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- Second Unit Director or Assistant Director
After training as a painter (he storyboards his films as full-scale paintings), Kurosawa entered the film industry in 1936 as an assistant director, eventually making his directorial debut with Sanshiro Sugata (1943). Within a few years, Kurosawa had achieved sufficient stature to allow him greater creative freedom. Drunken Angel (1948) was the first film he made without extensive studio interference, and marked his first collaboration with Toshirô Mifune. In the coming decades, the two would make 16 movies together, and Mifune became as closely associated with Kurosawa's films as was John Wayne with the films of Kurosawa's idol, John Ford. After working in a wide range of genres, Kurosawa made his international breakthrough film Rashomon (1950) in 1950. It won the top prize at the Venice Film Festival, and first revealed the richness of Japanese cinema to the West. The next few years saw the low-key, touching Ikiru (1952) (Living), the epic Seven Samurai (1954), the barbaric, riveting Shakespeare adaptation Throne of Blood (1957), and a fun pair of samurai comedies Yojimbo (1961) and Sanjuro (1962). After a lean period in the late 1960s and early 1970s, though, Kurosawa attempted suicide. He survived, and made a small, personal, low-budget picture with Dodes'ka-den (1970), a larger-scale Russian co-production Dersu Uzala (1975) and, with the help of admirers Francis Ford Coppola and George Lucas, the samurai tale Kagemusha: The Shadow Warrior (1980), which Kurosawa described as a dry run for Ran (1985), an epic adaptation of Shakespeare's "King Lear." He continued to work into his eighties with the more personal Dreams (1990), Rhapsody in August (1991) and Madadayo (1993). Kurosawa's films have always been more popular in the West than in his native Japan, where critics have viewed his adaptations of Western genres and authors (William Shakespeare, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Maxim Gorky and Evan Hunter) with suspicion - but he's revered by American and European film-makers, who remade Rashomon (1950) as The Outrage (1964), Seven Samurai (1954), as The Magnificent Seven (1960), Yojimbo (1961), as A Fistful of Dollars (1964) and The Hidden Fortress (1958), as Star Wars: Episode IV - A New Hope (1977).- Writer
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The father of cinematic Surrealism and one of the most original directors in the history of the film medium, Luis Buñuel was given a strict Jesuit education (which sowed the seeds of his obsession with both religion and subversive behavior), and subsequently moved to Madrid to study at the university there, where his close friends included Salvador Dalí and Federico García Lorca.
After moving to Paris, Buñuel did a variety of film-related odd jobs in Paris, including working as an assistant to director Jean Epstein. With financial assistance from his mother and creative assistance from Dalí, he made his first film, the 17-minute Un chien andalou (1929), in 1929, and immediately catapulted himself into film history thanks to its shocking imagery (much of which - like the sliced eyeball at the beginning - still packs a punch even today). It made a deep impression on the Surrealist Group, who welcomed Buñuel into their ranks.
The following year, sponsored by wealthy art patrons, he made his first feature, the scabrous witty and violent L'Age d'Or (1930), which mercilessly attacked the church and the middle classes, themes that would preoccupy Buñuel for the rest of his career. That career, though, seemed almost over by the mid-1930s, as he found work increasingly hard to come by and after the Spanish Civil War he emigrated to the US where he worked for the Museum of Modern Art and as a film dubber for Warner Bros.
Moving to Mexico in the late 1940s, he teamed up with producer Óscar Dancigers and after a couple of unmemorable efforts shot back to international attention with the lacerating study of Mexican street urchins in The Young and the Damned (1950), winning him the Best Director award at the Cannes Film Festival.
But despite this new-found acclaim, Buñuel spent much of the next decade working on a variety of ultra-low-budget films, few of which made much impact outside Spanish-speaking countries (though many of them are well worth seeking out). But in 1961, General Franco, anxious to be seen to be supporting Spanish culture invited Buñuel back to his native country - and Bunuel promptly bit the hand that fed him by making Viridiana (1961), which was banned in Spain on the grounds of blasphemy, though it won the Palme d'Or at the Cannes Film Festival.
