Conversations with Filmmakers Series - Böcker

Over nearly sixty years, Agnès Varda (b. 1928) has given interviews that are revealing not only of her work, but of her remarkably ambiguous status. She has been called the ""Mother of the New Wave"" but suffered for many years for never having been completely accepted by the cinematic establishment in France. Varda's first film, La Pointe Courte (1954), displayed many of the characteristics of the two later films that launched the New Wave, Truffaut's 400 Blows and Godard's Breathless. In a low-budget film, using (as yet) unknown actors and working entirely outside the prevailing studio system, Varda completely abandoned the ""tradition of quality"" that Truffaut was at that very time condemning in the pages of Cahiers du cinema. Her work, however, was not ""discovered"" until after Truffaut and Godard had broken onto the scene in 1959. Varda's next film, Cleo from 5 to 7, attracted considerably more attention and was selected as France's official entry for the Festival in Cannes. Ultimately, however, this film and her work for the next fifty years continued to be overshadowed by her more famous male friends, many of whom she mentored and advised.Her films have finally earned recognition as deeply probing and fundamental to the growing awareness in France of women's issues and the role of women in the cinema. ""I'm not philosophical,"" she says, ""not metaphysical. Feelings are the ground on which people can be led to think about things. I try to show everything that happens in such a way and ask questions so as to leave the viewers free to make their own judgments."" The panoply of interviews here emphasize her core belief that ""we never stop learning"" and reveal the wealth of ways to answer her questions.

The 1969 film Ma Nuit chez Maud catapulted its shy academic film director Eric Rohmer (1920-2010) into the limelight, selling over a million tickets in France and earning a nomination for an Academy Award. Ma Nuit chez Maud remains his most famous film, the highlight of an impressive range of films examining the sexual, romantic, and artistic mores of contemporary France, the temptations of desire, the small joys of everyday life, and sometimes, the vicissitudes of history and politics. Yet Rohmer was almost fifty years old when Maud was released and had already had a career as the editor of Cahiers du Cinéma, a position he lost in a political takeover in 1963. The interviews in this book offer a range of insights into the theoretical, critical, and practical circumstances of Rohmer's remarkably coherent body of films, but also allow Rohmer to act as his own critic, providing us with an array of readings concerning his interest in setting, season, color, and narrative.Alongside the application of a theoretical rigor to his own films, Rohmer's interviews also discuss directors as varied as Godard, Carné, Renoir, and Hitchcock, and the relations of film to painting, architecture, and music. This book reproduces little-known interviews, such as a debate Rohmer undertakes with Women and Film concerning feminism, alongside detailed discussions from Cahiers and Positif, many produced in English here for the first time.

Over the course of his career, legendary director Werner Herzog (b. 1942) has made almost sixty films and given more than eight hundred interviews. This collection features the best of these, focusing on all the major films, from Signs of Life and Aguirre, the Wrath of God to Grizzly Man and Cave of Forgotten Dreams. When did Herzog decide to become a filmmaker? Who are his key influences? Where does he find his peculiar themes and characters? What role does music play in his films? How does he see himself in relation to the German past and in relation to film history? And how did he ever survive the wrath of Klaus Kinski? Herzog answers these and many other questions in twenty-five interviews ranging from the 1960s to the present. Critics and fans recognized Herzog's importance as a young German filmmaker early on, but his films have attained international significance over the decades. Most of the interviews collected in this volume--some of them from Herzog's production archive and previously unpublished--appear in English for the very first time. Together, they offer an unprecedented look at Herzog's work, his career, and his public persona as it has developed and changed over time.

David Fincher (b. 1962) did not go to film school and hates being defined as an auteur. He prefers to see himself as a craftsman, dutifully going about the art and business of making film. Trouble is, it's hard to be self-effacing when you are the director responsible for Se7en, Fight Club, and The Social Network. Along with Quentin Tarantino, Fincher is the most accomplished of the Generation X filmmakers to emerge in the early 1990s. This collection of interviews highlights Fincher's unwavering commitment to his craft as he evolved from an entrepreneurial music video director (Fincher helped Madonna become the undisputed queen of MTV) into an enterprising feature filmmaker. Fincher landed his first Hollywood blockbuster at twenty-seven with Alien3, but that film, handicapped by cost overruns and corporate mismanagement, taught Fincher that he needed absolute control over his work. Once he had it, with Se7en, he achieved instant box-office success and critical acclaim, as well as a close partnership with Brad Pitt that led to the cult favorite Fight Club. Fincher became circumspect in the 2000s after Panic Room, shooting ads and biding his time until Zodiac, when he returned to his mantra that ""entertainment has to come hand in hand with a little bit of medicine. Some people go to the movies to be reminded that everything's okay. I don't make those kinds of movies. That, to me, is a lie. Everything's not okay."" Zodiac reinvigorated Fincher, inspiring a string of films--The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, The Social Network, and The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo--that enthralled audiences and garnered his films dozens of Oscar nominations.

