Movie Directors

Director Francis Lawrence's provocative storytelling impulse has played a large part in the image overhauls for a number of top-10 pop stars. Take his 2002 video for Justin Timberlake's "Cry Me a River." Lawrence re-imagined the sugary-sweet 'N Sync man-child as a creepy stalker who breaks into his ex-girlfriend's house. Such imagery helped recast Timberlake as an adult star with crossover appeal.

One year ago, after putting in a full day of work at her local department store, Betsy DelValley got home and pulled out her video camera. It was July 24, 2010, the day that YouTube launched an experimental project asking users of the social media site worldwide to submit videos about what transpired in their lives over 24 hours. The best submissions would later be culled together for a documentary film. DelValley, then 19, was intrigued by the undertaking. The problem was, nothing all that exciting had transpired on the day she was meant to film.

"People come to our film expecting some kind of true crime story but that's not what we were attempting to do," said 30-year-old filmmaker Joe Berlinger of the award-winning documentary "Brother's Keeper."

Two legends of French cinema, — Oscar-winning director Bertrand Blier ("Get Out Your Handkerchiefs") and César-winning actress Nathalie Baye ("Day for Night," "La Balance"), will be appearing with their latest films at the 15th annual City of Lights, City of Angels festival, which opens Monday and continues through April 18 at the Directors Guild of America Theater. It is the first time either has appeared at the festival, which features an eclectic array of the latest in contemporary French cinema — and includes two world premieres among the 34 features.

The young black woman in the stylish blue dress stood at a microphone inside the college gymnasium and addressed her remarks to director Spike Lee. "They say you are a lot like Malcolm X," she said, a trace of hero worship in her voice. Lee immediately began to fidget in his chair. "All untrue," he replied softly, shaking his head. "All untrue." If there was any doubt, it was now dispelled. Not only was Spike Lee carrying the hopes of Warner Bros.

Signe Hasso, a Swedish-born stage and film actress who played strong leading ladies in American movies in the 1940s, most notably in George Cukor's "A Double Life," has died. She was 91. Hasso died Friday at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles. The cause of death was not announced. Her father and grandfather died when she was 4, and her mother supported the family by making waffles. Hasso lived with her mother, grandmother, sister and brother in a one-room apartment in Stockholm.

From Oscar-winning director Barry Levinson to "Entrapment's" Jon Amiel to action movie maestro John Woo, directors known for their imprint on the big screen are contending for slots on the small screen. In a remarkable crossing of media, 23 feature directors, including Rob Reiner, Ivan Reitman, Barry Sonnenfeld and Bryan Singer, are preparing pilots for shows vying for placement on all six broadcast networks. At most, only a few will be picked up.

"Suffering is more cinematic than happiness," says Polish director Krzysztof Kieslowski on a subject that East European filmmakers perhaps know better than anyone else. But now with the end of 45 years of communist domination, filmmaking, like every other aspect of life in East Europe, is adjusting to the new demands of freedom. The oppression may be over, but the cinematic future of the region is far from settled.

Late one evening, Michael Mann realized that the airplanes were getting on his nerves. The director and his camera crew were camped on the edge of a runway at LAX, struggling to film a climactic scene in the cop drama "Heat" as jets roared 75 feet overhead every minute and a half. "There were periods when it got kind of surreal," he recalled. "You're breathing hard, your heart's going, you feel like you're working hard.

What everyone really wants, as the Hollywood cliche goes, is to direct. The ambition to get behind a camera and tell a story exactly as they envision it is powerfully alluring for actors, writers and others to whom producers turn to handle the task--and especially these days, it seems, directors of slick TV commercials and music videos. With rare exceptions, directors of animated features have not been a talent pool into which producers have dipped for their live-action pictures.

