Greatest Directors--A
This is a ranked list of directors whose last names begin with "A."
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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.- Director
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Robert Altman was born on February 20th, 1925 in Kansas City, Missouri, to B.C. (an insurance salesman) and Helen Altman. He entered St. Peters Catholic school at the age six, and spent a short time at a Catholic high school. From there, he went to Rockhurst High School. It was then that he started exploring the art of exploring sound with the cheap tape recorders available at the time. He was then sent to Wentworth Military Academy in Lexington, Missouri where he attended through Junior College. In 1945, he enlisted in the US Army Air Forces and became a copilot of a B-24. After his discharge from the military, he became fascinated by movies and he and his first wife, LaVonne Elmer, moved to Hollywood, where Altman tried acting (appearing in the film The Secret Life of Walter Mitty (1947)), songwriting (he wrote a musical intended for Broadway, "The Rumors are Flying"), and screen-writing (he co-wrote the screenplay for the film Bodyguard (1948) and wrote the story (uncredited) for Christmas Eve (1947)), but he could not get a foot hold in Tinseltown. After a brief fling as publicity director with a company in the business of tattooing dogs, Altman finally gave up and returned to his hometown of Kansas City, where he decided he wanted to do some serious work in filmmaking. An old friend of his recommended him to a film production company in Kansas City, the Calvin Co., who hired him in 1950. After a few months of work in writing scripts and editing films, Altman began directing films at Calvin. It was here (while working on documentaries, employee training films, industrial and educational films and advertisements) that he learned much about film making. All in all, Altman pieced together sixty to sixty-five short films for Calvin on every subject imaginable, from football to car crashes, but he kept grasping for more challenging projects. He wrote the screenplay for the Kansas City-produced feature film Corn's-A-Poppin' (1955), he produced and directed several television commercials including one with the Eileen Ford Agency, he co-created and directed the TV series The Pulse of the City (1953) which ran for one season on the independent Dumont network, and he even had a formative crack at directing local community theater. His big-screen directorial debut came while still at Calvin with The Delinquents (1957) and, by 1956, he left the Calvin Co., and went to Hollywood to direct Alfred Hitchcock's TV show. From here, he went on to direct a large number of television shows, until he was offered the script for M*A*S*H (1970) in 1969. He was hardly the producer's first choice - more than fifteen other directors had already turned it down. This wasn't his first movie, but it was his first success. After that, he had his share of hits and misses, but The Player (1992) and, more recently, Gosford Park (2001) were particularly well-received.- Writer
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The most internationally acclaimed Spanish filmmaker since Luis Buñuel was born in a small town (Calzada de Calatrava) in the impoverished Spanish region of La Mancha. He arrived in Madrid in 1968, and survived by selling used items in the flea-market called El Rastro. Almodóvar couldn't study filmmaking because he didn't have the money to afford it. Besides, the filmmaking schools were closed in early 70s by Franco's government. Instead, he found a job in the Spanish phone company and saved his salary to buy a Super 8 camera. From 1972 to 1978, he devoted himself to make short films with the help of of his friends. The "premieres" of those early films were famous in the rapidly growing world of the Spanish counter-culture. In few years, Almodóvar became a star of "La Movida", the pop cultural movement of late 70s Madrid. His first feature film, Pepi, Luci, Bom and Other Girls Like Mom (1980), was made in 16 mm and blown-up to 35 mm for public release. In 1987, he and his brother Agustín Almodóvar established their own production company: El Deseo, S. A. The "Almodóvar phenomenon" has reached all over the world, making his films very popular in many countries.- Director
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Wesley Wales Anderson was born in Houston, Texas. His mother, Texas Ann (Burroughs), is an archaeologist turned real estate agent, and his father, Melver Leonard Anderson, worked in advertising and PR. He has two brothers, Eric and Mel. Anderson's parents divorced when he was a young child, an event that he described as the most crucial event of his brothers and his growing up. During childhood, Anderson also began writing plays and making super-8 movies. He was educated at Westchester High School and then St. John's, a private prep school in Houston, Texas, which was later to prove an inspiration for the film Rushmore (1998).
Anderson attended the University of Texas in Austin, where he majored in philosophy. It was there that he met Owen Wilson. They became friends and began making short films, some of which aired on a local cable-access station. One of their shorts was Bottle Rocket (1993), which starred Owen and his brother Luke Wilson. The short was screened at the Sundance Film Festival, where it was successfully received, so much so that they received funding to make a feature-length version. Bottle Rocket (1996) was not a commercial hit, but it gained a cult audience and high-profile fans, which included Martin Scorsese.
Success followed with films such as Rushmore (1998), The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou (2004), The Royal Tenenbaums (2001) and an animated feature, Fantastic Mr. Fox (2009). The latter two films earned Anderson Oscar nominations.- 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).- Writer
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Is the son of a Spanish mother and a Chilean father. His family moved back to Spain when he was 1 year old, and he grew up and studied in Madrid. He wrote, produced and directed his first short film La cabeza at the age of 19, and he was 23 when he directed his feature debut Thesis (1996). His film Open Your Eyes (1997) was a huge success in Spain and was distributed worldwide. It was remade in Hollywood by Cameron Crowe as Vanilla Sky (2001), starring Tom Cruise, Penelope Cruz (also the star of the original version) and Cameron Diaz. The Others (2001) is Amenábar's first English language film.- Director
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Michael Apted was born on 10 February 1941 in Aylesbury, Buckinghamshire, England, UK. He was a director and producer, known for Amazing Grace (2006), Gorillas in the Mist (1988) and Rome (2005). He was married to Paige Simpson, Dana Stevens and Jo Apted. He died on 7 January 2021 in Los Angeles, California, USA.- 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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Robert Aldrich entered the film industry in 1941 when he got a job as a production clerk at RKO Radio Pictures. He soon worked his way up to script clerk, then became an assistant director, a production manager and an associate producer. He began writing and directing for TV series in the early 1950s, and directed his first feature in 1953 (Big Leaguer (1953)). Soon thereafter he established his own production company and produced most of his own films, collaborating in the writing of many of them. Among his best-known pictures are Kiss Me Deadly (1955), What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? (1962) and the muscular WW II mega-hit The Dirty Dozen (1967).- Director
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Chantal Akerman was born on 6 June 1950 in Brussels, Belgium. She was a director and writer, known for The Meetings of Anna (1978), I, You, He, She (1974) and A Couch in New York (1996). She was married to Sonia Wieder-Atherton. She died on 5 October 2015 in Paris, France.- Writer
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Dario Argento was born on September 7, 1940, in Rome, Italy, the first-born son of famed Italian producer Salvatore Argento and Brazilian fashion model Elda Luxardo. Argento recalls getting his ideas for filmmaking from his close-knit family from Italian folk tales told by his parents and other family members, including an aunt who told him frighting bedtime stories. Argento based most of his thriller movies on childhood trauma, yet his own--according to him--was a normal one. Along with tales spun by his aunt, Argento was impressed by stories from The Grimm Brothers, Hans Christian Andersen and Edgar Allan Poe. Argento started his career writing for various film journal magazines while still in his teens attending a Catholic high school. After graduation, instead of going to college, Argento took a job as a columnist for the Rome daily newspaper "Paese Sera". Inspired by the movies, he later found work as a screenwriter and wrote several screenplays for a number of films, but the most important were his western collaborations, which included Cemetery Without Crosses (1969) and the Sergio Leone masterpiece Once Upon a Time in the West (1968). After its release Argento wrote and directed his first movie, The Bird with the Crystal Plumage (1970), which starred Tony Musante and and British actress Suzy Kendall. It's a loose adoption on Fredric Brown's novel "The Screaming Mimi", which was made for his father's film company. Argento wanted to direct the movie himself because he did not want any other director messing up the production and his screenplay.
After "The Bird With the Crystal Plumage" became an international hit, Argento followed up with two more thrillers, The Cat o' Nine Tails (1971), starring 'Karl Madlen' (qv" and 'James Fransiscus', and Four Flies on Grey Velvet (1971) ("Four Flies On Black Velvet"), both backed by his father Salvatore. Argento then directed the TV drama Testimone oculare (1973) and the historical TV drama The Five Days (1973). He then went back to directing so-called "giallo" thrillers, starting with Deep Red (1975), a violent mystery-thriller starring David Hemmings that inspired a number of international directors in the thriller-horror genre. His next work was Suspiria (1977), a surreal horror film about a witch's coven that was inspired by the Gothic fairy tales of the Grimm Brothers and Hans Christian Anderson, which he also wrote in collaboration with his girlfriend, screenwriter/actress Daria Nicolodi, who acted in "Profondo Rosso" ("Deep Red") and most of Argento's films from then to the late 1980s. Argento advanced the unfinished trilogy with Inferno (1980), before returning to the "giallo" genre with the gory Tenebrae (1982), and then with the haunting Phenomena (1985).
The lukewarm reviews for his films, however, caused Argento to slip away from directing to producing and co-writing two Lamberto Bava horror flicks, Demons (1985) and Demons 2 (1986). Argento returned to directing with the "giallo" thriller Opera (1987), which according to him was "a very unpleasant experience", and no wonder: a rash of technical problems delayed production, the lead actress Vanessa Redgrave dropped out before filming was to begin, Argento's father Salvatore died during filming and his long-term girlfriend Daria broke off their relationship. After the commercial box-office failure of "Opera", Argento temporarily settled in the US, where he collaborated with director George A. Romero on the two-part horror-thriller Two Evil Eyes (1990) (he had previously collaborated with Romero on the horror action thriller Dawn of the Dead (1978)). While still living in America, Argento appeared in small roles in several films and directed another violent mystery thriller, Trauma (1993), which starred his youngest daughter Asia Argento from his long-term relationship with Nicolodi.
Argento returned to Italy in 1995, where he made a comeback in the horror genre with The Stendhal Syndrome (1996) and then with another version of "The Phantom of the Opera", The Phantom of the Opera (1998), both of which starred Asia. Most recently, Argento directed a number of "giallo" mystery thrillers such as Sleepless (2001), The Card Player (2003) and Do You Like Hitchcock? (2005), as well as two gory, supernatural-themed episodes of the USA TV cable anthology series Masters of Horror (2005).
Having always wanted to make a third chapter to his "Three Mothers" horror films, Argento finally completed the trilogy in 2007 with the release of Mother of Tears (2007), which starred Asia Argento as a young woman trying to identify and stop the last surviving evil witch from taking over the world. In addition to his Gothic and violent style of storytelling, "La terza madre" has many references to two of his previous films, "Suspiria" (1997) and "Inferno" (1980), which is a must for fans of the trilogy.
His movies may be regarded by some critics and opponents as cheap and overly violent, but second or third viewings show him to be a talented writer/director with a penchant for original ideas and creative directing.- Writer
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Together with Fellini, Bergman and Kurosawa, Michelangelo Antonioni is credited with defining the modern art film. And yet Antonioni's cinema is also recognized today for defying any easy categorization, with his films ultimately seeming to belong to their own distinctive genre. Indeed, the difficulty of precisely describing their category is itself the very quintessence of Antonioni's films. Among the most-cited contributions of Antonioni's cinema are their striking descriptions of that unique strain of post-boom ennui everywhere apparent in the transformed life and leisure habits of the Italian middle and upper classes. Detecting profound technological, political and psychological shifts at work in post-WWII Italy, Antonioni set out to explore the ambiguities of a suddenly alienated and dislocated Italy, not simply through his oblique style of narrative and characters, nor through any overt political messaging, but instead by tearing asunder the traditional boundaries of cinematic narrative in order to explore an ever shifting internal landscape expressed through architecture, urban space and the sculptural, shaping presence of objects, shapes and emotions invented by camera movement and depth of focus.