This revised and updated edition gathers interviews and profiles covering the entire forty-five-year span of Woody Allen's career as a filmmaker, including detailed discussions of his most popular as well as his most critically acclaimed works. The present collection is a complete update of the volume that first appeared in 2006. In the years since, Allen has continued making movies, including Midnight in Paris and the Oscar-winning Blue Jasmine.While many interviews from the original edition have been retained in the present volume, nine new entries extend the coverage of Allen's directorial career through 2015. In addition, there is a new, in-depth interview from the period covered in the first edition. Most of the interviews included in the original volume first appeared in such widely known publications and venues as the New York Times, the Washington Post, Time, the New Yorker, Rolling Stone, and Playboy. A number of smaller and lesser-known venues are also represented, especially in the new volume. Several interviews from non-American sources add an international perspective on Allen's work.Materials for the new volume include pieces focusing primarily on Allen's films as well as broader profiles and interviews that also concentrate on his literary talent. Perhaps Stephen Mamber best describes Allen's distinctiveness, especially early in his career: “Woody Allen is not the best new American comedy director or the best comedy writer or the best comedy actor, he's simply the finest combination of all three.”

With her gripping film The Hurt Locker, Kathryn Bigelow (b. 1951) made history in 2010 by becoming the first woman to win an Oscar for Best Director. Since then she has also filmed history with her latest movie, Zero Dark Thirty, which is about the mission to kill Osama Bin Laden.She is one of Hollywood's brightest stars, but her roots go back four decades to the very non-Hollywood, avant-garde art world of New York City in the 1970s. Her first feature The Loveless reflected those academic origins, but such subsequent films such as the vampire-Western Near Dark, the female vigilante movie Blue Steel, and the surfer-crime thriller Point Break demonstrated her determination to apply her aesthetic sensibilities to popular, genre filmmaking.The first volume of Bigelow's interviews ever published, Peter Keough's collection covers her early success with Near Dark; the frustrations and disappointments she endured with films such as Strange Days and K-19: The Widowmaker; and her triumph with The Hurt Locker. In conversations ranging from the casual to the analytical, Bigelow explains how her evolving ambitions and aesthetics sprang from her earliest aspirations to be a painter and conceptual artist in New York in the 1970s and then expanded to embrace Hollywood filmmaking when she was exposed to such renowned directors as John Ford, Howard Hawks, Don Siegel, Sam Peckinpah, and George Roy Hill.

Harmony Korine: Interviews tracks filmmaker Korine's stunning rise, fall, and rise again through his own evolving voice. Bringing together interviews collected from over two decades, this unique chronicle includes rare interviews unavailable in print for years and an extensive, new conversation recorded at the filmmaker's home in Nashville.After more than twenty years, Harmony Korine (b. 1973) remains one of the most prominent and yet subversive filmmakers in America. Ever since his entry into the independent film scene as the irrepressible prodigy who wrote the screenplay for Larry Clark's Kids in 1992, Korine has retained his stature as the ultimate cinematic provocateur. He both intelligently observes modern social milieus and simultaneously thumbs his nose at them. Now approaching middle age, and more influential than ever, Korine remains intentionally sensationalistic and ceaselessly creative.He parlayed the success of Kids into directing the dreamy portrait of neglect, Gummo, two years later. With his audacious 1999 digital video drama Julien Donkey-Boy, Korine continued to demonstrate a penchant for fusing experimental, subversive interests with lyrical narrative techniques. Surviving an early career burnout, he resurfaced with a trifecta of insightful works that built on his earlier aesthetic leanings: a surprisingly delicate rumination on identity (Mister Lonely), a gritty quasi-diary film (Trash Humpers), and a blistering portrait of American hedonism (Spring Breakers), which yielded significant commercial success. Throughout his career he has also continued as a mixed-media artist whose fields included music videos, paintings, photography, publishing, songwriting, and performance art.

