Essensial filmmakers - Part II

Sidney Lumet is an American film director, with over 50 films to his name, including the critically acclaimed 12 Angry Men (1957) and Network (1976). Lumet is regarded as an actor's director, and is known for his technical knowledge and his skill to get first-rate performances from his actors

He won Academy Award for Lifetime Achievement in 2005, for his "brilliant services to screenwriters, performers and the art of the motion picture".

Lumet was an actor before he was a director. His parents were Yiddish theater actor Baruch Lumet and dancer Eugenia Wermus. Lumet made his stage debut at New York's Yiddish Art Theater at the age of four and acted in Yiddish theater and on Broadway into the 1950s.

Lumet is perhaps best known for his critically and commercial successes in the 70s; the police corruption drama Serpico (1973), the crime drama Murder on the Orient Express (1974), the darkly comic bank robbery Dog Day Afternoon (1975), and the media satire Network (1976).

Jewison was born and raised in Toronto and attended Victoria College. As a young man in the 1950s, he embarked on a trip through the southern United States, where he was appalled by the open racism and inequality. This experience gave him a lifelong concern with racial issues and discrimination that can be clearly seen in many of his films, including his most acclaimed, In the Heat of the Night.

Interestingly, despite his surname and his fame for directing the film version of Fiddler on the Roof, he is not actually Jewish, but instead of gentile Hungarian decent.

In 1981, he was made an Officer of the Order of Canada and was promoted to Companion in 1991. In 1988, Jewison founded the Canadian Film Centre, an advanced film and television training institute located in Toronto, Ontario. He has been nominated for the best director Academy Award on a number of occasions, but has never won. In 1998, he was awarded The Irving G. Thalberg Memorial Award, awarded periodically at the Academy Awards ceremonies to "Creative producers, whose bodies of work reflect a consistently high quality of motion picture production." For his contribution to the motion picture industry, Norman Jewison has a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame 7000 Hollywood Blvd. and has been inducted into Canada's Walk of Fame.

In 2004, Norman Jewison published his autobiography titled This Terrible Business Has Been Good to Me. The month following the book's launch, on November 26, his wife Margaret Ann (Dixie) Jewison, died due to undisclosed causes a day after her 74th birthday in Orangeville, Ontario. She had been a source of inspiration for Jewison's film making career.

De Palma is often cited as a leading member of the Movie Brat generation of film directors, a distinct pedigree who either emerged from film schools or are overtly cine-literate. His contemporaries include Paul Schrader, Martin Scorsese, John Milius, George Lucas and Steven Spielberg. Throught the '70s and early '80s, De Palma worked repeatedly with actors Jennifer Salt, Amy Irving, Nancy Allen (his wife from 1979 to 1983), William Finley, Garrett Graham, cinematographers Stephen H. Burum and Vilmos Zsigmond, set designer Jack Fisk, and composers Bernard Herrmann and Pino Donaggio. De Palma is credited with fostering the careers of or outright discovering Robert De Niro, Jill Clayburgh, John C. Reilly, John Leguizamo, Margot Kidder.

Early efforts Greetings and Hi, Mom espouse a Leftist revolutionary viewpoint common of their era, and experiments in narrative and intertextuality reflect De Palma's stated intention to become the "American Godard." Hi, Mom, in its Be Black, Baby sequence, parodies cinema verite, championed by the documentary movement of the late '60s, while simultaneously providing the audience with as visceral and disturbingly emotional an experience as fiction film can provide, and remains a significant touchstone in interpreting De Palma's filmography.

Following a disastrous Hollywood foray, in which his next film Get to Know Your Rabbit was reedited by Warner Bros., De Palma returned to independent film. Both Blood Sisters and Phantom of the Paradise were tongue-in-cheek experiments in pure cinema, and allowed De Palma to jettison the more dated hippy trappings of his earlier films. Obsession, an emotional alternative take on Vertigo scripted by Paul Schrader, seems less now a bold attempt to usurp Alfred Hitchcock than an extention of the experiment begun on Blood Sisters, using the Hitchcock film as a template to analyze male and female roles and how an audience expects them to be reinforced.

His works explore themes of suspense and obsession, along with gender identity and the destructive nature of the male gaze. He is famous for his extensive use of split screen, split-diopter and process shots, and long tracking shots. His films also frequently feature characters changing their hair colour from blonde to brunette and vice versa.

Critics of De Palma accuse him of being misogynistic and of emphasizing technical aspects of storytelling at the expense of human stories. These views, along with the charge of 'ripping off' various filmmakers, is slowly fading from mainstream critical analysis of De Palma's work, as the complexities of his montage and mise en scene come into focus. Emerging views of De Palma compare him less and less with modernist filmmakers like Alfred Hitchcock and more with transgressionists such as Luis Bunuel and Jean-Luc Godard and to traditions ranging from Surrealism, Postmodernism to the theater of the Absurd.

