The Northman: A Call to the Gods is the official look at how this epic Viking revenge thriller was conceived, written, cast, and produced by acclaimed director Robert Eggers. Set against the ruthless backdrop of tenth-century Norse territory, The Northman is an epic Viking revenge thriller by acclaimed director Robert Eggers (The Witch [2015] and The Lighthouse [2019]), featuring an all-star cast including Alexander Skarsgard, Nicole Kidman, Ethan Hawke, Anya Taylor-Joy, Willem Dafoe, and Bjoerk. Compiled from fascinating interviews with the cast and crew, inspiring storyboards, exclusive behind-the-scenes photographs-including the director's own firsthand account of his creative processes in writing and directing-The Northman: A Call to the Gods explores the cold and forbidding world of the Vikings, their customs, traditions, and relentless thirst for battle and vengeance that inspired Eggers to write this compelling Norse saga. Learn how the wardrobe department recreated the intricate chainmail armor and costumes of Viking berserkers and warriors; and delve into the research behind the art department's visual inspiration for replicating the villages of Hrafnsey and Freysdalur.

This collection of interviews traces the career of filmmaker Henry Hathaway from his beginnings as a child actor for the American Film Company in 1911 through his directorial triumphs How the West Was Won (1962) and True Grit (1969). Begun as a special project for the American Film Institute, this oral history has now been edited and is being released for the first time in book form. Polly Platt, production designer, screenwriter, and producer of such films as Broadcast News, Pretty Baby, and The War of the Roses conducted the interviews and intended to edit them herself, but her busy career prevented her from completing the project. Now edited for release, this collection contains Hathaway's fascinating reflections about the studio system and working with such Hollywood luminaries as John Wayne, Marilyn Monroe, Jimmy Stewart, and Shirley Temple. A must for any Hollywood history buff.

Between 1959 and 1984, French film director Francois Truffaut was interviewed over three hundred times. Each interview offers critical insight into the genesis of Truffaut's films as he shares the sources of his inspiration, the choice of his themes, and the development of his screenplays. In addition, Truffaut discusses his relationships with collaborators, actors, and the circumstances surrounding the shooting of each film. These texts, originally assembled by Anne Gillain and published in French in 1988, are presented here in a montage arranged chronologically by film. This compilation includes an impressive array of reflections on cinema as an art form. Truffaut defines the aims and practices of the French New Wave, comparing their efforts to the films made by their predecessors and including comments that encompass the entire history of cinema. Truffaut on Cinema provides commentary on contemporary events, a wealth of biographical information, and Truffaut's own artistic itinerary.

This is the first book-length study in English on Chabrol since 1970. Chabrol has always been a neglected figure in the French New Wave but has recently been declared 'possibly the greatest living film director in France'.. Coincides with the recent renewal of interest in Chabrol, which has seen his back catalogue released in the UK on video.. Celebration of Chabrol's fiftieth film recently, Rien ne va plus prompted many festivals and retrospectives. Publication coincides with Chabrol's new film which is discussed in this study.. Writtten by one of the liveliest critics in French cinema - author of Contemporary French Cinema. -- .

Clint Eastwood (b. 1930) is the only popular American dramatic star to have shaped his own career almost entirely through films of his own producing, frequently under his own direction; no other dramatic star has directed himself so often. He is also one of the most prolific active directors, with thirty-three features to his credit since 1971.As a star, he is often recalled primarily for two early roles--the "Man with No Name" of three European-made Westerns, and the uncompromising cop "Dirty" Harry Callahan. But on his own as a director, Eastwood has steered a remarkable course. A film industry insider who works through the established Hollywood system and respects its traditions, he remains an outsider by steadfastly refusing to heed cultural and aesthetic trends in film production and film style. His films as director have examined an eclectic variety of themes, ranging from the artist's life to the nature of heroism, while frequently calling into question the ethos of masculinity and his own star image. Yet they have remained accessible to a popular audience worldwide. With two Best Director and two Best Picture Oscars to his credit, Eastwood now ranks among the most highly honored living filmmakers.These interviews range over the more than four decades of Eastwood's directorial career, with an emphasis on practical filmmaking issues and his philosophy as a filmmaker. Nearly a third are from European sources--several appearing here in English for the first time.

