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Christopher Nolan

Christopher Nolan and Leonardo Dicaprio talk about the making of Inception from the set.

Popularity: 2% [?]

Acclaimed writer-director Paul Haggis has been a fixture of television and film for over 25 years. In this wide-ranging interview, the Oscar®-winning co-screenwriter, director, and producer of Crash (Best Picture 2005) discusses a three-decade career that led from writing for sitcoms like Diff’rent Strokes and The Facts of Life to his breakthrough screenplay for Oscar®-winning director Clint Eastwood, Million Dollar Baby (Best Picture 2004). Haggis’s matter-of-fact stories of navigating the entertainment industry are an indelible primer for how to manage the screenwriting life, make a successful transition from TV to film, develop a strong story and characters, pitch an idea, and surmount Hollywood’s more frustrating obstacles.

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Popularity: 66% [?]

James Cameron was born in Kapuskasing, Ontario, Canada, on August 16, 1954. He moved to the USA in 1971. The son of an engineer, he majored in physics at California State University but, after graduating, drove a truck to support his screen-writing ambition. He landed his first professional film job as art director, miniature-set builder, and process-projection supervisor on Roger Corman‘s Battle Beyond the Stars (1980) and debuted as a director with Piranha Part Two: The Spawning (1981) the following year.

In 1984, he wrote and directed The Terminator (1984), a futuristic action-thriller starring Arnold Schwarzenegger, Michael Biehn, and Linda Hamilton. It was a huge success. After this came a string of successful science-fiction action films such as Aliens (1986) and Terminator 2: Judgment Day (1991). Cameron is now one of the most sought-after directors in Hollywood. He was formerly married to producer Gale Anne Hurd, who produced several of his films. He married Kathryn Bigelow in 1989.

IMDb Mini Biography By: André Hansson

Cameron’s latest project ‘Avatar’ was set to be released May 22, of this year but much like Scrosese’s ‘Shutter Island’, it has since been pushed back as well to December 19th, 2009.

Popularity: 20% [?]

Robert Altman was born on February 20th, 1925 in Kansas City, Missouri, to B.C. (an insurance salesman) and Helen Altman. He entered St. Peters Catholic school at the age six, and spent a short time at a Catholic high school. From there, he went to Rockhurst High School. It was then that he started exploring the art of exploring sound with the cheap tape recorders available at the time. He was then sent to Wentworth Military Academy in Lexington, Missouri where he attended through Junior College. In 1945, he enlisted in the Air Force and became a copilot of a B-24. After his discharge from the military, he became fascinated by movies and he and his first wife, LaVonne Elmer, moved to Hollywood, where Altman tried acting (appearing in the film The Secret Life of Walter Mitty (1947)), songwriting (he wrote a musical intended for Broadway, “The Rumors are Flying”), and screen-writing (he co-wrote the screenplay for the film Bodyguard (1948) and wrote the story (uncredited) for Christmas Eve (1947)), but he could not get a foot hold in Tinseltown. After a brief fling as publicity director with a company in the business of tattooing dogs, Altman finally gave up and returned to his hometown of Kansas City, where he decided he wanted to do some serious work in filmmaking. An old friend of his recommended him to a film production company in Kansas City, the Calvin Co., who hired him in 1950. After a few months of work in writing scripts and editing films, Altman began directing films at Calvin. It was here (while working on documentaries, employee training films, industrial and educational films and advertisements) that he learned much about film making. All in all, Altman pieced together sixty to sixty-five short films for Calvin on every subject imaginable, from football to car crashes, but he kept grasping for more challenging projects. He wrote the screenplay for the Kansas City-produced feature film Corn’s-A-Poppin’ (1954), he produced and directed several television commercials including one with the Eileen Ford Agency, he co-created and directed the TV series “The Pulse of the City” (1953) which ran for one season on the independent Dumont network, and he even had a formative crack at directing local community theater. His big-screen directorial debut came while still at Calvin with The Delinquents (1957) and, by 1956, he left the Calvin Co., and went to Hollywood to direct Alfred Hitchcock‘s TV show. From here, he went on to direct a large number of television shows, until he was offered the script for MASH (1970) in 1969. He was hardly the producer’s first choice – more than fifteen other directors had already turned it down. This wasn’t his first movie, but it was his first success. After that, he had his share of hits and misses, but The Player (1992) and, more recently, Gosford Park (2001) were particularly well-received.

IMDb Mini Biography By: Christopher W. Johnson

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Popularity: 61% [?]

Turner Classic Movies presents an in-depth documentary by acclaimed author, critic and documentarian Richard Schickel on director and producer Martin Scorsese, entitled Scorsese on Scorsese (2004).

Based on an in-depth, five-hour interview conducted by Schickel, the documentary stresses Scorsese’s memories of childhood in Little Italy, N.Y., and the warmth and fractiousness of his Italian-American heritage, using family photos and home movies. It also addresses the way his early movie going influenced his own work and, most importantly, the lasting power and influence of his own films. In particular, Scorsese discusses such seminal films as TAXI DRIVER (1976), nominated for four Academy Awards® including Best Picture; RAGING BULL (1980), which earned Robert DeNiro a Best Actor Oscar®, won for Best Editing and earned six additional Academy Award® nominations; MEAN STREETS (1973), one of his early efforts which was set in Scorsese’s old Little Italy stomping grounds; and THE AGE OF INNOCENCE (1993), which earned the Best Costume Oscar® and was nominated in four additional categories.

Schickel, one of the nation’s most influential film critics, has been reviewing movies for Time magazine since 1972. He has also made a name for himself as a producer, writer and director, and in addition to Scorsese on Scorsese (working title), he has made more than 20 documentaries, including the influential series, “The Men Who Made the Movies,” as well as four “star portraits” for Turner Network Television (Gary Cooper, Myrna Loy, Barbara Stanwyck and Clint Eastwood), Emmy-nominated biographies of directors Vincente Minelli and Elia Kazan and a study of legendary special-effects artist Ray Harryhausen. Another of his recent projects Woody Allen: A Life in Film, premiered on TCM in 2002. He is the author of more than 25 books, among them The Disney Version, D.W. Griffith: An American Life, Intimate Strangers: The Culture of Celebrity and Matinee Idylls, which was named a New York Times Notable Book of the Year.

BW&C-86m. Letterboxed. Closed Captioning.

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Popularity: 32% [?]