American filmmaker John Cassavetes (1929-1989) made only nine independent films during a quarter century, but those films have affected the cinema culture of the 1960s to the 1980s in unprecedented ways. With a close nucleus of actors and crew members on his team, including his wife Gena Rowlands, Peter Falk, and Ben Gazzara, Cassavetes created films that explored the gritty side of human relationships. He staunchly advocated the right of actors and filmmakers to full artistic freedom over their work. Attracting both fervent admirers and harsh critics, Cassavetes's films have garnered prestigious awards in the US and Europe and continue to evoke strong reactions.Starting in New York with his first film Shadows (1959), Cassavetes moved on to the West Coast with Faces (1968), Husbands (1970), Minnie and Moskowitz (1971), A Woman Under the Influence (1974), The Killing of a Chinese Bookie (1976), Opening Night (1977), Gloria (1980), and Love Streams (1984). He also directed several studio films, which often rankled his independent streak that rebelled against a loss of artistic freedom. Cassavetes's work in the theater and his performances in numerous television programs and films, including The Dirty Dozen (1967) and Rosemary's Baby (1968), made him, as a director, fiercely protective of his actors' right to self-expression.Cassavetes's contributions to film as actor, writer, director, producer, and cinematographer at a time of radical changes in cinema history continue to inspire independent filmmakers to challenge creative restrictions and celebrate actors' artistic contributions. John Cassavetes: Interviews captures this ""maverick"" streak of an intensely personal filmmaker who was passionate about his art.

Bertrand Tavernier (b. 1941) is widely considered to be the leading light in a generation of French filmmakers who launched their careers in the 1970s, in the wake of the New Wave. In just over forty years, he has directed twenty-two feature films in an eclectic range of genres, from intimate family portrait to historical drama and neo-Western. Beginning with his debut feature--L'Horloger de Saint-Paul (1974), which won the prestigious Louis Delluc prize--Tavernier has shown himself to be a public intellectual. Like his films, he is deeply engaged with the pressing issues facing France and the world: the consequences of war, colonialism and its continuing aftermath, the price of heroism, and the power of art. A voracious cinephile, he is immensely knowledgeable about world cinema and American film in particular. Tavernier's roots are in Lyon, the birthplace of the cinema. He founded and presides over the Institut Lumière, which hosts retrospectives and an annual film festival in the factory where the Lumière brothers made the first films.In this collection, containing numerous interviews translated from French and available in English for the first time, he discusses the arc of his career following in the lineage of the Lumière brothers, in that his goal, like theirs, is to ""show the world to the world.""It is no surprise, then, that an interview with Tavernier is a treat. Beginning with discussions of his own films, the interviews in this volume cover a vast range of topics. At the core are his thoughts about the ways cinema can inspire the imagination and contribute to the broadest possible public conversation.

A pioneer of the New Queer Cinema, Todd Haynes (b. 1961) is a leading American independent filmmaker. Whether working with talking dolls in a homemade short (Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story) or with Oscar-winning performers in an HBO miniseries (Mildred Pierce), Haynes has garnered numerous awards and nominations and an expanding fan base for his provocative and engaging work. In all his films, Haynes works to portray the struggles of characters in conflict with the norms of society. Many of his movies focus on female characters, drawing inspiration from genres such as the woman's film and the disease movie (Far from Heaven and Safe); others explore male characters who transgress sexual and other social conventions (Poison and Velvet Goldmine).The writer-director has drawn on figures such as Karen Carpenter, David Bowie, Iggy Pop, and Bob Dylan in his meditations on American and British music, celebrity, and the meaning of identity. His 2007 movie I'm Not There won a number of awards and was notable for Haynes's decision to cast six different actors (one of whom was a woman) to portray Dylan.Gathering interviews from 1989 through 2012, this collection presents a range of themes, films, and moments in the burgeoning career of Todd Haynes.

Spanning five decades and twenty-four films, director Michael Haneke's career is one of the most significant in the history of European art cinema. However, critical reception has long lagged behind his output. By the time Haneke (b. 1942) emerged into the international spotlight as a cinematic visionary with the 1989 Cannes premiere of The Seventh Continent, he had worked in filmmaking for two decades, producing seven feature-length films.As many of his films aired solely on Austrian and German television, they remained unknown to audiences outside the German-speaking world until 2007, when the first comprehensive Haneke retrospective took place in the United States.Michael Haneke: Interviews presents some of Haneke's most profound interviews to English speakers. The volume features seventeen articles, fourteen of which have been translated into English for the first time, and all of which provide a detailed, eloquent commentary on his films and worldview. This book represents the most extensive collection to date of interviews with the filmmaker, spanning his entire oeuvre - from his earliest television films to his so-called "Glaciation Trilogy" of the 1990s, from the notorious dark satire Funny Games to its similarly notorious 2007 Hollywood remake, and from his French films of the 2000s to his Oscar-winning drama, Amour, and his most recent feature, Happy End.