This volume offers a new interpretation of one of the most innovative directors in the history of cinema. It is the first book to cover the whole of Godard's career, from the French New Wave to the recent triumphs of Histoire(s) du cinema and Eloge de l'amour. Drawing on a wide range of literary, filmic and philiosophical texts, the book places Godard's work within its intellectual context, examining how developments in French culture and thought since 1950 have been mirrored in - and sometimes anticipated by - Godard's films. Numerous sequences from Godard's films are singled out for close analysis, demonstrating how the director's radical approaches to narrative, editing, sound and shot composition have made the cinema into an analytical tool in its own right. The book will be essential to all students of Godard's films, and of interest to scholars of modern and contemporary French cinema, culture and thought. -- .

Challenging the prevailing notion among cinephiles that the auteur is an isolated genius interested primarily in individualism, Colin Burnett positions Robert Bresson as one whose life's work confronts the cultural forces that helped shape it. Regarded as one of film history's most elusive figures, Bresson (1901-1999) carried himself as an auteur long before cultural magazines, like the famed Cahiers du cinema, advanced the term to describe such directors as Jacques Tati, Alfred Hitchcock, and Jean-Luc Godard. In this groundbreaking study, Burnett combines biography with cultural history to uncover the roots of the auteur in the alternative cultural marketplace of midcentury France.

The films of Alfred Hitchcock deal heavily with psychological and philosophical themes, and one needn't look very far into the canon to find them. In ""Psycho"", for example, the personality metamorphosis in Marion Crane that leads her into grand larceny is a pale double of the murderous Oedipal divide in Norman Bates. In ""The Birds"", overbearing natural mutations turn what might have been a ""creature feature"" into a film about fear of the unknowable. This book looks at 12 Hitchcock films and the positions they put forth on three problem areas of epistemology: deception, knowledge of mind, and problematic knowledge of the external world. These philosophical concepts are explained and woven into the author's thorough and thought-provoking discussion of each film. Descartes and Wittgenstein star; Plato, Locke, Hume, Kant and Kierkegaard also make appearances in this new ""philosopher's cut"" of the master's works.

Werner Herzog came to fame in the 1970s as the European new wave explored new cinematic ideas. With films like Signs of Life (1968), Aguirre, the Wrath of God (1972), The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser (1974) and Fitzcarraldo (1982), Herzog became the subject of public debate, particularly due to his larger-than-life characters, often played by the mad Klaus Kinski. After the success of his documentary Grizzly Man (2005), Herzog began to lead a new form of hybrid documentary, and his tough attitude towards life and film made him a director's director for a new generation. Kristoffer Hegnsvad's award-winning book guides the reader through films depicting gangster priests, bear whisperers, shoe eating, revolutionary filmmakers. . . and a penguin. It is full of rare insights from Herzog's otherwise secret Rogue film school, and features interviews with Herzog.

Terence Davies has made some of the most innovative, harrowing, and hauntingly lyrical films of the contemporary era. This is the first ever book-length study of his work, combining detailed analysis of all his films with a persuasive and stimulating investigation of key filmic issues of time and memory, identity and selfhood, and the nature of literary adaptation, as well as a previously unpublished interview with Davies himself. The book demonstrates that Davies's films successfully subvert traditional division between 'popular' culture and 'art-house' cinema. Gardner explores not only Davies's debt to social realism, the British Documentary movement, and Ealing comedies, but equally to the European auteur tradition and to the great Hollywood musicals and melodramas that continue to inspire him. It provides fresh insight into the centrality of music in Davies's work, and into his conviction that film itself is closer to music than to any other art form. -- .