Antonioni deftly manipulates the quieter, indirect edges of cinematic structure, often so discretely that his existential puzzles are felt before they can be intellectualized. The negative space is as prominent as the positive, silence as loud as noise, absence as palpable as presence, and passivity as driving a force as direct action. Transgressing unspoken cinematic laws, Antonioni frequently focuses on female protagonists while refusing to sentimentalize or morally judge his characters and placing them on equal footing with the other elements within his total dynamic system, like sounds or set pieces. And he violates spoken rules with unconventional cutting techniques, fractured spatial and temporal continuity, and a camera that insistently lingers in melancholy pauses, long after the actors depart, as if drifting just behind an equally distracted, dissipating narrative. Leaving questions unanswered and plot points irresolute, dispensing with exposition, suspense, sentimentality and other cinematic security blankets, Antonioni releases the viewer into a gorgeous, densely layered fog to contemplate and wrestle with his characters' imprecise quandaries and endless possibilities. Culminating in tour de force endings that often reframe the narrative in a daring, parting act of deconstruction, Antonioni's rigorously formal, yet open compositions allow his great, unwieldy questions to spill over into the world outside the cinema and outside of time.
Born into a middle-class family in the northern Italian town of Ferrara, Antonioni studied economics at the University of Bologna where he also co-founded the university's theatrical troupe. While dedicating himself to painting, writing film reviews, working in financial positions and in different capacities on film productions, Antonioni suffered a few false starts before expressing his unique directorial vision and voice in his first realized short film, Gente del Po, a moving portrait of fisherman in the misty Po Valley where he was raised. Uncomfortable with the neo-realist thrust of Italian cinema, Antonioni directed a series of eccentric and oblique documentary shorts that, in retrospect, reveal his desire to investigate the psyche's mysterious interiors. In his first fictional feature, Story of a Love Affair, Antonioni immediately subtly challenged traditional plot and audience expectation in ways that anticipate the formal and emotional expressionist dynamic that would fully flower within the groundbreaking L'Avventura (1960).
Reversing its raucous 1960 premiere to an infuriated Cannes audience, L'Avventura was rapturously lauded by fellow artists and filmmakers and awarded a special Jury Prize "for its remarkable contribution toward the search for a new cinematic language." It also presented the controlled ambivalence of Monica Vitti, who would become his partner, muse and psychological constant throughout his famed trilogy of L'Avventura, La Notte (1961) and L'Eclisse (1962) in addition to the exquisite Red Desert (1964), a film that marked another significant shift toward expressive color, male leads and working with soft focus and faster cuts. After the phenomenal commercial success of the MGM-produced Blow-Up (1966), Antonioni was devastated by the anti-climactic box office disaster of Zabriskie Point (1970) and returned to documentary. Invited to make Chung Kuo China by the Chinese government, Antonioni delivered a mesmerizing yet unsentimental four-hour tour of China which was vehemently rejected by its solicitors. A few years later, Antonioni returned to fictional form in his last masterpiece, The Passenger (1975), an enigmatic fable of vaporous identity that offers a bold companion piece to L'Avventura. Aside from the thematically retrospective Identification of a Woman (1982) and a period film made for television, The Mystery of Oberwald (1980) in which he conducted unusual experiments with color and video, Antonioni closed out his career with mostly short films, many of which were made after he suffered a stroke in 1985.
Tremendously influential yet largely taken for granted, Antonioni made difficult, abstract cinema mainstream. Embracing an anarchic geometry, Antonioni turned the architecture of narrative filmmaking inside-out in the most eloquent way possible, with many of his iconic scenes eternally preserved in the depths of the cinema's psyche. Observing modern maladies without judgment - sexism, dissolution of family and tradition, ecological/technological quandaries and the eternal questions of our place in the cosmos - Antonioni's prescience continues to resonate deeply as we find our way in the quickly moving fog.- Producer
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Judd Apatow is an American film director, screenwriter, producer and comedian. He directed The 40-Year Old Virgin, Knocked Up, This is 40, Funny People, Trainwreck and The King of Staten Island. He also developed the television shows Freaks and Geeks, Undeclared, Girls, Love and Crashing. He is married to Leslie Mann and has two children.- Director
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Cuba's greatest and best-known director, Tomas Gutierrez Alea fell in love with cinema at an early age, began as a documentarian much influenced by Italian neorealism and came into his own as an artist during Fidel Castro's regime. Over the years he has evinced a fondness for both historical and contemporary fables, invariably politically pointed and satirical, their flights into absurdity showing the influence of Luis Buñuel. An ardent supporter of the revolution that rid the country of the despotic Fulgencio Batista and brought Castro to power, Alea has painted a more complex portrait of Cuba in his cinema than the rest of the world has generally been willing to conceive. The documentary impulse has remained, yet it is used to constantly scrutinize contemporary Cuba. Indeed, Alea has made some gutsy critiques of the socioeconomic and political realities of his land, as he ponders the persistence of a petty-bourgeois mentality in a society supposedly dedicated to the plight of the working poor.
Born to a fairly well-off family, Alea was sent to college in Havana to follow in his father's footsteps and become a lawyer. At about the same time he entered school, though, he acquired an 8mm camera and made two short films, El faquir (1947) and La caperucita roja (1947). Several years later he collaborated with fellow student (and future film great) Néstor Almendros on a short adaptation of a Franz Kafka story they named Una confusión cotidiana (1950). Upon graduation, Alea journeyed to Italy to study film directing for two years during the crest of neorealism at the famed Centro Sperimentale de Cinematografia. He returned to Cuba in 1953 and joined the radical "Nuestro Tiempo" cultural society, becoming active in the film section, working as a publicist and aligning himself with Castro's fight against the Batista regime. In 1955 Alea co-directed, with fellow society member 'Julio Garcia Espinosa', the 16mm short El mégano (1955), a semi-documentary about exploited workers, acted by nonprofessionals from the locales in which it was shot. The film was seized by Batista's secret police because of its political content.
Soon after the Cuban revolution in 1959, Alea co-founded (with Santiago Álvarez) the national revolutionary film institute ICAIC ("Instituto del Arte y Industria Cinematografica"). He promptly made a documentary, Esta tierra nuestra (1959), full of hope for the new government's plan to help the poor through agrarian reform, and has remained a pillar of the organization ever since. Alea's diverse creative personality has led him to experiment with a broad range of styles and themes. His first feature, Stories of the Revolution (1960), employs a neorealist style to present three dramatic sketches depicting the armed insurrection against Batista. Alea's relatively straightforward approach to film style, however, would change, altered not only through his appropriation of Hollywood and art cinema stylistics but also by his increasingly personal attempts at self-expression. A Cuban Fight Against Demons (1972), the film on which he first worked with regular cinematographer Mario García Joya, comes across as the prelude to a period Alea has described as full of personal and artistic instability as much as it does an aggressive allegorical portrait of church and state corruption. The director's later Cartas del parque (1988) is more of a twilight work, exploring the romantic period piece as a scribe meets a diverse cross-section of society via his talents at letter writing.
The finest of Alea's historical films, The Last Supper (1976), continued to highlight his versatility, drawing on Afro-Cuban musical motifs and the literary style of magic realism to recreate an 18th-century slave revolt. Alea has also made several satiric comedies that explore the legacy of bourgeois society in post-revolutionary Cuba. The madcap adventure The Twelve Chairs (1962), a tale also told by Russian filmmakers and by Mel Brooks, satirizes greed and bureaucracy as a lingering post-revolutionary bourgeois, his roguish manservant and a corrupt priest hunt for a chair concealing priceless diamonds. The Hollywoodian black comedy Death of a Bureaucrat (1966) cites not only Buñuel but also Mack Sennett and Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy as it criticizes, at an early point in the Castro regime, the administrative muck of the political system (Alea reused the gallows humor of the bureaucracy connected with burying a corpse for his road picture Guantanamera (1995), which began to appear at festivals in 1995 and 1996). In Los sobrevivientes (1979) an aristocratic family devolves from civilization to savagery; using a metaphor found in many films from poor countries, the family resorts to cannibalism in trying to remain isolated from the Revolution. The stresses and strains of a revolutionary society were explored in several dramatic works set in contemporary Cuba, among them Memories of Underdevelopment (1968) and Hasta cierto punto (1983). "Memories", Alea's masterpiece and arguably the best-known Cuban film ever made, brilliantly blends documentary and drama to create an extremely witty yet sensitive portrait of a restless, oversexed, politically uncommitted intellectual as he meanders through the early days of the Revolution. The latter film is, in some ways, a continuation of the former, as documentary filmmakers attempt to examine lingering machismo among dockworkers, eventually discovering that the Revolution's goals for changes in consciousness have succeeded only "up to a certain point."
Alea returned yet again to the nexus between the sexual and the political with the best-known Cuban film of the 1990s, Strawberry & Chocolate (1993). The story of the unusual friendship that develops between a naive believer in Castro's contemporary version of communism and a more experienced, gay critic of the regime was widely praised and just as widely attacked. Some found it atypically gentle for Alea and read its gay lead as a cover-up of Castro's horrifying treatment of homosexuals, while others thought it needlessly provocative in its characterizations; such divergent responses only testify to the complexity typical of Alea's tapestries. In 1994, "Strawberry and Chocolate" became the first Cuban film to receive an Oscar nomination as Best Foreign Film. Alea has written or co-scripted all his features and, in accordance with ICAIC's collective approach to filmmaking, has served as advisor on two of the institute's most stylistically innovative films: El otro Francisco (1974), directed by Sergio Giral, and One Way or Another (1977), directed by Sara Gomez.
Alea has been less active in filmmaking in the 1980s and 1990s, and Juan Carlos Tabío has co-directed several of the aging master's recent films. He has, though, written a book of film theory, "Dialectica del espectador (1982)", and continued to inspire a new generation of sophisticated and politically committed artists.- Director
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John G. Avildsen was born on 21 December 1935 in Oak Park, Illinois, USA. He was a director and editor, known for Rocky (1976), The Karate Kid Part III (1989) and Rocky V (1990). He was married to Tracy Brooks Swope and Marie Olga Maturevich. He died on 16 June 2017 in Los Angeles, California, USA.- Writer
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One of Québec's most politically aware filmmakers, Denys Arcand studied history at Université de Montréal, where he co-directed Seul ou avec d'autres (1962) with Denis Héroux and co-written with Stéphane Venne. He joined the National Film Board (NFB) in 1963, where his feature-length documentary on the textile industry, On est au coton (1970), was so controversial it was suppressed for 6 years. He made another fine documentary, Québec: Duplessis et après... (1972), before leaving the NFB for the private sector. La maudite galette (1972), Réjeanne Padovani (1973) and Gina (1975) were distinctive views of Québec society, original and provocative. All 3 used the gangster film as a source while distorting many of its conventions. He then moved to TV, scripting the Duplessis (1978) series for Radio-Canada and directing 3 episodes of Empire, Inc. (1983). He returned to the NFB to make a documentary on the 1980 referendum, Le confort et l'indifférence (1982), which revealed growing cynicism about the political process. It won the Québec Critics Prize.
