with the social system" (807). Commenting on the improbable scene in which Grandpa Vanderhof persuades the munitions magnate Anthony P. Kirby to give everything up and play the harmonica, Greene stated:
"It sounds awful, but it isn't as awful as all that, for Capra has a touch of genius with a camera: his screen always seems twice as big as other people's, and he cuts as brilliantly as Eisenstein (the climax when the big bad magnate takes up his harmonica is so exhilarating in its movement that you forget its absurdity). Humour and not wit is his line, a humor that shades off into whimsicality, and a kind of popular poetry which is apt to turn wistful. We may groan and blush as he cuts his way remorselessly through all finer values to the fallible human heart, but infallibly he makes his appeal - to that great soft organ with its unreliable goodness and easy melancholy and baseless optimism. The cinema, a popular craft, can hardly be expected to do more."
Capra was a populist, and the simplicity of his narrative structures, in which the great social problems facing America were boiled down to scenarios in which metaphorical boy scouts took on corrupt political bosses and evil-minded industrialists, created mythical America of simple archetypes that with its humor, created powerful films that appealed to the elemental emotions of the audience. The immigrant who had struggled and been humiliated but persevere due to his inner resolution harnessed the mytho-poetic power of the movie to create proletarian passion plays that appealed to the psyche of the New Deal movie-goer. The country during the Depression was down but not out, and the ultimate success of the individual in the Capra films was a bracing tonic for the movie audience of the 1930s. His own personal history, transformed on the screen, became their myths that got them through the Depression, and when that and the war was over, the great filmmaker found himself out of time. Capra, like Charles Dickens, moralized political and economic issues. Both were primarily masters of personal and moral expression, and not of the social and political. It was the emotional realism, not the social realism, of such films as Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (1939), which he was concerned with, and by focusing on the emotional and moral issues his protagonists faced, typically dramatized as a conflict between cynicism and the protagonist's faith and idealism, that made the movies so powerful, and made them register so powerfully with an audience.- Producer
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Terrence Malick was born in Ottawa, Illinois. His family subsequently lived in Oklahoma and he went to school in Austin, Texas. He did his undergraduate work at Harvard, graduating summa cum laude with a degree in philosophy in 1965.
A member of the Phi Beta Kappa honor society, he attended Magdalen College, Oxford on a Rhodes scholarship, but did not finish his thesis on Martin Heidegger, allegedly because of a disagreement with his advisor. Returning to the States, he taught philosophy at M.I.T. and published a translation of Heidegger's "Vom Wesen des Grundes" as "The Essence of Reasons". Malick did not get his PhD in philosophy: Instead, he attended the American Film Institute Conservatory in its inaugural year (1969), taking a Masters of Fine Arts degree in film-making. His masters thesis was the seventeen-minute comedy short Lanton Mills (1969), which starred Warren Oates and Harry Dean Stanton. Malick himself acted in the short.
At A.F.I., Malick made a lasting association with Jack Fisk, who would establish himself as an Oscar-nominated art director and production designer and serve as art director on all of Malick's films. He also picked up Mike Medavoy as an agent, who got Malick work doctoring scripts and marketed his original ones. He wrote the screenplay for the 1972 Alan Arkin trucker movie Deadhead Miles (1972), which was many miles from Harvard let along Oxford, and for the 1972 Paul Newman-Lee Marvin contemporary oater Pocket Money (1972), another departure from fields of academia. "Deadhead Miles" was dumped by Paramount as unreleasable and "Pocket Money", despite being headlined by two Top Ten Box Office stars, flopped. It was an inauspicious start to a legendary career, but it influenced Malick to begin directing his own scripts.
His first two films were the now critically acclaimed Badlands (1973) and Days of Heaven (1978). He then took a self-imposed retirement of nearly two decades from film-making before lensing his 1998 adaptation of James Jones's The Thin Red Line (1998), which was nominated for 7 Academy Awards, including nods for Malick for directing and adapted screenplay.
Adopting a Kubrickian pace of movie-making, he directed The New World (2005) and the autobiographical The Tree of Life (2011) with gaps of only seven and six years, respectively, between release. However, he reportedly was working on ideas for "The Tree of Life" since the late 70s, including exposing footage that found its way into his finished film.
In an unprecedented burst of productivity, he shot his next four films, To the Wonder (2012), Knight of Cups (2015), an as-yet unnamed drama and the cosmic documentary Voyage of Time: Life's Journey (2016) back-to-back during and immediately after completing the long editing process of "Tree of Life". Like Stanley Kubrick, Malick usually takes well over a year to edit his films. All three are highly anticipated by cineastes the world over.- Producer
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Timothy Walter Burton was born in Burbank, California, to Jean Rae (Erickson), who owned a cat-themed gift shop, and William Reed Burton, who worked for the Burbank Park and Recreation Department. He spent most of his childhood as a recluse, drawing cartoons, and watching old movies (he was especially fond of films with Vincent Price). When he was in the ninth grade, his artistic talent was recognized by a local garbage company, when he won a prize for an anti-litter poster he designed. The company placed this poster on all of their garbage trucks for a year. After graduating from high school, he attended California Institute of the Arts. Like so many others who graduated from that school, Burton's first job was as an animator for Disney.