Some spent years fighting to bring their movies to the screen. Others had the great fortune of seeing the pieces fall into place almost overnight. A few of the directors work so closely with their actors they almost become their therapists. One simply turns on the camera and lets his performers fly. The six filmmakers who recently came together at the Los Angeles Times to talk about their craft have dramatically different work and directing habits. And their films could hardly be more diverse: David Fincher's Facebook film "The Social Network," Ben Affleck's crime story "The Town," Tom Hooper's historical drama "The King's Speech," Darren Aronofsky's ballet tale "Black Swan," Lisa Cholodenko's family comedy "The Kids Are All Right" and Ethan Coen's western "True Grit" (directed with brother Joel)

In the late 1990s, the Los Angeles Police Department's Rampart Division was caught up in the worst corruption scandal in the department's history. It didn't take long for Hollywood to mine the subject matter. The scandal, in which dozens of officers in Rampart's anti-gang unit were accused of serious misconduct, including perjury and evidence tampering, heavily influenced the FX TV series "The Shield" and the 2001 movie "Training Day," starring Denzel Washington and Ethan Hawke.

By many counts, 2009 was a great year for women in Hollywood. Female directors knocked out such hits as "The Proposal," "Alvin and the Chipmunks: The Squeakquel," "It's Complicated," and "Julie & Julia," as well as the Oscar contenders "The Hurt Locker" and "An Education." Sandra Bullock and Meryl Streep outperformed most of their male counterparts dollar for dollar at the box office, nabbing Oscar nominations to boot. The elusive female movie-going audience has started to gel into a potent force, driving such hits as the "Twilight" franchise, "The Blind Side" and this weekend's "Alice in Wonderland."

Hollywood directors have long been known to throw their weight around to get what they want. But over the weekend, on a Burbank-bound Southwest Airlines flight, indie auteur Kevin Smith took that cherished convention to a new extreme. The plus-sized writer-director behind such potty-mouthed comedies as "Clerks," "Dogma" and 2008's "Zack & Miri Make a Porno" was kicked off a plane at Oakland International Airport on Saturday, allegedly because the captain deemed Smith's obesity a "safety risk" to other passengers.

Most writers, musicians and filmmakers are delighted to talk about the biggest influences on their work. After all, for artists, the influences from their youth are usually the subconscious fuel that drives their imagination. And when it comes to cinematic influence peddling, no American filmmaker has spent more time yakking about the movies that made him fall in love with movies than Quentin Tarantino, whose Oscar-nominated "Inglourious Basterds" is crammed with hundreds of references to obscure old films of every shape, stripe and size.

As Pierce Brosnan and Ewan McGregor describe it, there was no need for the cast of Roman Polanski's "The Ghost Writer" to have long, philosophical discussions about the movie's creepy real-life parallels. It wasn't necessary, for example, to dissect Brosnan's character, a hazily sinister British ex-prime minister who's a dead ringer for Tony Blair, or to over-analyze his seething, neurotic wife, played by Olivia Williams as a cross between Cherie Blair and Lady Macbeth. It was all pretty obvious and pretty amusing.

The week that East and West Germany became one again, Michael Verhoeven was in the United States drumming up publicity for his film about a far less jubilant era in German history--an era that, as his darkly comic film illustrates, the majority of Germans would simply prefer to forget.

"Hot Sex," the sign says, but of course some wag with a Magic Marker and a penchant for wishful thinking has altered the original, which merely promised "Hot Set." No, there's probably not much sex going on. The set is, however, indisputably hot. It costs about $2 million and sits in a building that resembles a 747 hangar on a nondescript parcel wedged into a nondescript Baltimore neighborhood; you could drive by it for years and never even notice it. But inside, nothing's nondescript.

Kathryn Bigelow sounds a wee bit tired of questions about being a "female director," but given that on Tuesday she became only the fourth woman to be nominated for best director by the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences, she knows it comes with the territory. "I long personally for the day when the modifier is a moot point," said a very happy Bigelow, whose film nabbed nine nominations, including one for best picture. "I anticipate that day will come, but if 'The Hurt Locker' can make the impossible seem possible to somebody, it's pretty overwhelming and gratifying.

It's as inescapable as any law of physics: To be a movie director, you must first direct a movie. But being a movie director and becoming one are two fundamentally dissimilar things, as the filmmaking participants in the Envelope Roundtable made clear. For nearly two hours, five of the year's most celebrated filmmakers gathered together at The Times discussed the challenges -- and rewards -- of making distinctive and often highly personal movies, even as the studios grow all the more interested in presold sequels, remakes and adaptations of board games.