He returned to commercial filmmaking after a hiatus of 10 years with The Crime of Ovide Plouffe (1984), before achieving major success with the scathing comedy about sexual mores, The Decline of the American Empire (1986) (The Decline of the American Empire), a film that won numerous prizes, including the prestigious Critic's Prize at the Cannes Film Festival. The New York Film Critics voted it Best Foreign Film in 1986 and it won Best Picture, Best Director and Best Original Screenplay at the 1987 Genies. It was also nominated as Best Foreign Film by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Science. Jesus of Montreal (1989) confirmed Arcand's international reputation, winning the Jury prize at the Cannes Film Festival. It won 10 Genies, including Best Picture and Director, and was nominated in the Best Foreign Film category by the Academy. Arcand then moved into English-language production in an attempt to break into a larger international market. Love and Human Remains (1993), his first feature in English, was followed by Stardom (2000), a film that looked at the world of fashion. Neither achieved the subtlety and texture of his earlier work.
The overwhelming success of The Barbarian Invasions (2003), which marked both a return to the French language and to the characters who had peopled The Decline of the American Empire (1986), showed that Arcand had lost none of his powers of observation. The film won two awards at the Cannes Film Festival (best screenplay, and best actor for Marie-Josée Croze), Best Canadian Feature Film at the Toronto International Film Festival and the prestigious Oscar for Best Foreign Film. In 2005 Arcand was named Companion of the Order of Canada, which recognizes individuals for exceptional achievements of national or international significance.- Actor
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Richard Attenborough, Baron Attenborough of Richmond-upon-Thames, was born in Cambridge, England, the son of Mary (née Clegg), a founding member of the Marriage Guidance Council, and Frederick Levi Attenborough, a scholar and academic administrator who was a don at Emmanuel College and wrote a standard text on Anglo-Saxon law. The family later moved to Leicester where his father was appointed Principal of the university while Richard was educated at Wyggeston Grammar School for Boys in Leicester and at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art (RADA).
His film career began with a role as a deserting sailor in In Which We Serve (1942), a part that contributed to his being typecast for many years as a coward in films like Dulcimer Street (1948), Operation Disaster (1950) and his breakthrough role as a psychopathic young gangster in the film adaptation of Graham Greene's novel, Brighton Rock (1948). During World War II, Attenborough served in the Royal Air Force.
He worked prolifically in British films for the next 30 years, and in the 1950s appeared in several successful comedies for John Boulting and Roy Boulting, including Private's Progress (1956) and I'm All Right Jack (1959). Early in his stage career, Attenborough starred in the London West End production of Agatha Christie's "The Mousetrap", which went on to become one of the world's longest-running stage productions. Both he and his wife were among the original cast members of the production, which opened in 1952 and (as of 2007) is still running.
In the 1960s, he expanded his range of character roles in films such as Seance on a Wet Afternoon (1964) and Guns at Batasi (1964), for which he won the BAFTA Award for Best Actor for his portrayal of the regimental Sergeant Major. He appeared in the ensemble cast of The Great Escape (1963), as Squadron Leader "Roger Bartlett" ("Big X"), the head of the escape committee.
In 1967 and 1968, he won back-to-back Golden Globe Awards in the category of Best Supporting Actor, the first time for The Sand Pebbles (1966), starring Steve McQueen, and the second time for Doctor Dolittle (1967), starring Rex Harrison. He would win another Golden Globe for Best Director, for Gandhi (1982), in 1983. Six years prior to "Gandhi", he played the ruthless "Gen. Outram" in Indian director Satyajit Ray's period piece, The Chess Players (1977). He has never been nominated for an Academy Award in an acting category.
He took no acting roles following his appearance in Otto Preminger's The Human Factor (1979), until his appearance as the eccentric developer "John Hammond" in Steven Spielberg's Jurassic Park (1993). The following year, he starred as "Kris Kringle" in Miracle on 34th Street (1994), a remake of the 1947 classic. Since then, he has made occasional appearances in supporting roles, including the historical drama, Elizabeth (1998), as "Sir William Cecil".
In the late 1950s, Attenborough formed a production company, "Beaver Films", with Bryan Forbes and began to build a profile as a producer on projects, including The League of Gentlemen (1960), The Angry Silence (1960) and Whistle Down the Wind (1961), also appearing in the first two of these as an actor.
His feature film directorial debut was the all-star screen version of the hit musical, Oh! What a Lovely War (1969), and his acting appearances became more sporadic - the most notable being his portrayal of serial killer "John Christie" in 10 Rillington Place (1971). He later directed two epic period films: Young Winston (1972), based on the early life of Winston Churchill, and A Bridge Too Far (1977), an all-star account of Operation Market Garden in World War II. He won the 1982 Academy Award for Directing for his historical epic, Gandhi (1982), a project he had been attempting to get made for many years. As the film's producer, he also won the Academy Award for Best Picture. His most recent films, as director and producer, include Chaplin (1992), starring Robert Downey Jr. as Charles Chaplin, and Shadowlands (1993), based on the relationship between C.S. Lewis and Joy Gresham. Both films starred Anthony Hopkins, who also appeared in three other films for Attenborough: "Young Winston", "A Bridge Too Far" and the thriller, Magic (1978).
Attenborough also directed the screen version of the hit Broadway musical, "A Chorus Line" (A Chorus Line (1985)), and the apartheid drama, Cry Freedom (1987), based on the experiences of Donald Woods. He was nominated for a Golden Globe Award for Best Director for both films. His most recent film as director was another biographical film, Grey Owl (1999), starring Pierce Brosnan.
Attenborough is the President of RADA, Chairman of Capital Radio, President of BAFTA, President of the Gandhi Foundation, and President of the British National Film and Television School. He is also a vice patron of the Cinema and Television Benevolent Fund.
He is also the patron of the UWC movement (United World Colleges), whereby he continually contributes greatly to the colleges that are part of the organization. He has frequented the United World College of Southern Africa(UWCSA) Waterford Kamhlaba. His wife and he founded the "Richard and Sheila Attenborough Visual Arts Center". He also founded the "Jane Holland Creative Center for Learning" at Waterford Kamhlaba in Swaziland in memory of his daughter, who died in the Tsunami on Boxing Day, 2004. He passionately believes in education, primarily education that does not judge upon color, race, creed or religion. His attachment to Waterford is his passion for non-racial education, which were the grounds on which Waterford Kamhlaba was founded. Waterford was one of his inspirations for directing Cry Freedom (1987), based on the life of Steve Biko.
He was elected to the post of Chancellor of the University of Sussex on 20 March 1998, replacing the Duke of Richmond and Gordon. A lifelong supporter of Chelsea Football Club, Attenborough served as a director of the club from 1969-1982 and, since 1993, has held the honorary position of Life Vice President. He is also the head of the consortium, "Dragon International", which is constructing a film and television studio complex in Llanilid, Wales, often referred to as "Valleywood".
In 1967, he was made a Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE). He was knighted in 1976 and, in 1993, he was made a life peer as Baron Attenborough, of Richmond-upon-Thames in the London Borough of Richmond upon Thames.
On 13 July 2006, Attenborough and his brother, David Attenborough, were awarded the titles of Distinguished Honorary Fellows of the University of Leicester "in recognition of a record of continuing distinguished service to the University". Lord Attenborough is also listed as an Honorary Fellow of Bangor University for his continued efforts to film making.
Attenborough has been married to English actress Sheila Sim, since 1945. They had three children. In December 2004, his elder daughter, Jane Holland, as well as her daughter Lucy and her mother-in-law, also named Jane, were killed in the tsunami caused by the Indian Ocean earthquake. A memorial service was held on 8 March 2005, and Attenborough read a lesson at the national memorial service on 11 May 2005. His grandson, Samuel Holland, and granddaughter, Alice Holland, also read in the service.
Attenborough's father was principal of University College, Leicester, now the city's university. This has resulted in a long association with the university, with Lord Attenborough a patron. A commemorative plaque was placed on the floor of Richmond Parish Church. The university's "Richard Attenborough Centre for Disability and the Arts", which opened in 1997, is named in his Honor.
His son, Michael Attenborough, is also a director. He has two younger brothers, the famous naturalist Sir David Attenborough and John Attenborough, who has made a career in the motor trade.
He has collected Pablo Picasso ceramics since the 1950s. More than 100 items went on display at the New Walk Museum and Art Gallery in Leicester in 2007; the exhibition is dedicated to his family members lost in the tsunami.- Director
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Roy Arne Lennart Andersson is a Swedish film director, best known for his distinctive style of absurdist humor and melancholic depictions of human life. His personal style is characterized by long takes, and stiff caricaturing of Swedish culture and grotesque. Over his career Andersson earned prizes from the Cannes Film Festival, Berlin International Film Festival and Venice International Film Festival.
Andersson spent much of his professional life working on advertisement spots, directing over 400 commercials and two short films; directing six feature-length films in six decades. He made his feature film debut with A Swedish Love Story (1970) followed by Giliap (1975). Anderson received the Cannes Film Festival Jury Prize for Songs from the Second Floor (2000). His film A Pigeon Sat on a Branch Reflecting on Existence (2014) won the Venice International Film Festival's Golden Lion. He other notable films include You, the Living (2007), and About Endlessness (2019).- Director
- Editorial Department
- Actor
Hal Ashby was born the fourth and youngest child in a Mormon household, in Ogden, Utah, to Eileen Ireta (Hetzler) and James Thomas Ashby, on September 2, 1929. His father was a dairy farmer. After a rough childhood that included the divorce of his parents, his father's suicide, his dropping out of high school, getting married and divorced all before he was 19, he decided to leave Utah for California. A Californian employment office found him a printing press job at Universal Studios. Within a few years, he was an assistant film editor at various other studios. One of his pals while at MGM was a young messenger named Jack Nicholson. He moved up to being a full fledged editor on The Loved One (1965) and started editing the films of director Norman Jewison.
A highlight of his film editing career was winning an Oscar for the landmark In the Heat of the Night (1967). Itching to become a director, Jewison gave him a script he was too busy to work on called The Landlord (1970). It became Ashby's first film as a director. From there he delivered a series of well-acted, intelligent human scaled dramas that included The Last Detail (1973), Shampoo (1975), Bound for Glory (1976), Coming Home (1978) and Being There (1979). Great reviews and Oscar nominations became common on Ashby films.
Ashby was always a maverick and a contrary person and success proved difficult for Ashby to handle. He became unreliable due to his dependence on drugs and a reclusive lifestyle. He actually collapsed while making The Rolling Stones concert film Let's Spend the Night Together (1982) in Arizona. Although he recovered, he was never the same after that. He began taking too much time in post production on his films and actually had a couple of his later projects taken away from him to be edited by others. He tried to straighten himself out, but in the 1980s, he was considered by many to be unemployable. Just when he felt he was turning a corner in his life, he developed cancer that spread to his liver and colon. He died on December 27, 1988. Actor Sean Penn dedicated his first film as a director, The Indian Runner (1991) to Ashby and John Cassavetes, even though Penn was never directed by either one. Because he did not have a set visual style, many mistake this for no style at all. His career is not discussed as often as the careers of some of his contemporaries.- Producer
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Jeffrey Jacob Abrams was born in New York City and raised in Los Angeles, the son of TV producer parents. At 15, he wrote the music for Don Dohler's Nightbeast (1982). In his senior year of college, he and Jill Mazursky teamed up to write a feature film, which became Taking Care of Business (1990). He went on to write and produce Regarding Henry (1991) and Forever Young (1992). He also co-wrote Gone Fishin' (1997) with Mazursky. Along with other Sarah Lawrence alumni, he experimented with computer animation and was contracted to develop pre-production animation for Shrek (2001).
