From script development through pre-production to production and post-production, famed directors offer personal insights into every step of the creative process. They also reveal their candid takes on the best and worst aspects of their profession. This second edition features personal materials from many of the directors, including storyboards, script notes, sketches, and on-set photos. Directors Close Up will be of interest to both professional and aspiring directors; as well as to film fans that will enjoy this inside look into making movies.

Since 1992, the Directors Guild of America has hosted an annual symposium featuring its nominees for outstanding feature film directing. From the first, film and television director Jeremy Kagan has moderated these sessions in which the finest contemporary directors weigh in on every aspect of the filmmaking process. In Directors Close Up, Second Edition, Kagan culled the most insightful and entertaining responses from sessions conducted between 1992 and 2005. In Directors Close Up 2, an all-new sequel, Kagan shines his spotlight on nominees from the 2006-2012 seminars as they discuss their work on some of the most brilliant films of the last several years. From script development through pre-production to production and post-production, the directors offer personal insights into every step of the creative process. They also reveal their candid takes on the best and worst aspects of their profession. Featuring materials from their productions--including storyboards, script notes, sketches, and on-set photos--Directors Close Up 2 will be of interest to both professional and aspiring directors, as well as film fans who will enjoy this inside look into making movies. The interviewed nominees featured in this volume: Paul Thomas Anderson, There Will Be Blood Darren Aronofsky, Black Swan Kathryn Bigelow, The Hurt Locker Danny Boyle, Slumdog Millionaire James Cameron, Avatar George Clooney, Good Night, and Good Luck. Ethan Coen and Joel Coen, No Country for Old Men Bill Condon, Dreamgirls Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris, Little Miss Sunshine Lee Daniels, Precious David Fincher, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, The Social Network, and The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo Stephen Frears, The Queen Tony Gilroy, Michael Clayton Paul Haggis, Crash Michel Hazanavicius, The Artist Tom Hooper, The King's Speech Ron Howard, Frost/Nixon Alejandro Gonz lez I rritu, Babel Ang Lee, Brokeback Mountain Bennett Miller, Capote Christopher Nolan, The Dark Knight and Inception Alexander Payne, The Descendants Jason Reitman, Up in the Air David O. Russell, The Fighter Julian Schnabel, The Diving Bell and the Butterfly Martin Scorsese, The Departed and Hugo Steven Spielberg, Munich Quentin Tarantino, Inglourious Basterds Gus Van Sant, Milk

Two of the most stylized shots in cinema—the close-up and the long shot—embody distinct attractions. The iconicity of the close-up magnifies the affective power of faces and elevates film to the discourse of art. The depth of the long shot, in contrast, indexes the facts of life and reinforces our faith in reality. Each configures the relation between image and distance that expands the viewer’s power to see, feel, and conceive. To understand why a director prefers one type of shot over the other then is to explore more than aesthetics: It uncovers significant assumptions about film as an art of intervention or organic representation. Close-ups and Long Shots in Modern Chinese Cinemas is the first book to compare these two shots within the cultural, historical, and cinematic traditions that produced them. In particular, the global revival of Confucian studies and the transnational appeal of feminism in the 1980s marked a new turn in the composite cultural education of Chinese directors whose shot selections can be seen as not only stylistic expressions, but ethical choices responding to established norms about self-restraint, ritualism, propriety, and female agency. Each of the films discussed—Zhang Yimou’s Red Sorghum, Ang Lee’s Lust, Caution, Hou Hsiao-hsien’s The Assassin, Jia Zhangke’s I Wish I Knew, and Wei Desheng’s Cape No. 7— represents a watershed in Chinese cinemas that redefines the evolving relations among film, politics, and ethics. Together these works provide a comprehensive picture of how directors contextualize close-ups and long shots in ways that make them interpretable across many films as bellwethers of social change.

In Rose Eichenbaum's latest book on the confluence of art making and human expression, she sits down with thirty-five modern day storytellers—the directors of theater, film, and television. Eichenbaum's subjects speak with revealing clarity about the entertainment industry, the role and life of the director, and how theatrical and cinematic storytelling impacts our culture and our lives. The Director Within includes interviews with Peter Bogdanovich (The Last Picture Show), Julie Taymor (The Lion King), Mel Brooks (Blazing Saddles), Tim Van Patten (The Sopranos, Boardwalk Empire), Hal Prince (The Phantom of the Opera), Barry Levinson (Rain Man), and many others. The interviews are skillfully crafted, sensitively executed, and brimming with honesty and insight. The accompanying portraits demonstrate Eichenbaum's mastery of photography and convey the truth, depth, and intimacy of their subjects. The Director Within is an inspirational, informative, and entertaining resource for anyone interested in creativity, art making, and artistic collaboration. The book includes a listing of works from each of the directors. Publication of this book is funded by the Beatrice Fox Auerbach Foundation Fund at the Hartford Foundation for Public Giving.

Abbas Kiarostami planted Iran firmly on the map of world cinema when he won the Palme d'Or at the Cannes film festival for his film A Taste of Cherry in 1997. In this book Hamid Dabashi examines the growing reputation of Iranian cinema from its origins in the films of Kimiyai and Mehrjui, through the work of established directors such as Kiarostami, Beyzai and Bani-Etemad, to young filmmakers like Samira Makhmalbaf and Bahman Qobadi, who triumphed at the Cannes 2000 festival. Dabashi combines exclusive interviews with directors, detailed and insightful commentary, critical cultural context, an extensive filmography, and generous illustration to provide an indispensable guide to a globally celebrated but little-studied cinematic genre. Book jacket.

Through extensive, exclusive interviews with Eastwood (and the friends and colleagues of a lifetime), Time magazine film critic Richard Schickel has penetrated a complex character who has always been understood too quickly, too superficially. Schickel pierces Eastwood's monumental reserve to reveal the anger and the shyness, the shrewdness and frankness, the humor and powerful will that have helped make him what he is today. of photos.

Examining how Hong Kong filmmakers, spectators and critics wrestled with this perturbation between the Leftist Riots (1967) and the aftermath of the Umbrella Movement (2014), this book traces how Hong Kong's extraterritoriality has been framed: in its position of being doubly occupied and doubly abandoned by contesting juridical, political, linguistic and cultural forces. Extraterritoriality scrutinises creative works in mainstream cinema, independent films, television, video artworks and documentaries - especially those by marginalised artists - actively rewriting and reconfiguring how Hong Kong cinema and media are to be defined and located.