Conversations with filmmakers series

Controversy and acclaim mark Martin Scorsese's career from his earlier iconoclastic New York films like Mean Streets and Raging Bull to the more recent The Last Temptation of Christ, GoodFellas and Cape Fear. In Martin Scorsese: A Journey, Mary Pat Kelley, writer and prize-winning filmmaker, traces Scorsese's life and work through interviews with Scorsese as well as more than twenty major motion picture figures, providing a rare look at the process and inspiration behind the films of America's premier director. Martin Scorsese: A Journey includes exclusive interviews with Robert De Niro, Barbara Hershey, Harvey Keitel, Ellen Burstyn, Willem Dafoe, Paul Newman, Liza Minelli, Joe Pesci, Nick Nolte, Sandra Bernhard, and Rosanna Arquette; and includes a new Foreword by Andy Dougan, author of Untouchable: A Biography of Robert De Niro.

As a star, Clint Eastwood is recalled primarily for two early roles - the "Man with No Name" of three European-made Westerns and "Dirty" Harry Callahan, the uncompromising cop who spoke softly and carried a big gun in five movies. But like few other stars, Eastwood has shaped his own career by appearing almost exclusively in films he produced or co-produced, frequently under his own direction. No other contemporary dramatic star has directed himself so often. The interviews collected here range over the nearly three decades of Eastwood's directorial career. The emphasis is on practical filmmaking issues and on his philosophy of filmmaking.

"I am trying to change the world," film-maker Jean-Luc Godard told critic Gene Youngblood some thirty years ago. He has pursued his revolution in works ranging from the explosive Breathless to the eloquent Contempt to the controversial Hail Mary and the postmodern Histoire(s) du cinema, shaking up conventional formulas with boldly innovative approaches to every aspect of cinema and video - including film criticism via provocative essays in Cahiers du Cinema and interviews dating to the early years of his career. This book presents a varied selection of his conversations with critics, scholars, and journalists, spanning the 1960s to the 1990s and illuminating key facets of his life work and ideas.

Publisher description: The interviews in this collection catch Hitchcock at key moments of transition in his long career. These conversations dramatize his shifting attitudes on a variety of cinematic matters that engaged and challenged him, including the role of stars in a movie, the importance of story, the use of sound and color, his relationship to the medium of television, and the attractions and perils of realism.

Starting his career as an animator for Disney, Tim Burton made his feature film directorial debut with the visually dazzling, low-budget Pee-Wee's Big Adventure. When it became a surprise blockbuster, studios began to trust him with larger budgets and the whims of his expansive imagination. Mixing gothic horror, black comedy, and oddball whimsy, Burton's movies veer from childlike enchantment to morbid melancholy, often with the same frame. His beautifully designed and highly stylized films-including Batman, Edward Scissorhands, Beetlejuice, Big Fish, Sleepy Hollow, and Ed Wood-are idiosyncratic, personal visions that have found commercial success. In Tim Burton: Interviews, the director discusses how animation and art design affect his work, how old horror films have deeply influenced his psyche, why so many of his protagonists are outcasts, and how he's managed to make personal films within the Hollywood system. He gives tribute to writers he's worked with, his favorite actors-including Johnny Depp and Vincent Price-and talks enthusiastically about pulp horror fiction and the works of Edgar Allan Poe. These interviews show his progression from an inarticulate young director to a contemplative and dry-witted artist over the course of twenty years. In later interviews, he opens up about being in therapy and how his childhood fantasies still affect his art. Tim Burton: Interviews reveals a man who has managed to thrive inside Hollywood while maintaining the distinctive quirks of an independent filmmaker. Kristian Fraga, New York City, wrote and directed the award-winning PBS documentary The Inside Reel: Digital Filmmaking. He is a founding partner of Sirk Productions, LLC, a Manhattan-based film and television production company.

In the 1960s and 1970s, Michelangelo Antonioni (1912-2007) forged a cinematic language that reflected a changed, postwar world. His early successes, including L'avventura (1960) and La notte (1961), reshaped film drama by focusing so intently on characters (particularly couples) that plot was often a secondary concern. He also moved away from the social realism of his Italian peers. His most notable English-language films, from Blow Up (1966) to Zabriskie Point (1970), engage contemporary politics and modern social alienation.

Over nearly sixty years, Agnès Varda (b. 1928) has given interviews that are revealing not only of her work, but of her remarkably ambiguous status. She has been called the "Mother of the New Wave" but suffered for many years for never having been completely accepted by the cinematic establishment in France. Varda's first film, La Pointe Courte (1954), displayed many of the characteristics of the two later films that launched the New Wave, Truffaut's 400 Blows and Godard's Breathless. In a low-budget film, using (as yet) unknown actors and working entirely outside the prevailing studio system, Varda completely abandoned the "tradition of quality" that Truffaut was at that very time condemning in the pages of Cahiers du cinema. Her work, however, was not "discovered" until after Truffaut and Godard had broken onto the scene in 1959. Varda's next film, Cleo from 5 to 7, attracted considerably more attention and was selected as France's official entry for the Festival in Cannes. Ultimately, however, this film and her work for the next fifty years continued to be overshadowed by her more famous male friends, many of whom she mentored and advised. Her films have finally earned recognition as deeply probing and fundamental to the growing awareness in France of women's issues and the role of women in the cinema. "I'm not philosophical," she says, "not metaphysical. Feelings are the ground on which people can be led to think about things. I try to show everything that happens in such a way and ask questions so as to leave the viewers free to make their own judgments." The panoply of interviews here emphasize her core belief that "we never stop learning" and reveal the wealth of ways to answer her questions. --Amazon.com.