Wes Craven (Conversations with Filmmakers)
With a career spanning four decades, Wes Craven (1939–2015) bridged independent exploitation cinema and Hollywood big-budget horror. A pioneer of the modern horror cinema, Craven directed such landmark films as The Last House on the Left, The Hills Have Eyes, A Nightmare on Elm Street, and Scream—considered not only classics of the genre, but examples of masterful filmmaking. Producing an impressive oeuvre that mixed intellectual concerns and political ideas, Craven utilized high-tension suspens...
This collection of interviews brings the filmmaker John Huston vividly to life in his own words. Huston (1906-1987) had an extraordinary career that spanned more than forty years and nearly fifty films. Among these are such classics as The Maltese Falcon, Key Largo, The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, The African Queen, The Night of the Iguana, Prizzi's Honor, and The Dead. In these interviews ranging from 1952 to 1985 Huston talks about his approach to directing, the influence of painting upon hi...
In outstanding films that are sharply focused on unusual women Jane Campion has gained worldwide admiration and respect. This New Zealand director first attracted international attention with her 1989 film Sweetie, an acerbic study of two sisters in a wildly dysfunctional family. She followed this in 1990 with the television miniseries An Angel at My Table, based on the autobiography of New Zealand author Janet Frame. Subsequently released in theatres, the film chronicles the early trials of the...
From his first feature film, Fear and Desire (1953), to his final, posthumously released Eyes Wide Shut (1999), Stanley Kubrick excelled at probing the dark corners of human consciousness. In doing so, he adapted such popular novels as The Killing, Lolita, A Clockwork Orange, and The Shining and selected a wide variety of genres for his films -- black comedy (Dr. Strangelove), science fiction (2001: A Space Odyssey), and war (Paths of Glory and Full Metal Jacket). Because he was peerless in unve...
Wong Kar-wai (Conversations with Filmmakers) (Conversations with Filmmakers (Hardcover))
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...
David Lynch (Conversations with Filmmakers)
Few directors in the past three decades have produced movies more compelling, controversial, or confounding than David Lynch (b. 1946). And fewer still have been so reluctant to talk about what they do. In this collection, editor Richard A. Barney has chosen the rare interviews in which Lynch opens up to questions rather than deflecting them. Whether Lynch is talking about his earliest film shorts such as The Grandmother or the break-out surrealist feature Eraserhead, the hit TV series Twin Peak...
Clint Eastwood (USA, b. 1930) is a veteran among the grand masters of contemporary American cinema, whose rise through the system took a highly unusual form. After playing iconic roles in Sergio Leone's spaghetti westerns of the 1960s, he returned to Hollywood and underwent a controversial reincarnation as the ultraviolent cop Harry. In the 1970s Eastwood began to direct and, in the style of the great directors of the past, made masterpieces in genres ranging from the western (Unforgiven, 1992)...
Oliver Stone is one of the grand masters of American cinema. A multiple Academy Award–winning screenwriter and director (Midnight Express, Scarface, Platoon, JFK, Natural Born Killers, Snowden), he is as well known for his outspoken, controversial political beliefs as he is for his innovative films.Over the course of five years, Stone and author Matt Zoller Seitz discussed the arc of Stone’s life and work with extraordinary candor. The cinematic mastermind shares anecdotes about Vietnam, his chi...
Finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize (Biography) A Hollywood love story, a Hollywood memoir, a dual biography of two of Hollywood’s most famous figures, whose golden lives were lived at the center of Hollywood’s golden age, written by their daughter, an acclaimed writer and producer.Fay Wray was most famous as the woman—the blonde in a diaphanous gown—who captured the heart of the mighty King Kong, the twenty-five-foot, sixty-ton gorilla, as he placed her, nestled in his eight-foot han...
One of the most influential filmmakers of the late 20th century, Derek Jarman directed cult feature films such as Jubilee (1977) and Caravaggio (1986), as well as music videos for The Smiths, the Pet Shop Boys and Marianne Faithfull. He also trained in fine art and a painterly mentality permeates all his work, particularly his experimental Super 8 films. The Super 8s show Jarman at his most visually courageous and creative, using prisms, filters and superimposition to produce rich colour and art...
Marco Ferreri (1928-1997) was one of Italian cinema's most unique auteurs. A maverick personality, he worked with some of the most popular actors of the time (Marcello Mastroianni, Michel Piccoli, Catherine Deneuve, Gerard Depardieu, Ugo Tognazzi, Carroll Baker, Roberto Benigni, Isabelle Huppert, Christopher Lambert…), and directed internationally acclaimed films. His filmography includes The Conjugal Bed (1963), The Ape Woman (1964), Dillinger Is Dead (1969), the scandalous La Grande Bouffe...
The Man Who Leapt Through Film: The Art of Mamoru Hosoda
by Charles Solomon
An illustrated overview of writer/director/animator Mamoru Hosoda's Academy Award–nominated movies and career, including previously unpublished storyboards, background paintings, character designs, and concept art Journey into the mind and creative process of one of the most celebrated anime directors working today with The Man Who Leapt Through Film: The Art of Mamoru Hosoda. Written by renowned animation critic and historian Charles Solomon (The Art of WolfWalkers, Abrams 2020) and featuring...
Agnes Varda, a pioneer of the French New Wave, has been making radical films for over half a century. Many of these are considered by scholars, filmmakers, and audiences alike, as audacious, seminal, and unforgettable. This volume considers her production as a whole, revisiting overlooked films like Mur, Murs/Documenteur (1980-81), and connecting her cinema to recent installation work. This study demonstrates how Varda has resisted norms of representation and diktats of production. It also shows...
Oscar-winning French director/performer Jacques Tati (1907–1982) was a fiercely innovative and original filmmaker who found inspiration in the observation of life around him. By creating and playing unassuming characters thrown into the bustle of society—the hapless postman François and the maladroit Monsieur Hulot—Tati brilliantly exposed the ways in which class distinctions, social mores, architecture, and technology affect the basic ways that humans relate to one another. Unlike Buster Keaton...
John Sayles (Eight Men Out, The Brother from Another Planet) is one of today's most highly regarded independent filmmakers. This biography examines his films and offers behind-the-scenes revelations about a director who, at just forty-seven, has already received the Writers Guild Lifetime Achievement Award.