Peckinpah worked initially as a scriptwriter and director of Western genre television series such as Gunsmoke and The Rifleman. In the early 1960s he moved into film and earned a reputation in Hollywood as an enfant terrible of the cinematic world. His feature films were criticised as being overly violent, but he defended his work as anti-violence commentary.

His films were visually inventive, having a style of film-making that was unconventional for the time period. He was a pioneer in the use of slow-motion, and rapid-fire edits.

Peckinpah's critics panned the filmmaker's use of blood and gore, and how often violence was cast as a redeeming action, bringing closure to its perpetrators and a brand of rough justice to its victims. This, however, was not always the case. Where film critics of this era were conditioned to expect movies with heroes, Peckinpah's films were often peopled with only victims and villains.

Peckinpah drank and abused drugs, girlfriends and producers. During the filming of The Killer Elite (1975) Peckinpah allegedly discovered cocaine. This led to increased paranoia and his slow breakdown psychologically. At one point he overdosed, landing himself in a hospital and receiving a second pacemaker. Sam Peckinpah died in Inglewood, California from heart failure at the age of only 59.

He is generally regarded as one of the most original filmmakers of Hollywood's second golden age.

Raymond Roman Polanski was born in Paris as Raimund Liebling to Ryszard Polanski (aka Ryszard Liebling), a Jew, and Bula Polanska (née Katz), a Roman Catholic. In 1937 his family moved back to Poland, where they were eventually captured and imprisoned by the Nazis, along with with millions of other Polish Jews. His mother died in a concentration camp, but Polanski avoided incarceration there, escaped the Cracow Ghetto and spent the war wandering the countryside of Europe.

He was educated at the film school in Lodz, Poland, from which he graduated in 1959. His first major film Knife in the Water (1962) was the first significant Polish film after the war that was not associated with the war theme. It was Polanski's first nomination for the Oscar.

Polanski then made films in Britain; Repulsion (1965), a disturbing tale of madness and alienation; Cul-de-Sac (1966) is similar in tone to the plays of Samuel Beckett, telling the story of a couple living on a remote island (Donald Pleasance and Francoise Dorleac) who are visited by two gangsters (Lionel Stander and Jack MacGowran).

The Fearless Vampire Killers (1967) is the American title for Dance of the Vampires, an unusual combination of comedy and horror. Polanski's visuals give the film the feeling of a fairy tale, and at the same time he continues to explore the darker side of human relationships. The director was not happy with the American version of the film, which was re-cut in addition to having its title changed.

In 1968 Polanski went to Hollywood, where his reputation was enhanced by the success of the sophisticated psychological thriller Rosemary's Baby (1968), based on Ira Levin's book of the same name, about a woman (Mia Farrow) who discovers she is pregnant with Satan's baby.

Polanski's next feature was a film version of Macbeth (1971), which was both praised for its intelligence and criticized for its explicit violence. This was followed by What? (1972), a surreal comedy about a young woman (Sydne Rome) and her adventures in a remote villa inhabited by an assortment of eccentric, and sometimes scary, people.

The director's next commercial success was Chinatown (1974), based on a screenplay by Robert Towne. The film was also embraced by critics, in part for its skillful evocation of the film noir classics made by the Hollywood studios. Chinatown references the history of the real Los Angeles, but it also alludes to the imaginary Los Angeles of the movies.

Polanski chose to play the lead in his next film, The Tenant (1976), the story of a Polish immigrant living in Paris. The Tenant is a chilling exploration of alienation and identity, asking disturbing questions about how we define ourselves.

He received another Academy Award nomination for Tess (1979). Pirates (1986), a lavish period piece, was a commercial and critical failure. This was followed by Frantic (1988), probably the most conventional of the thrillers the director has made, and it, too, failed to excite critics or the general public.

In May 2002, Polanski won the Palme d'Or (Golden Palm) award at the Cannes Film Festival for The Pianist, which also later won the 2002 Academy Award for Directing.

During the summer and autumn of 2004, Polanski shot a new film adaptation of Charles Dickens' novel Oliver Twist. The shooting took place at the Barrandov studios in Prague, Czech Republic. Ronald Harwood wrote the screenplay.

