Exposure: Davis Guggenheim
If you think you know filmmaker Davis Guggenheim by his many episodic TV credits or iconic last name, you’ve missed most of his story. Raised on social justice documentaries by his father, Charles Guggenheim, whose first Oscar-winning film, Nine From Little Rock, explored ‘60s era school desegregation, and whose second Academy Award-winner, Robert Kennedy Remembered, paid tribute to America’s greatest public education statesman, Davis Guggenheim’s first and best passion is nonfiction filmmaking, and the opportunity it gives him to “be a part of something much bigger than yourself.” His 2007 Oscar-winning documentary, An Inconvenient Truth, placed climate change front and center in the national debate. And with his new documentary, Waiting for Superman, which won the Audience Award at the 2010 Sundance Film Festival, Guggenheim has again tapped into the national zeitgeist, exploring America’s failed public school system through the eyes of five different children whose futures literally depend on a tumbling ball in a lottery basket. As evident by the conversation below, Guggenheim, much like his father, truly believes in moviemaking as a transformative medium. In that respect, Waiting for Superman is his chalkboard and the educators who come before his cameras are textbook examples of how to change our troubled world. Read more
Exposure: Aaron Sorkin
Aaron Sorkin came to prominence in 1989 with the smash Broadway play, A Few Good Men, which garnered him the John Gassner Award for an American play by a new playwright. His film adaptation a few years later, forever immortalized by a growling Jack Nicholson insisting American civilians “can’t handle the truth,” swiftly propelled Sorkin to Hollywood’s A-list for screenwriters. He followed up his courtroom drama (A Few Good Men earned Oscar, DGA and ASC nominations) with a string of notable feature films – Malice, The American President and Charlie Wilson’s War – and television series – Sports Night, The West Wing and Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip, functioning in many cases as both writer and executive producer. His most recent project, The Social Network, charts the founding and early days of Facebook and its notorious creator Mark Zuckerburg, a brilliant Harvard undergrad who ruffled many feathers on the road to making 500 million friends. Chris Wolski spoke with Sorkin about why he prefers to emphasize dialogue when creating a film template, and why he was glad William Shakespeare wasn’t in the running to write The Social Network script! Read more
Exposure: Emma Thomas
Emma Thomas met Christopher Nolan while they were both students majoring in English literature at University College in London, England, and they were married during their last year at the school. Hardcore film buffs, Thomas and Nolan organized a film society and arranged screenings of classic movies for their fellow students; then used the money they earned from selling tickets to produce a 16 mm black-and-white film (Following), which premiered at the 1999 Slamdance Film Festival in Park City, Utah. While in Park City, they saw The Hi-Line, over at the Sundance Festival, and made it a point to find the film’s cinematographer, Wally Pfister, ASC. Thus began a creative partnership that would stretch over the breadth of Thomas and Nolan’s career – Memento, Insomnia, Batman Begins, The Prestige, The Dark Knight – and their latest effort, Inception. Read more
Exposure: Steve Ritzi
Stunt coordinator and 2nd Unit director Steve Ritzi grew up around boats on Florida’s Intracoastal Waterway on the Atlantic coast. In 1989 he auditioned for and won a role in the stunt boat show at Universal Studios Orlando. At the time, Florida ’s film and television industry was booming, and Ritzi decided he wanted to learn more about stunts. Fortunately, veteran stuntman Glenn Wilder had moved from Los Angeles to Florida, and Ritzi began attending informal training sessions in Wilder’s backyard where scaffolding had been erected so they could practice falls, and, of course, fights. Ritzi also attended a driving seminar held by another veteran stuntman, Wally Crowder, and soon found himself heading over to Orlando-area soundstages, resume and headshots in hand, to introduce himself to the stunt coordinators. The result has been a stellar career in Hollywood’s action game that has included executing physical “gags” on dozens of films – Passenger 57, The Patriot, Bad Boys II, Transporter 2, Body of Lies, Zombieland among them – while also adding stunt coordinator and second unit director credits to his resume on a number of films, most recently, Jonah Hex. Read more
Exposure: Ridley Scott
Ridley Scott’s extraordinary sense of visuals was clear from the start. In 1977, he made a big splash in the film industry with The Duellists. Based on a Joseph Conrad story and set in the Napoleonic era, the film was nominated for the Palme d’Or and earned Best First Work at the Cannes Film Festival, and BAFTA and BSC nominations for cinematographer Frank Tidy, BSC. For Scott, it was a case of an overnight sensation, a dozen years in the making: the filmmaker, who grew up in a military family and possessed an M.A. in graphic design from the Royal College of Art, had already revolutionized the advertising industry, having directed thousands of television commercials dating back to the early 1960s. Scott brought an artist’s eye and a storyteller’s passion for detail to the craft of selling with images, and his first stab at the big screen turned out to be a harbinger; his next film, Alien, changed the sci-fi genre, if not the entire film industry, forever. Scott followed that up with Blade Runner, one of the most influential films in cinema history in so many areas, first and foremost its cinematography by Jordan Cronenweth, ASC. Right through to his newest work, Robin Hood, the director/producer’s work continually displays the scale and grandeur of epic cinema. David Heuring caught up with Scott to probe his thoughts about cinema lighting, his roots in commercials, and his feeling about new digital technologies. (Hint: if the term “old school master” comes to mind, Scott would brook no quarrel.)