At his peak, from the late 1960s through the early 1970s, Sam Peckinpah was hailed as one of the new masters of the Western film, while simultaneously becoming one of the most controversial American directors of the era. In a time of great social turmoil, Peckinpah's on-screen orchestration of physical and emotional violence drew adamant praise for what some considered fearless realism and vehement criticism for what others called tasteless gore and brutal misogyny. Debate over the violence and sexual themes of Peckinpah's films often eclipsed aesthetic appreciation of his work. A favorite target of 1970s feminist critics, feminist social debate, combined with the director's own combative persona usually prevented reasoned evaluation of his films. A prevalent auteurist view did not recognize how Peckinpah was subject to the whims and character of an industry in which he rarely navigated successfully. While the passage of time has muted the initial shock value of his filmed violence, no similar reappraisal has ever dealt with those initial misperceptions of misogyny, and looked to reevaluate his on-screen treatment of women. Peckinpah's Women examines the confluence of factors that worked with, and often against, Peckinpah's cinematic voice to divine a recurring positive theme regarding women in those films that form the heart of his body of work: his period Westerns.

Noteworthy Francophone Women Directors: A Sequel is a comprehensive guide that foregrounds the productions of nearly three hundred Francophone women filmmakers from France, Belgium, Switzerland, Latin American, Quebec, and even Thailand. The book begins following films released after the publication of Pallister and Hottell's last volume, Francophone Women Film Directors, in 2005 and stops after the Cannes film festival in 2010.

Between 1959 and 1984, French film director Francois Truffaut was interviewed over three hundred times. Each interview offers critical insight into the genesis of Truffaut's films as he shares the sources of his inspiration, the choice of his themes, and the development of his screenplays. In addition, Truffaut discusses his relationships with collaborators, actors, and the circumstances surrounding the shooting of each film. These texts, originally assembled by Anne Gillain and published in French in 1988, are presented here in a montage arranged chronologically by film. This compilation includes an impressive array of reflections on cinema as an art form. Truffaut defines the aims and practices of the French New Wave, comparing their efforts to the films made by their predecessors and including comments that encompass the entire history of cinema. Truffaut on Cinema provides commentary on contemporary events, a wealth of biographical information, and Truffaut's own artistic itinerary.

Before being black-listed in the McCarthy era, Bernard Vorhaus was one of Hollywood's most respected silent film writers, working for studios such as Paramount and Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. Not only did he cross paths with some of the brightest lights in early Hollywood Greta Garbo, Norma Shearer, D.W. Griffith, John Wayne, Laurence Olivier are some examples but he was a principal influence upon British filmmaker David Lean. Now in his nineties, Vorhaus recounts some of his pioneering work in film in Saved from Oblivion; he was the first director to incorporate subjective flash-backs and to use a sequence before the main titles. Recently, retrospectives of his films, such as Dusty Ermine and The Last Journey, were shown at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City, as well as at the National Film Theatre and the Edinburgh Festival in England. This autobiography, replete with insight into the techniques and personas of early cinema, is an important as well as entertaining look at the early history of the medium that shaped the twentieth century. Although Vorhaus did not return to directing after he was prematurely cut from the industry in the wake of McCarthyism, he remembers his years there with nostalgia. "Making films is much more exciting than anything else you can do," he says, and this book proves it.

Warsaw- and London-based filmmakers Franciszka and Stefan Themerson are often recognized internationally as pioneers of the 1930s Polish avant-garde. Yet, from the turn of the century to the end of the 1920s, Poland's literary and art scenes were also producing a rich array of criticism and early experiments with the moving image that set the stage for later developments in the avant-garde. In this comprehensive and accessible study, Kamila Kuc draws on myriad undiscovered archival sources to tell the history of early Polish avant-garde movements-Symbolism, Expressionism, Futurism, and Constructivism-and to reveal their impact on later practices in art cinema.

This book traces the development of Richard Linklater's Boyhood from its audacious concept through its tenacious production to its celebrated reception, placing it within the context of cinematic parables about children to demonstrate its distinctive vision. Timothy Shary, author of numerous studies on the history of teen cinema, evaluates the film's many messages about youth and adolescence within the context of early twenty-first century American culture, illuminating how Linklater's singular vision of the otherwise ordinary life of a boy reveals potent universal truths about all people.

