The long and prolific career of Steven Soderbergh (b. 1963) defies easy categorization. From his breakout beginnings in 1989 with sex, lies, and videotape to 2013, when he retired from big-screen studio movie making to focus on other pursuits including television, the director's output resembles nothing less than an elaborate experiment. Soderbergh's Hollywood vehicles such as the Ocean's Eleven movies, Contagion, and Magic Mike appear just as risky and ...

'Packed with trivia, filled with wit and endlessly readable, this is the biography Joss’ s career deserves. We can’ t recommend it enough' ***** SFXJoss Whedon is a male writer whose most famous creation is a girl-power icon; a geek who deals in classic themes of love, betrayal and redemption; and one of the first people in the entertainment industry to have harnessed the power of the internet to engage directly with his fans.Amy Pascale became one...

Andrei Tarkovsky is the most celebrated Russian filmmaker since Eisenstein, and one of the most important directors to have emerged during the 1960s and 70s.Although he made only seven features, each one was a major landmark in cinema, the most well-known of them being the mediaeval epic Andrei Rublev - widely regarded as one of the greatest films of all time - and the autobiographical Mirror, set during the Russia of Stalin's purges in the 1930s ...

In 1983 visionary director John Cassavetes asked journalist Michael Ventura to write a unique film study - an on-set diary of the making of his film Love Streams. Cassavetes laid out his expectations. He wanted 'a daring book, a tough book'. In Ventura's words, 'All I had to do for 'daring' and 'tough' was transcribe this man's audacity day by day.'Cassavetes Directs describes the creation of Love Streams shot by shot, crisis by crisis. During production,...

In One-Man Band, the third volume in his epic survey of Orson Welles’ life and work, Simon Callow again probes in comprehensive and penetrating detail into one of the most complex artists of the twentieth century, looking closely at the triumphs and failures of an ambitious one-man assault on one medium after another – theatre, radio, film, television, even, at one point, ballet – in each of which his radical and original approach opened up new directions and hitherto unglimpsed p...

The stylistic and bloody excesses of the films of Dario Argento are instantly recognisable. Vivid, baroque and nightmarish, his films lock violent deaths in a twisted embrace with an almost sexual beauty. Narrative and logic are often lost in a constant bombardment of atmosphere, technical mastery and provocative imagery. It's a body of work which deals explicitly with death and violence, all the while revelling in perversely alluring stylistics and shot through with an unflinching intensi...

Although Stanley Kubrick adapted novels and short stories, his films deviate in notable ways from the source material. In particular, since 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), his films seem to definitively exploit all cinematic techniques, embodying a compelling visual and aural experience. But, as author Elisa Pezzotta contends, it is for these reasons that his cinema becomes the supreme embodiment of the sublime, fruitful encounter between the two arts and, simultaneously, of their i...

From the unbridled sensuality of silent Italian films, to the neorealist classic Bitter Rice, to the astonishing imagination of Fellini and the more cerebral and fascinating movies of Antonioni, Italy has a filmic legacy unlike that of any other nation. And then there are the popular movies: the lively sword and sandal epics of the peplum era through to the inextricable mix of sexuality and violence in the gialli of such directors as Mario Bava and Dario Argento. All the ...

The 1969 film Ma Nuit chez Maud catapulted its shy academic film director Eric Rohmer (1920-2010) into the limelight, selling over a million tickets in France and earning a nomination for an Academy Award. Ma Nuit chez Maud remains his most famous film, the highlight of an impressive range of films examining the sexual, romantic, and artistic mores of contemporary France, the temptations of desire, the small joys of everyday life, and sometimes, the vicissitudes of histor...

Fred Zinnemann directed some of the most acclaimed and controversial films of the twentieth century, yet he has been a shadowy presence in Hollywood history. In Fred Zinnemann and the Cinema of Resistance, J. E. Smyth reveals the intellectual passion behind some of the most powerful films ever made about the rise and resistance to fascism and the legacy of the Second World War, from The Seventh Cross and The Search to High Noon, From Here to Eternity, and Jul...

Over the course of his career, legendary director Werner Herzog (b. 1942) has made almost sixty films and given more than eight hundred interviews. This collection features the best of these, focusing on all the major films, from Signs of Life and Aguirre, the Wrath of God to Grizzly Man and Cave of Forgotten Dreams. When did Herzog decide to become a filmmaker? Who are his key influences? Where does he find his peculiar themes and characters? What role ...

Born in Taiwan, Ang Lee is one of cinema's most versatile and daring directors. His ability to cut across cultural, national, and sexual boundaries has given him recognition in all corners of the world, the ability to work with complete artistic freedom whether inside or outside of Hollywood, and two Academy Awards for Best Director. He has won astounding critical acclaim for Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (2000), which transformed the status of martial arts films across the globe...