Filmmaking and production Books
MP-MPP University Press of Mississippi Barbara Kopple Interviews
Book SynopsisBarbara Kopple has established herself as one of the most prolific filmmakers of her generation. Her projects have ranged from documentaries to feature films to an educational series for kids. Through it all, Kopple has made herself available for many print and broadcast interviews. The most revealing of these are brought together in this volume.
£23.96
MP-MPP University Press of Mississippi Stan Brakhage Interviews
Book SynopsisCollects eight of Stan Brakhage's most important interviews in which the filmmaker describes his conceptual frameworks; his theories of vision and sound; the importance of poetry, music, and the visual arts in relation to his work; his concept of the muse; and the key influences on his art-making.
£22.50
MP-MPP University Press of Mississippi Steven Spielberg Interviews Revised and Updated
Book SynopsisWith this new collection of interviews, readers will recognise the themes that motivate Steven Spielberg, the cinematic techniques he employs to create his feature films, and the emotional connection he has to his movies. The result is a nuanced and engaging portrait of the most popular director in American cinema history.
£23.96
MP-MPP University Press of Mississippi Tyler Perry Interviews
Book SynopsisA career-spanning volume, Tyler Perry: Interviews collects sixteen interviews, ranging from the early 2000s to 2018. Once a destitute and struggling playwright, Tyler Perry (b.1969) is now a multimedia phenomenon and one of the most lucrative auteurs in Hollywood.
£23.96
MP-MPP University Press of Mississippi The Lost World of DeMille
Book SynopsisAs only an accomplished author, consummate collector, and savvy insider can, John Kobal tells the story of the man who invented Hollywood, Cecil Blount DeMille. Kobal narrates the story of DeMille's life and follows the director's career from his first film in 1914 tp his last in 1956.
£30.36
MP-MPP University Press of Mississippi Blake Edwards Interviews
Book SynopsisHighlights how Blake Edwards created the hugely successful Pink Panther franchise; his long partnership with award-winning composer Henry Mancini; his principles of comedy as influenced by the comic greats of film history, especially silent comedies; his marriage and film collaborations with Julie Andrews; and his unique philosophy of life.
£23.96
MP-MPP University Press of Mississippi Ang Lee Interviews
Book SynopsisThoughtful and passionate, Ang Lee humbly reveals here a personal journey that brought him from Taiwan to his chosen home in the United States as he struggled and ultimately triumphed in his quest to become a superb filmmaker. Ang Lee: Interviews collects the best interviews of this reticent yet bold figure.
£23.96
University Press of Mississippi Wes Craven Interviews
Book SynopsisThese interviews trace Wes Craven's life and career, from his upbringing in a strict religious family and his life as an academic to his years toiling in exploitation cinema. The volume also chronicles Craven's ascendancy as an independent director, his work within the studio system, and his eventual triumph in mainstream cinema.
£24.71
MP-MPP University Press of Mississippi Claude Chabrol Interviews
Book SynopsisThe seventeen interviews in this volume, most of which have been translated into English for the first time, offer new insights into Claude Chabrol's remarkably wide-ranging filmography, providing a sense of his attitudes and ideas about a number of subjects.
£22.46
MP-MPP University Press of Mississippi William Friedkin Interviews
Book SynopsisPresents fifteen articles, interviews, and seminars spanning William Friedkin's career. He discusses early influences, early successes, awards, and current projects. The volume provides coverage of his directorial process, beliefs, and anecdotes from his time serving as the creative force of some of the biggest films of the 1970s and beyond.
£81.75
MP-MPP University Press of Mississippi Peter Weir Interviews
Book SynopsisThe first volume of interviews to be published on the esteemed Australian director. Although Weir has acquired a reputation of being guarded about his life and work, these interviews by archivists, journalists, historians, and colleagues reveal him to be a most amiable and forthcoming subject.Trade ReviewIt is the sort of historical document which will get more valuable over the years, and we should all be grateful to John C. Tibbetts for writing it.""- Kevin Brownlow
£23.96
MP-MPP University Press of Mississippi Nichols and May Interviews
Book SynopsisIn the late 1950s, Mike Nichols and Elaine May soared to superstar status as a sketch comedy duo in live shows and TV. After their 1962 breakup, both went on to long and distinguished careers in other areas of show business. This collection of twenty-seven interviews ranging over more than five decades tells their stories in their own words.
£22.46
MP-MPP University Press of Mississippi Kasi Lemmons Interviews
Book SynopsisCollects fifteen interviews that illuminate Kasi Lemmons's ability to challenge social expectations through film and actualize stories that broaden expectations of cinematic black femaleness and maleness. The interviews reveal Lemmons's passion to create art through film, intimately linked to her mission to push the boundaries imposed by Hollywood.
£22.46
MP-MPP University Press of Mississippi Otto Preminger Interviews
Book SynopsisPresents interviews from across Otto Preminger's career, providing fascinating insights into the methods and mindset of a wildly polarizing filmmaker. With remarkable candour, Preminger discusses his filmmaking practices, his distinctive film style, his battles against censorship, his clashes with film critics, and his turbulent relationships.
£81.75
MP-MPP University Press of Mississippi Stuart Gordon Interviews
Book SynopsisThe first collection of interviews ever to be published on the director, Stuart Gordon: Interviews contains thirty-six articles spanning a period of fifty years. Bountiful in anecdote and information, these candid conversations chronicle the trajectory of a fascinating career - one that courted controversy from its very beginning.
£81.75
MP-MPP University Press of Mississippi Stuart Gordon Interviews
Book SynopsisThe first collection of interviews ever to be published on the director, Stuart Gordon: Interviews contains thirty-six articles spanning a period of fifty years. Bountiful in anecdote and information, these candid conversations chronicle the trajectory of a fascinating career - one that courted controversy from its very beginning.
£23.96
MP-MPP University Press of Mississippi Su Friedrich Interviews
Book SynopsisThe first volume dedicated exclusively to Su Friedrich and her work. The interviews collected here highlight the historical, theoretical, political, and economic dimensions through which Friedrich’s films gain their unique and defiantly ambiguous identity.