His early film career was fueled by almost unbelievable good luck, but it's his talent and originality that have kept him at the top of the Hollywood tree. He worked on such films as The Fox and the Hound (1981) and The Black Cauldron (1985), but had some creative differences with his colleagues. Nevertheless, Disney recognized his talent, and gave him the green light to make Vincent (1982), an animated short about a boy who wanted to be just like Vincent Price. Narrated by Price himself, the short was a critical success and won several awards. Burton made a few other short films, including his first live-action film, Frankenweenie (1984). A half-hour long twist on the tale of Frankenstein, it was deemed inappropriate for children and wasn't released. But actor Paul Reubens (aka Pee-Wee Herman) saw Frankenweenie (1984), and believed that Burton would be the right man to direct him in his first full-length feature film, Pee-wee's Big Adventure (1985). The film was a surprise success, and Burton instantly became popular. However, many of the scripts that were offered to him after this were essentially just spin-offs of the film, and Burton wanted to do something new.
For three years, he made no more films, until he was presented with the script for Beetlejuice (1988). The script was wild and wasn't really about anything, but was filled with such artistic and quirky opportunities, Burton couldn't say no. Beetlejuice (1988) was another big hit, and Burton's name in Hollywood was solidified. It was also his first film with actor Michael Keaton. Warner Bros. then entrusted him with Batman (1989), a film based on the immensely popular comic book series of the same name. Starring Michael Keaton and Jack Nicholson, the film was the most financially successful film of the year and Burton's biggest box-office hit to date. Due to the fantastic success of his first three films, he was given the green light to make his next film, any kind of film he wanted. That film was Edward Scissorhands (1990), one of his most emotional, esteemed and artistic films to date. Edward Scissorhands (1990) was also Burton's first film with actor Johnny Depp. Burton's next film was Batman Returns (1992), and was darker and quirkier than the first one, and, while by no means a financial flop, many people felt somewhat disappointed by it. While working on Batman Returns (1992), he also produced the popular The Nightmare Before Christmas (1993), directed by former fellow Disney Animator Henry Selick. Burton reunited with Johnny Depp on the film Ed Wood (1994), a film showered with critical acclaim, Martin Landau won an academy award for his performance in it, and it is very popular now, but flopped during its initial release. Burton's subsequent film, Mars Attacks! (1996), had much more vibrant colors than his other films. Despite being directed by Burton and featuring all-star actors including Jack Nicholson, Glenn Close, Pierce Brosnan and Michael J. Fox, it received mediocre reviews and wasn't immensely popular at the box office, either.
Burton returned to his darker and more artistic form with the film Sleepy Hollow (1999), starring Johnny Depp, Christina Ricci and Casper Van Dien. The film was praised for its art direction and was financially successful, redeeming Burton of the disappointment many had felt by Mars Attacks! (1996). His next film was Planet of the Apes (2001), a remake of the classic of the same name. The film was panned by many critics but was still financially successful. While on the set of Planet of the Apes (2001), Burton met Helena Bonham Carter, with whom he has two children. Burton directed the film Big Fish (2003) - a much more conventional film than most of his others, it received a good deal of critical praise, although it disappointed some of his long-time fans who preferred the quirkiness of his other, earlier films. Despite the fluctuations in his career, Burton proved himself to be one of the most popular directors of the late 20th century. He directed Johnny Depp once again in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (2005), a film as quirky anything he's ever done.- Writer
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Considered to be one of the most pivotal stars of the early days of Hollywood, Charlie Chaplin lived an interesting life both in his films and behind the camera. He is most recognized as an icon of the silent film era, often associated with his popular character, the Little Tramp; the man with the toothbrush mustache, bowler hat, bamboo cane, and a funny walk.
Charles Spencer Chaplin was born in Walworth, London, England on April 16, 1889, to Hannah Harriet Pedlingham (Hill) and Charles Chaplin, both music hall performers, who were married on June 22, 1885. After Charles Sr. separated from Hannah to perform in New York City, Hannah then tried to resurrect her stage career. Unfortunately, her singing voice had a tendency to break at unexpected moments. When this happened, the stage manager spotted young Charlie standing in the wings and led him on stage, where five-year-old Charlie began to sing a popular tune. Charlie and his half-brother, Syd Chaplin spent their lives in and out of charity homes and workhouses between their mother's bouts of insanity. Hannah was committed to Cane Hill Asylum in May 1903 and lived there until 1921, when Chaplin moved her to California.