Abrams worked on the screenplay for Armageddon (1998) and co-created (as well as composing the opening theme of) Felicity (1998), which ran for four seasons. He founded the production company Bad Robot in 2001 with Bryan Burk. He created and executive-produced Alias (2001) and Lost (2004), composing the theme music for both, and co-writing episodes of "Lost". He also co-wrote and produced thriller Joy Ride (2001). He made his feature directing debut with Mission: Impossible III (2006), reinvigorating the series. He produced the hit mystery film Cloverfield (2008) and co-created Fringe (2008).
He directed the Star Trek (2009) reboot, proving successful with fans and newcomers to the franchise. He next directed Super 8 (2011), co-produced by Steven Spielberg and produced Mission: Impossible - Ghost Protocol (2011). He returned to direct the follow-up to his reboot, Star Trek Into Darkness (2013). Disney and Lucasfilm announced J.J. as their choice for director of the first episode in the new 'Star Wars' trilogy, Star Wars: Episode VII - The Force Awakens (2015). He initially resisted, as he didn't want to travel away from his family to London, but Kathleen Kennedy convinced him that his voice would be the best to reinvigorate this franchise, as he had done with two others before. He also produced Mission: Impossible - Rogue Nation (2015) and Star Trek Beyond (2016), and executive-produced Star Wars: Episode VIII - The Last Jedi (2017). When it was announced that Colin Trevorrow would no longer direct Star Wars: Episode IX - The Rise of Skywalker (2019), it was announced that J.J. would return to complete the trilogy he started.- Director
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Theo Angelopoulos began to study law in Athens but broke up his studies to go to the Sorbonne in Paris in order to study literature. When he had finished his studies, he wanted to attend the School of Cinema at Paris but decided instead to go back to Greece. There he worked as a journalist and critic for the newspaper "Demokratiki Allaghi" until it was banned by the military after a coup d'état. Now unemployed, he decided to make his first movie, Anaparastasi (1970). Internationally successful was his trilogy about the history of Greece from 1930 to 1970 consisting of Days of '36 (1972), The Travelling Players (1975), and Oi kynigoi (1977). After the end of the dictatorship in Greece, Angelopoulos went to Italy, where he worked with RAI (and more money). His movies then became less political.- Writer
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Olivier Assayas is a French film director, screenwriter and film critic. He is best know for his films Demonlover (2002), Something in the Air (2012), Clouds of Sils Maria (2014) and Personal Shopper (2016).
Assayas is the son of French director/screenwriter Raymond Assayas, alias Jacques Rémy.
His directorial debut was in the short film Copyright (1979).- Director
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- Editor
Dorothy Arzner, the only woman director during the "Golden Age" of Hollywood's studio system--from the 1920s to the early 1940s and the woman director with the largest oeuvre in Hollywood to this day--was born January 3, 1897 (some sources put the year as 1900), in San Francisco, California, to a German-American father and a Scottish mother. Raised in Los Angeles, her parents ran a café which featured German cuisine and which was frequented by silent film stars including: Charles Chaplin and William S. Hart, and director Erich von Stroheim. She worked as a waitress at the restaurant, and no one could have foreseen at the time that Arzner would be one of the few women to break the glass ceiling of directing and would be the only woman to work during the early sound era.
In her 15-year career as a director (1928-43), Arzner made three silent movies and 14 "talkies". Her path to the director's chair was different than that of women directors in the future (indeed, different than most male directors too). Directors nowadays are typically graduates of film schools or were working actors prior to directing. Like most of the directors of her generation, Arzner gained wide training in most aspects of filmmaking by working her way up from the bottom. It was the best way to become a filmmaker, she later said.
After graduating from high school in 1915, she entered the University of Southern California, where she was in the pre-med program for two years. When the US entered World War I in 1917, Arzner was unable to realize her ambition of serving her country in a military capacity, as there were no women's units in the armed forces at the time, so she served as an ambulance driver during the war.
After the cessation of hostilities, Azner got a job on a newspaper. The director of her ambulance unit introduced her to film director William C. de Mille (the brother of Cecil B. DeMille, one of the co-founders of Famous Players-Lasky, which eventually became known by the title of its distribution unit--Paramount Pictures). She decided to pursue a film career after visiting a movie set and being intrigued by the editing facilities. Arzner decided that she would like to become a director (there was no strict delineation between directors and editors in the immediate postwar period as the movie studios matured into a "factory" industrial production paradigm).
Though she was the sole member of her gender to direct Hollywood pictures during the first generation of sound film, in the silent era a woman behind the camera was not unknown. The first movie in history was directed by a Frenchwoman, and many women were employed in Hollywood during the silent era, most frequently as scenario writers (some research indicates that as many as three-quarters of the scenario writers during the silent era--when there was no requirement for a screenplay as such as there was no dialogue--were women). Indeed, there were women directors in the silent era, such as Frances Marion (though she was more famous as a screenwriter) and Lois Weber, but Arzner was fated to be the only female director to have made a successful transition to "talkies". It wasn't until the 1930s and the verticalization of the industry, as it matured and consolidated, that women were squeezed out of production jobs in Hollywood.
The introduction to William deMille paid off when he hired her for the sum of $20 a week to be a stenographer. Her first job for DeMille was typing up scripts at Famous Players-Lasky. She was reportedly a poor typist. Ambitious and possessed of a strong will, Arzner offered to write synopses of various literary properties, and eventually was hired as a writer. Impressing DeMille and other Paramount powers-that-be, Arzner was assigned to Paramount's subsidiary Realart Films, as a film cutter. She was promoted to script girl after one year, which required her presence on the set to ensure the continuity of the script as shot by the director. She then was given a job editing films. She excelled at cutting: as an editor (she was the first Hollywood editor professionally credited as such on-screen), she labored on 52 films, working her way up from cutting Bebe Daniels comedies to assignments on "A" pictures within a couple of years. She came into her own as a filmmaker editing the Rudolph Valentino headliner Blood and Sand (1922), about a toreador. Her editing of the bullfighting scenes was highly praised, and she later said that she actually helmed the second-unit crew shooting some of the bullfight sequences. Director James Cruze was so impressed by her work on the Valentino picture that he brought her on to his team to edit The Covered Wagon (1923). Arzner eventually edited three other Cruze films: Ruggles of Red Gap (1923), Merton of the Movies (1924) and Old Ironsides (1926). Her work was of such quality that she received official screen credit as an editor, a first for a cutter of either gender.
While collaborating with Cruze she also wrote scenarios, scripting her ideas both solo and in collaboration. She was credited as a screenwriter (as well as an editor) on "Old Ironsides", one of the more spectacular films of the late silent era, being partially shot in Magnascope, one of the earliest widescreen processes. She would always credit Cruze as her mentor and role model. "Old Ironsides" proved to be the last film on which she was credited as an editor, as her ambitions to become a director would finally come to fruition. To indulge her, Paramount gave her a job as an assistant director, for which she was happy--until she realized it was not a stepping stone to the director's chair, and she was determined to sit in that chair.
Arzner pressured Paramount to let her direct, threatening to leave the studio to work for Columbia Pictures on Poverty Row, which had offered her a job as a director. Unwilling to lose such a talented filmmaker, the Paramount brass relented, and she made her debut with Fashions for Women (1927). It was a hit. In the process of directing Paramount's first talkie, Manhattan Cocktail (1928), she made history by becoming the first woman to direct a sound picture. The success of her next sound picture, The Wild Party (1929), starring Paramount's top star, Clara Bow, helped establish Fredric March as a movie star.
Arzner proved adept at handling actresses. As Budd Schulberg related in his autobiography "Moving Pictures", Clara Bow--a favorite of his father, studio boss B.P. Schulberg--had a thick Brooklyn accent that the silence of the pre-talkie era hid nicely from the audience. She was terrified of the transition to sound, and developed a fear of the microphone. Working with her sound crew, Arzner devised and used the first boom mike, attaching the microphone to a fish pole to follow Bow as she moved around the set. Arzner even used Bow's less-than-dulcet speaking tones to underscore the vivaciousness of her character.
Though Arzner made several successful films for Paramount, the studio teetered on the edge of bankruptcy due to the Depression, eventually going into receivership (before being saved by the advent of another iconic woman, Mae West). When the studio mandated a pay cut for all employees, Arzner decided to go freelance. RKO Radio Pictures hired her to direct its new star, headstrong young Katharine Hepburn, in her second starring film, Christopher Strong (1933). It was not a happy collaboration, as both women were strong and unyielding, but Arzner eventually prevailed. She was, after all, the boss on the set: The director. The fiercely independent Hepburn complained to RKO, but the studio backed its director against its star. Eventually the two settled into a working relationship, respecting each other but remaining cold and distant from one another. Ironically, Arzner would display her directorial flair in elucidating the kind of competitive rivalries between women she experienced with Hepburn.
The Directors Guild of America was established in 1933, and Arzner became the first woman member. Indeed, she was the only female member of the DGA for many years.
Arzner's films featured well-developed female characters, and she was known at the time of her work, quite naturally, as a director of "women's pictures". Not only did her movies portray the lives of strong, interesting women, but her pictures are noted for showcasing the ambiguities of life. Since the rise of feminist scholarship in the 1960s, Arzner's movies have been seen as challenging the dominant, phallocentric mores of the times.
Arzner was a lesbian, who cultivated a masculine look in her clothes and appearance (some feel as camouflage to hide the boy's club that was Hollywood). Many gay critics discern a hidden gay subtext in her films, such as "Christopher Strong". Whereas feminist critics see a critique of gender inequality in "Christopher Strong", lesbian critics see a critique of heterosexuality itself as the source of a woman's troubles. The very private Azner, the woman who broke the glass ceiling and had to survive, and indeed thrived, in the all-male world of studio filmmaking, refused to be categorized as a woman or gay director, insisting she was simply a "director." She was right.
Arzner did have less troubled and more productive collaborations with other actresses after her experience with Hepburn. She developed a close friendship with one of her female stars, Joan Crawford, whom she directed in two 1937 MGM vehicles, The Last of Mrs. Cheyney (1937) and The Bride Wore Red (1937). Arzner later directed Pepsi commercials as a favor to Crawford's husband, Pepsi-Cola Company's Chairman of the Board Alfred Steele.
In 1943 Arzner joined other top Hollywood directors such as John Ford and George Stevens in going to work for the war effort during World War Two. She made training films for the US Army's Women's Army Corps (WACs). That same year her health was compromised after she contracted pneumonia. After the war she did not return to feature film directing, but made documentaries and commercials for the new television industry. She also became a filmmaking teacher, first at the Pasadena Playhouse during the 1950s and 1960s and then at the University of California-Los Angeles campus during the 1960s and 1970s. At UCLA she taught directing and screenwriting, and one of her students was Francis Ford Coppola, the first film school grad to achieve major success as a director. She taught at UCLA until her death in 1979.