£81.75
MP-MPP University Press of Mississippi Louis Malle Interviews
Book SynopsisFeatures seventeen interviews, the majority translated into English for the first time, covering the entirety of Malle’s career. The collection demonstrates that Malle was a filmmaker who thought deeply about his choices as a director, the ideological implications of those choices, and the often-controversial themes treated in his films.
£23.85
MP-MPP University Press of Mississippi Improvising the Score Rethinking Modern Film
Book SynopsisProvides an original, vivid investigation of innovative collaborations between renowned contemporary jazz artists and prominent independent filmmakers. The book explores how these integrative jazz-film productions challenge us to rethink the possibilities of cinematic music production.
£78.40
MP-MPP University Press of Mississippi Abbas Kiarostami
Book SynopsisThe cinephile community knows Abbas Kiarostami (1940-2016) as one of the most important filmmakers of the previous decades. This volume illustrates why the Iranian filmmaker achieved critical acclaim around the globe and details his many contributions to the art of filmmaking.
£19.90
MP-MPP University Press of Mississippi Christian Petzold
Book SynopsisThe first book to document how one of Germany’s best-known directors thinking about his work has evolved over the course of a quarter of a century, spanning his days as a flailing student filmmaker in the early 1990s in postunified Germany to 2020, when his reputation as one of world cinema’s most respected auteurs has been firmly enshrined.
£73.80
MP-MPP University Press of Mississippi Christian Petzold Interviews
Book SynopsisThe first book to document how one of Germany’s best-known directors thinking about his work has evolved over the course of a quarter of a century, spanning his days as a flailing student filmmaker in the early 1990s in postunified Germany to 2020, when his reputation as one of world cinema’s most respected auteurs has been firmly enshrined.
£19.00
MP-MPP University Press of Mississippi M. Night Shyamalan Interviews
Book SynopsisWith interviews spanning from 1993 through 2022, M. Night Shyamalan: Interviews is the first survey of conversations with the filmmaker to cover the broad spectrum of his life and career. This collection includes interviews with renowned American film journalists such as Jeff Giles, Carrie Rickey and Stephen Pizzello.
£81.75
MP-MPP University Press of Mississippi M. Night Shyamalan
Book SynopsisWith interviews spanning from 1993 through 2022, M. Night Shyamalan: Interviews is the first survey of conversations with the filmmaker to cover the broad spectrum of his life and career. This collection includes interviews with renowned American film journalists such as Jeff Giles, Carrie Rickey and Stephen Pizzello.
£19.90
University of Minnesota Press Movement, Action, Image, Montage: Sergei
Book SynopsisA major new study of Sergei Eisenstein delivers fresh, in-depth analyses of the iconic filmmaker’s body of work What can we still learn from Sergei Eisenstein? Long valorized as the essential filmmaker of the Russian Revolution and celebrated for his indispensable contributions to cinematic technique, Eisenstein’s relevance to contemporary culture is far from exhausted. In Movement, Action, Image, Montage, Luka Arsenjuk considers the auteur as a filmmaker and a theorist, drawing on philosophers such as Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel and Gilles Deleuze—as well as Eisenstein’s own untranslated texts—to reframe the way we think about the great director and his legacy.Focusing on Eisenstein’s unique treatment of the foundational concepts of cinema—movement, action, image, and montage—Arsenjuk invests each aspect of the auteur’s art with new significance for the twenty-first century. Eisenstein’s work and thought, he argues, belong as much to the future as the past, and both can offer novel contributions to long-standing cinematic questions and debates.Movement, Action, Image, Montage brings new elements of Eisenstein’s output into academic consideration, by means ranging from sustained and comprehensive theorization of Eisenstein’s practice as a graphic artist to purposeful engagement with his recently published, unfinished book Method, still unavailable in English translation. This tour de force offers new and significant insights on Eisenstein’s oeuvre—the films, the art, and the theory—and is a landmark work on an essential filmmaker.Trade Review"If Eisenstein, his cinema, and his writings sometimes threaten to become invisible, taken-for-granted figures in the history of cinema, Luka Arsenjuk's demanding and articulate polemic returns him and that work to a critical and crucial place in contemporary film culture. This is a book for all film historians and lovers of cinema."—Timothy Corrigan, author of The Essay Film: From Montaigne, After Marker"A uniquely striking work of film theory and historical reflection by one of the most exciting film and critical theorists working today. Movement, Action, Image, Montage is the most important theory of cinematic movement to have emerged since Deleuze’s cinema books. The theory of figuration that accompanies this extraordinary conception of movement will not only change the way that we look at Eisenstein but also how we understand cinema and the related arts more generally."—Brian Price, University of Toronto"Movement, Action, Image, Montage is a critical tour de force, combining brilliant close readings of Eisenstein’s films, drawings, and major texts with subtle speculative thinking. Its central concept, a ‘dialectic of division,’ emphasizes not ‘organic’ synthesis, but the fundamental negativity of Eisensteinian montage and its often-overlooked implications and effects. Drawing on archival material, Luka Arsenjuk succeeds in demonstrating the importance of Eisenstein’s thinking to our own critical moment."—Karla Oeler, Stanford UniversityTable of ContentsContentsIntroduction: A Dialectic of Division1. The Figure-in-Crisis: From Intuition to the Dialectic, from Kinematography to Cinematic Movement2. The Form-Problem: The Grotesque and the Epic in Action3. The Event of the Image: Between Symbol and Symptom4. Montage of Forms: Concept and Witz, Organicism and the ComicConclusion: Eisenstein, OurselvesAcknowledgmentsNotesIndex
£20.69
University of Minnesota Press Scenarios II: Signs of Life; Even Dwarfs Started
Book SynopsisThe second in a series: the master filmmaker’s prose scenarios for four of his notable filmsOn the first day of editing Fata Morgana, Werner Herzog recalls, his editor said: “With this kind of material we have to pretend to invent cinema.” And this, Herzog says, is what he tries to do every day. In this second volume of his scenarios, the peerless filmmaker’s genius for invention is on clear display. Written in Herzog’s signature fashion—more prose poem than screenplay, transcribing the vision unfolding before him as if in a dream—the four scenarios here (three never before translated into English) reveal an iconoclastic craftsman at the height of his powers.Along with his template for the film poem Fata Morgana (1971), this volume includes the scenarios for Herzog’s first two feature films, Signs of Life (1968) and Even Dwarfs Started Small (1970), along with the hypnotic Heart of Glass (1976). In a brief introduction, Herzog describes the circumstances surrounding each scenario, inviting readers into the mysterious process whereby one man’s vision becomes every viewer’s waking dream.Trade Review"Enigmatic and imaginative, Herzog creates an unfamiliar world in each screenplay through his evocative prose."—Publishers Weekly "This follow-up to the previous collection, Scenarios, will please Herzog’s fans and intrepid readers of short fiction." —Library JournalTable of ContentsSigns of Life Even Dwarfs Started SmallFata MorganaHeart of Glass
£17.99
Boydell & Brewer Ltd Gender and Representation in the Films of Ingmar