Chaplin began his official acting career at the age of eight, touring with the Eight Lancashire Lads. At age 18, he began touring with Fred Karno's vaudeville troupe, joining them on the troupe's 1910 United States tour. He traveled west to California in December 1913 and signed on with Keystone Studios' popular comedy director Mack Sennett, who had seen Chaplin perform on stage in New York. Charlie soon wrote his brother Syd, asking him to become his manager. While at Keystone, Chaplin appeared in and directed 35 films, starring as the Little Tramp in nearly all.
In November 1914, he left Keystone and signed on at Essanay, where he made 15 films. In 1916, he signed on at Mutual and made 12 films. In June 1917, Chaplin signed up with First National Studios, after which he built Chaplin Studios. In 1919, he and Douglas Fairbanks, Mary Pickford and D.W. Griffith formed United Artists (UA).
Chaplin's life and career was full of scandal and controversy. His first big scandal was during World War I, at which time his loyalty to England, his home country, was questioned. He had never applied for American citizenship, but claimed that he was a "paying visitor" to the United States. Many British citizens called Chaplin a coward and a slacker. This and other career eccentricities sparked suspicion with FBI chief J. Edgar Hoover and the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC), who believed that he was injecting Communist propaganda into his films. Chaplin's later film The Great Dictator (1940), which was his first "talkie", also created a stir. In the film, Chaplin plays a humorous caricature of Adolf Hitler. Some thought the film was poorly done and in bad taste. However, the film grossed over $5 million and earned five Academy Award Nominations.
Another scandal occurred when Chaplin briefly dated 22 year-old Joan Barry. However, Chaplin's relationship with Barry came to an end in 1942, after a series of harassing actions from her. In May 1943, Barry returned to inform Chaplin that she was pregnant and filed a paternity suit, claiming that the unborn child was his. During the 1944 trial, blood tests proved that Chaplin was not the father, but at the time, blood tests were inadmissible evidence, and he was ordered to pay $75 a week until the child turned 21.
Chaplin also was scrutinized for his support in aiding the Russian struggle against the invading Nazis during World War II, and the United States government questioned his moral and political views, suspecting him of having Communist ties. For this reason, HUAC subpoenaed him in 1947. However, HUAC finally decided that it was no longer necessary for him to appear for testimony. Conversely, when Chaplin and his family traveled to London for the premier of Limelight (1952), he was denied re-entry to the United States. In reality, the government had almost no evidence to prove that he was a threat to national security. Instead, he and his wife decided to settle in Switzerland.
Chaplin was married four times and had a total of 11 children. In 1918, he married Mildred Harris and they had a son together, Norman Spencer Chaplin, who lived only three days. Chaplin and Harris divorced in 1920. He married Lita Grey in 1924, who had two sons, Charles Chaplin Jr. and Sydney Chaplin. They were divorced in 1927. In 1936, Chaplin married Paulette Goddard, and his final marriage was to Oona O'Neill (Oona Chaplin), daughter of playwright Eugene O'Neill in 1943. Oona gave birth to eight children: Geraldine Chaplin, Michael Chaplin, Josephine Chaplin, Victoria Chaplin, Eugene Chaplin, Jane Chaplin, Annette-Emilie Chaplin, and Christopher Chaplin.
In contrast to many of his boisterous characters, Chaplin was a quiet man who kept to himself a great deal. He also had an "un-millionaire" way of living. Even after he had accumulated millions, he continued to live in shabby accommodations. In 1921, Chaplin was decorated by the French government for his outstanding work as a filmmaker and was elevated to the rank of Officer of the Legion of Honor in 1952. In 1972, he was honored with an Academy Award for his "incalculable effect in making motion pictures the art form of the century". He was appointed Knight Commander of the Order of the British Empire in the 1975 New Year's Honours List. No formal reason for the honour was listed. The citation simply reads "Charles Spencer Chaplin, Film Actor and Producer".
Chaplin's other works included musical scores that he composed for many of his films. He also authored two autobiographical books, "My Autobiography" (1964) and its companion volume, "My Life in Pictures" (1974).
Chaplin died at age 88 of natural causes on December 25, 1977 at his home in Vevey, Switzerland. His funeral was a small and private Anglican ceremony according to his wishes. In 1978, Chaplin's corpse was stolen from its grave and was not recovered for three months; he was re-buried in a vault surrounded by cement.
Six of Chaplin's films have been selected for preservation in the National Film Registry by the United States Library of Congress: The Immigrant (1917), The Kid (1921), The Gold Rush (1925), City Lights (1931), Modern Times (1936), and The Great Dictator (1940).
Charlie Chaplin is considered one of the greatest filmmakers in the history of American cinema, whose movies were and still are popular throughout the world and have even gained notoriety as time progresses. His films show, through the Little Tramp's positive outlook on life in a world full of chaos, that the human spirit has and always will remain the same.