She was honored in her own lifetime, becoming a symbol and role model for women filmmakers who desired entry into mainstream cinema. The feminist movement in the 1960s championed her. In 1972 the First International Festival of Women's Films honored her by screening "The Wild Party", and her oeuvre was given a full retrospective at the Second Festival in 1976. In 1975 the DGA honored her with "A Tribute to Dorothy Arzner." During the tribute, a telegram from Katharine Hepburn was read: "Isn't it wonderful that you've had such a great career, when you had no right to have a career at all?"- Director
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Grigori Aleksandrov was a Soviet-Russian filmmaker best known as director of Volga - Volga (1938), The Circus (1936), and October (Ten Days that Shook the World) (1927), as well as co-star in Battleship Potemkin (1925) by director Sergei Eisenstein.
He was born Grigori Vasilyevich Mormonenko on January 23, 1903 in Ekaterinburg, Russia. His father, Vasili Mormonenko, was a worker. Young Aleksandrov was obsessed with acting and movies. At the age of 9 he was hired as a delivery boy at the Ekaterinburg Opera; there he eventually worked as an assistant dresser, electrician, decorator, and assistant director. He studied violin and piano at the Ekaterinburg School of Music, graduating in 1917. During the Russian Civil War of 1917-1920, he was road manager with the Theatre of Eastern Front of the Red Army. After the Civil War he graduated from the Directors Courses for Proletariat Theatre in Ekaterinburg, and was appointed Inspector of Arts at the Ekaterinburg Regional Administration. His job was to supervise theaters and to select films in compliance with the new ideology.
Aleksandrov met Eisenstein in 1921. They worked together on several stage productions in 1921-24. In 1923 Aleksandrov appeared as Glumov in a stage production of A. Ostrovsky's play at the Moscow Proletkult Theatre, directed by Eisenstein. They worked together on the scenario of their first films: 'Stachka' (1924) and 'Bronenosets Potemkin' (1925). They wrote and directed 'Oktyabr' (1927), a historical film made to look like a documentary about the Russian revolution. In 1929-1933 both Aleksandrov and Eisenstein were sent to study and work in Hollywood. Back in the Soviet Union Aleksandrov made a short documentary film titled 'International' (1932).
In 1933 Aleksandrov had a meeting with Joseph Stalin and Maxim Gorky at the Gorky's State Dacha near Moscow. Stalin offered the oportunity to Aleksandrov to make a musical comedy for the Soviet people. 'Veselye Rebyata' (aka.. Jolly fellows) was completed in 1934, starring Leonid Utyosov and Lyubov Orlova. 'Veselye Rebyata' became the #1 box office hit in Russia and was awarded at the Venice Film Festival. Leonid Utyosov and Lyubov Orlova became instant celebrities, and songs by composer Isaak Dunaevskiy became popular hits in the Soviet Union.
Aleksandrov directed and edited the documentary of Stalin's speech about the Soviet constitution, titled 'Doklad tov. Stalina o proekte Konstitutsii SSSR na VIII Chresvychaynom S'ezde Sovetov' (1937). After that Aleksandrov returned to making comedies. Aleksandrov's wife, Lyubov Orlova, starred in almost all of his feature films, such as 'Tsirk' (1936), 'Volga-Volga' (1938), 'Svetly Put' (1940), 'Vesna' (1947) among his other films. His 1930s comedies remained rather popular among several generations of viewers in the Soviet Union, as well as internationally. In 1942 Joseph Stalin sent a copy of Volga - Volga (1938) to American president Franklin D. Roosevelt.
However, Aleksandrov's success came at a painful price, as he suffered from many attacks by some less fortunate and envious filmmakers, as well as from blackmailing by invisible and anonymous enemy. In 1938 Aleksandrov's colleagues, cinematographer Vladimir Nilsen, and producer Boris Shumyatskiy, were executed by the firing squad for anti-government activities. At the same time both Aleksandrov and Orlova were falsely accused of spying for the Nazi Germany, but were cleared of all charges.
During the 1950s he taught directing at State Institute of Cinematography (VGIK). His last films had little success, and some, like 'Skvorets i lira' (1973) were not even released in theaters. Aleksandrov also made a few documentaries, including one about Lenin, and one about his wife, star actress Lyubov Orlova.
Grigori Aleksandrov received the Stalin's Prize twice (1941, 1950), the Order of Lenin twice (1939, 1950), the Order of Red Star (1938), and the Order of the Red Banner twice (1963, 1967). He was designated People's Actor of the USSR. Grigori Aleksandrov died of kidney infection on December 16, 1983, at the Kremlin Hospital in Moscow, and was laid to rest next to his wife, Lyubov Orlova in Novodevichy Cemetery, Moscow, Russia.- Director
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Jack Arnold reigns supreme as one of the great directors of 1950s science-fiction features. His films are distinguished by moody black and white cinematography, solid acting, smart, thoughtful scripts, snappy pacing, a genuine heartfelt enthusiasm for the genre and plenty of eerie atmosphere.
Arnold was born on October 14, 1912, in New Haven, Connecticut. He began his show business career as an actor in both on- and off-Broadway stage productions in the late 1930s and early 1940s; among the plays he appeared in are "The Time of Your Life," "Juke Box Jenny," "Blind Alibi," "China Passage," and "We're on the Jury." Arnold served in the US Army in the Signal Corps during World War II. He apprenticed under famous documentary filmmaker Robert J. Flaherty. Following his tour of duty Jack started making short films and documentaries. One short, With These Hands (1950), was nominated for an Academy Award as Best Documentary Feature. Arnold made his theatrical movie debut with the B picture Girls in the Night (1953). He then did his first foray into the science-fiction genre: the supremely spooky It Came from Outer Space (1953). Jack achieved his greatest enduring cult popularity with Creature from the Black Lagoon (1954), a scary yet poetic reworking of "Beauty and the Beast". Revenge of the Creature (1955) was a worthy sequel. Tarantula (1955) was likewise a lot of fun. The Incredible Shrinking Man (1957) rates highly as Arnold's crowning cinematic achievement; it's an intelligent and entertaining classic that's lost none of its potency throughout the years.
Arnold's final two genre entries were the enjoyable Monster on the Campus (1958) and the offbeat The Space Children (1958). His other movies are a pretty varied and interesting bunch, including the hugely successful The Mouse That Roared (1959) (which helped to establish Peter Sellers as an international star), the teen exploitation gem High School Confidential! (1958), the superior Audie Murphy western No Name on the Bullet (1959), the goofy comedy Hello Down There (1969) and the silly softcore romp The Bunny Caper (1974).
In addition to his film work, Arnold also directed episodes of such TV shows as Science Fiction Theatre (1955), Peter Gunn (1958), Perry Mason (1957), Rawhide (1959), Gilligan's Island (1964), Mod Squad (1968), Wonder Woman (1975), The Love Boat (1977), The Bionic Woman (1976) and Buck Rogers in the 25th Century (1979).
The father of producer/casting director Susan Arnold, Jack Arnold died at age 79 on March 17, 1992.- Director
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Kenneth Anger grew up in Hollywood and started out as a child actor, but his interest in filmmaking was evident at an early age: he made his first film, Who Has Been Rocking My Dreamboat (1941) , at age 14.
Anger developed into one of the pioneers of the American underground film movement. His gritty, violent, often homosexual-themed films were too strong for American audiences of the time, and many of his productions were filmed in Europe, mainly France.
However, Anger is best known for authoring the landmark "Hollywood Babylon" book series, which detailed a far seamier side of the Hollywood film industry than most people were aware.- Director
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Bille August was born on 9 November 1948 in Brede, Denmark. He is a director and writer, known for The House of the Spirits (1993), Pelle the Conqueror (1987) and Les Misérables (1998). He is married to Sara-Marie Maltha. He was previously married to Pernilla August, Masja Dessau and Annie Munksgaard.- Director
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Gillian Armstrong was born on 18 December 1950 in Melbourne, Victoria, Australia. She is a director and producer, known for My Brilliant Career (1979), Not Fourteen Again (1996) and Little Women (1994). She is married to John Pleffer. They have two children.- Actor
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Dominique Abel was born in 1957. He is an actor and writer, known for Lost in Paris (2016), The Fairy (2011) and Walking on the Wild Side (2000).and Fiona Gordon- Director
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Lenny Abrahamson was born in Dublin in 1966. He studied physics and philosophy at Trinity College Dublin. While at university he directed short videos with the Trinity Video Society, which he co-founded with Ed Guiney. He graduated in 1991 with first class honours (gold medal). His first short film, 3 Joes, won the Best European Short Film Award at the 1991 Cork Film Festival and the Organiser's Award at the 1992 Oberhausen Short Film Festival. He directed numerous commercials for television in Ireland, the UK and worldwide before taking the helm on his first feature film, Adam & Paul, a stylized downbeat comedy written by Mark O'Halloran and released in 2004. Adam and Paul won the Best First Feature award at the 2004 Galway Film Fleadh and the Grand Prix at the 2005 Sofia International Film Festival. His second feature film, Garage, another collaboration with writer Mark O' Halloran, was selected for Director's Fortnight at the 2007 Cannes Film Festival and won the CICAE Art and Essai award. The film also won the awards for Best Film, Best Director, Best Script and Best Actor at the 2008 Irish Film and Television Awards (IFTAs). Lenny has also directed for television: his four one-hour TV films for RTE, Prosperity, also won the Best Director for TV award 2008 Irish Film and Television Awards. What Richard Did, his third feature, was released in 2012 to critical acclaim. The film, written by Malcolm Campbell, presents a stark portrait of a privileged Dublin teen whose world unravels with one summer night. What Richard Did premiered at the 2012 Toronto International Film Festival and was also selected for the 2012 BFI London Film Festival. Lenny's fourth feature, Frank, a comedy about a young wannabe musician starring Michael Fassbender and Domhnall Gleeson, will be shooting in Winter 2012.- Director
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Ana Lily Amirpour was born in Margate, Kent, England, UK. She is a director and writer, known for A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night (2014), The Bad Batch (2016) and Mona Lisa and the Blood Moon (2021).- Director
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Miguel Arteta was born in 1965 in San Juan, Puerto Rico. He is a director and producer, known for Beatriz at Dinner (2017), Succession (2018) and Enlightened (2011). He is married to Justine Arteta.- Director
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- Music Department
Tomas Alfredson was born on 1 April 1965 in Lidingö, Stockholms län, Sweden. He is a director, known for Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (2011), Let the Right One In (2008) and The Snowman (2017). He is married to Charlotte Alfredson. They have one child. He was previously married to Cissi Elwin.- Writer
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Gregg Araki was born on 17 December 1959 in Los Angeles, California, USA. He is a writer and director, known for Mysterious Skin (2004), White Bird in a Blizzard (2014) and Kaboom (2010).- Writer
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- Director
A graduate of New York's Columbia School of Journalism, Irwin Allen was a magazine editor, the producer/director of a radio show and the owner of an advertising agency before entering film production in the 1950s. His documentary, The Sea Around Us (1953), won an Academy Award. A successful TV series producer (The Time Tunnel (1966), Lost in Space (1965)), Allen was nicknamed "The Master of Disaster" in the 1970s due to the tremendous success of his two special effects-laden epics, The Poseidon Adventure (1972) and The Towering Inferno (1974).- Director
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Fatih Akin was born in 1973 in Hamburg of Turkish parentage. He began studying Visual Communications at Hamburg's College of Fine Arts in 1994. His collaboration with Wueste Film also dates from this time. In 1995, he wrote and directed his first short feature, "Sensin - You're The One!" ("Sensin - Du bist es!"), which received the Audience Award at the Hamburg International Short Film Festival. His second short film, "Weed" ("Getürkt", 1996), received several national and international festival prizes. His first full length feature film, "Short Sharp Shock" ("Kurz und schmerzlos", 1998) won the Bronze Leopard at Locarno and the Bavarian Film Award (Best Young Director) in 1998. His other films include: "In July" ("Im Juli", 2000), "Wir haben vergessen zurückzukehren" (2001), "Solino" (2002), the Berlinale Golden Bear-winner and winner of the German and European Film Awards "Head-On" ("Gegen die Wand", 2003), and "Crossing the Bridge - The Sound of Istanbul" (2005).- Director
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Gabriel Axel was born on 18 April 1918 in Århus, Denmark. He was a director and actor, known for Babette's Feast (1987), The Red Mantle (1967) and Christian (1989). He was married to Lucie Axel Moerch. He died on 9 February 2014 in Copenhagen, Denmark.- Director
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Jean-Jacques Annaud is a French film director, screenwriter and producer, best known for directing Quest for Fire (1981), The Name of the Rose (1986), The Lover (1992), Seven Years in Tibet (1997) and Wolf Totem (2015). Annaud has received numerous awards for his work, including four César Awards, one David di Donatello Award, and one National Academy of Cinema Award. Annaud's first film, Black and White in Color (1976), received an Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film.- Director
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Michael Almereyda was born on 7 April 1959 in Overland Park, Kansas, USA. He is a director and writer, known for Marjorie Prime (2017), Experimenter (2015) and Tesla (2020).- Director
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Lindsay was born in Bangalore, India but educated in England at Cheltenham College and Wadham College, Oxford where he was a classical scholar. He then spent 3 years war time service in the Kings Royal Rifle Corps. His career in the theatre started at the Royal Court in the late 1950's where he was responsible for the premiere productions of The Long and the Short and the Tall, Sergeant Musgrave's Dance, Billy Liar and The Bed Before Yesterday. His collaboration with David Storey began with the film This Sporting Life followed by the plays In Celebration, Home, The Changing Room, Early Days and his last, in 1992, Stages He also contributed to the Times, Observer and New Statesman newspapers.- Director
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British film director Anthony Asquith was born on November 9, 1902, to H.H. Asquith, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, and his second wife. A former home secretary and the future leader of the Liberal Party, H.H. Asquith served as prime minister of the United Kingdom from 1908-1916 and was subsequently elevated to the hereditary peerage. His youngest child, Anthony, was called Puffin by his family, a nickname given him by his mother, who thought he resembled one. Puffin was also the name his friends called him throughout his life.