Book SynopsisA detailed feminist study of Bergman's most important films. This book covers the whole of Bergman's production, but concentrates in particular on close analyses of five of his major films: Smiles of a Summer Night, The Seventh Seal, The Silence, Persona, and Cries and Whispers. In addition to bringing post-modernist theoretical strategies to bear on the films, it offers a clear, current, pluralist feminist perspective.Trade ReviewMarilyn Johns Blackwell concentrates on about half a dozen of the forty-odd films, and applies an intense gaze to each of them. Ms. Blackwell herself often has better notions than the myriad other academics she cites. She is excellent on Bergman's voyeuristic technique in Smiles, on the Swede's 'troubling stereotype' of associating the upper classes with the spirit, and the lower classes with the flesh, and the underestimated use of silence throughout a film like The Seventh Seal. * THE SWEDISH BOOK REVIEW *
£81.00
Boydell & Brewer Ltd Narrative and Stylistic Patterns in the Films of
Book SynopsisA critical study of the films of Stanley Kubrick, one of the great directors of the century. García Mainar's critical study of the films of the late Stanley Kubrick includes analysis of all but his last work, Eyes Wide Shut, and offers both a formal analysis of the films based on style and narrative pattern, and atheoretical, postmodernist approach to ideas presented in the films. García Mainar is particularly concerned with analyzing the relevance of spectacle in Kubrick's films, seeing it as a disruptive mechanism that can call into question the value and necessity of communication. He identifies different kinds of spectacle in the films, and proceeds to a detailed examination of these different forms in 2001 A Space Odyssey, Barry Lyndon, and Full Metal Jacket. Luis M. García Mainar teaches English at the University of Zaragoza, Spain.Table of ContentsIntroduction Poetics Modifications of Accounts of Film as Narrative, Motivated by the Previous Analysis of Poetics 2001: A Space Odyssey(1968); or, A Journey toward Ambiguity Barry Lyndon(1975); or, The Comnfort of Tradition Full Metal Jacket(1987): One Possible Answer Conclusion
£26.99
Boydell & Brewer Ltd Approaches to Kurban Said's Ali and Nino: Love,
Book SynopsisEssays showcasing Ali and Nino as particularly topical for today's readers both in and out of the classroom, and providing a number of diverse approaches to it. Ali and Nino is a novel published in German in 1937 under the alias "Kurban Said," a love story between a Muslim man and a Christian woman set in Baku, Azerbaijan, during World War I and the country's brief independence. Itwas a major success, translated into several other languages, but was forgotten by the end of World War II. Recent research by the journalist Tom Reiss has revealed the identity of the author as Lev/Leo Nussimbaum (1905-1942), aJewish man born in Baku who converted to Islam, worked as a journalist in Berlin, and died forgotten in exile. Reiss's discovery has spurred new interest in the novel, as has the fact that the book prefigures today's perceived conflicts between East and West or Islam and Christianity, but also suggests a more peaceful model of intercultural living in multiethnic Baku's melting pot of Islam, Judaism, and Christianity. The present volume collects twelve newessays on different aspects of the text by scholars from a variety of disciplines and cultural backgrounds. It is intended to showcase the suitability of Ali and Nino for inclusion in a curriculum focused on German, world literature, or area studies, and to suggest a variety of approaches to the novel while also appealing to its fans. Contributors: Sara Abdoullah-Zadeh, Cori Crane, Chase Dimock, Christine Rapp Dombrowski, Elizabeth WeberEdwards, Anja Haensch, Kamaal Haque, Lisabeth Hock, Ruchama Johnston-Bloom, Carl Niekerk, Elke Pfitzinger, Soraya Saatchi, Daniel Schreiner, Azade Seyhan. Carl Niekerk is Professor of German with affiliate appointmentsin French, Comparative and World Literature, and Jewish Studies at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Cori Crane is Associate Professor of the Practice and Director of the Language Program in the Department of Germanic Languages and Literature at Duke University.Trade Review[T]he contributors [to this volume] productively upset the notion of a traditional literary canon, which still lingers in the discipline of German Studies. . . . An intriguing aspect of this volume is the approach to the readings and the way these readings were framed in each chapter: namely, as springboards for further analysis and debate. . . . The volume will be a great resource for German Studies professionals and students alike. -- Ervin Malakaj * STUDIES IN 20TH- AND 21ST-CENTURY LITERATURE *Table of ContentsIntroduction: Ali and Nino as World Literature - Carl Niekerk Notes on Editions of and References to Ali and Nino Introduction: Ali and Nino as World Literature - Cori Crane Ali and Nino: The Novel as/of Cultural Translation - Azade Seyhan Crossing Borders, Crossing Disciplines: Ali and Nino in the Twenty-First Century - Lisabeth M. Hock Crossing Borders, Crossing Disciplines: Ali and Nino in the Twenty-First Century - Soraya Saatchi Glowing Rubies and Persian Daggers: The Role of the Persian Poetry in Ali and Nino - Christine Rapp Dombrowski Gendered Stereotypes and Cross-Cultural Moral Values through the Eyes of Kurban Said - Sara Abdoullah-Zadeh Orientalist Itineraries: Cultural Hegemony, Gender, Race, and Relition in Ali and Nino - Anja Haensch Gendered Conflicts in Muslim and Christian Cultures: Honor (and Shame) in Ali and Nino - Elizabeth Weber Edwards Love and Politics: Retelling History in Ali and Nino and Artush and Zaur - Daniel Schreiner "Herr Professor, Please: We'd Rather Stay in Asia": Ali Khan Shirvanshir and the Spaces of Baku - Kamaal Haque The Female Body and the Seduction of Modernity in Ali and Nino - Chase Dimock Seeing the Unseen: Symbolic Writing in Ali and Nino - Elke Pfitzinger Ali and Nino and Jewish Questions - Ruchama Johnston-Bloom Between Orientalism and Occidentalism: Culture, Identity, and the "Clash of Civilizations" in Ali and Nino - Carl Niekerk Works Cited Notes on the Contributors Index
£87.30
University Press of Mississippi Mike Leigh: Interviews
Book SynopsisBritish filmmaker Mike Leigh began his career in the 1970s as a playwright and theater director. Later he made a number of films of varying lengths for British television and then moved into feature film production. Although well established in the U. K., he slowly gained a reputation in the United States, where, at first, his work was known to a relatively small number of filmgoers and critics. Such major films as High Hopes and Life Is Sweet attracted little attention in America. With the release of Secrets and Lies, however, the audience for Leigh's films increased dramatically. Mike Leigh: Interviews collects published conversations from the past seven years. Not just a close-up encounter with Leigh, they also express both his unusual work style and the emotional and intellectual toughness that characterizes his distinct approach to filmmaking. As Leigh speaks in these interviews, he reveals what is unique in his work, particularly that his films do not begin with a script. Explaining this approach, he discusses how he begins by assembling a few actors who talk, improvise, create characters, and gradually develop a story that contains their actions. Before the camera rolls, a tentative script is set, but many months may pass before the script is finished and the shooting begins. Among those he talks with in these interviews are Jay Carr of the Boston Globe, Kenneth Turan of the Los Angeles Times, and Judy Stone, the longtime critic of the San Francisco Chronicle. Leigh is asked to discuss politics, social attitudes, and religion--all of which give his films a unique signature.