Most of Polanski's works are often considered psychological thrillers. He has been called a genius of exploring the "dark sides" of human personality. His favourite theme that can be found in almost every movie he made is the relationship between the victim and the hangman (Death and The Maiden, Bitter Moon, Cul-de-Sac, Rosemary's Baby). The world of Polanski's movies is cruel, grotesque and filled with brutal sex and dark humour. The main characters seem to be frail and weak, not able to fight whatever is surrounding them. Polanski likes to shoot his films from the position of a voyeur. He has been critically praised as a director who brought intelligent and artistic values to commercial cinema (Rosemary's Baby, Chinatown). Death and the Maiden star Stuart Wilson said of Polanski, "Roman is very deep water pretending shallow water."

Scorsese originally planned to become a priest, and many of his movies bear the stamp of Catholic upbringing. He was bitten by the movie bug at a young age, and has admitted to being "obsessed" with movies, an obsession apparent in the three hour and 45 minute long 1995 documentary film A Personal Journey with Martin Scorsese Through American Movies.

Scorsese attended New York University's film school. He made his first feature-length film, Who's That Knocking At My Door? with fellow student Harvey Keitel, and from there he became a friend and acquaintance of the so-called "movie brats" of the 1970s: Francis Ford Coppola, Brian De Palma, George Lucas, and Steven Spielberg. It was De Palma who introduced Robert De Niro to Scorsese, and the two figures have become close friends, working together in many projects.

In 1972 Scorsese directed Boxcar Bertha for famed B-movie producer Roger Corman, who had also helped directors like Francis Ford Coppola, James Cameron and John Sayles to launch their careers. Bertha taught Scorsese how to make films cheaply and quickly, preparing him for his first film with De Niro, Mean Streets. Championed by influential movie critic Pauline Kael, Mean Streets was a breakthrough for Scorsese and De Niro. Actress Ellen Burstyn chose Scorsese to direct her in the 1974 movie Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore.

Two years later, in 1976, Scorsese stunned the cinema world with Taxi Driver. The film starred Robert De Niro and Jodie Foster in brilliant performances in one of the most violent and grim depictions of life in New York City committed to celluloid. It also marked the start of a series of collaborations with Paul Schrader. Five years after the film was released, in 1981, President Ronald Reagan was nearly assassinated by a young man who blamed his obsession with Foster's character for his act.

The critical success of Taxi Driver encouraged Scorsese to move ahead with his first big-budget project: New York, New York. By this stage Scorsese had also developed a serious heroin addiction. However, Scorsese did find the creative drive to make what is arguably the finest film about rock and roll, The Last Waltz (1978), a beautifully photographed documentary of the final concert by The Band. Another Scorsese-directed documentary entitled American Boy also appeared in 1978. A period of wild partying followed, damaging Scorsese's fragile health. Convinced that he would never make another movie, he poured his energies into the making of Raging Bull, which he thought would be his final project. Raging Bull (released in 1980).

Scorsese made three movies during the early-to-mid 1980s: The King of Comedy (1983), After Hours (1985), and The Color of Money (1986). The latter of the three starred Paul Newman and Tom Cruise, and it won Newman an Oscar, as well as giving Scorsese the clout to secure backing for a project that had been a longtime goal for him: The Last Temptation of Christ.

The Last Temptation of Christ (1988) is based on the 1951 book written by Nikos Kazantzakis, a book that Barbara Hershey gave to Scorsese when they were both attending New York University in the late 1960's. Originally, it was slated to shoot under the Paramount Studios banner in 1983 (after Scorsese had finished The King of Comedy). Mere days before principal photography was to commence, Paramount pulled the plug on the project, citing pressure from religious groups. Scorsese would quietly, reluctantly, retire the project, eventually turning to what would become After Hours. Scorsese filmed The Last Temptation of Christ on a low budget in 1987, with nationwide protests against the film.

With Goodfellas, Scorsese returned to his native New York and reunited with Robert De Niro and Joe Pesci (whom he had previously directed in Raging Bull). This motion picture of life as a gangster has been called the greatest "Mob movie" since The Godfather, and it secured Scorsese a place among the greatest motion picture directors of all time.

Scorsese went on to direct a remake of the 1962 thriller Cape Fear, which proved to Hollywood that he could make a box-office hit. However, Scorsese's projects have continued to cast him as a figure who can make critically acclaimed pictures (The Age of Innocence, Kundun) that only turn in modest box-office revenues. He continued to be intimately involved in filmmaking through the 1990s, making cameo appearances in movies like Quiz Show and Search and Destroy and working to help up-and-coming filmmakers (Mad Dog and Glory, Clockers). He re-visited the world of Taxi Driver in 1999 with Bringing Out The Dead, while critics said that his 1995 movie Casino looked and felt like a re-hash of Goodfellas.