Martin Scorsese (b. 1942) has long been considered one of America’s greatest cinematic storytellers. Over the last fifty years he has created some of the most iconic moments in American film, never afraid to confront controversial issues with passion. While few of his films are directly autobiographical, his upbringing in New York’s Little Italy, the childhood asthma that kept him from playing sports, and his early desire to enter the priesthood all helped form his sensibilities and later shaped his distinct style. Community, religion, violence?these themes drive a Scorsese picture, and whether he examines the violence that bursts forth in the hand of Travis Bickle or the passion of Jesus Christ, Scorsese’s mastery of the history, art, and craft of filmmaking is undeniable.This collection was originally edited by the late Peter Brunette in 1999 and is now revised and extensively updated by Robert Ribera. It traces Scorsese’s evolution from the earliest days of the New American Cinema, his work with Roger Corman, and his days at New York University’s film program to his efforts to preserve the legacy of cinema, his documentary work, and his recent string of successes. Among new movies discussed are The Departed, Hugo, and The Wolf of Wall Street, and the documentaries No Direction Home and The Blues. Scorsese stands out as a director, producer, scholar, preservationist, and icon. His work both behind the camera and in the service of its history are a cornerstone of American and world cinemas. In these interviews, Scorsese takes us from Elizabeth Street to the heights of Hollywood and all the journeys in between.

Martin Scorsese (b. 1942) has long been considered one of America’s greatest cinematic storytellers. Over the last fifty years he has created some of the most iconic moments in American film, never afraid to confront controversial issues with passion. While few of his films are directly autobiographical, his upbringing in New York’s Little Italy, the childhood asthma that kept him from playing sports, and his early desire to enter the priesthood all helped form his sensibilities and later shaped his distinct style. Community, religion, violence?these themes drive a Scorsese picture, and whether he examines the violence that bursts forth in the hand of Travis Bickle or the passion of Jesus Christ, Scorsese’s mastery of the history, art, and craft of filmmaking is undeniable.This collection was originally edited by the late Peter Brunette in 1999 and is now revised and extensively updated by Robert Ribera. It traces Scorsese’s evolution from the earliest days of the New American Cinema, his work with Roger Corman, and his days at New York University’s film program to his efforts to preserve the legacy of cinema, his documentary work, and his recent string of successes. Among new movies discussed are The Departed, Hugo, and The Wolf of Wall Street, and the documentaries No Direction Home and The Blues. Scorsese stands out as a director, producer, scholar, preservationist, and icon. His work both behind the camera and in the service of its history are a cornerstone of American and world cinemas. In these interviews, Scorsese takes us from Elizabeth Street to the heights of Hollywood and all the journeys in between.

Before he was the Academy Award-nominated director of The Last Picture Show, Peter Bogdanovich (b. 1939) interviewed some of cinema's great masters: Orson Welles, Alfred Hitchcock, John Ford, and others. Since becoming an acclaimed filmmaker himself, he has given countless interviews to the press about his own career.This volume collects thirteen of his best, most comprehensive, and most insightful interviews, many long out of print and several never before published in their entirety. They cover more than forty years of directing, with Bogdanovich talking candidly about his great triumphs, such as The Last Picture Show and What's Up, Doc?, and his overlooked gems, such as Daisy Miller and They All Laughed.Assembled by acclaimed critic Peter Tonguette, also author of a new critical biography of Bogdanovich, these interviews demonstrate that Bogdanovich is not only one of America's finest filmmakers, but also one of its most eloquent when discussing film and his own remarkable movies.