£23.96
University Press of Mississippi Martin Scorsese: Interviews
Book SynopsisFrom the moment he captured the film world's attention with Mean Streets (1973), a portrait of life at the fringes of the Mob, it was clear that a dazzling cinematic talent had arrived on the scene. With Robert DeNiro, one of the most talented young actors from this film, Scorsese went on to make some of the greatest American films of the postwar period, including Taxi Driver (1976), Raging Bull (1980), and Goodfellas (1990). A Scorsese film seldom fails to stir controversy, for his devotion to realism has led him to forthrightly depict violence and its frightening randomness in the modern world. His biblical film also created quite a stir. This adaptation of Kazantzakis's The Last Temptation of Christ generated outrage among conservative religious leaders. Scorsese, however, has not limited himself to contemporary, violent urban dramas or new interpretations of biblical subjects. Other widely heralded Scorsese films include Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore (1974), New York, New York (1977), The Last Waltz (1978), The King of Comedy (1983), After Hours (1985), The Color of Money (1986), Cape Fear (1991), The Age of Innocence (1993), Casino (1995), and Kundun (1998). These interviews begin with conversations about the highly autobiographical Mean Streets (1973), which first brought Scorsese serious attention, and end with conversations about Kundun, an overtly political biography of the Dalai Lama of Tibet, released in early 1998. ""I look for a thematic idea running through my movies, he says, and I see that it's the outsider struggling for recognition. I realize that all my life I've been an outsider, and above all, being lonely but never realizing it."" Peter Brunette , a professor of English and film studies at George Mason University, is the author of Roberto Rossellini and (forthcoming) The Films of Michelangelo Antonioni. With David Wills he co-authored Screen/Play: Derrida and Film Theory.
£23.96
University Press of Mississippi Jean-Luc Godard: Interviews
Book SynopsisSome thirty years ago filmmaker Jean-Luc Godard told critic Gene Youngblood, I am trying to change the world. 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 cinéma, shaking up conventional formulas with boldly innovative ap-proaches to every aspect of cinema and video-including film criticism via provocative essays in Cahiers du Cinéma 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. Topics include the seductiveness of cinema (Films are the only things by which to look inside of people, and that's why people are so fond of movies and why they'll never die); film as a blend of truth and beauty (I mix images and sounds like a scientist, I hope. The mystery of the scientific is the same as the mystery of the artist. So is the misery); and the personal realities of aging (Maybe it's that when you get old, in one way you feel younger and younger but still being old-young oldness, if I may say so, which is very. . .comforting). As challenging and evocative as they are quirky and unpredictable, these interviews cast light on Godard's lifelong position as a proudly unclassifiable thinker who feels, as he said in 1980, that a language is obviously made to cross borders. I'm someone whose real country is language, and whose territory is movies. David Sterritt is an associate professor of film at Long Island University and film critic of The Christian Science Monitor.
£23.96
University Press of Mississippi Jane Campion: Interviews
Book SynopsisIn outstanding films that are sharply focused on unusual women Jane Campion has gained worldwide admiration and respect. This New Zealand director first attracted international attention with her 1989 film Sweetie, an acerbic study of two sisters in a wildly dysfunctional family. She followed this in 1990 with the television miniseries An Angel at My Table, based on the autobiography of New Zealand author Janet Frame. Subsequently released in theatres, the film chronicles the early trials of the young writer. Poor, timid, and physically awkward, Frame was misdiagnosed as schizophrenic and was scheduled for a lobotomy, but her success as a writer enabled her to escape this fate and won her fame and acceptance. In 1993 in yet another story about an extraordinary woman, Campion made the award-winning film The Piano. It starred Holly Hunter as the Victorian mail-order bride who refuses to speak. Arriving in New Zealand with her young daughter, the young Scottish widow confronts isolation in the wilderness and communicates only via her piano until she finds real love in her husband's neighbor, played by Harvey Keitel. Campion next adapted Henry James's The Portrait of a Lady, starring Nicole Kidman as Isabel Archer, a young American heiress seduced by a decadent pair of expatriates living in Italy. In this collection of interviews Campion speaks of these films that have given women a revival as a strong screen presence. Campion tells of her early life in Wellington and of her training as a filmmaker in the 1980s at the Australian School of Film and Television. She speaks of those who have influenced her style and her experiences in making movies. Campion received the Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay in 1993 and was the first woman director to win the Palme d'Or at Cannes. Virginia Wright Wexman, a professor of English and Associate Vice-Chancellor of Academic Affairs at University of Illinois, Chicago, has published Creating the Couple, Roman Polanski, and Letter from an Unknown Woman, as well as articles in Film Quarterly and Cinema Journal.