Asquith was active in the British film industry from the late silent period until the mid-1960s. As a director he was highly respected by his contemporaries and had a long and successful career; by the 1960s he was one of only three British directors (the others being David Lean and Carol Reed) who were directing major international motion picture productions. However, Asquith's proclivity for adapting plays for the screen caused an erosion in his critical reputation as a filmmaker after his death. He was faulted for what was perceived as his failure to focus, like his contemporary Alfred Hitchcock, on the cinematic. Asquith was known as an actor's director, and solicited some of the finest film performances from Britain's greatest actors, including Edith Evans and Michael Redgrave.
Although Asquith's first love was music, he lacked musical talent. He channeled his artistic ambitions toward the nascent motion picture, and was instrumental in the formation of the London Film Society to promote artistic appreciation of film. Asquith traveled to Hollywood in the 1920s to observe American film production techniques, and after returning to England, he became a director.
Among his best-known films is Pygmalion (1938), an adaptation of George Bernard Shaw's stage play, which he co-directed with its star, Leslie Howard. The film was a major critical success, even in the United States, winning multiple Academy Award nominations. Nobel Prize-winner Shaw, who had been a co-founder of the London Film Society along with Asquith, won an Academy Award for best adapted screenplay for the film. Asquith had a long professional association with playwright Terence Rattigan, and two of Asquith's most famous and successful pictures were based on Rattigan plays, The Winslow Boy (1948) and The Browning Version (1951). Asquith directed the screen version of Rattigan's first successful play, French Without Tears (1940), in 1940.
Asquith's most successful postwar film was, arguably, his adaptation of Oscar Wilde's play The Importance of Being Earnest (1952). More than a half-century after it was made, Asquith's film remains the best adaptation of Wilde's work. Ironically, Asquith's father H.H., while serving as Home Secretary, ordered Wilde's arrest for his homosexual behavior. Wilde's arrest, for "indecent behavior", led to his incarceration in the Reading jail and destroyed the great playwright, personally. The Wilde incident stifled gay culture in Britain for the first two-thirds of the 20th century. Another irony of the situation is that H.H.'s youngest son, Anthony, himself was gay.
By the 1960s Asquith was directing Hollywood-style all-star productions, including the episodic The Yellow Rolls-Royce (1964), once again from a screenplay by Rattigan, and the Richard Burton-Elizabeth Taylor potboiler The V.I.P.s (1963), also with a screenplay by Rattigan. It is based in an incident in the life of Laurence Olivier, a frequent Asquith collaborator. In 1967 Asquith was tipped to direct the big-screen adaptation of the best-selling novel The Shoes of the Fisherman (1968) set to co-star Olivier and Anthony Quinn, but he had to drop out of the production due to ill heath. He died on February 20, 1968, at the age of 65.
The British Academy Award for best music is named the Anthony Asquith Award in his honor.- Director
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Tex Avery was a descendant of Judge Roy Bean and Daniel Boone, but all his grandma ever told him about it was "Don't ever mention you are kin to Roy Bean. He's a no good skunk!!" After graduating from North Dallas High School in 1927, Avery moved to Southern California in 1929 and got a job in the harbor. After showing samples of his artwork he got a job at Walter Lantz Studios in 1929 as animator. His contributions during the years at Walter Lantz Studios were minor. From 1936 to 1941 he worked as supervisor - another word for cartoon director - of some 60 titles in the Merrie Melodies and Looney Tunes series for Leon Schlesinger at Warner's. From 1942 to 1954 Avery worked as director of cartoons at MGM. He was responsible for practically every MGM Cartoon that did not feature Tom and Jerry. In 1955 he did four cartoons, again for Walter Lantz Studios, before leaving the field for advertising, where, alas, his unique sense of humor went largely unappreciated, but primarily because commercials are not credited for the viewing audience (perhaps his best known commercial work was for Raid bug spray, which always featured the cartoon bugs screaming "Raid!" before getting smashed.)
Among the many cartoon characters Avery created are Daffy Duck, Droopy, Screwy Squirrel, George and Junior and Chilly Willy. Tex Avery is also credited with creating the basic personality of Bugs Bunny. He was the one who coined the phrase "What's up, Doc?"- Director
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Hany Abu-Assad a Palestinian/Dutch movie director and writer. From the famous movies Abu-Assad has directed so far are : Rana's Wedding (2002), Paradise Now (2005) and Omar (2013), The mountains between us (2017). He has been nominated twice for Academy Awards for his movies 'Paradise Now' in 2006 and 'Omar' in 2014.- Director
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Brad Anderson was born in 1964 in Madison, Connecticut, USA. He is a director and producer, known for Session 9 (2001), The Machinist (2004) and Transsiberian (2008).- Producer
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Alexandre Aja was born on 7 August 1978 in Paris, France. He is a producer and director, known for High Tension (2003), The Hills Have Eyes (2006) and Piranha 3D (2010). He is married to Laïla Marrakchi.- Director
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Santiago Álvarez was born on 18 March 1919 in Cuba. He was a director and writer, known for 79 primaveras (1969), Hanoi, martes 13 (1968) and El sueño del pongo (1970). He died on 20 May 1998 in Havana, Cuba.- Director
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Anders weathered a rough childhood and young adult life which not only encouraged an escapist penchant for making up characters but also an insider's sympathy for the strong but put-upon women who people her films. Growing up in rural Kentucky, Anders would always remember hanging onto her father's leg at age five as he abandoned her family. Traveling frequently with her mother and sisters, Anders would later be raped at age 12, endure abuse from a stepfather who once threatened her with a gun, and suffer a mental breakdown at age 15. Venturing back to Kentucky from Los Angeles at 17, she would soon move to London to live with the man who would father her first child. Upon her return to the US, Anders finally began to pick up the pieces of her life. She enrolled in junior college and later the UCLA film school and managed when a second daughter came along. Enchanted with _Wim Wenders_' films, she so deluged the filmmaker with correspondence that he gave her a job as a production assistant on his film Paris, Texas (1984). After graduating from UCLA, Anders made her feature writing and directing debut, Border Radio (1987), a study of the LA punk scene, in collaboration with two former classmates. Her first solo effort, Gas Food Lodging (1992), telling of a single mother and her two teenage daughters, and her followup, My Crazy Life (1993), looking at girl gangs in the Echo Park neighborhood of LA where Anders settled, have shown her to be a deeply personal filmmaker who has used her own experience to make grittily realistic, well-observed, gently ambling studies of women coming of age amid tough, sterile social conditions.- Director
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Marc Allégret was born on 22 December 1900 in Basel, Switzerland. He was a director and writer, known for The Curtain Rises (1938), Avec André Gide (1951) and Julietta (1953). He was married to Nadine Vogel. He died on 3 November 1973 in Paris, France.- Director
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London-born Michael Anderson began his career in films as an office boy at Elstree studios. By 1938, he had progressed up the ladder to become assistant director for distinguished film makers Noël Coward, David Lean and Anthony Asquith. Shortly after, during wartime with the Royal Signals Corps (Army Kinematograph Service), Anderson made the acquaintance of Peter Ustinov. Upon demobilisation, the 24-year old up-and-coming director secured the release from the military of his 'favourite corporal' and mentor to work as first assistant on Secret Flight (1946) and Vice Versa (1948). For Ustinov's third venture, Private Angelo (1949), Anderson both co-directed and co-wrote the screenplay, but the picture that first put him on the map was to be the patriotic wartime drama The Dam Busters (1955), based on true events. Britain's most successful film of 1955, in turn, led to Anderson being hired by Mike Todd to direct the all-star blockbuster Around the World in 80 Days (1956). A hugely popular box-office hit and winner of five Academy Awards, it elevated Anderson into the realm of more ambitious international productions.
His strong visual style -- in no small way complemented by a fruitful and long-standing collaboration with the cinematographer Erwin Hillier -- became ideally suited for suspenseful thrillers and action subjects like Chase a Crooked Shadow (1958), the sub-Hitchcockian psychological whodunnit The Naked Edge (1961) or the underrated maritime drama The Wreck of the Mary Deare (1959) (based on a novel by Hammond Innes and originally intended for Alfred Hitchcock who went on to do North by Northwest (1959) instead). Another little gem is the intricately plotted spy thriller The Quiller Memorandum (1966), tautly directed and noteworthy for supremely well captured Berlin exteriors (a familiarity which stemmed from Anderson having spent some of his early childhood in Berlin and Hillier having worked at Ufa in the 20s before collaborating on Fritz Lang's classic thriller M (1931)). According to Hillier, Anderson also had a reputation for being "superb at handling actors". This is reflected in his films which have often featured big name stars like Gary Cooper, Charlton Heston, Laurence Olivier or Alec Guinness.