After a robust career in the Netherlands as the country's most successful director, Paul Verhoeven (b. 1938) built an impressive career in the United States with such controversial blockbusters as RoboCop, Total Recall, Basic Instinct, Starship Troopers, and Showgirls before returning home to direct 2006's Black Book. After a recent stint as a reality television judge in the Netherlands, Verhoeven returned to the big screen with his first feature film in a decade, a highly anticipated French-language production, Elle, starring Isabelle Huppert.Verhoeven, who holds a PhD in mathematics with a concentration on the theory of relativity, boasts a fascinating background. Traversing Hollywood, the Dutch film industry, and now French filmmaking, the interviews in this volume reveal a complex, often ambiguous figure, as well as a director of immense talent.Paul Verhoeven: Interviews covers every phase of the director's career, beginning with six newly translated Dutch newspaper interviews dating back to 1968 and ending with a set of previously unpublished interviews dedicated to his most recent work. He experimented with crowd-sourced filmmaking for the television show The Entertainment Experience, which resulted in the film Tricked, as well as his latest feature Elle. Editor Margaret Barton-Fumo includes ""Sex, Cinema and Showgirls,"" a long out-of-print essay by Verhoeven on his most controversial film, accompanied by pages of original storyboards from this and some of Verhoeven's other films. Finally, Barton-Fumo allots due attention to the director's little-known lifelong fascination with the historical Jesus Christ. Verhoeven is the only non-theologian member of the exclusive Westar Institute and author of the book Jesus of Nazareth.

Since 1996, Alexander Payne (b. 1961) has made six feature films and a short segment of an omnibus movie. Although his body of work is quantitatively small, it is qualitatively impressive. His movies have garnered numerous accolades and awards, including two Academy Awards for Best Adapted Screenplay. As more than one interviewer in this volume points out, he maintains an impressive and unbroken winning streak. Payne's stories of human strivings and follies, alongside his mastery of the craft of filmmaking, mark him as a contemporary auteur of uncommon accomplishment.In this first compilation of his interviews, Payne reveals himself as a captivating conversationalist as well. The discussions collected here range from 1996, shortly after the release of his first film, Citizen Ruth, to the 2013 debut of his film, Nebraska. Over his career, he muses on many subjects including his own creative processes, his commitment to telling character-centered stories, and his abiding admiration for movies and directors from across decades of film history.Critics describe Payne as one of the few contemporary filmmakers who consistently manages to buck the current trend toward bombastic blockbusters. Like the 1970s director-driven cinema that he cherishes, his films are small-scale character studies that manage to maintain a delicate balance between sharp satire and genuine poignancy.

In this volume, editor Suranjan Ganguly collects eight of Stan Brakhage’s most important interviews in which the filmmaker describes his conceptual frameworks, his theoriesof vision and sound, the importance of poetry, music, and the visual arts in relation to his work, his concept of the muse, and the key influences on his art-making. In doing so, Brakhage (1933–2003) discusses some of his iconic films, such as Anticipation of the Night, Dog Star Man, Scenes from Under Childhood, Mothlight, and Text of Light.One of the most innovative filmmakers in the history of experimental cinema, Brakhage made almost 350 films in his fifty-two year- long career. These films include psychodramas, autobiography, Freudian trance films, birth films, song cycles, meditations on light, and hand-painted films, some of which range from nine seconds to over four hours in duration. Born in Kansas City, Missouri, he lived most of his life in the mountains of Colorado, teaching for twenty-one years in the film studies program at the University of Colorado, Boulder.As a filmmaker, Brakhage’s life-long obsession with what he called an “adventure in perception” made him focus on the act of seeing itself, which he tried to capture on film in multiple ways both with and without his camera and by scratching and painting on film. Convinced that there is a primary level of cognition that precedes language, he wrote of the “untutored eye” with which children can access ineffable visual realities. Adults, who have lostsuch primal sight, can “retrain” their eyes by becoming conscious of what constitutes true vision and the different ways in which they daily perceive the world. Brakhage’s films experiment with such perceptions, manipulating visual and auditory experience in ways that continue to influence film today.

In the New Yorker, Stephen Schiff has described Fred Schepisi (b. 1939) as “probably the least-known great director working in the mainstreamAmerican cinema—a master storyteller with a serenely muscular style that can make more flamboyant moviemakers look coarse and overweening.” Schepisi’s launch in Australia during the country’s film renaissance of the 1970s and his ongoing international work have rightfully earned him a reputation as an actors’ director. But he has also become a skillful stylist, forging his own way as he works alongside a talented team of collaborators.This volume includes twenty interviews with Schepisi andtwo with longtime collaborators, cinematographer Ian Baker and composer Paul Grabowsky. The interviews trace the filmmaker’s career from his beginnings in advertising, through his two early Australian features—The Devil’s Playground and The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith—to his subsequent work in the United Statesand beyond on films as various as Plenty, Roxanne, A Cry in the Dark, The Russia House, Six Degrees of Separation, Empire Falls, Last Orders, and Eye of the Storm. Schepisi’s films are diverse thematically and visually. In what is effectively a master class on film direction, Schepisi discusses his creative choices and his workwith actors and collaborators behind the scenes. In the process, he provides a goldmine of insights into his films, his filmmaking style, and what makes him tick as an artist.