£23.96
University Press of Mississippi Steven Spielberg: Interviews
Book SynopsisSteven Spielberg has become a brand name and a force that extends far beyond the movie screen. Phrases like ""phone home"" and the music score from Jaws are now part of our cultural script, appearing in commercials, comedy routines, and common conversation. Yet few scholars have devoted time to studying Spielberg's vast output of popular films despite the director's financial and aesthetic achievements. Spanning twenty-five years of Spielberg's career, Steven Spielberg: Interviews explores the issues, the themes, and the financial considerations surrounding his work. The blockbuster creator of E.T., Jaws, and Schindler's List talks about dreams and the almighty dollar. ""I'm not really interested in making money,"" he says. ""That's always come as the result of success, but it's not been my goal, and I've had a tough time proving that to people."" Ranging from Spielberg's twenties to his mid-fifties, the interviews chart his evolution from a brash young filmmaker trying to make his way in Hollywood, to his spectacular blockbuster triumphs, to his maturation as a director seeking to inspire the imagination with meaningful subjects. The Steven Spielberg who emerges in these talks is a complex mix of businessman and artist, of arrogance and insecurity, of shallowness and substance. Often interviewers will uncover the director's human side, noting how changes in Spielberg's personal life -- marriage, divorce, fatherhood, remarriage -- affect his movies. But always the interviewers find keys to the story-telling and filmmaking talent that have made Spielberg's characters and themes shape our times and inhabit our dreams. ""Every time I go to a movie, it's magic, no matter what the movie's about,"" he says. ""Whether you watch eight hours of Shoah or whether it's Ghostbusters, when the lights go down in the theater and the movie fades in, it's magic.""
£999.99
University Press of Mississippi George Lucas: Interviews
Book SynopsisA director, producer, and writer, George Lucas is the power behind ""The Force."" The son of a conservative small-town businessman, he grew up to become arguably the most identifiable and popular filmmaker in the history of the medium. Yet unlike his more publicly engaged contemporaries, Lucas rarely grants reporters an audience. This first book of Lucas's interviews affords fans and students of film and science fiction a rare opportunity. Editor Sally Kline collects conversations from the reticent director spanning Lucas's entire career, from the making of his first film, 1971's THX-1138, through American Graffiti, the triumph of the Star Wars trilogy, and even a 1999 interview given while awaiting the release of Star Wars: Episode One--The Phantom Menace. In interviews from venues such as Rolling Stone, Playboy, and American Film, Lucas reveals his distrust of the Hollywood establishment, his love for making movies, and his unambiguous values and how those values translate into the epic clash between good and evil created when he explores characters like Darth Vader and Luke Skywalker. Lucas revolutionized the movie industry and created the most successful film series of all time. Along with films of his close friend Steven Spielberg, Lucas's releases invented the notion of blockbuster movies. Before the end of the millennium, he could count the loyal fans of the Star Wars trilogy in the millions.
£23.96
University Press of Mississippi John Sayles: Interviews
Book SynopsisNominated for both an Academy Award for scriptwriting and a National Book Award, John Sayles has written screenplays, teleplays, short stories, and novels and has worked as a script doctor for a virtual who's who of Hollywood film and television talent. He has acted in films and on stage and even directed a music video for Bruce Springsteen. In making movies, Sayles has handled subjects as diverse as seventies activists in The Return of the Secaucus Seven (1980); a 1920s Appalachian miners' strike in Matewan (1987); the 1919 Black Sox scandal in Eight Men Out (1988); the Selkies of Ireland in The Secret of Roan Inish (1994); and Latin American guerilla warfare in Men with Guns (1997). Conducted over a period of twenty years, these interviews span Sayles's career as a writer, director, and sometimes actor. Whether he is interviewed in The Progressive, Film Comment, Sight and Sound, or Rod Serling's The Twilight Zone Magazine, Sayles is always direct and candid. In each conversation, he cuts to the core of the film business and to the meat of what he is trying to accomplish as an artist. Known for his fiercely independent vision, his authentic characters, and his provocative observations on the human condition, Sayles demonstrates in these interviews what an endurably original director and artist he is. As he tells Sight and Sound, ""First of all, I'm not afraid of failure. I don't get upset if people don't like it. I'm doing it because I'm interested. . . [Return of the Secaucus Seven] was the start, because even if I hadn't got it released, at least I've made a movie I wanted to make."" Diane Carson is Professor of Film Studies at St. Louis Community College at Meramec and Adjunct Professor of Film at Webster University, both in St. Louis, Missouri. A film critic for Riverfront Times and KDHX in St. Louis, she is also the editor of Multiple Voices in Feminist Film Criticism.
£23.96
University Press of Mississippi Orson Welles: Interviews
Book SynopsisThis book brings together an exceptional array of interviews, profiles, and press conferences tracing the half century that Orson Welles (1915- 1985) was in the public eye. Originally published or broadcast between 1938 and 1989 in worldwide locations, these pieces confirm that Welles's career was multidimensional and thoroughly inter-woven with Welles's persona.Several of them offer vivid testimony to his grasp on the public imagination in Welles's heyday, including accounts of his War of the Worlds broadcast. Some interviews appear in English for the first time. Two transcriptions of British television interviews have never before appeared in print. Interviewers include Kenneth Tynan, French critic André Bazin, and Gore Vidal.The subjects center on the performing arts but also embrace philosophy, religion, history, and, especially, American society and politics. Welles confronts painful topics: the attempts to suppress Citizen Kane, RKO's mutilation of The Magnificent Ambersons, his loss of directorial authority, his regret at never having run for political office, and his financial struggles. ""I would have sold my soul"" to play Marlon Brando's role as Don Corleone in The Godfather, he tells a BBC interviewer.Welles deflates the notion of the film director's omnipotence, insisting that it is only in the editing studio that he possesses ""absolute control."" With scholarly erudition, Welles revels in the plays of Shakespeare and discusses their adaptation to stage and screen. He assesses rival directors and eminent actors, offers penetrating analyses of Citizen Kane, Touch of Evil, Chimes at Midnight, and The Third Man, and declares that he never made a film that lacked an ethical point-of-view. These conversations reveal the majestic mind and talent of Welles from a fresh perspective.
