Directors

Directors of the decade: No. 7: Steven Soderbergh

Matt Zoller Seitz — Sun, 20 Dec 2009 18:01:00 PST

Steven Soderbergh has directed 17 features and produced two TV series in 10 years, often working simultaneously as director, producer, co-writer, cinematographer (under the pseudonym Peter Andrews) and editor (as Mary Ann Bernard). The sheer volume of his output, coupled with his technical daring, formal playfulness and versatility, beg a number of questions. To wit:

Will Ecuador's Indians bankrupt Chevron?

Andrew O'Hehir — Thu, 10 Sep 2009 03:19:00 PDT

Is Nora Ephron the foodiest filmmaker?

Rebecca Traister — Wed, 05 Aug 2009 03:20:00 PDT

"Julie & Julia," the movie written and directed by Nora Ephron, is based on two books about two cooks, one world-famous and one world-weary, and there is little question that watching it provokes a physiological response. It makes you crave hollandaise. It makes you want soufflé. It might even, briefly, make you hungry for aspic made of beef feet.

Anthony Minghella, 1954-2008

Andrew O'Hehir — Tue, 18 Mar 2008 09:28:00 PDT

REUTERS/Gary Hershorn/Files

Director Anthony Minghella after winning the Oscar for best director for his movie "The English Patient" in March 24, 1997. Minghella died in London at the Charing Cross Hospital after suffering a fatal hemorrhage.

I'm an interesting, talented artist but I can't take the rejection!

Cary Tennis — Mon, 13 Aug 2007 03:31:00 PDT

Dear Cary,

Peter Bogdanovich

Stephen Lemons — Fri, 19 Apr 2002 12:00:00 PDT

Sneering at Peter Bogdanovich's name has been an art form in some circles for so long that when you meet the man, you expect the insufferable popinjay whom writers still have a field day skewering. This is the man who, according to the Los Angeles Times, sported $323 blue leather clogs in court just prior to filing bankruptcy in 1997. The man who married (and later divorced) his lover Dorothy Stratten's half-sister Louise several years after Stratten was brutally murdered by her jealous husband. The man who stole Truffaut's shtick by going from film scribe to filmmaker, and so on.

Frederick Wiseman

Nick Poppy — Wed, 30 Jan 2002 12:00:00 PST

Though he gets less press than, say, Scorsese or Spielberg (or Brett Ratner or Tom Green, for that matter), Frederick Wiseman for over 30 years has quietly forged a lasting impression of our nation on celluloid. The Cambridge-based documentarian, along with D.A. Pennebaker and the Maysles brothers, is a pioneer of cinéma vérité. In its early years, cinéma vérité consisted of more than just its stylistic trappings (grainy footage, hand-held camera work and natural sound); it sought to reveal the underlying truths of situations by capturing the unscripted action of real people. Think of the vérité filmmakers as the very disappointed stepfathers of "The Real World" and "Cops."

David Lynch

Brian Libby — Tue, 06 Nov 2001 12:00:00 PST

There is a car wash on La Brea Avenue in Los Angeles not far from David Lynch's home in the Hollywood Hills. Its marquee is supposed to read "God Bless America," but the 'B' has fallen off. The message that's left -- "God Less America" -- is an accordingly odd mixture of eerie and comical. In other words, it makes for a perfect Lynchian moment.

Mel Brooks

Mary Elizabeth Williams — Tue, 19 Jun 2001 12:00:00 PDT

Sondheim didn't do it. Bernstein didn't, either. Rodgers and Hammerstein put together didn't come close. No, the creator of the Broadway show that smashed all the box office records is the man who gave us "Spaceballs." The maestro who revitalized the Great White Way is the guy who brought fart jokes to major motion pictures. And the impresario whose show netted an unprecedented 12 Tony awards was also the only winner to ever thank Hitler in his acceptance speech.

Liv Ullmann

Stephan Cox — Wed, 28 Mar 2001 12:00:00 PST

Adultery is a dead subject. From Hester Prynne to Monica Lewinsky, there's very little we seem to want to say about it anymore. Thus, it makes perfect sense that someone like Liv Ullmann would take on the scarlet "A" in her latest film, "Faithless." Ullmann is not jaded, nor does she offer easy answers; on the subject of morality, she's more interested in what the audience might have to say. In the hands of many other contemporary directors, a film about adultery has the tendency to be pedantic and overly moralistic, featuring, say, Harrison Ford. Ullmann knows better. She ought to -- her many years as one of Ingmar Bergman's lead actors have left their mark, and her directing style reflects his light touch.

Jean-Jacques Annaud

Stephen Lemons — Mon, 19 Mar 2001 12:00:00 PST

Loquacious and leonine with a mass of curly white hair, director Jean-Jacques Annaud is the embodiment of French conviviality. The 57-year-old Academy Award-winning filmmaker relishes conversation and especially delights in aggressive questioning. That's a good thing, because he's getting plenty of tough queries in regard to his latest film, "Enemy at the Gates," an $85 million World War II epic set during the 1942 Nazi siege of Stalingrad (now Volgograd).

Roland Joffé

Stephen Lemons — Fri, 02 Mar 2001 12:00:00 PST

Gaunt, bearded and slightly disheveled, Roland Joffé looks as out of place in this trendy Hollywood restaurant as George W. Bush behind the lectern at a White House news conference. There's something a little too sensitive about Joffé, as if he can't really get with La-La Land's hip viciousness. That's a genuine handicap for him. Minus the epidermis of a rhino, he might as well be back where his career began, shooting for British TV. Not that there aren't worse fates, mind you.