Scorsese's 2002 production of Gangs of New York was seen as his biggest and most risk-taking venture to date. With a production budget said to be in excess of $100 million, this was Scorsese's most expensive work. Scorsese's next film The Aviator, is a biopic of director, producer, legendary eccentric, multi-millionaire and aviation pioneer Howard Hughes.

Don Siegel was Born in Chicago, Illinois. He graduated from Jesus College, Cambridge and found work in Warner Brothers film library, rising to become head of the Montage Department. In 1945 he won an Academy Award for his shorts Hitler Lives? and A Star in the Night which launched his career as a feature director.

He directed whatever material came his way, often transcending the limitations of budget and script to produce interesting and adept works. He worked well with Steve McQueen in Hell Is For Heroes and Lee Marvin in the influential The Killers (1964 before a series of films with Clint Eastwood that were successful on both an artistic and commercial level. He was a considerable influence on Eastwood's own career as a director.

He was briefly married to the actress Viveca Lindfors, by whom he had a son Kristofer Tabori.

Peter Weirs interest in film was sparked by his meeting with fellow students, including Phillip Noyce and the future members of the Sydney filmmaking collective Ubu Films.

After leaving university in the mid-1960s he joined Sydney television station ATN-7, where he worked as a production assistant on the groundbreaking satirical comedy program The Mavis Bramston Show. During this period he made his first two experimental short films, Count Vim's Last Exercise and The Life and Flight of Reverend Buckshotte.

Weir then took up a position with the Commonwealth Film Unit (now Film Australia), for whom he made several documentaries, including a short documentary about young people living in the underprivileged outer suburbs of Sydney, and the short rock music film Three Directions In Australian Pop (1970), which featured rare in-concert colour footage of three major Australian rock acts of the period, Spectrum, The Captain Matchbox Whoopee Band and Wendy Saddington.

After leaving the CFU Weir made the short feature Homesdale (1971), a black comedy which co-starred actress Kate Fitzpatrick and musician and comedian Grahame Bond, who later became famous as the star of The Aunty Jack Show; Weir also played a small role, but this was his only significant screen appearance.

His first full-length feature film was the underground cult classic, The Cars That Ate Paris (1974). He achieved considerable success in Australia and internationally with the atmospheric Picnic at Hanging Rock (1975), based on the novel by Joan Lindsay. Widely credited as a pivotal work in the much-discussed Australian film renaisssance of the mid-1970s, the film also helped launched the career of internationally renowned Australian cinematographer Russell Boyd. It was widely praised by critics, many of whom praised it as a welcome antidote to the so-called "ocker film" genre, typified by The Adventures of Barry McKenzie.

His next feature, The Last Wave, which starred American actor Richard Chamberlain, was a pensive, ambivalent film which expanded on the themes of Picnic, exploring the interaction between the native Aboriginal culture and the European. It was only moderately successful at the time, but Weir scored a major hit with his next film Gallipoli (1981), scripted by renowned Australian playwright David Williamson. It is regarded as classic Australian cinema. Gallipoli was instrumental in making Mel Gibson into a major international film star, but Gibson's co-star Mark Lee, who also received high praise for his role, has made only a handful of film appearances since.

Weir's first American film was the highly successful thriller Witness (1985), which was set in an Amish community. It was followed by the darker and less accessible The Mosquito Coast (1986). Both films starred Harrison Ford and provided him with opportunities to avoid being typecast by his previous roles in the Star Wars and Indiana Jones films, and to play more subtle and substantial roles.

Both of Weir's next two films, Dead Poets Society (1989), starring Robin Williams, and Green Card (1990), starring Gerard Depardieu, were major box-office hits, and they brought Weir significant critical and commercial success; the latter remains a favourite with many comedy lovers. His next film, Fearless, starred Jeff Bridges as a man who believes he has become invincible after surviving a catastrophic air crash. Though well reviewed and featuring a sterling performance by Bridges, its unsettling subject matter and darker tone was less appealing to audiences than his two preceding films.

But Weir bounced back in 1998 with the hugely successful The Truman Show, a wry satire on the nascent reality TV trend. It was a box-office smash and won numerous awards including three Oscars -- Best Original Screenplay, Best Supporting Actor (Ed Harris), and Best Director for Weir himself. It also gave its star, comedian Jim Carrey, the chance to prove himself in a serious acting role and he received glowing reviews for his performance. The Truman Show also includes a small reference back to the very beginning of Weir's directorial career -- Australian actor Terry Camilleri, who starred in Weir's first feature, The Cars That Ate Paris, appears in a cameo role.

In 2003 Weir directed the blockbuster movie, Master and Commander, starring Russell Crowe; it was successful with mainstream audiences despite its slow pace and focus on period detail and characterization, qualities that are characteristic of Weir's work.