Essensial filmmakers - Part I

First working as a dry-cleaner and journalist in the late 1950s, he moved into TV documentary filmmaking, eventually becoming the head of the BBC's Bristol-based Documentary Unit in 1962. Capturing the interest of producer David Deutsch, he was offered to direct a film aimed a repeating the success of A Hard Day's Night (directed by Richard Lester in 1964): Catch Us If You Can (1965) is about competing pop group Dave Clark Five. While not as successful commercially as Lester's film, it smoothed Boorman's way into the film industry. Boorman was drawn to Hollywood for the opportunity to make larger-scale cinema and in Point Blank (1967), a powerful interpretation of a Richard Stark novel, brought a stranger's vision to the decaying fortress of Alcatraz and the proto-hippy world of San Francisco. Lee Marvin gave the then unknown director his full support, telling MGM he deferred all his approvals on the project to Boorman.

After Point Blank, Boorman re-teamed with Marvin (and Toshiro Mifune) for the robinsonade of Hell in the Pacific (1968), which tells a fable story of two representative soldiers stranded together on an island and forced to put aside war to survive.

Returning to the UK, he made Leo The Last (US/UK, 1970), which, with the presence of Marcello Mastroianni importing a Fellinian influence, won him a Best Director award at Cannes.

Boorman achieved much greater resonance with Deliverance (1972, adapted from a novel by James Dickey). The odyssey of city people played by Jon Voight, Burt Reynolds, Ronny Cox and Ned Beatty as they trespass into Appalachian backwoods and discover their inner savagery, captured the imagination of audiences and became Boorman's first true box office success.

At the beginning of the 1970s Boorman was planning to film The Lord of the Rings and corresponded about his plans with J. R. R. Tolkien.

A wide genre variety of films followed: Zardoz (1973) starred Sean Connery in a bizarre take on post-apocalyptic science fiction. Excalibur (1981) is well-remembered as a mythical film (and one of the very few "true" retellings of the Arthurian legend and tragedy. Very eco-conscious, Boorman's foray into Hollywood filmmaking, The Emerald Forest (1985), a rainforest adventure, casts his actor son Charley Boorman as an eco-warrior, mingling commercially-required elements - action and near-nudity - with anthropological detail and the gorgeous threat of a green inferno. Beyond Rangoon (1995) and The Tailor of Panama (2000) both explore unique worlds with alien characters stranded and desperate in them.

Hope and Glory (1985) is his most autobiographical movie to date, a re-telling of his childhood under the WWII blitz.

In 1999, Boorman won the "Best Director" award at the Cannes Film Festival for his black-and-white biopic of Martin Cahill (The General), a somewhat glamorous criminal in Ireland eventually killed by the IRA.

Joel and Ethan Coen, commonly called The Coen Brothers, are United States film directors best known for their quirky comedies such as Raising Arizona and The Big Lebowski, as well as for darker film noir dramas such as Fargo. The brothers write, direct and produce their films jointly, alternating top billing for the screenplay. Until recently, Joel received sole credit for directing the films, and Ethan for producing, but the two brothers work so closely together and share such a strong vision of what their films are to be that actors report that they can approach either brother with a question and get the same answer.

The Coen brothers' films typically feature a combination of dry wit, exaggerated language, and glaring irony. The brothers frequently use dialogue to develop characters and advance plot. The Coen brothers use camera angles which sometimes hide rather than reveal information, as in Fargo when Jean Lundegaard is hiding in the shower, in Miller's Crossing when Tom goes into his room after Leo leaves, (Verna is on the bed behind him), and in Blood Simple when Abby is sitting up in bed with Ray and the Volkswagen pulls up outside her window.

Stylistically, Coen brothers movies show a heavy debt to film noir, featuring stark contrast in lighting (most notably in Blood Simple, Miller's Crossing, and Fargo) and the typical theme of people being in over their heads in a scheme. Their movies often deal with kidnapping. A near universal plot device is misunderstanding: misunderstanding over who killed Rug Daniels and who took his hair causes friction between different mobs in Miller's Crossing; misunderstanding of Norville's blueprint causes him some grief later in The Hudsucker Proxy; everyone except for the nihilists in The Big Lebowski misunderstands Bunny's kidnapping; and in Blood Simple, misunderstanding is the driving force behind the entire plot past the thirty-minute mark. The Coen brothers' film The Man Who Wasn't There pays homage to film noir, with a plot that seems an update/twist of The Postman Always Rings Twice.

