Movie Directors

"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."

Tick, tick, tick. You can almost hear that lethal sound in director Ben Affleck's explosive drama "Argo. " You can certainly feel the clock running out in this rare based-on-a-true-life story that manages to keep hold of its stomach-churning suspense until the end. Affleck as a CIA operative-pseudo filmmaker, Alan Arkin as a fake movie studio head and John Goodman as the make-up artist are the central brain trust trying to pull off an insane scam to...

John HUSTON was large than life. He was a poet, gambler, raconteur, womanizer, charmer and man's man. He had an uncanny ability to adapt novels and plays and turn them into bold, living cinema. And he had knack for casting his movies and guiding his actors to Oscar-caliber performance. Beginning Friday, the American Cinematheque at the Egyptian Theatre in Hollywood is kicking off the first part of its two-part retrospective, "Beat the Devil: The Films of John Huston."

A word to the wise, Frank Oz fans: He won't do that Yoda impression. The 68-year-old Hollywood Renaissance man - Muppet puppeteer, movie director and the voice behind the pint-sized Jedi master - holds his characters too sacred for such tripe. "You wouldn't parade your kids around like that, would you?" he said. "They're part of me. I won't use them as a party favor to impress people. " Oz, who currently resides in Manhattan, will return to Los Angeles on Thursday to accept a lifetime achievement honor at the 38th Saturn Awards (which, for the sci-fi un-savvy, is a sort of Oscars for the horror and fantasy genre, presented annually by the Academy of Science Fiction, Fantasy and Horror Films)

More than three years have passed since Kasi Lemmons made her feature directing debut with "Eve's Bayou," not exactly a typical entree into the world of movie-making. With an all-black cast headlined by Samuel L. Jackson (who also co-produced) and a challenging story line infused with magical realism and hallucinatory imagery, "Eve's Bayou" was 1997's most commercially successful independent film.

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.

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.

It wasn't enough that Mike Nichols had pledged $1.5 million of his own money in a bidding war for the film rights to the best-selling "Primary Colors," a roman a clef based on Bill Clinton's 1992 presidential campaign. The Oscar-winning director also had to "audition"--that is, present his vision of the film to "Anonymous," the phantom author of the book.

It was a deal of exquisite simplicity: When British film director Sally Potter fell in love with the tango, she cornered one of its leading exponents, Argentine Pablo Veron, and told him: "Teach me to tango--and I'll make you a film star." Did Veron imagine he would be romancing a succession of young, statuesque Hollywood starlets on screen? It is unclear. But in any case he acquiesced--and thus, a film, Potter's "The Tango Lesson," was born.

Potent, persuasive and hypnotic, "The Dark Knight Rises"has us at its mercy. A disturbing experience we live through as much as a film we watch, this dazzling conclusion to director Christopher Nolan's Batman trilogy is more than an exceptional superhero movie, it is masterful filmmaking by any standard. So much so that, its considerable 2-hour, 44-minute length notwithstanding, as soon as it's over, all you want to do is see it all over again. That desire comes despite - or perhaps because of - the fact that "The Dark Knight Rises" might be the bleakest, most despairing superhero film ever made.

Night flatters the Sunset Strip. At sunrise, dead cockroaches line the sidewalk outside the famed Whisky a Go Go. Bus exhaust fills the air. The sound of crunching metal echoes off the buildings as deliverymen roll up the back panels of their trucks, making their morning drops. Filmmaker Adam Shankman is posing for a photographer on the corner of San Vicente and Sunset at 10 a.m., trying to give his best rock 'n' roll face, though he readily admits his edge is as sharp as a butter knife.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.