Moving into science fiction, Anderson made style triumph over content with his (for the time) expensively made dystopian thriller Logan's Run (1976). Though not a big success with critics, the picture won at the box office and helped MGM out of its financial doldrums. Also in this genre, but with less distinction, Anderson directed Millennium (1989) and a miniseries, The Martian Chronicles (1980). A foray into the world of comic strip heroes, Doc Savage: The Man of Bronze (1975), proved to be one of his rare failures. His more recent work of note has included the Gemini Award-winning TV movie Young Catherine (1991), based on the early life of Russia's Catherine the Great. Vanessa Redgrave, who played Empress Elizabeth, was also nominated for a Primetime Emmy in the Supporting Actress category.
In 1957, Anderson received the Silver Medallion for outstanding work from the Screen Director's Guild of America and was in 2012 also honoured with a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Directors Guild of Canada. A Canadian resident since the 1970s, Anderson passed away at his home on the Canadian Sunshine Coast in British Columbia on April 25 2018 at the age of 98.- Director
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Claude Autant-Lara was born on 5 August 1901 in Luzarches, Val-d'Oise, France. He was a director and writer, known for Devil in the Flesh (1947), The Crossing of Paris (1956) and The Red and the Black (1954). He was married to Ghislaine Autant-Lara. He died on 5 February 2000 in Antibes, Alpes-Maritimes, France.- Writer
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Born in Paris, France, in 1952. Jacques Audiard's family has always been involved in movie business. His father, Michel, was a popular screenwriter and director and his uncle a producer. But in his teens he refused that world and wanted to be a teacher. He studied literature and philosophy at the Sorbonne but didn't finish his degree. By that time, his then girlfriend suggested he work as a trainee editor during his university holidays. He worked as an assistant editor on several movies like "Le locataire" (1976) directed by Roman Polanski.
He also joined a theater where he did all kinds of work. He specially enjoyed adapting works for stage. In the eighties he wrote the screenplays of some successful movies like "Mortelle Randonnee" (1983), "Reveillon Chez Bob" (1984), "Saxo" (1987), "Frequence meurtre" (1988) and "Grosse fatigue" (1994). Most of those films were thrillers directed by prestigious filmmakers like Claude Miller and Michel Blanc. He also directed some well received short movies.
Thanks to the success of those movies he was able, in 1994, to raise up the money to make his first movie "Regarde les hommes tomber" a somber road movie starred by two of the most important French actors: Mathieu Kassovitz and Jean Louis Trintignant. That movie won 3 Cesars of the French academy for best editing, best new director (Jacques Audiard) and best new actor (for Kassovitz).
Kassovitz also became the star of his second movie "Un heros tres discret" released in the Festival de Cannes in 1996 where it won the award for best screenplay. "Un heros tres discret" undermined the myth of the French resistance to the Nazis by telling the story of a young impostor who rises high in French society after World war by concocting a past for himself as a hero. It also won awards in the festivals of Stockholm and Valladolid and made his name internationally.
In 2001 he made his third movie "Sur mes levres". The love story between two outsiders (a deaf office worker and a hoodlum) who decide to con a group of gangsters also became a success. It also won three Cesars (best actress, sound and screenplay).
His last movie, "De battre mon Coeur sest arrête" (a remake of "Fingers" a James Toback's movie) was released in the Berlin festival of 2005.
With those movies, Audiard has become the new master of the "polar" (French thriller) and inheritor of others great French directors like Jean-Pierre Melville (1917-1973) and Henri Georges-Clouzot (1907-1977).- Actress
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Andrea Arnold was born on 5 April 1961 in Dartford, Kent, England, UK. She is an actress and director, known for American Honey (2016), Fish Tank (2009) and Red Road (2006).- Director
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A director known for the thematic and visual bleakness of his work, Aoyama often sets his films in the Kyushu region from which he hails. He graduated from Rikkyo University and became known in 1996, but it was Eureka in 2000, which won him prizes at the Cannes Film Festival. Aoyama would continue in film, but also write novels, contribute to magazines and become a film professor at Tama Art University. Aoyama married actress Maho Toyota and has cast her in his films.- Director
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A former salesman and journalist, Ken Annakin got into the film industry making documentary shorts. His feature debut, Holiday Camp (1947), was a comedy about a Cockney family on vacation. It was made for the Rank Organization and was a modest success, spawning three sequels, all of which he directed. He worked steadily thereafter, mainly in light comedies. One of his more atypical films was the dark thriller Across the Bridge (1957), based on a Graham Greene story about a wealthy businessman who embezzles a million dollars from his company, kills a man who resembles him and steals his identity so he can escape to Mexico. It boasted an acclaimed performance by Rod Steiger as the villain and a distinct "noir" feel to it, unlike anything Annakin had done before (or, for that matter, since).
In the 1960s he was one of several British directors--e.g., Guy Green, John Guillermin--who specialized in turning out all-star, splashy, big-budget European/American co-productions, shot on the Continent. He was one of the directors of the epic World War II spectacle The Longest Day (1962) and went solo on Battle of the Bulge (1965), both of which were financial--if not exactly critical--successes. He also directed Those Magnificent Men in Their Flying Machines or How I Flew from London to Paris in 25 Hours 11 Minutes (1965), which was less successful. His final film was Genghis Khan: The Story of a Lifetime, a film that was started in 1992 under Annakin's direction but never completed. In 2009 it was restarted again and Annakin was hired to assemble the existing footage for release, but died before completing the job. Italian director Antonio Margheriti finished up and the film was released in 2010.- Director
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Percy Adlon is best known for his film "Bagdad Cafe" aka "Out of Rosenheim." He was born on June 1, 1935 in Munich, the son of Paul Rudolf Laubenthal, a prominent opera singer, and Susanne Adlon, and grew up in Ammerland/Starnbergersee, in the Bavarian countryside. He studied art and theater history, and German literature at Munich's Ludwig-Maximilian University, took acting and singing classes, and was a member of the student theater group. He started his professional career as an actor, became interested in radio work, was a narrator and editor of literature series and a presenter and voice-over actor in television for 10 years.
In 1970 he made his first short film for the Bavarian Television, followed by more than 150 documentary films about art and the human condition. His first one-hour portrait "Tomi Ungerer's Landleben" started a very successful co-operation with Benigna von Keyserlingk who became the Adlon's television producer of documentaries and feature films.
Percy and Eleonore Adlon formed their film production company, pelemele FILM GmbH, in 1978. Their first project was the docu-drama "The Guardian and his Poet" about the Swiss poet Robert Walser for which they won 2 Adolf-Grimme Awards in Gold (best writer/director, best actor). Their first feature film "Celeste", drew international attention at Cannes in 1981. "Bagdad Cafe", 1987, started their co-operation with Dietrich v. Watzdorf (Bayerischer Rundfunk) The story of Jasmin Münchgstettner and the Cafe owner Brenda became a symbol of friendship and warmth, and is loved all over the globe. Marianne Sägebrecht whom Percy Adlon discovered in 1979 became a cult figure, and Bob Telson's song "Calling You" a classic.
Percy and Eleonore Adlon live in Pacific Palisades, California, working together with their son Felix whose first feature film "Eat Your Heart Out" (1997) they produced with their US company Leora Films. Felix was also the lead in the Adlons' docu-fantasy "The Glamorous World of the Adlon Hotel". (Bavarian TV award).
In 1997 Percy Adlon started working with a digital camera. He filmed a three hour special about the draftsman Tomi Ungerer for ARTE; Mozart's "Magic Flute" with images of today's Berlin; Esa-Pekka Salonen and the LA Phil; 22 short films based on unknown masterpieces by Johann Strauss, Jr.; a 90 minute film about his past and present relationship with his hometown Munich, "Mein Munchen", and he completed his tenth feature film "Hawaiian Gardens" and a documentary Koenig's Sphere - the story of the monumental world trade center sculpture that was damaged but not destroyed in the 9/11 attack.
Remembering his roots in theater, in 2002 Percy Adlon directed Donizetti's Elisir d'Amore at the State Opera unter den Linden, Berlin, followed in March 2004 by the world premiere of Wilfried Hiller's opera Wolkenstein at the State Opera Nuernberg, Germany.
Percy and Eleonore Adlon's recent work also includes their own adaptation of Bagdad Cafe for the stage as a musical. Music by Bob Telson. It premiered on July 6, 2004, at the Barcelona Teatre Musical. In 2007, the Adlons completed "Orbela's People", a documentary about a time with a Maasai family in Ngorongoro, Tanzania.
Percy Adlon is the recipient of the Officer's Cross of the Federal Republic of Germany, and the Bavarian Order of Merit. He is a voting member of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.- Writer
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Gilda de Abreu was born on 23 September 1904 in Paris, France. She was a writer and director, known for Coração Materno (1951), O Ébrio (1946) and Pinguinho de Gente (1949). She was married to Vicente Celestino. She died on 4 June 1979 in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.- Director
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Although it is very unlikely that his admittedly cheap-'n'-cheesy films will ever be acknowledged as true works of cinematic art, producer/director/screenwriter Al Adamson did, nonetheless, make a slew of entertainingly trashy low-budget exploitation features for the drive-in market throughout the 1960s and 1970s.
He was born on July 25, 1929, in Hollywood, California, the son of actress Dolores Booth and actor/director Victor Adamson who, appropriately enough, specialized in shoddy B-grade - and lower - Westerns in the 1920s and 1930s, both as an actor and especially as a director. Adamson's first foray into filmmaking was helping his father as director and producer on the film Halfway to Hell (1953). In the mid-1960s, he founded the prolific grindhouse outfit Independent-International Pictures with fellow producer/distributor Samuel M. Sherman. Adamson cranked out flicks in every conceivable genre: scuzzy biker items (Satan's Sadists (1969), Hell's Bloody Devils (1970), Angels' Wild Women (1971)), grungy Westerns (Five Bloody Graves (1969), Jessi's Girls (1975)), smarmy softcore porn sex comedies (The Naughty Stewardesses (1973), Blazing Stewardesses (1975)), funky blaxploitation films (Mean Mother (1973), Black Heat (1976)), ridiculous science fiction dross (the gloriously ghastly Horror of the Blood Monsters (1970)), two Jim Kelly martial arts/action outings (Black Samurai (1976) and Death Dimension (1978)), lurid horror fare (Dracula vs. Frankenstein (1971), Brain of Blood (1971), Nurse Sherri (1977)) and even a tongue-in-cheek softcore porn science fiction musical (Cinderella 2000 (1977)). Moreover, Adamson served as producer for both the exciting Fred Williamson blaxploitation vehicle Hammer (1972) and the acclaimed made-for-TV drama Cry Rape (1973). The casts of Adamson's films were made up of oddball but enthusiastic amateurs and faded professional thespians whose careers were on the wane, including Kent Taylor, Russ Tamblyn, Lon Chaney Jr. and the ubiquitous John Carradine. Adamson frequently gave his wife, Regina Carrol, sizable parts in his films. Moreover, he was a mentor for future schlock feature directors Greydon Clark and John 'Bud' Cardos. He was also instrumental in launching the career of ace cinematographer Gary Graver. In addition, Adamson kept fellow top cinematographers László Kovács and Vilmos Zsigmond employed in the early days of their careers.