Auteurism - the idea that a director of a film is its source of meaning and should retain creative control over the finished product - has been one of film studies' most important paradigms ever since the French New Wave of the late 1950s and early 1960s, and the adoption of the term 'auteur' by Andrew Sarris. Through the popular, controversial and critically acclaimed films of Olivier Assayas, Jacques Audiard, the Dardenne brothers, Michael Haneke and Francois Ozon, this book looks into how the meaning of 'auteur' has changed over this half-century, and assesses the current state of Francophone auteur cinema. It combines French philosophical and sociological approaches with methodologies from the Anglo-American fields of gender studies, queer theory and postmodernism. This volume will be of interest to researchers and students of film studies, European cinema and French and Francophone studies, as well as to film enthusiasts. -- .

Scorsese and Religion concerns the religious vision of the great American filmmaker Martin Scorsese. Not only will this volume explore the foundation of Scorsese's interest in religion-namely, his relation to the Catholic Church-but it will also highlight the religious breadth of Scorsese's corpus. Ultimately, this book demonstrates that Scorsese's cinematic "re-presentation" of reality brings together various religious influences (Catholicism, existentialism, Buddhism, etc.) and topics such as violence, morality, nihilism, and so on. The overarching claim is that Scorsese, who indeed once claimed that his "whole life" had been "movies and religion," cannot be properly understood without reflecting on the ways in which his religious interests are expressed in and through his art.

The art of Senegalese director Djibril Diop Mambety's cinema lies in the tension created between the visual narrative and the aural narrative. His work has been considered hugely influential, and his films bridge Western practices of filmmaking and oral traditions from West Africa. Mambety's film Touki Bouki is considered one of the foundational works of African cinema. Vlad Dima proposes a new reading of Mambety's entire filmography from the perspective of sound. Following recent analytical patterns in film studies that challenge the primacy of the visual, Dima claims that Mambety uses voices, noise, and silence as narrative tools that generate their own stories and sonic spaces. By turning an ear to cinema, Dima pushes African aesthetics to the foreground of artistic creativity and focuses on the critical importance of sound in world cinema.

The son of famed director and screenwriter Joseph L. Mankiewicz ( All About Eve [1950], Guys and Dolls [1955], Cleopatra [1963]) and the nephew of Citizen Kane screenwriter Herman Mankiewicz, Tom Mankiewicz was genuine Hollywood royalty. He grew up in Beverly Hills and New York, spent summers on his dad's film sets, had his first drink with Humphrey Bogart, dined with Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton, went to the theater with Ava Gardner, and traveled the world writing for Brando, Sinatra, and Connery. Although his family connections led him to show business, Tom "Mank" Mankiewicz forged a career of his own, becoming a renowned screenwriter, director, and producer of acclaimed films and television shows. He wrote screenplays for three James Bond films -- Diamonds Are Forever (1971), Live and Let Die (1973), and The Man with the Golden Gun (1974) -- and made his directorial debut with the hit TV series Hart to Hart (1979--1984). My Life as a Mankiewicz is a fascinating look at the life of an individual whose creativity and work ethic established him as a member of the Hollywood writing elite. Mankiewicz details his journey through the inner world of the television and film industries, beginning with his first job as production assistant on The Comancheros (1961), starring John Wayne. My Life as a Mankiewicz illuminates his professional development as a writer and director, detailing his friendships and romantic relationships with some of Hollywood's biggest stars as well as his struggle with alcohol and drugs. With the assistance of Robert Crane, Mankiewicz tells a story of personal achievement and offers an insider's view of the glamorous world of Hollywood during the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s.

In a long and varied career, Lindsay Anderson made training films, documentaries, searing family dramas and blistering satires, including This Sporting Life, O Lucky Man , and Britannia Hospital.Students of British cinema and television from the 1950s to 1990s will find this book a valuable source of information about a director whose work came to public attention with Free Cinema but who, unlike many of his peers in that movement did not take the Hollywood route to success. What emerges is a strong feeling for the character of the man as well as for a remarkable career in British cinema.The book will appeal to admirers, researchers, and students alike. Making use of hitherto unseen original materials from Anderson's extensive personal and professional records, it is most valuable as a study of how the films came about: the production problems involved, the collaborative input of others, as well as the completed films' promotion and reception.It also offers a finely argued take on the whole issue of film authorship, and achieves the rare feat of being academically authoritative whilst also being completely accessible. It prompts renewed respect for the man and the artist and a desire to watch the films all over again.