Fans and critics alike perceive Wong Kar-wai (b. 1958) as an enigma. His dark glasses, his nonlinear narrations, and his high expectations for actors all contribute to an assumption that he only makes art for a few high-brow critics. However Wong’s interviews show this Hong Kong auteur is candid about the art of filmmaking, even surprisinghis interlocutors by suggesting his films are commercial and made for a popular audience.Wong’s achievements nevertheless feel like arthouse cinema.His third film, Chungking Express, introduced him to a global audience captivated by the quick and quirky editing style. His Cannes award-winning films Happy Together and In the Mood for Love confirmed an audience beyond the greater Chinese market. His latest film, The Grandmaster, depicts the life of a kung fu master by breaking away from the martial arts genre. In each of these films, Wong Kar-wai’s signature style—experimental, emotive, character-driven, and timeless—remains apparent throughout.This volume includes interviews that appear in English for the first time, including some that appeared in Hong Kong magazines now out of print. The interviews cover every feature film from Wong’s debut As Tears Go By to his 2013 The Grandmaster.

Though he has made only five films in two decades- Strictly Ballroom, William Shakespeare's Romeo + Juliet, and the Oscar-nominated films Moulin Rouge!, Australia, and The Great Gatsby- Australian writer-director Baz Luhrmann is an internationally known brand name. His name has even entered the English language as a verb, as in ""to Baz things up,"" meaning ""to decorate them with an exuberant flourish. "" Celebrated by some, loathed by others, his work is underscored by what has been described as ""an aesthetic of artifice"" and is notable for both its glittering surfaces and recurring concerns.In this collection of interviews, Luhrmann discusses his methods and his motives, explaining what has been important to him and his collaborators from the start and how he has been able to maintain an independence from the studios that have backed his films. He also speaks about his other artistic endeavors, including stage productions of La Bohème and A Midsummer Night's Dream, and his wife and collaborative partner Catherine Martin, who has received two Academy Awards for her work with Luhrmann.

Margarethe von Trotta (b. 1942) entered the film industry in the only way she could in the 1960s—as an actress. Throughout her career, von Trotta added thirty-two acting credits to her name; however, these credits came to a halt in 1975. Her ambition had always been to be a movie director. Though she viewed acting as a detour, it allowed her to be in the right place at the right time, and through her line of work she met such important directors as Rainer Werner Fassbinder and Volker Schlöndorff. The latter would eventually provide her with the opportunity to codirect her first film, Die Verlohrene Ehre der Katharina Blum (The Lost Honor of Katharina Blum) in 1975. The debut’s success ensured von Trotta’s future in the film industry and launched her accomplished film directing career.In Margarethe von Trotta: Interviews, volume editor Monika Raesch furnishes twenty-four illuminating interviews with the auteur. Spanning three decades, from the mid-1980s until today, the interviews reveal not only von Trotta’s life in the film industry, but also evolving roles of and opportunities provided to women over that time period. This collection of interviews presents the different dimensions of von Trotta through the lenses of film critics, scholars, and journalists. The volume offers essential reading for anyone seeking a better understanding of an iconic female movie director at a time when this possibility for women just emerged.

Blake Edwards (1922-2010) was a multitalented, versatile director constantly exploring who he was, not only in filmmaking but also in life. Often typecast as a comedy director, he also created westerns, thrillers, musicals, and heart-wrenching dramas. His strength as a filmmaker came from his ability to be a triple threat—writer, director, and producer—allowing him full control of his films, especially when the studio system failed him.Blake Edwards: Interviews highlights how the filmmaker created the hugely successful Pink Panther franchise; his long partnership with award-winning composer Henry Mancini; his principles of comedy as influenced by the comic greats of film history, especially silent comedies; his decades-long marriage and film collaborations with Julie Andrews; and his unique philosophy of life. Continually testing his abilities as a writer, which he considered himself to be above all other professions, Edwards did not hesitate to strip comedy from films that clearly and purposefully explored other genres with sharp, dramatic insight. He created thrilling suspense (Experiment in Terror); rugged westerns (Wild Rovers); riveting drama (Days of Wine and Roses); and bittersweet romance (Breakfast at Tiffany’s). He also created musicals, namely Darling Lili and Victor/Victoria, showcasing the talents of Andrews. In fact, many of these films have been considered some of Edwards’s finest in his appreciable career.Reinventing himself throughout his sixty-year career, Edwards found new outlets of expression that fueled his creativity to the very end. This long-overdue collection of published interviews explores the up and downs—and ups again—of a sometimes flawed but always gifted and often surprising filmmaker.