We three kings

Michael Sragow — Thu, 25 Jan 2001 12:00:00 PST

Near the start of "Shadow of the Vampire," the producer of the 1922 vampire classic "Nosferatu" tells reporters that his 34-year-old director, F. W. Murnau, is Germany's greatest filmmaker. In 1964, when he commenced four and a half years' work on "2001: A Space Odyssey," you could argue that Stanley Kubrick, at age 36, was America's greatest young director. By 1974, the mantle had passed to Francis Ford Coppola, 35, who had already done the first two "Godfather" films and "The Conversation."

Directors from B to Z

Michael Sragow — Thu, 18 Jan 2001 12:00:00 PST

Speaking to directors Henry Bromell and Robert Zemeckis in short order before Christmas provided a lesson in contrasting kinds of liberty and power in Hollywood. The clout that came with crafting a succession of blockbusters, including "Forrest Gump," gave Zemeckis the opportunity to make "Cast Away" (for Fox and DreamWorks) exactly the way he wanted it, whether that meant underplaying melodramatic plot turns or scheduling a highly publicized hiatus so Tom Hanks could shed pounds and turn from a comfortably padded managerial type into a human scarecrow.

Life is like a FedEx box

Michael Sragow — Fri, 12 Jan 2001 12:00:00 PST

The only commentator who hit on the sub-surface appeal of the runaway hit "Cast Away" is cartoonist Ted Rall in last week's Time magazine. In a strip called "The Movie Pitch Meeting," a screenwriter is trying to sell a story about a Type A-plus personality who "loses everything he has due to a bizarre twist of fate," is presumed dead for four years, then "gets back the job and the life that was stolen from him and is welcomed home as a hero." In the strip's final frame, he says, "I call it 'Castaway 2,'" and the producer responds, "Thanks for coming, Mr. Gore. We'll be in touch."

An ornery kind of American heroism

Michael Sragow — Thu, 04 Jan 2001 12:03:00 PST

In the appreciations of Jason Robards that appeared when he died of cancer at age 78 on the day after Christmas, he was lauded as our greatest stage interpreter of Eugene O'Neill and the winner of back-to-back supporting Oscars for playing Washington Post executive editor Ben Bradlee in "All the President's Men" (1976) and novelist Dashiell Hammett in "Julia" (1977). Apart from his brilliant replay of James Tyrone Jr. in Sidney Lumet's movie version of O'Neill's "Long Day's Journey Into Night" (1962), I think he will be remembered on film primarily as our greatest interpreter of Jonathan Demme and Sam Peckinpah, in a pair of parts that together defined a rough-hewn and ornery kind of American heroism.

"You'll shoot your eye out, kid"

Michael Sragow — Thu, 14 Dec 2000 12:00:00 PST

Last weekend, the high point of Val Kilmer's first guest-host appearance on "Saturday Night Live" came right at the beginning, when his intro turned into a parody of "It's a Wonderful Life." No film has led a more charmed afterlife than Frank Capra's holiday perennial. Over the past 55 years it has become America's celluloid yule log. A critical and box-office disappointment in 1946, it was treated as Capra's masterpiece when he died in 1991, overshadowing his true masterpiece, the miraculously airy "It Happened One Night," as well as his official classics, "Mr. Deeds Goes to Town" and "Mr. Smith Goes to Washington," and his daring early works, including "Miracle Woman" and "The Bitter Tea of General Yen."

Another "Hard Day's Night"

Michael Sragow — Thu, 07 Dec 2000 12:03:00 PST

Thirty-seven years ago, late producer Walter Shenson told the New York Times that the Beatles never wanted to appear in a "rags to riches" story or, he went on, "the one about the record being smuggled into the studio in the last reel and put on by mistake."

"A demented peacock"

Michael Sragow — Thu, 30 Nov 2000 12:59:00 PST

To quote Doug Wright's screenplay, the first aural and visual impressions you get of the Marquis de Sade in "Quills" are a "reptilian" eye and a voice at once "mellifluous" and "low." His hand sports an amber ring containing "an arachnid trapped in stone." Yet from the get-go, Australian actor Geoffrey Rush imbues this ominous figure with a nihilistic joie de vivre that's both infectious and unsettling. It's crucial to the complexities of Philip Kaufman's exuberant, rending tragicomedy that the man who prances through the intersection of pleasure and pain remains a life force and an art force. Rush comes through with flying colors -- albeit ones ranging from gore-red to dung-brown. He gives Sade an anarchic erotic glee that's inseparable from his theatrical imagination and volcanic urge to write. It's fitting that Rush used as a major source book Francine du Plessix Gray's biography "At Home With the Marquis de Sade: A Life," which emphasizes Sade's seductive dance with surrogates for his distant mother, while Kaufman relied more on Neil Schaeffer's "The Marquis de Sade: A Life," which pivots on the Marquis' vain attempt to find a moral and intellectual authority to substitute for an absent father. Thanks to Rush and Kaufman (and, of course, Doug Wright), "Quills" has a quivering blend of yin and yang.

Charlie's dude

Michael Sragow — Thu, 16 Nov 2000 12:00:00 PST

The director of the new version of "Charlie's Angels," who goes by the name McG, has a very slight résumé. He grew up in Newport Beach, Calif., studied psychology at the University of California at Irvine and began committing images to film when he borrowed a pro friend's camera gear and shot some grass-roots music videos for the alt-rock band Sugar Ray.