This inaugurated Buñuel's last great period when, in collaboration with producer Serge Silberman and writer Jean-Claude Carrière he made seven extraordinary late masterpieces, starting with Diary of a Chambermaid (1964). Although far glossier and more expensive, and often featuring major stars such as Jeanne Moreau and Catherine Deneuve, the films showed that even in old age Buñuel had lost none of his youthful vigour.
After saying that every one of his films from Belle de Jour (1967) onwards would be his last, he finally kept his promise with That Obscure Object of Desire (1977), after which he wrote a memorable (if factually dubious) autobiography, in which he said he'd be happy to burn all the prints of all his films- a classic Surrealist gesture if ever there was one.
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David Wark Griffith was born in rural Kentucky to Jacob "Roaring Jake" Griffith, a former Confederate Army colonel and Civil War veteran. Young Griffith grew up with his father's romantic war stories and melodramatic nineteenth-century literature that were to eventually shape his movies. In 1897 Griffith set out to pursue a career both acting and writing for the theater, but for the most part was unsuccessful. Reluctantly, he agreed to act in the new motion picture medium for Edwin S. Porter at the Edison Company. Griffith was eventually offered a job at the financially struggling American Mutoscope & Biograph Co., where he directed over four hundred and fifty short films, experimenting with the story-telling techniques he would later perfect in his epic The Birth of a Nation (1915).
Griffith and his personal cinematographer G.W. Bitzer collaborated to create and perfect such cinematic devices as the flashback, the iris shot, the mask and cross-cutting. In the years following "Birth", Griffith never again saw the same monumental success as his signature film and, in 1931, his increasing failures forced his retirement. Though hailed for his vision in narrative film-making, he was similarly criticized for his blatant racism. Griffith died in Los Angeles in 1948, one of the most dichotomous figures in film history.- Cinematographer
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William Heise was an engineer who was integral in the development of the kinetoscope for Thomas A. Edison, working with inventor William K.L. Dickson in the development of the device. He later became a cameraman, director and producer responsible for the creation of hundreds of short films. In 1890, Heise was employed as a machinist at Edison's West Orange, New Jersey laboratory, fabricating the first prototype of a film perforator. Though not a true motion picture projector, Edison's kinetoscope ran a strip of perforated film encased in a cabinet over a light source, which was viewed by a single individual through a viewing screen by means of a shutter in a "peep show" configuration. (Though soon surpassed by new technology, the kinetoscope would be used for peep shows for decades afterwards, though in the end, strictly as a novelty.) Under the direction of Dickson, Heise operated the kinetograph camera for making kinetoscope films from the very beginning of the movie-making process in 1890 and appeared in the 1892 short A Hand Shake (1892), which some cineastes call the first "modern" American motion picture. He became a cameraman in the famous Black Maria studio located at Edison's campus. Dickson left Edison in 1895, and Heise stayed on, making kinetoscope films and later films for the vitascope, a 35-mm film projector developed by Thomas Armat and C. Francis Jenkins that Edison bought the rights to in 1896. Film exhibition in a theater was now a reality. Heise was the cameraman for one of the most famous shorts of the first decade of cinema, The Kiss (1896) featuring Broadway stars May Irwin and John C. Rice. By mid-1896, a portable camera was fabricated that permitted Heise and other Edison cameramen to leave the Black Maria and shoot "actualities" on location in New York City and such locations as Niagara Falls. Heise often worked with director James H. White, another cinema pioneer of both the kinetoscope and the vitascope. White went off on a filming trip to the Orient in 1897-98 with another cameraman; in his 10-month-long absence, Heise produced, directed and shot numerous films. He quit Edison in October 1898, and his film-making career was through, except for one short documentary he made in 1903, Cock Fight, No. 2 (1903). He eventually returned to Edison, but was no longer associated with film-making.- Cinematographer
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Born in France to British parents, William Kennedy-Laurie Dickson stayed in that country until age 19, when he, his mother and sisters (their father had died sometime before) returned to Great Britain. Once there, Dickson--in an early indication of his lifelong fascination with science and mechanics--began a correspondence with Thomas A. Edison in the US, asking for employment, but was turned down. Eventually Dickson's family moved to the US, and several years afterward Dickson actually did land a job with Edison, and soon proved to be a trusted and valuable associate. He worked closely with Edison on the development of both the phonograph and, closer to Dickson's heart, the motion picture (it was Dickson who eventually decided that motion picture film should be 35mm wide; he also developed the emulsion process used in the film).