£23.96
University Press of Mississippi Andrei Tarkovsky: Interviews
Book SynopsisAndrei Tarkovsky (1932-1986) was one of Russia's most influential and renowned filmmakers, despite an output of only seven feature films in twenty years. Revered by such filmmaking giants as Ingmar Bergman and Akira Kurosawa, Tarkovsky is famous for his use of long takes, languid pacing, dreamlike metaphorical imagery, and meditations on spirituality and the human soul. His Andrei Roublev, Solaris, and The Mirror are considered landmarks of postwar Russian cinema.Andrei Tarkovsky: Interviews is the first English-language collection of interviews with and profiles of the filmmaker. It includes conversations originally published in French, Italian, Russian, and British periodicals. With pieces from 1962 through 1986, the collection spans the breadth of Tarkovsky's career. In the volume, Tarkovsky candidly and articulately discusses the difficulties of making films under the censors of the Soviet Union. He explores his aesthetic ideology, filmmakers he admires, and his eventual self-exile from Russia. He talks about recurring images in his movies--water, horses, fire, snow--but adamantly refuses to divulge what they mean, as he feels that would impose his own meaning onto the audience. At times cagey and resistant to interviewers, Tarkovsky nevertheless reveals his vision and his rigorous devotion to his art.
£23.96
University Press of Mississippi The Films of Martin Ritt: Fanfare for the Common Man
Book SynopsisIn a Hollywood career that spanned more than thirty years, Martin Ritt (1914-1990) directed twenty-six films. Among them were some of Hollywood's most enduring works--Hud, Hombre, The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, The Molly Maguires, The Front, and Norma Rae.In addition to displaying a passionate commitment to social issues, Ritt's body of work represents a sustained exploration of the American myth and American national character. This study of his films shows how his work articulates the communal, agrarian ideal and its perversion as industrialism and urbanism have denatured the landscape.Encompassing a hundred years of American life, these films follow the common man through the chronology of social history, including the arrival of the railroads in the West, coal mining in nineteenth-century Pennsylvania, Jack Johnson's rise as the first black heavyweight champion of the boxing world, the television blacklist, spying and the Cold War, trade unions, and the war in Vietnam. The subjects he treats project a cultural framework for examining what America means as a nation and as an experience.The sixties was the decade of Ritt's most sustained achievement. This period culminated in his masterpiece, The Molly Maguires, perhaps the finest film ever made on the subject of American labor. In the first detailed analysis of this great realistic film The Films of Martin Ritt: Fanfare for the Common Man shows that its greatness lies in Ritt's complex interweaving of love and friendship, the labor struggle, the story of the immigrant dream, and the ideal of upward mobility. The book includes analyses of all twenty-six films, including such early works as Edge of the City and The Long Hot Summer, as well as such later successes as Norma Rae, Sounder, and Murphy's Romance. Ritt's work in theater, notably in the Group Theatre, which he joined in 1937, and his being blacklisted from television during the 1950s, informed his directorial philosophy throughout his career. Many recognize him as America's finest director of social films.
£27.96
University Press of Mississippi Stanley Kubrick: Interviews
Book SynopsisFrom his first feature film, Fear and Desire (1953), to his final, posthumously released Eyes Wide Shut (1999), Stanley Kubrick excelled at probing the dark corners of human consciousness. In doing so, he adapted such popular novels as The Killing, Lolita, A Clockwork Orange, and The Shining and selected a wide variety of genres for his films -- black comedy (Dr. Strangelove), science fiction (2001: A Space Odyssey), and war (Paths of Glory and Full Metal Jacket). Because he was peerless in unveiling the intimate mysteries of human nature, no new film by Kubrick ever failed to spark debate or to be deeply pondered. Kubrick (1928-1999) has remained as elusive as the subjects of his films. Unlike many other filmmakers he was not inclined to grant interviews, instead preferring to let his movies speak for themselves. By allowing both critics and moviegoers to see the inner workings of this reclusive filmmaker, this first comprehensive collection of his relatively few interviews is invaluable. Ranging from 1959 to 1987 and including Kubrick's conversations with Gene Siskel, Jeremy Bernstein, Gene D. Phillips, and others, this book reveals Kubrick's diverse interests -- nuclear energy and its consequences, space exploration, science fiction, literature, religion, psychoanalysis, the effects of violence, and even chess -- and discloses how each affects his films. He enthusiastically speaks of how advances in camera and sound technology made his films more effective.Kubrick details his hands-on approach to filmmaking as he discusses why he supervises nearly every aspect of production. ""All the hand-held camerawork is mine,"" he says in a 1972 interview about A Clockwork Orange. ""In addition to the fun of doing the shooting myself, I find it virtually impossible to explain what I want in a hand-held shot to even the most talented and sensitive camera operator. ""Neither guarded nor evasive, the Kubrick who emerges from these interviews is candid, opinionated, confident, and articulate. His incredible memory and his gift for organization come to light as he quotes verbatim sections of reviews, books, and articles. Despite his reputation as a recluse, the Kubrick of these interviews is approachable, witty, full of anecdotes, and eager to share a fascinating story.
£23.96
University Press of Mississippi Jim Jarmusch: Interviews
Book SynopsisPerhaps the most gifted and invigorating of the American independent film directors of the past two decades, Jim Jarmusch (b. 1953) has presented moviegoers with his uniquely personal vision, from his first feature film, Permanent Vacation (1980), to his latest, Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai (1999). As the interviews in this volume reveal, Jarmusch has always been interested in mixing very different cultural ingredients to form something uncategorizably new in films that transcend the boundaries between high and low cultures. Jarmusch half-mockingly described his movie Stranger Than Paradise (1984), the film that first brought him substantial notice, as ""a semi-neorealist black comedy in the style of an imaginary Eastern European film director obsessed with Ozu, and familiar with the 1950s American television show The Honeymooners."" His unique approach to movie making jump-started the low-budget American independent film movement with Stranger Than Paradise, which won the Camera d'Or for best first feature at the Cannes Film Festival. Ranging from 1981 to 2000 this collection chronicles the career and sensibility of a thoroughly independent filmmaker. It features one previously unpublished interview, two that have never appeared in English, and another two which are presented in their entirety rather than in the abridged forms in which they were published. Jarmusch discusses the actors with whom he has worked (Johnny Depp, Forest Whitaker, and Roberto Benigni among them), the progression of his camera and editing techniques, his fascination with the co-existence of disparate and often opposing cultures, and his cult status as an independent movie director. He comes across as kind, modest, and attentive, with a warm sense of humor and an ever-glowing affection for and dedication to his art, and for all the small and marginalized aspects of the world. Ludvig Hertzberg is a freelance film critic and a doctoral candidate in cinema studies at Stockholm University, Sweden.