Al Adamson's life came to a brutal and untimely end at 66 when he was murdered by his live-in contractor, Fred Fulford, on August 2, 1995.- Producer
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Maren Ade was born in Karlsruhe on 12 December 1976 to a couple of teachers.She studied cinema at Munich's Hochschule für Fernsehen und Film. As of 2001 she co-founded, together with Janine Jackowski, a fellow graduate from HFF, the "Komplizen" film company. It is through Komplizen that Maren would later co-produce, among others, "Arabian Nights", Miguel Gomes' masterpiece. After two shorts in 2000 and 2001 made under the auspices of her film school, she co-produced, wrote and and directed Der Wald vor lauter Bäumen (2003), her first feature. A grueling drama about the difficult beginnings of a new teacher, the movie impressed both audiences and critics. Incidentally, it is of interest to specify that its school scenes were entirely shot within the walls of the educational institution where her mother was teaching at the time. This promising effort was followed six years later by Everyone Else (2009), which although taking place in a totally different setting (the Sardinian seaside in the glory of Summer) also concerns characters unsure of themselves. A taut drama as well, it revolves around two holiday making newly married couples and describes in a Roman Polanski-like manner the wicked relationships they share. But her greatest success came in 2015 and 2016 with Toni Erdmann (2016), an offbeat comedy with a philosophical approach, which enthused the festival-goers at Cannes, allegedly making them "roar with laughter", and later making unexpected profit in art houses throughout the world. And it is true that a father playing dirty tricks on his daughter (meant to make her realize she is wasting her life) is no ordinary entertainment. As a matter of fact, after only three full-length movies to her credit, Maren Ade has become a name that counts in today's German cinema.- Director
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Yasmin Ahmad was born on 7 January 1958 in Bukit Treh, Muar, Johor, Malaysia. She was a director and actress, known for Sepet (2004), Talentime (2009) and Gubra (2006). She died on 25 July 2009 in Petaling Jaya, Malaysia.- Director
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Marianne Ahrne was born on 25 May 1940 in Lund, Skåne län, Sweden. She is a director and writer, known for Långt borta och nära (1976), Frihetens murar (1978) and A Matter of Life and Death (1986).- Director
- Cinematographer
- Editor
Peggy Ahwesh was born in 1954 in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, USA. She is a director and cinematographer, known for Creepshow (1982), Strange Weather (1993) and The Scary Movie (1993).- Director
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- Camera and Electrical Department
Ghana born John Akomfrah is known for his experimental documentaries and video installations on the subjects of race, migration, and slavery in the encounters between European colonisers and African subjects.In the 1980s working in London, he helped found the Black Audio Film Collective and later set up the Smoking Dogs production company. His cinematic influences include Carl Dreyer and Sergei Eisenstein.- Director
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Russian-born French experimental short artist Alexeieff, who with his wife American-born Claire Parker invented the pinscreen animation technique,is most known for designing the prologue sequence for Orson Welles's The Trial.He grew up in Constantinople, then the Ottoman Empire, where in 1906 his military attaché father was killed by the German secret service.Returning to Czarist Russia with his school principal mother, he entered the Cadets military academy of Saint Petersburg and his 16 years there would influence his later fondness for Russian themes in his art work and filmmaking. After the Revolution, in 1922, Alexeieff settled in Paris where he studied painting, did stage decor, and beginning in 1925 lent his hand to illustrating editions of classic literature.Under the influence of the avant garde Cinema movement of the time, he aspired to move into directing.His landmark work, Night on Bald Mountain, in 1933 was a fusion of a musical piece and imagery 7 years before Wait Disney attempted the same piece as part of Fantasia.Two years later he would produce the first promotional film in France made in color.and Claire Parker- Director
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- Second Unit Director or Assistant Director
Yves Allégret was born on 13 October 1905 in Asnières-sur-Seine, Hauts-de-Seine, France. He was a director and writer, known for The Proud and the Beautiful (1953), La meilleure part (1955) and Dédée d'Anvers (1948). He was married to Michèle Cordoue, Simone Signoret and Renée Naville. He died on 31 January 1987 in Jouars-Pontchartrain, Yvelines, France.- Director
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- Producer
Merzak Allouache was born on 6 October 1944 in Algiers, Alger, France [now Algeria]. He is a director and writer, known for El taaib (2012), Bab El Oued City (1994) and The Rooftops (2013).- Director
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- Producer
Lisandro Alonso was born on 2 June 1975 in Buenos Aires, Argentina. He is a director and writer, known for La libertad (2001), Los Muertos (2004) and Jauja (2014).- Director
- Writer
Suzana Amaral was born on 28 March 1932 in Sao Paulo, Brazil. She was a director and writer, known for Hour of the Star (1985), Uma Vida em Segredo (2001) and Hotel Atlântico (2009). She died on 25 June 2020 in Sao Paulo, Brazil.- Director
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- Producer
Joaquim Pedro de Andrade was born on 25 May 1932 in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. He was a director and writer, known for Macunaima (1969), Guerra Conjugal (1974) and The Brazilwood Man (1982). He was married to Cristina Aché, Sarah de Castro Barbosa and Ana Maria Galano. He died on 10 September 1988 in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.- Director
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- Editor
Annette Apon was born in 1949. She is a director and writer, known for Giovanni (1983), De man met de hond (1998) and Ik wil gelukkig zijn (2016).- Director
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- Producer
Semyon Aranovich was born on 23 July 1934 in Derazhnya, Ukrainian SSR, USSR [now Derazhnia, Khmelnytskyi Oblast, Ukraine]. He was a director and writer, known for God sobaki (1994), Ya sluzhil v okhrane Stalina, ili Opyt dokumentalnoy mifologii (1989) and Slomannaya podkova (1973). He died in 1995.- Actress
- Director
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Amma Asante is a British BAFTA award winning screenwriter and director, known for Belle (2013), and A Way of Life (2004). She is a former child actress, who began her writing career at the age of 23 with a script deals from both Channel 4 in the UK and BBC. Her first movie, A Way of Life, which she wrote and directed won her numerous awards, both in the UK and internationally, including FIPRESCI prizes and the Carl Foreman BAFTA Film Award. In 2017 Amma was awarded an MBE on the Queen's New Year's Honours List, for her services to film as a writer and director.- Director
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Asif was born Asif Karim in Etawah, Uttar Pradesh to Parents Dr. Fazal Karim and Bibi Ghulam Fatima. He was the youngest of his siblings with Sikander Begum, wife of versatile Actor/Director/Producer Nazir Ahmed Khan being the Eldest and Masood Karim, the first Muslim President of Sindh Club second in line. Asif Karim went to Bombay to his brother-in-law Nazir Ahmed Khan and later took the name K. Asif. He became a Successful director due to his perfectionism in weaving his imagination into an art form and gave birth to Mughal-e-Azam, a legendary film in the Sub-Continental Cinema which needs no introduction. He passed away at very early age- Director
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- Actor
Born in Paris on July 13th 1923, Alexandre Astruc is the son of a couple of journalists. Very good at school, he attended a preparatory school for Polytechnique but finally became both a law and an arts graduate. First a literary critic, he soon specialized as a film critic and worked for various papers and magazines such as "Combat", "La Gazette du Cinéma", "L'Ecran français", "La Nef", "Ciné-Digest", "Les Cahiers du Cinéma". He was instrumental in the creation of the film club "Objectif 49" and of the "Festival du Film Maudit" in Biarritz (circa 1949/50). His first two works were sixteen millimeter films characteristic of the Saint Germain des Prés" era. In the fifties and early sixties he directed very personal, elegant, literary movies but found it harder and harder to find producers interested in his style. He turned to television and novel writing instead.- Director
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Carlos Atanes was born on 8 November 1971 in Barcelona. He is a director and writer, known for FAQ: Frequently Asked Questions (2004), Alter-Ego Film Project and Maximum Shame (2010).- Director
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- Second Unit Director or Assistant Director
At the time when women directors make more and more their presence felt on the French scene, the importance of Jacqueline Audry cannot be overstated. All today's daring Metteuses En Scene are certainly her psychic daughters as they are Agnès Varda's. Audry, born in 1908, began to direct long before Varda, as contemporary of Ida Lupino in America. Audry's movies mostly dealt with female psychology from every angle. Her first effort was a subversive adaptation of La Comtesse De Ségur's "Les Malheurs De Sophie" (1946), the young heroine refused the aristocratic happiness and eventually took a rebel stand. "Gigi" (1948) (remade by Vincente Minnelli as a musical) and "Minne" (1950), both from Colette's novels, featured Danielle Delorme. But it was the overlooked "Olivia" (1951) which revealed Audry's remarkable talent: in a boarding-school for girls, two female teachers vied with each other for their students love; using literary works to enhance her story, helped by Edwige Feuillère's masterful performance, this Audry's tour De force about lesbianism was far ahead of its time. "Huis clos" (1954) from Sartre was her second great achievement: the beginning (the elevator) might have inspired Alan Parker for "Angel Heart", using flashbacks to avoid filmed stage production style, Audry's directing is dazzling, with an excellent cast featuring glorious Arletty as lesbian Inès. 'La Garçonne", a remake of a thirties movie which surpassed its model, introduced a woman who would want to live like a man, it contained scenes which, at the time, were more scandalous than what Roger Vadim was doing with Brigitte Bardot. Sadly, another remake, "L'Ecole Des Cocottes" (1958) ,could not hold a candle to the thirties version featuring Raimu. Her last worthwhile effort was "Le Secret Du Chevalier D'Eon" (1960), the fictionalized story of Louis The Fifteenth's spy who used to dress up as a woman: this film and "La Garçonne" featured Andrée Debar, whose androgynous looks worked wonders. A road movie ("Les Petits Matins",1961) and other indifferent movies in the sixties and Audry's career closed in 1971. She died in 1977, and she had unfairly sunk into oblivion. She was married to screenwriter Pierre Laroche who would work with her.- Director
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After school, Amelio studied philosophy. He graduated with a doctorate. Amelio developed a keen interest in film at a young age. In 1970 he began working as a cameraman for the Italian state television RAI. A little later, Amelio worked as an assistant director for RAI. In 1970 he directed his first television film: "La fine del gioco". He then also took part in the production of several TV commercials, for example for the state-owned airline Alitalia. In the 1970s, Amelio first attracted attention in international cinema with films such as "La città del sole" (1973), "La morte al lavoro" (1978) and "Il piccolo Archimede" (1979).
Amelio celebrated his breakthrough as an internationally recognized film director in 1990 with "Porte aperte". With "Il ladro di bambini" in 1992, Gianni Amelio impressively staged the conflicts of conscience of a carabinieri officer in today's Italian society. In 1994 he came to the public with the film "Lamerica", which dealt with the current refugee problem between Albania and Italy and exposed the unscrupulous dealings with the plight of refugees by the smuggling organizations. The director has been honored with several international awards for his film work.
He received an Oscar nomination in 1991 for "Porte aperte". In 1992, Amelio was awarded the Nastro d'Argento, the Felix Award and the Cannes Grand Prix for "Il ladro di bambini". Another silver ribbon (Nastro d'Argento) at the Venice Film Festival followed in 1994 for "Lamerica". In the same year he received the Grolla d'Oro for his life's work. In 1996 the Spanish Goya Film Prize also followed for "Lamerica". The director also published a book under the same title in 1994 about the film "Lamerica". At the same time, Amelio also worked as a theater director: in 1995 he staged the play "I pagliacci" in Genoa's Carlo Felice Theater. The director's other successful films were "Così ridevano" in 1998 and "Le chiavi di casa" in 2004.
In 2008 he took over the management of the Torino Film Festival from Nanni Moretti.- Actor
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Mathieu Amalric was born on 25 October 1965 in Neuilly-sur-Seine, Hauts-de-Seine, France. He is an actor and director, known for The Diving Bell and the Butterfly (2007), The Grand Budapest Hotel (2014) and Munich (2005).