In 1889, while Edison was on a trip to Europe, Dickson set up a building in which to conduct his "photographic experiments", the forerunner of the first motion picture studio. In 1890 he and his chief mechanical assistant, Eugène Lauste, showed the results of their experiments, produced on a cylindrical system called the Kinetoscope: a short film called Monkeyshines, No. 1 (1890), featuring one of his assistants. Improvements on this system continued, and in 1891 patents were filed on an improved camera called the Kinetograph. Edison's plans to exhibit the new system at the Chicago World Exposition necessitated not only the production of many new machines but also films that could be shown on them, and the result was the building of a film studio at Edison's laboratory in West Orange, NJ, which was nicknamed "The Black Maria" because it was constructed of wood covered with tar-paper, resembling the police wagons of that era which were known by that nickname.
However, even with Dickson's perfecting of a new version of the Kinetograph camera, not enough films were completed to be shown at Edison's planned exhibition. Dickson, however, did manage to persuade many stage and vaudeville stars to appear in films shot at the West Orange studio, and in the following years the studio was a beehive of activity, with some of the biggest names of the era making short films there. However, friction between Dickson and an executive appointed to oversee Edison's businesses soon broke into open conflict, resulting in Dickson's angrily leaving Edison's employ in 1895. He then joined forces with two businessmen in the development of a way to exhibit films differently than Edison's peepshow-style Kinetoscope. The system eventually developed into what was called the Mutoscope, and the camera that was developed to take pictures for the Mutoscope was called the Biograph. This in turn developed into a filming and projection system that retained the Biograph name.
In 1896 Dickson and three partners began the American Mutoscope and Biograph Co. (often referred to as just "Biograph", and generally considered to be the first major American motion picture studio) to produce and distribute films. Dickson produced and directed many of Biograph's early films, but by the turn of the century he had taken over management of the company's European branch, headquartered in England. He died there in 1935.- Director
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Yorgos Lanthimos was born in Athens, Greece. He studied directing for Film and Television at the Stavrakos Film School in Athens. He has directed a number of dance videos in collaboration with Greek choreographers, in addition to TV commercials, music videos, short films and theater plays. Kinetta, his first feature film, played at Toronto and Berlin film festivals to critical acclaim. His second feature Dogtooth, won the "Un Certain Regard prize" at the 2009 Cannes film festival, followed by numerous awards at festivals worldwide. It was nominated for a Best Foreign Language Film Academy Award (Oscar) in 2011. Alps won the "Osella for best screenplay" at the 2011 Venice film festival and Best Film at the Sydney film festival in 2012. His first English language film The Lobster was presented in Competition at the 68th Cannes Film Festival. Moreover, "The Lobster" was nominated for the (Oscar about the) Best Original Screenplay by the Academy and won Best Screenplay and Best Costume Design at the European Film Awards of 2015. His fifth project "The Killing of a Sacred Deer" was also presented in Competition at the 70th Cannes Film Festival where it won the award for the best Screenplay. Lanthimos's last film "The Favorite" is a historical Drama about the British Queen Anne.- Writer