The various aspects that make the character of a city, state or region of America are an integral component in several Coen brothers films. Raising Arizona strongly features the distinct Arizona landscape, and some of the movie's characters are stereotypes of typical Arizonans. Similarly, in Fargo the landscape and accents of North Dakota and Minnesota are an essential component of the film. The Big Lebowski is the Coen's Los Angeles film, with the Dude and other characters as emblematic of the city's eclectic population. O Brother, Where Art Thou? is distinctly Southern, as it was filmed in rural Mississippi, most of the characters speak with pronounced Southern accents, and the soundtrack is a mix of old country and folk songs. Barton Fink is in some respects a satire on another famous area of Los Angeles, Hollywood. There are several scenes in the movie that in the Coen brothers' distinctly farcical way, paint the movie industry, and movie executives in particular, in a very unflattering light.

Coppola studied film at UCLA and while there, he made numerous short films, including some soft core porn films. In the late 1950s, he started his professional career making low-budget films with Roger Corman and writing screenplays. His first notable motion picture was made for Corman, the low-budget Dementia 13.

After graduating to mainstream motion pictures with You're a Big Boy Now, Coppola was offered the reins of the movie version of the Broadway musical Finian's Rainbow, starring Petula Clark, in her first American film, and veteran Fred Astaire. Producer Jack Warner was nonplussed by Coppola's shaggy-haired, bearded, "hippie" appearance and generally left him to his own devices. He took his cast to the Napa Valley for much of the outdoor shooting, but these scenes were in sharp contrast to those obviously filmed on a Hollywood soundstage, resulting in a disjointed look to the film. Dealing with outdated material at a time when the popularity of film musicals was already on the downslide, Coppola's end result was only semi-successful, but his work with Clark no doubt contributed to her Golden Globe Best Actress nomination.

In 1971, Coppola won an Academy Award for his screenplay for Patton. However, his name as a filmmaker was made as the co-writer and director of The Godfather (1972) and The Godfather Part II (1974), which both won the Academy Award for Best Picture — the latter being the first sequel to do so.

In between The Godfather and The Godfather Part II, Coppola directed The Conversation, a story of a paranoid wiretapping and surveillance expert (played by Gene Hackman) who finds himself caught up in a possible murder plot. The Conversation was released to theaters in 1974 and was also nominated for Best Picture. During this period he also wrote the screenplay for the 1974 remake of the critical and commercial failure, The Great Gatsby (with Mia Farrow and Robert Redford), and produced George Lucas's breakthrough film, American Graffiti.

Following the success of The Godfather and its sequel, Coppola set about filming an ambitious version of Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness, set during the Vietnam War. The film, entitled Apocalypse Now (1979), was beset by numerous problems, including typhoons, nervous breakdowns, Martin Sheen's heart attack, and Marlon Brando's bloated appearance (which Coppola attempted to hide by shooting him in the shadows). It was delayed so often it was nicknamed Apocalypse Whenever. The film was equally lauded and hated by critics when it finally appeared, and the cost nearly bankrupted Coppola's nascent studio American Zoetrope.

Despite the setbacks and ill health Coppola suffered during the making of Apocalypse Now, he kept up with film projects, presenting in 1981 a restoration of the 1927 film Napoléon that was edited and released in the United States by American Zoetrope. However it wasn't until the experimental musical One from the Heart (1982) that he returned to directing. Unfortunately, the film was a huge failure, although it developed a cult following in later years.

In 1990 he completed the Godfather series with The Godfather Part III which, while not as critically acclaimed as the first two movies, was still a box office success.

David Paul Cronenberg (born March 16, 1943 in Toronto, Ontario) is a Canadian horror and science fiction film director, who has also worked as an actor. He is famous for creating the genre of "body horror", exploring people's fears of bodily transformation and infection. In his films, the psychological is typically intertwined with the physical.

Cronenberg's father was a journalist and his mother a pianist. He graduated from the University of Toronto with a degree in literature.

Cronenberg's films follow a definite progression, a movement from the social world to the inner life. In his early films, scientists modify human bodies, which results in social anarchy (e.g. Shivers, Rabid). In his middle period, the chaos wrought by the scientist is more personal, (e.g. The Brood, Scanners, Videodrome). In the later period, the scientist himself is altered by his hubris (e.g. Cronenberg's remake of The Fly). This trajectory culminates in Dead Ringers, in which a twin pair of gynecologists spiral into codependency and drug addiction.

Cronenberg's later films tend more to the psychological, often contrasting subjective and objective realities (eXistenZ, M. Butterfly, Spider).

In most projects, Cronenberg tries to represent The New Flesh, which explains the mutation of human body or living organism by a machine or any other mutated organism, into the New Flesh. Cronenberg has said that his films should be seen "from the point of view of the disease". This perspective is illustrated in The Fly when the hero discovers that he has been genetically fused with an insect. Rather than saying "My teleport machine went wrong", he says "My teleport machine turned into a gene-splicer". Disease and disaster, in Cronenberg's work, are less problems to be overcome than agents of personal transformation. Similarly, in Crash (1996), people who have been injured in car crashes attempt to view their ordeal as "a fertilising rather than a destructive event".

In 2002, he was made an Officer of the Order of Canada.