Exposure: Shawn Levy
Shawn Levy, a product of Yale’s drama department and USC’s graduate film program, paid his dues doing one-off acting jobs on many hit TV shows from the late 1980s. And he says acting roles on shows like thirtysomething, 21 Jump Street, China Beach and Beverly Hills 90210 only fueled his aspirations to stand on the other side of the camera. Such ambition led to directing episodes of 1990’s era shows that were not quite as crucial in the cultural zeitgeist – The Secret World of Alex Mack, The Journey of Allen Strange and whatever iteration of Lassie was being produced a decade ago. However, Levy says he did hone his craft, learning the true importance of preparation when blowing through eight or more script pages a day. By the time he got to direct features with more resources and well-known actors, such as Just Married with Brittany Murphy and Ashton Kutcher, he no longer needed to feel his way through the job. That film led to two major studio remakes, Cheaper by the Dozen and The Pink Panther, both starring Steve Martin, so by the time of his breakout hit, Night at the Museum, with Ben Stiller, he was cementing a reputation directing and producing tentpole comedies with top tier talent. With Date Night, an action/comedy starring Steve Carell and Tina Fey, he builds further on that specialty, as Jon Silberg reports.
Exposure: Jon Landau
Although producer Jon Landau was born into the Hollywood industry, serendipity still played a role in his career. As COO of James Cameron’s production company Lightstorm Entertainment, Landau produced both Avatar and Titanic. His early career, however, didn’t seem headed in the direction of tent-pole movies. In fact, Landau was raised on the art house hits produced by parents Ely and Edie Landau, which included The Pawnbroker, Long Day’s Journey into Night, and The Man in the Glass Booth. He began as a production manager and in short order rose to be an executive vice president of feature production at Twentieth Century Fox, in the early 1990s. And that’s where the serendipity came in. He was a suit at the West L.A. studio lot when Cameron directed True Lies, and the proverbial “creative sparks” must have flown, because after Landau left Fox, Cameron asked him to join him on a little project called Titanic. “The idea I’d be doing movies like this had never crossed my mind,” Landau says with genuine surprise. “And the fact that I am? I am thrilled.” Debra Kaufman caught up with one of the industry’s most creative producers about the challenges of making Avatar, the new standard-bearer for 3D production around the globe.
Exposure: Rick Baker
If there is one person in Hollywood worthy of laying claim to the crown worn by Jack P. Pierce – Universal Studios’ makeup genius of the 1930s and ‘40s (Frankenstein, The Mummy, The Wolf Man) – it is Rick Baker. The special effects makeup designer grew up watching monster movies on late night television, and burst into prominence while still in his 20’s, winning an Emmy Award® for his startling aging makeup for Cicely Tyson in The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman (1974). Just seven years later, Baker won the first of his six Academy Awards® for John Landis’ horror comedy, An American Werewolf in London. With The Wolfman, starring Benicio del Toro, Baker not only barks back up the same tree that first earned him Oscar gold, but he puts his own spin on Pierce’s 1941 classic, which starred the legendary Lon Chaney, Jr. Matt Hurwitz went throat to nuzzle with the master of creature makeup to hear about Baker’s designs for the newest incarnation of Hollywood’s favorite monster, as well as his thoughts on the classic films that first fired his imagination.
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Exposure: Peter Jackson
Between his earliest low-budget films and later studio-sponsored efforts, New Zealand-born filmmaker Peter Jackson has blended inventive visual effects (sometimes hilariously over-the-top in nature) and photographic sleight of hand to portray apparitions, both ghastly and ghostly. These treatments have varied greatly down through the years: Bad Taste, Meet the Feebles and Braindead show grotesque horrors through a darkly-comedic glass and a “home movie” approach to filmmaking that is utterly unique. Heavenly Creatures, by contrast, captured the fantasies of teenaged girls in a delicate, even artful approach that was both giddy and ethereal. Jackson’s acclaimed The Lord of the Rings trilogy, along with King Kong (all shot by Andrew Lesnie, ACS, ASC), boldly reaffirmed his ability and inclination to depict fantastic realms within a deeply felt drama, human or otherwise. With his new adaptation of the Alice Sebold novel, The Lovely Bones, Jackson explores a much different “middle earth” than any J.R.R. Tolkien imagined; a Pennsylvania suburb in 1973, where the ghastly takes the form of a serial killer of young girls, and the ghostly the spirit of his most recent victim trapped between life and what lies beyond.
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Exposure: Ken Burns
Ken Burns was born in Brooklyn and raised in Ann Arbor, Michigan. He enrolled at Hampshire College in Amherst, Massachusetts, in 1971 with, as he puts its, “a naïve notion of preparing for a career as a narrative filmmaker in the tradition of John Ford or Alfred Hitchcock.” Jerome Liebling and Elaine Mayes were among his mentors on the faculty. They were both still photographers who focused on socially relevant issues. Read more
