Movie Directors

In terms of respect, French director Jean-Jacques Beineix is sort of the Rodney Dangerfield of filmmaking in his country. When his first film, 1981's "Diva," opened in France, the critics gave it a resounding thumbs down. But word-of-mouth built for the quirky story of a postman and opera buff who ends up recording his singing idol. "Diva" became a huge hit not only in France but also internationally.

Director Michael Bay has never been a critics' favorite, but the thrashing he received for "Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen" was the worst of his eight-film career. Reviewers ridiculed the new sequel about battling robots as "beyond bad" (Rolling Stone), "bewildering" and "sloppy" (the Village Voice) and "a great grinding garbage disposal of a movie" (the Detroit News).

Sam Raimi does not seem like a gleeful sadist. During a recent morning interview in the sparsely populated Culver City production offices of "Spider-Man 4," he's exceedingly polite and far more modest than the average A-list director whose blockbuster comic book movie franchise has grossed almost $2.5 billion around the world.

Unless you're making "Transformers 3" or "Iron Man 2," every movie in Hollywood is a gamble in one way or another. But some gambles are more intriguing than others, like the one Lionsgate recently announced teaming Russell Crowe and Paul Haggis. The two Oscar winners have joined forces on "The Next Three Days," a Haggis-directed adaptation of the 2008 French film "Pour Elle" that begins production in Pittsburgh in late September.

Ten years ago, when Quentin Tarantino first sat down to write his own WWII extravaganza, "Inglourious Basterds," a film he referred to as his "men on a mission" saga, he needed to come up with two story staples: a cool group of renegades and a mission. For his rough-edged warriors, he quickly settled on Jewish soldiers -- not the most obvious choice, given the legacy of Jerry Seinfeld and Woody Allen -- and for his mission, nothing less than revising history in his update of such war film staples as "The Dirty Dozen" and "The Guns of Navarone," "Where Eagles Dare" and "The Great Escape."

Life is messy, and Greg Mottola sees no reason to clean it up. The director of 2007's blockbuster "Superbad" and writer-director of the new "Adventureland" is drawn to ambiguous characters and unresolved story lines, to the delight of fans and the vexation of marketers. Sitting on a sun-drenched hotel poolside cafe in dark clothing, his head shaved bald and wearing black-framed glasses, Mottola is the very model of a modern indie filmmaker.

As "No Country for Old Men" star Josh Brolin said in accepting the Screen Actors Guild Award for ensemble cast, "The Coen brothers are freaky little people, you know, and we did a freaky little movie." Indeed, sitting down with the notoriously press-shy, iconoclastic auteurs in a suite at the Four Seasons in Beverly Hills with the only light coming from the rapidly dimming, overcast sky, is a little bit freaky.

Mark Waters had just finished the acclaimed Lindsay Lohan high school comedy "Mean Girls" when he was asked to direct the fantasy adventure "The Spiderwick Chronicles." "I was looking to have a movie where I don't have locker doors slamming every time you called 'background action,' " recalled Waters, who also directed Lohan in the high school hit "Freaky Friday."

British director Alex Cox made his name in the 1980s with two cult hits, the nihilist fantasy "Repo Man" (1984) and the punk valentine "Sid & Nancy" (1986). His third feature, "Walker" (1987), finally arriving on DVD this week (Criterion, $39.95), was the last film he made in Hollywood.

Jess Manafort jokes that she was born with a "put-on-a-production" gene because, at age 4, she was already directing her parents while they were taking home movies of her. "You can see in the actual home movies, I am, like, stamping my foot, ordering them to turn my Cinderella record up loudly and telling them to move closer." And now, 21 years later, she's directing young actors -- including Amber Heard and Alexa Vega -- in her first feature film, "Remember the Daze," which opens Friday.