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Born in precisely the kind of small-town American setting so familiar from his films, David Lynch spent his childhood being shunted from one state to another as his research scientist father kept getting relocated. He attended various art schools, married Peggy Lynch and then fathered future director Jennifer Lynch shortly after he turned 21. That experience, plus attending art school in a particularly violent and run-down area of Philadelphia, inspired Eraserhead (1977), a film that he began in the early 1970s (after a couple of shorts) and which he would work on obsessively for five years. The final film was initially judged to be almost unreleasable weird, but thanks to the efforts of distributor Ben Barenholtz, it secured a cult following and enabled Lynch to make his first mainstream film (in an unlikely alliance with Mel Brooks), though The Elephant Man (1980) was shot through with his unique sensibility. Its enormous critical and commercial success led to Dune (1984), a hugely expensive commercial disaster, but Lynch redeemed himself with the now classic Blue Velvet (1986), his most personal and original work since his debut. He subsequently won the top prize at the Cannes Film Festival with the dark, violent road movie Wild at Heart (1990), and achieved a huge cult following with his surreal TV series Twin Peaks (1990), which he adapted for the big screen, though his comedy series On the Air (1992) was less successful. He also draws comic strips and has devised multimedia stage events with regular composer Angelo Badalamenti. He had a much-publicized affair with Isabella Rossellini in the late 1980s.- Producer
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Aki Kaurismäki did a wide variety of jobs including postman, dish-washer and film critic, before forming a production and distribution company, Villealfa (in homage to Jean-Luc Godard's Alphaville (1965)) with his older brother Mika Kaurismäki, also a film-maker. Both Aki and Mika are prolific film-makers, and together have been responsible for one-fifth of the total output of the Finnish film industry since the early 1980s, though Aki's work has found more favour abroad. His films are very short (he says a film should never run longer than 90 minutes, and many of his films are nearer 70), eccentric parodies of various genres (road movies, film noir, rock musicals), populated by lugubrious hard-drinking Finns and set to eclectic soundtracks, typically based around '50s rock'n'roll.
In the 1990s he has made films in Britain (I Hired a Contract Killer (1990)) and France (The Bohemian Life (1992)).- Director
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Le Prince was a French artist and the inventor of an early motion picture camera born in Metz, France. His father was a major of artillery in the French Army and an officer of the Légion d'honneur. When growing up, he reportedly spent time in the studio of his father's friend, the pioneer of photography Louis Daguerre, from whom he may have received some lessons on photography and chemistry before he was 10 years old. His education went on to include the study of painting in Paris and post-graduate chemistry at Leipzig University. He then moved to Leeds, England in 1866, after being invited to join John Whitley, a friend from college, in Whitley Partners of Hunslet, a firm of brass founders making valves and components. In 1869, he married Elizabeth Whitley, John's sister and a talented artist, and the two of them started a school of applied art, the Leeds Technical School of Art, and became well renowned for their work in fixing coloured photographs on to metal and pottery. In 1881, Le Prince went to the United States with his family where he began experiments relating to the production of 'moving' photographs, designing a camera that utilised sixteen lenses, which was the first invention he patented. After his return to Leeds in May 1887, he built a single-lens camera in mid-late 1888 used to shoot his motion-picture films. It was first used on 14 October 1888 to shoot what would become known as Roundhay Garden Scene (1888) and Accordion Player (1888). He later used it to film Traffic Crossing Leeds Bridge (1888). In September 1890, he was preparing for a trip to the United States, supposedly to publicly premiere his work and join his wife and children. Before this journey, he decided to return to France to visit his brother in Dijon. Then, on 16 September, he took a train to Paris but, having taken a later train than planned, his friends missed him in Paris. He was never seen again by his family or friends. The last person to see Le Prince at the Dijon station was his brother. The French police, Scotland Yard and the family undertook exhaustive searches, but never found him. Le Prince was officially declared dead on 16 September 1897.