Werner Herzog, born Werner Stipetic, is a German screenwriter, film director, actor and opera director of Croat descent.

Many of his films are in the English language. He directed five films starring German actor Klaus Kinski: Aguirre: The Wrath of God, Nosferatu, Woyzeck, Fitzcarraldo, and Cobra Verde. In 1999 he directed and narrated the documentary film My Best Fiend, a retrospective on his often-rocky relationship with Kinski. He is noted for his filmic interest in indigenous peoples and considered one of the best post-war directors.

Herzog is often associated with the German New Wave movement, along with Rainer Werner Fassbinder & Wim Wenders and features heroes with impossible dreams or people with unique talents in obscure fields.

Walter Hill is a prominent American film director. Hill broke into the film industry after working on The Getaway for Sam Peckinpah. His passion has been the Western and he is an admirer of the work of John Ford. However, the majority of his successes have been with thrillers and comedies, such as 48 Hours, The Driver, The Warriors and Southern Comfort.

He was co-producer and one of the originators of the Alien series of films and he wrote the story for Aliens, the second film in the series.

Hill's The Long Riders, released in 1980, was a modern western epic which won critical acclaim but failed to find an audience in the post-Western age of film. Likewise, his film biography of Geronimo, with a screenplay written by John Milius, was well received by the critics but fared poorly at the box office.

Hill enjoyed a major box office hit with the Eddie Murphy Nick Nolte film 48 Hours and the sequel, Another 48 Hours.

Hill, along with Steven Spielberg, George Lucas, John Milius, Martin Scorcese, Paul Schrader, and Francis Ford Coppola, can be regarded as part of a 1970s generation of directors who revolutionized the cinema.

Influenced by expressionism in Germany, Hitchcock began directing in England and worked in the United States from 1939. With more than fifty feature films to his credit, in a career spanning six decades, he remains one of the best known and most popular directors of all time. His innovations and vision have influenced a great number of filmmakers, producers, and actors.

Hitchcock's films draw heavily on both fear and fantasy, and are known for their droll humour. They often portray innocent people caught up in circumstances beyond their control or understanding. This often involves a transference of guilt in which the "innocent" character's failings are transferred to another character and magnified. Another common theme is the exploration of the compatibility of men and women; Hitchcock's films often take a cynical view of traditional romantic relationships.

The French new wave critics, especially François Truffaut, were among the first to promote his films as having artistic merit beyond entertainment. Hitchcock was one of the first directors to whom they applied their auteur theory, which stresses the centrality of the director in the movie-making process. Indeed, through his fame, public persona, and degree of creative control, Hitchcock transformed the role of the director into that of a celebrity personality in its own right.

Hitchcock preferred the use of suspense over surprise in his films. In surprise, the director assaults the viewer with frightening things. In suspense, the director tells or shows things to the audience which the characters in the film do not know, and then artfully builds tension around what will happen when the characters finally learn the truth.

Further blurring the moral distinction between the innocent and the guilty, occasionally making this indictment clear, Hitchcock also makes voyeurs of his "respectable" audience. In Rear Window (1954), after L. B. Jeffries (played by James Stewart) has been staring across the courtyard at him for most of the film, Lars Thorwald (played by Raymond Burr) confronts Jeffries by saying "What do you want of me?" Burr might as well have been addressing the audience. In fact, shortly before asking this, Thorwald turns to face the camera directly for the first time — at this point, audiences often gasp.

Many of Hitchcock's films contain a cameo appearance by Hitchcock himself: the director would be seen for a brief moment boarding a bus, crossing in front of a building, standing in an apartment across the courtyard, or appearing in a photograph. This playful gesture became one of Hitchcock's signatures. As a recurring theme he would carry a musical instrument — especially memorable was the large cello case that he wrestles onto the train at the beginning of Strangers on a Train. In his earliest appearances he filled in as obscure extras, in a crowd or walking through a scene in a long camera shot. His later appearances became more prominent, as when he turns to see Jane Wyman's disguise as she passes him in Stage Fright, and in stark silhouette in his final film Family Plot. (See a list of Hitchcock cameo appearances.)

Hitchcock seemed to delight in the technical challenges of filmmaking. In Lifeboat, Hitchcock sets the entire action of the movie in a small boat, yet manages to keep the cinematography from monotonous repetition. His trademark cameo appearance was a dilemma, given the claustrophobic setting; so Hitchcock appeared on camera in a fictitious newspaper ad for a weight loss product.

His 1958 film Vertigo contains a camera trick that has been imitated and re-used so many times by filmmakers, it has become known as the Hitchcock zoom.

Although famous for inventive camera angles, Hitchcock generally avoided points of view that were physically impossible from a human perspective. For example, he would never place the camera looking out from inside a refrigerator.