£23.96
University Press of Mississippi George Cukor: Interviews
Book SynopsisFor investing movies with an image of style and glamour George Cukor (1899--1983) is considered one of the founding fathers of the Golden Age of Hollywood. The roll call of the great films he made and the stars he directed validates his rank as one of cinema's greatest moviemakers. ""The only really important thing I have to say about George Cukor,"" Katharine Hepburn proclaimed, ""is that all the other directors I have worked with starred themselves. But George 'starred' the actor. He didn't want people to say, 'this great director.' He wanted them to say 'this great actor.' "" Along with introducing Hepburn and Greta Garbo to American audiences, he worked with many of the most acclaimed movie actresses of his day, including Vivien Leigh, Olivia de Havilland, Jean Harlow, Elizabeth Taylor, Joan Crawford, Ingrid Bergman, Ava Gardner, Claudette Colbert, Angela Lansbury, Judy Holliday, Audrey Hepburn, and Marilyn Monroe. These interviews are a pleasure to read because Cukor is so immersed in his subject and so forthright in his observations. He comes to life immediately with disarming candor and infectious enthusiasm for cinema and the people who make it. In addition to discussing his romantic comedies, Cukor talks about his famous screen adaptations of classic novels and plays, including Little Women (1933) and David Copperfield (1935). His experience of being fired by producer David O. Selznick partway through the shooting of Gone With the Wind (1939) surfaces in nearly every interview. Instead of having his career derailed by this dismissal, however, he continued his rise as one of America's premier directors. In his cornucopia of films are Holiday (1938), The Philadelphia Story (1940), Adam's Rib (1949), Born Yesterday (1950), A Star Is Born (1954), Let's Make Love (1960), and My Fair Lady (1964). Cukor was a man of myriad dimensions. In his last years he opened up about his private life and his previously undisclosed homosexuality. He was ardent in his friendships and single-minded in his devotion to making quality movies for a popular audience. Robert Emmet Long, a literature and film scholar and writer living in Fulton, New York, is the author or editor of more than forty books, including John Huston: Interviews (University Press of Mississippi).
£23.96
University Press of Mississippi Carlos Saura: Interviews
Book SynopsisThrust into the international spotlight in 1966 when The Hunt, his critique of the Franco regime, won the Silver Bear at Berlin, Spanish filmmaker Carlos Saura (b. 1932) has remained an abiding presence and frequent victor at worldwide cinema competitions ever since. Best known in the United States for his Flamenco trilogy--Blood Wedding, Carmen, and A Love Bewitched--he also received Oscar nominations for Mama Turns a Hundred, Carmen, and Tango. Saura's movies are frequently ambiguous, sometimes controversial, and always narratively complex. In many of his films, such as Cría and Goya in Bordeaux, he creates sophisticated expressions of time and space by fusing reality with fantasy, past with present, and memory with hallucination. Carlos Saura: Interviews collects interviews the filmmaker has given in Spain, France, Germany, and Canada. All of the conversations appear here in English for the first time, and, as such, they represent a treasure trove of comments by Saura on his own work. Covering the entire spectrum of his career, including his latest film Buñuel and King Solomon's Table, the interviews discuss his early contributions to the New Spanish Cinema, his documentaries and documentary-like urban films, his cinematic essays on historical figures, his dance films, his adaptations of literary and theatrical works, and the films rooted in his personal reminiscences of the Spanish Civil War. In addition, the collection touches upon Saura's efforts as a photographer, opera director, and novelist and explores his friendship with filmmaker Luis Buñuel. These interviews disclose Saura's amazingly consistent approach to his cinema, his role as an auteur, and the principles on which his creativity and intuition continue to build in innovative ways. Linda M. Willem is professor of Spanish at Butler University. She is the author of Galdós's Segunda Manera: Rhetorical Strategies and Affective Response and editor of A Sesquicentennial Tribute to Galdós. Her work has been published in Literature/Film Quarterly, Bulletin of Hispanic Studies, Latin American Literary Review, Letras Peninsulares, and Crítica Hispánica.
£23.96
University Press of Mississippi Brian De Palma: Interviews
Book SynopsisBrian De Palma (b. 1940) isn't your average Hollywood director.For years he reigned as the ""master of the macabre,"" the man who massacred the class of '76 in Carrie and stalked Angie Dickinson in Dressed to Kill. By the mid-1980s De Palma found himself assaulting his audience and critics, daring them to watch a chainsaw enter a man's skull in Scarface and a power drill disembowel a defenseless woman in Body Double. What drove De Palma to such extremes? In the late 1960s, he wanted to be the next Jean-Luc Godard and revolutionize American cinema. Instead, he found himself ostracized when Warner Bros. removed him from Get to Know Your Rabbit, his first Hollywood feature. De Palma sought the refuge of Alfred Hitchcock until the late 1970s (Sisters, Obsession), when his surreal approach to horror became a genre unto itself (Carrie, The Fury, Dressed to Kill). Ironically, just as De Palma achieved the success that his fellow Movie Brats George Lucas, Martin Scorsese, and Steven Spielberg had enjoyed since the mid-1970s, he could not hide his resentment toward Hollywood. After battling with the MPAA in the 1980s, he gradually became part of the mainstream with the success of The Untouchables and Mission: Impossible, although he never suppressed his desire to make audiences aware of his camera-eye and his dark, penetrating worldview. Brian De Palma: Interviews follows De Palma's fortunes as he makes the difficult transition from underground filmmaker to celebrity auteur. In profiles and q&a interviews, he emerges as a fascinating figure of excess and ambivalence. De Palma is not afraid to share his opinions about censorship, violence, feminism, American culture, and the fate of cinema in the twenty-first century.
