This wide-ranging and insightful collection of interviews with D. A. Pennebaker (1925-2019) spans the prolific career of this pioneer of observational cinema. From the 1950s, Pennebaker made documentary films that revealed the world of politics, celebrity culture, and the music industry. Following his early collaborations with Robert Drew on a ......
Krzysztof Kieslowski's untimely death came at the height of his career, after his Three Colors trilogy of films garnered international acclaim (and an Oscar nomination), and he had been proclaimed Europe's most important filmmaker by many critics. Born in 1941, he was only fifty-four years old when he died. Kieslowski himself tried to tell the ......
Abraham Polonsky (1910-1999), screenwriter and filmmaker of the mid-twentieth-century Left, recognized his writerly mission to reveal the aspirations of his characters in a material society structured to undermine their hopes. In the process, he ennobled their struggle. His auspicious beginning in Hollywood reached a zenith with his ......
A humble man from humble beginnings, Danny Boyle (b. 1956) became a popular cinema darling when Slumdog Millionaire won big at the 2009 Academy Awards. Prior to this achievement, this former theater and television director helped the British film industry pull itself out of a decades-long slump. With Trainspotting, he proved British films could be ......
Alan Ball: Conversations features interviews that span Alan Ball's entire career and include detailed observations and insights into his Academy Award-winning film American Beauty and Emmy Award-winning television shows Six Feet Under and True Blood. Ball began his career as a playwright in New York, and his work soon caught the attention of ......
In the early twentieth century, the art world was captivated by the imaginative, original paintings of Henri Rousseau, who, without formal art training, produced works that astonished not only the public but great artists such as Pablo Picasso. Samuel Fuller (1912-1997) is known as the "Rousseau of the cinema," a mostly "B" genre Hollywood ......
Anthony Minghella: Interviews is an illuminating anthology of in-depth conversations with this important contemporary film director and producer. The collection explores Minghella's ideas on every aspect of the cinematic creative process including screenwriting, acting, editing, the use of music in film, and other topics concerning the role of the ......
D. W. Griffith (1875-1948) is one of the most influential figures in the history of the motion picture. As director of The Birth of a Nation, he is also one of the most controversial. He raised the cinema to a new level of art, entertainment, and innovation, and at the same time he illustrated, for the first time, its potential to influence an ......
Prolific British director Michael Winterbottom (b. 1961) might be hard to pin down and even harder to categorize. Over sixteen years, he has created feature films as disparate and stylistically diverse as Welcome to Sarajevo, 24 Hour Party People, In This World, Butterfly Kiss, and The Killer Inside Me. But in this collection, the first ......
