Movie Directors

"Raise the Red Lantern" director Zhang Yimou plans to make a movie to mark the 60th anniversary of communist China, cementing his shift from a dissident to a government-favored artist. Zhang is still working on the script for the film, China Central Television reported Wednesday. Zhang designed the opening and closing ceremonies of the Beijing Olympics in August, and was earlier chosen by the government as the director of an Oct. 1 gala celebrating the People's Republic of China's 60th anniversary.

When it came to making movies quickly and cheaply, it was hard to beat Roger Corman, who once joked that he could make a film about the Roman Empire with two extras and a sagebrush. He directed 1960's "The Little Shop of Horrors" in two days. Corman started directing films in 1955 and, during his peak, could turn out seven a year. A true auteur of "B" movies, his films featured offbeat characters, dark humor, social commentary and a savvy use of special effects and sets -- he would often simply shoot another film on the same sets with the same actors.

"There's a tremendous buoyancy and sense of expectation in Scotland at the moment," director Gillies MacKinnon says. "We're making a lot of films here now. But is there a Scottish school? Do the films have anything in common? A certain impudence, maybe. But I don't think we know ourselves what the style is." Until last year, international audiences were only rarely exposed to films made in or about Scotland. It simply isn't a country that had registered on the world's cinematic consciousness.

Armed only with a flashlight, director Mick Jackson leads his "Volcano" camera crew into the inky depths of a 100-foot-long tube that's dressed up like a Los Angeles storm drain. His flashlight beam bounces off walls coated with blackened gunk, playing on motor oil cans scattered on the floor and a thicket of stalactite-like roots.

This ghostly old mountain mining town makes Brigadoon look like Tomorrowland--that's how much folks here hate change. At the Metals Bar and Lounge downtown, the FBI bust of the renowned Wallace bordellos in 1991 is regarded as a jackboot cultural crackdown akin to Beijing's raid on the Dalai Lama. "Wallace was built on mining, prostitution and gambling, and we're not ashamed of it," says Wallace resident Okie Ross.

"Michael Collins" may have more than Oscar potential written all over it. Neil Jordan's sweeping, devoted testament to the Irish freedom fighter--whom the British saw as a terrorist--has become something of a metaphor for the troubled times in Ireland and the United Kingdom. It's also become a film requiring special handling after the Irish Republican Army's bombing in February of the London financial district that killed two and last month's outbreak of sectarian violence in Northern Ireland.

Long before the arrival of Bill Gates, the 500-channel universe and the Internet, one of the great showmen of modern filmmaking imagined satellite communications as the basis of a grand new business and cultural exchange between North and South America. Francis Ford Coppola chose the republic of Belize, newly independent in 1981, as the seat of this grand enterprise. His mission, he said at the time, inspired by Plato's "Republic," was not so much "making just movies, but building a new city."

"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.

For the first time since 1981's "Reds," for which he won the best director Oscar, Warren Beatty will produce, write, direct and star in a film, scheduled to go before the cameras in late September. The as-yet-untitled movie, which Beatty conceived of three years ago, is said to be budgeted at less than the current industry average of $35 million, and will be distributed by 20th Century Fox. The rest of the roles are being cast. "This is not a big movie," Beatty said Thursday.