David O. Russell (b. 1958) boasts a diverse body of work as a writer and director, spanning multiple genres and featuring radically differing aesthetic styles. While his early work comically explored taboo subjects with unerring directness, he has also investigated politics with explosive satire. In his most recent films, including American Hustle and Silver Linings Playbook, Russell examines characters and situations that are at once everyday and also extraordinary. Whatever the project, Russell is driven to explore the idiosyncrasies that make each character human, and he extends that curiosity to explore what makes each actor unique. His attentiveness to his cast members has earned him the label of ""actor's director,"" due in no small part to the many nominations and awards earned by a long list of Hollywood stars in his movies.Russell has also become one of our era's most interesting formal stylists as he adopts a visual design appropriate to each of his film's thematic concerns. The result may be a color palette resembling the washed-out pages of a newspaper achieved by manipulating the film stock for Three Kings or the tumultuous opening of The Fighter when an audacious, roving camera plunges viewers straight into the story from the very first shots of the film. Rather than building a signature style, Russell has instead tested the varied possibilities of cinematic expression.This career-spanning volume features conversations with scholars and journalists as well as filmmakers. Speaking to directors like Alexander Payne and Spike Jonze, Russell contextualizes each of his films, offers an intimate account of his evolving writing and directing process, and opens his life to reveal how a remarkable body of work has come to be.

David O. Russell (b. 1958) boasts a diverse body of work as a writer and director, spanning multiple genres and featuring radically differing aesthetic styles. While his early work comically explored taboo subjects with unerring directness, he has also investigated politics with explosive satire. In his most recent films, including American Hustle and Silver Linings Playbook, Russell examines characters and situations that are at once everyday and also extraordinary. Whatever the project, Russell is driven to explore the idiosyncrasies that make each character human, and he extends that curiosity to explore what makes each actor unique. His attentiveness to his cast members has earned him the label of ""actor's director,"" due in no small part to the many nominations and awards earned by a long list of Hollywood stars in his movies.Russell has also become one of our era's most interesting formal stylists as he adopts a visual design appropriate to each of his film's thematic concerns. The result may be a color palette resembling the washed-out pages of a newspaper achieved by manipulating the film stock for Three Kings or the tumultuous opening of The Fighter when an audacious, roving camera plunges viewers straight into the story from the very first shots of the film. Rather than building a signature style, Russell has instead tested the varied possibilities of cinematic expression.This career-spanning volume features conversations with scholars and journalists as well as filmmakers. Speaking to directors like Alexander Payne and Spike Jonze, Russell contextualizes each of his films, offers an intimate account of his evolving writing and directing process, and opens his life to reveal how a remarkable body of work has come to be.

American filmmaker John Cassavetes (1929-1989) made only nine independent films during a quarter century, but those films affected the cinema culture of the 1960s to the 1980s in unprecedented ways. With a close nucleus of actors and crew members on his team, including his wife Gena Rowlands, Peter Falk, and Ben Gazzara, Cassavetes created films that explored the gritty side of human relationships. He staunchly advocated the right of actors and filmmakers to full artistic freedom over their work. Attracting both fervent admirers and harsh critics, Cassavetes's films have garnered prestigious awards in the US and Europe and continue to evoke strong reactions.Starting in New York with his first film Shadows, Cassavetes moved on to the West Coast with Faces, Husbands, Minnie and Moskowitz, A Woman Under the Influence, The Killing of a Chinese Bookie, Opening Night, Gloria, and Love Streams. He also directed several studio films, which often rankled his independent streak that rebelled against a loss of artistic freedom. Cassavetes's work in the theater and his performances in numerous television programs and films, including The Dirty Dozen and Rosemary's Baby, made him, as a director, fiercely protective of his actors' right to self-expression.