£999.99
University Press of Mississippi Lars von Trier: Interviews
Book SynopsisWith six entries at the Cannes Film Festival thus far, Lars von Trier has been a Cannes award winner four times. Without question, he is the most intriguing film director to emerge in Denmark since the days of his great mentor in spirit Carl Theodor Dreyer. A relentless visionary, von Trier (b. 1956) has succeeded not only in realizing his projects but also in managing to gather substantial audiences to his films. Breaking the Waves (1996) made him a well-known figure to American audiences, as did Dancer in the Dark (2000), winner of the Palme d'Or at Cannes. His work on the groundbreaking TV series The Kingdom (1994-97) made him a household name in Denmark. He has continued to stir controversy for his polarizing views on the characters and subject matter of his films, as well as for his film technique. Media attention reached its peak when von Trier created Dogme 95, a movement dedicated to the ""Vow of Chastity,"" which strips cinema of its artifice, flash, and polish. Rather than being strident or shrill, however, these collected interviews reveal the Danish filmmaker to be impish, forthright, witty, sometimes infuriating, and deeply committed to the possibilities of cinema. The conversations in this collection trace his development from the structured, image-obsessed formalist of The Element of Crime (1984) and Europa (U.S. title Zentropa, 1991) to the control-shunning game master of the 1990s. Most of these interviews, two previously unpublished, are translated into English for the first time. They begin in 1968, when von Trier was the lead actor in a children's TV series, and end in 2001. Von Trier speaks of his visions, ideals, dislikes, and technical experimentations, of his conception of actors, his childhood, his phobias, and of his views on religion and his ill-fated female protagonists. His style in conversation is relaxed and honest, his mood affirmative and passionate.
£23.96
University Press of Mississippi Alfred Hitchcock: Interviews
Book SynopsisEven twenty years after his death and nearly fifty or more years after his creative peak, Alfred Hitchcock (1899-1980) is still arguably the most instantly recognizable film director in name, appearance, vision, and voice. Long ago, through a combination of timing, talent, genius, energy, and publicity, he made the key transition from proper noun to adjective that confirms celebrity and true stature. It is a rare filmwatcher indeed who cannot define ""Hitchcockian."" As the director of such films as Psycho, North by Northwest, Spellbound, Vertigo, Rear Window, To Catch a Thief, Notorious, and The Birds, Hitchcock has become synonymous with both stylish, sophisticated suspense and mordant black comedy. He was one of the most interviewed directors in the history of film. Among the hundreds of interviews he gave, those in this collection catch Hitchcock at key moments of transition in his long career--as he moved from silent to sound pictures, from England to America, from thrillers to complex romances, and from director to producer-director. 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. His engaging wit and intelligence are on display here, as are his sophistication, serious contemplation, and playful manipulation of the interviewer. Sidney Gottlieb, a professor of English at Sacred Heart University in Fairfield, Connecticut, is the editor of Hitchcock on Hitchcock: Selected Writings and Interviews.
£19.96
University Press of Mississippi Fritz Lang: Interviews
Book SynopsisThe films of Fritz Lang depict an entrapping, claustrophobic world in which people are controlled by larger forces. His overriding theme is the struggle against fate and against the traits of human nature that doom us. His life and work spanned six decades of film history-from the silent era through the golden age of German Expressionism of the 1920s and the classic studio system in Hollywood to the rise of the international co-production. In Hollywood he worked for every major studio except Disney. He made blockbusters, modest B movies, and everything in between. Among his films are classics of German cinema-including Metropolis and M. In America he made some of the most notable crime movies (Fury), noir films (The Big Heat), and Westerns (The Return of Frank James) of the studio era. Despite the different time periods, nations, and genres in which he worked, his films remain stylistically consistent. Lang (1890-1976), a notoriously difficult interviewee, granted relatively few interviews apart from short publicity exchanges in the promotion of his films. Fully aware of his public persona, he was a canny self-promoter who carefully constructed half-truths and myths about himself. This fascinating collection covers his conversations about his life and his works over a period of forty years. They reveal how cinema for Lang was an intensely personal art. ""For me,"" he said, ""cinema is a vice. I love it intimately. I've often written that it is the art form of our century.""
£23.96
University Press of Mississippi Robert Aldrich: Interviews
Book SynopsisIn this collection of interviews, Robert Aldrich (1918-1983) tells fascinating stories of making motion pictures with such film legends as Burt Lancaster, Lee Marvin, Jack Palance, Robert Mitchum, Bette Davis, Joan Crawford, James Stewart, Charles Bronson, Eddie Albert, and Burt Reynolds. As he speaks of them, of his on-going battles with censors, and of his audacious but failed attempt to create his own studio, he talks bluntly, sometimes ferociously, about struggling to make movies that accented his uncompromising view of life. Among Aldrich's interviewers are Richard Combs, Peter Bogdanovich, Alain Silver, Pierre Sauvage, and David Sterritt. In dialogue with these critics and film scholars he recounts a life in filmmaking that encompassed both old Hollywood's studio system and the spirited independence that took American cinema in a new direction in the 1960s and '70s. Although he was a member and a kinsman of wealthy, powerful families (the Aldriches of Rhode Island and the Rockefellers of New York), he gained a reputation as an anti-authoritarian maverick whose films condemned corruptive power. While succeeding as popular entertainment, they also were personal attacks on hypocrisy and intolerance. Aldrich redefined genres and undercut the conventions they portrayed. Kiss Me Deadly transformed the detective film into a satire on Cold War America. Vera Cruz disclosed the corruption at the heart of the traditional western. The Dirty Dozen and Twilight's Last Gleaming rendered the ambiguous underside of combat and the military. Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? and Hush . . . Hush, Sweet Charlotte shaped horror films into psychological studies of female loneliness and alienation. Eugene L. Miller is the author, with Edwin T. Arnold, of The Films and Career of Robert Aldrich. Edwin T. Arnold, a professor of English at Appalachian State University, is co-editor of Perspectives on Cormac McCarthy and A Cormac McCarthy Companion: The Border Trilogy (both published by the University Press of Mississippi).
£23.96