Takeshi Kitano is a Japanese comedian, actor, author, poet, painter and film director who has received acclaim both in his native Japan and abroad for his highly idiosyncratic cinematic work. He uses his pseudonym Beat Takeshi for all works other than as film director. Since April 2005 he is a professor at the Graduate School of Visual Arts, Tokyo National University of Fine Arts and Music.

His films are usually dramas about gangsters or police, characterized as being highly deadpan to the point of near-stasis. He often uses long takes where nothing appears to be happening, or with edits that cut immediately to the aftermath of an event. Many of his films express a bleak or nihilistic philosophy, but they are also filled with a great deal of humor and remarkable affection for their characters. Kitano's films paradoxically seem to leave controversial impressions: while formally disguised as dark comedies or gangster movies, the films raise moral questions and give food for thought. While Kitano's international fame continues to rise sharply, Japanese public knows him more as a TV host and comedian. His portrayal of Zatoichi in the 2003 movie by the same name is said to be his biggest domestic commercial success. Kitano is very careful as far as interviews are concerned, hiding his enigmatic personality behind a mask of a 'funny regular guy'.

After several other roles, mostly comedic, in 1989 he was cast in the lead for Violent Cop (Sono Otoko, Kyōbō ni Tsuki) as a sociopathic detective who responds to every situation with violence. When the original director fell ill, Kitano offered to step in, and rewrote the script heavily. The result was a financial and critical success in Japan, and the beginning of Kitano's career as a filmmaker.

Kitano's second film as director and first film as screenwriter, released in 1990, was Boiling Point (3-4X Jūgatsu). Masahiko Ono plays the lead role of a young man whose baseball coach is threatened by a local yakuza. He and a friend travel to Okinawa to purchase guns so they can get revenge, but along the way they are befriended by a psychotic gangster played by Kitano, who has his own revenge to plot. With complete control of the script and direction, Kitano uses this film to cement his style: shocking violence, bizarre black humor and beautifully shot 'still' scenes.

Kitano's third film, A Scene at the Sea (Ano Natsu, Ichiban Shizukana Umi), was released in 1991. It featured no gangsters, but instead a garbage collector, who is determined to learn how to surf. Kitano's more delicate, romantic side came to the fore here, along with his trademark deadpan approach.

Foreign audiences (that would outnumber his domestic audience in the coming years) began to take notice of Kitano after the 1993 release of Sonatine. Kitano plays a Tokyo yakuza who is sent by his boss to Okinawa to help end a gang war there. He is tired of gangster life, and when he finds out the whole mission is a ruse, he welcomes what comes with open arms.

The 1995 release of Getting Any? (Minna Yatteruka!) showed Kitano returning to his comedic roots. This Airplane!-like assemblage of comedic scenes, all centering loosely around a Walter Mitty-type character trying to have sex in a car, met with little acclaim in Japan. Much of the film satirizes popular Japanese culture, such as Ultraman or Godzilla, and even Kitano's own gangster movies.

In 1995, Kitano was involved in a motorcycle accident and suffered injuries that caused the paralysis of one side of his body, and required extensive surgery to regain the use of his facial muscles. (The severity of his injuries was apparently due to him not fastening the chin strap on his helmet.) Many in the foreign press speculated that he might never be able to work again. Kitano put any such thoughts to rest by making Kids Return in 1996, directly after recovering. At the time it became his most successful film yet in his native Japan.

After his motorcycle accident, Kitano took up painting. His bright, simplified style is reminiscent of Belarusian painter Marc Chagall. His paintings have been published in books, featured in gallery exhibitions, and adorn the covers of many of the soundtrack albums for his films. His paintings were featured prominently in his most critically acclaimed film, 1997's Hana-bi (released as Fireworks in North America). Although for years already Kitano's largest audience had been the foreign arthouse crowd, Hana-bi cemented his status internationally as one of Japan's foremost modern filmmakers.

Kitano has continued to work regularly since his accident. Kikujiro (Kikujirō no Natsu), released in 1999, featured Kitano as a ne'er-do-well gangster who winds up paired up with a young boy looking for his mother, and goes on a series of misadventures with him. Brother (2001), shot in Los Angeles, had Kitano as a deposed Tokyo yakuza setting up a drug empire in L.A. with the aid of a local gangster played by Omar Epps. Despite a large buzz around Kitano's first English language film, the film was met with tepid response in the US and abroad. Dolls (2002) had Kitano directing but not starring in a film with three different stories about undying love; it met with unfavorable critical and public reception.

Between the underwhelming response to Brother and Dolls, Kitano became a punching bag for the press, who wondered if he had lost his ability to make a good film. Kitano's answer came in the form of 2003's Zatoichi, in which he directed and starred. A remake of Shintaro Katsu's 1970s film series, Zatoichi was Kitano's biggest box office success in Japan, did quite well in limited release across the world, and won countless awards at home and abroad.