After a robust career in the Netherlands as the country's most successful director, Paul Verhoeven (b. 1938) built an impressive career in the United States with such controversial blockbusters as RoboCop, Total Recall, Basic Instinct, Starship Troopers, and Showgirls before returning home to direct 2006's Black Book. After a recent stint as a reality television judge in the Netherlands, Verhoeven returned to the big screen with his first feature film in a decade, a highly anticipated French-language production, Elle, starring Isabelle Huppert.Verhoeven, who holds an advanced degree in mathematics and physics, boasts a fascinating background. Traversing Hollywood, the Dutch film industry, and now French filmmaking, the interviews in this volume reveal a complex, often ambiguous figure, as well as a director of immense talent.Paul Verhoeven: Interviews covers every phase of the director's career, beginning with six newly translated Dutch newspaper interviews dating back to 1968 and ending with a set of previously unpublished interviews dedicated to his most recent work. He experimented with crowd-sourced filmmaking for the television show The Entertainment Experience, which resulted in the film Tricked, as well as his latest feature Elle. Editor Margaret Barton-Fumo includes ""Sex, Cinema and Showgirls,"" a long out-of-print essay by Verhoeven on his most controversial film, accompanied by pages of original storyboards from this and some of Verhoeven's other films. Finally, Barton-Fumo allots due attention to the director's little-known lifelong fascination with the historical Jesus Christ. Verhoeven is the only non-theologian member of the exclusive Westar Institute and author of the book Jesus of Nazareth.

Fans and critics alike perceive Wong Kar-wai (b. 1958) as an enigma. His dark glasses, his nonlinear narrations, and his high expectations for actors all contribute to an assumption that he only makes art for a few highbrow critics. However, Wong's interviews show this Hong Kong auteur is candid about the art of filmmaking, even surprising his interlocutors by suggesting his films are commercial and made for a popular audience.Wong's achievements nevertheless feel like art-house cinema. His third film, Chungking Express, introduced him to a global audience captivated by the quick and quirky editing style. His Cannes award-winning films Happy Together and In the Mood for Love confirmed an audience beyond the greater Chinese market. His latest film, The Grandmaster, depicts the life of a kung fu master by breaking away from the martial arts genre. In each of these films, Wong Kar-wai's signature style-experimental, emotive, character-driven, and timeless-remains apparent throughout.This volume includes interviews that appear in English for the first time, including some that appeared in Hong Kong magazines now out of print. The interviews cover every feature film from Wong's debut As Tears Go By to his 2013 The Grandmaster.

The long and prolific career of Steven Soderbergh (b. 1963) defies easy categorization. From his breakout beginnings in 1989 with sex, lies, and videotape to 2013, when he retired from big-screen movie-making to focus on other pursuits including television, the director's output resembles nothing less than an elaborate experiment. Soderbergh's Hollywood vehicles such as the Ocean's Eleven movies, Contagion, and Magic Mike appear just as risky and outside-the-box as low-budget exercises such as Schizopolis, Bubble, and The Girlfriend Experience. This edition details key career moments: his creative crisis surrounding his fourth film, The Underneath; his rejuvenation with the ultra-low-budget free-style Schizopolis; the mainstream achievements Erin Brockovich, Traffic, and the Ocean's Eleven films; and his continuing dedication to pushing his craft forward with films as diverse as conspiracy thrillers, sexy dramas, and biopics on Che Guevara and Liberace. Spanning twenty-five years, these conversations reveal Soderbergh to be as self-effacing and lighthearted in his later more established years as he was when just beginning to make movies. He comes across as a man undaunted by the glitz and power of Hollywood, remaining, above all, a truly independent filmmaker unafraid to get his hands dirty and pick up the camera himself.

Jeffrey Jacob ""J. J."" Abrams (b. 1966) decided to be a filmmaker at the age of eight after his grandfather took him on the back-lot tour of Universal Studios. Throughout his career, Abrams has dedicated his life to storytelling and worked tirelessly to become one of the best-known and most successful creators in Hollywood. The thirty interviews collected in this volume span Abrams's entire career, covering his many projects from television and film to video games and theater. The volume also includes a 1982 article about Abrams as a teen sensation whose short film High Voltage won the Audience Award at a local film festival and garnered the attention of Steven Spielberg. Beginning his career as a screenwriter on films like Regarding Henry and Armageddon, Abrams transitioned into a TV mogul with hit shows like Alias and Lost. Known for his imaginative work across several genres, from science fiction and horror to action and drama, Abrams's most successful films include Mission: Impossible III; Star Trek; and Star Wars: The Force Awakens, which went on to become the highest-grossing film of all time in the United States. His production company, Bad Robot, has produced innovative genre projects like Cloverfield and Westworld. Abrams also cowrote a novel with Doug Dorst called S., and, most recently, he produced the Broadway run of The Play That Went Wrong. In conversations with major publications and independent blogs, Abrams discusses his long-standing collaborations with others in the field, explains his affinity for mystery, and describes his approach to creating films like those he gravitated to as a child, revealing that the award-winning director-writer-producer is a fan before he is a filmmaker.