NAOMI WATTS AND TIM ROTH WITH UNWELCOME VISITORS MICHAEL PITT AND BRADY CORBETT IN DIRECTOR MICHAEL HANEKE’S FUNNY GAMES U.S. COURTESY WARNER INDEPENDENT PICTURES. Michael Haneke is a director who makes films strictly on his terms, and — as his new movie demonstrates — writes his own rules if he doesn’t like the existing ones. The son of an actor-director father and an actress mother, Haneke was born in Munich, Germany, and grew up just outside the Austrian capital, Vienna. He attended the University of Vienna, where he studied philosophy, psychology and theater. Over the course of the 70s and […]

BLIND CLIMBER DACHUNG IN DIRECTOR LUCY WALKER’S BLINDSIGHT. COURTESY ROBSON ENTERTAINMENT. The projects Lucy Walker has chosen to take on in her career demonstrate an admirable desire to tell difficult and important stories. The British documentarian was born and raised in London, and during her childhood lost the sight in one of her eyes. However, if anything this only further fueled her fascination with film and other visual media. She was a literature major at Oxford University before winning a Fulbright Scholarship which took her to NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts, where she studied film. During this time, she […]

ALEJANDRO POLANCO IN DIRECTOR RAMIN BAHRANI’S CHOP SHOP. COURTESY KOCH LORBER FILMS. Ramin Bahrani’s films are what one could term “outsider cinema,” and yet they are made with the quiet confidence of someone who knows he belongs. Iranian-American Bahrani was born and raised in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, and moved to New York to study film at Columbia University. After making the short films Backgammon (1998) and Strangers (2000), he spent three years living in Iran, his parents’ former home country. Once back in the U.S., his awareness of immigrant life and the psychology of the outsider found a voice in […]

AUGUST DIEHL, KARL MARKOVICS, VEIT STÜBNER AND AUGUST ZIRNER IN DIRECTOR STEFAN RUZOWITZKY’S THE COUNTERFEITERS. COURTESY SONY PICTURES CLASSICS. It is the natural desire of critics to put films and their directors into neat categorizations, and yet there are some directors, such as Stefan Ruzowitzky, whose work simply cannot be summed up in a simple all-encompassing description. Born in Vienna, Austria, on Christmas Day 1961, Ruzowitzky stayed in his home city to study film, theater and history before pursuing a career in directing television shows, commercials, and pop promos for bands such as The Scorpions and Nsync. In 1996 he […]

With the passing yesterday of legendary horror auteur George Romero, we’re reposting Nick Dawson’s 2008 interview with the director on the release of the penultimate chapter of his zombie series, Diary of the Dead. R.I.P. George Romero. No matter how you look at it, George A. Romero will always be remembered as the godfather of the zombie movie. Born in 1940 in New York City, Romero graduated from Carnegie Mellon in the early 60s and stayed in Pittsburgh to set up a commercial production company. In 1968, he segued into features with his seminal debut, Night of the Living Dead, […]

LORRAINE STANLEY AND GEORGIA GROOME IN DIRECTOR PAUL ANDREW WILLIAMS’ LONDON TO BRIGHTON. COURTESY OUTSIDER PICTURES. A rare handful of people are born to make movies, and new British writer-director Paul Andrew Williams is undoubtedly one of those few. Born in 1973 in the Southern coastal town of Portsmouth, Williams initially studied as an actor at LAMDA and spent the latter part of the 1990s playing smaller roles in UK TV shows like Casualty, Eastenders and Soldier, Soldier. In 2000, however, he set up So Loose Films and began making a string of short films. The second of these, Sugar […]

WRITER-DIRECTOR-STAR NADINE LABAKI IN A SCENE FROM CARAMEL. COURTESY ROADSIDE ATTRACTIONS. As role models, few filmmakers are more inspirational than Nadine Labaki. On top of the inherent difficulty of succeeding as a writer-director, Labaki grew up in Lebanon’s war-ravaged capital, Beirut, in a Middle Eastern culture where women are essentially second-class citizens. However, Labaki’s passion for film drove her to overcome her obstacles, and in 1998 her short film 11 Rue Pasteur (her graduating project at Beirut’s Saint-Joseph University) won the top prize at an Arabian film festival in Paris. Back in Lebanon, Labaki honed her craft as a director […]

BONO AND THE EDGE IN CATHERINE OWENS AND MARK PELLINGTON’S U2 3D. COURTESY NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC ENTERTAINMENT. Though her body of work is famous, Catherine Owens — the woman behind the visual design of U2’s legendary stadium tours of the past 15 years — until now has maintained a much lower profile. Beginning with the band’s revolutionary ZooTV tour in 1992, Irish artist Owens used her expertise in many media (sculpture, video art, sound design, photography, etc.) as inspiration for their subsequent PopMart, Elevation and Vertigo tours, helping the band gain a reputation as the best live act in the world. […]

CHRIS KLEIN, JON BERNTHAL AND ELIJAH WOOD IN DIRECTOR BRYAN GUNNAR COLE’S DAY ZERO. COURTESY FIRST LOOK PICTURES. It is common for directors to have a background in theater, documentary filmmaking or editing, but Bryan Gunnar Cole is almost unique for having made a mark in all three fields. Cole was one of the founders of the Annex Theatre, a fringe company based in his native Seattle which memorably put on shows like Wonka, a colorful musical version of Roald Dahl’s Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. He gained a BA in Film at Yale and then an MFA at NYU, […]

AN EXPECTANT MOTHER IN DIRECTOR ABBY EPSTEIN’S THE BUSINESS OF BEING BORN. COURTESY RED ENVELOPE ENTERTAINMENT. After years as a theater director, Abby Epstein has transitioned into being one of the most important new female voices in documentary film. Epstein began directing plays in the 1980s in Chicago where she started her own theater company, Roadworks Productions. In the late 1990s, she relocated to New York to helm the highly successful Broadway musical RENT. Notable amongst numerous other credits is her involvement with Eve Ensler’s seminal The Vagina Monologues, which she directed during its New York run as well as […]