Warsaw- and London-based filmmakers Franciszka and Stefan Themerson are often recognized internationally as pioneers of the 1930s Polish avant-garde. Yet, from the turn of the century to the end of the 1920s, Poland's literary and art scenes were also producing a rich array of criticism and early experiments with the moving image that set the stage for later developments in the avant-garde. In this comprehensive and accessible study, Kamila Kuc draws on myriad undiscovered archival sources to tell the history of early Polish avant-garde movements-Symbolism, Expressionism, Futurism, and Constructivism-and to reveal their impact on later practices in art cinema.

Hal Ashby (1929-1988) is considered to be the lost genius of the New Hollywood generation. While his name does not bear the familiarity of, say, Robert Altman or Martin Scorsese, his diverse films are among the best known and most beloved of the era. From the cult classic "Harold and Maude" (1971) to the iconic political satire "Being There" (1979), from the subversive sex comedy "Shampoo" (1975) to the anti-Vietnam romance "Coming Home" (1979), Ashby rejected mainstream conventions while his films attracted both popular and critical praise.

A true actors' director, Ashby drew A-list stars and elicited powerful performances from Jack Nicholson in "The Last Detail" (1973), Warren Beatty and Julie Christie in "Shampoo," Jon Voight and Jane Fonda in "Coming Home," and Peter Sellers in "Being There."

"Hal Ashby: Interviews" for the first time brings together the best interviews conducted over the course of Ashby's career. Ashby discusses his filmmaking philosophy, memories of working his way up the Hollywood ladder in the 1950s, and his troubled productions in the 1980s.

Go behind the scenes of DreamWorks Animation's smart,hilarious comedy The Boss Baby. This beautifully illustratedbook includes a wide range of colorful development art,storyboards and character sketches, as well as in-depthinterviews with director Tom McGrath, writer MichaelMcCullers, producer Ramsey Naito, plus key members ofthe storyboard, visual development, visual effects, CGanimation, modeling and layout departments.

John Frankenheimer's career as a professional director began and ended in television. In the mid-1950s, he won acclaim working on live productions for anthology series like Playhouse 90, and from the mid-1990s until his death in 2002 he helmed a string of Emmy-winning features for cable TV, including The Burning Season (1994) and Andersonville (1996). Despite these successes, Frankenheimer's reputation rests primarily upon the nearly thirty feature films he directed, which range from bona fide classics like Birdman of Alcatraz (1962) and The Manchurian Candidate (1962) to such lesser achievements as Prophecy (1979) and Dead Bang (1989). Unfortunately for Frankenheimer, the discrepancy between his best films and his worst led many critics during his lifetime to dismiss him as someone whose talent dissipated in the late 1960s. In the decade since his death, however, several critics have emerged who reject the assertion that the quality of Frankenheimer's output faded after an impressive start. In John Frankenheimer: Interviews, Essays, and Profiles, Stephen B. Armstrong has collected the most interesting and insightful articles and features published on this underrated director. While question-and-answer exchanges make up the bulk of the items featured here, also included are journalistic profiles of the director at work and essays Frankenheimer himself wrote for magazine audiences. In addition, readers will find a series of interviews of people who worked with Frankenheimer, including actors Roy Scheider, Tim Reid, and the director's wife of 40 years, Evans Frankenheimer. In this volume, the director and others look back on a career that included such films as Seven Days in May, The Train, Grand Prix, The Iceman Cometh, Black Sunday, and Ronin. The first collection of its kind, John Frankenheimer: Interviews, Essays, and Profiles enables those who value the director's work to develop a better understanding of the man through his own words and the words of others.