Movie Directors

Jean Renoir and Francois Truffaut, mentor and protege, were filmmakers first, last and always. But they were also writers of great skill and sensitivity: Renoir a scenarist, novelist and memoirist of his unique life with father, Truffaut a sharp, eloquent and demanding film critic.

With the release of "The Crying Game" in 1992, it was clear a significant new talent had arrived. Irish director Neil Jordan had released critically acclaimed films before--most notably "Mona Lisa" in 1986--but none of his preceding five films had captured the public imagination quite the way "The Crying Game" did.

When "Batman & Robin" director Joel Schumacher bailed last week on plans to direct an adaptation of John Grisham's bestseller "The Runaway Jury" for Warner Bros., his move caught many by surprise. Schumacher is considered one of the most bankable filmmakers in the business and certainly on the Warner Bros. lot. Warners paid about $8 million to Grisham just for movie adaptation rights for "The Runaway Jury," studio sources said.

It started as a simple protest. Reading about yet another peso devaluation in December 1994 and watching his money nearly evaporate overnight, film director Luis Estrada had an idea: What about a movie that featured the folly and corruption of Mexico's long-ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party? So the seed was planted for "La Ley de Herodes" (Herod's Law), a movie that was, ironically, financed in part by the government's film institute.

You're a filmmaker from what used to be Yugoslavia. Who still considers himself Yugoslavian. And you've made one of the funnier films of the year. Well, the irony isn't lost on Goran Markovic. "It's my style, you know," the director said, with a hint of apology, not that his "Tito and Me"--which opens in Los Angeles today--requires any. "I like the combination of the serious and the comic. Always, I find in the comic aspects of serious things, and in comic situations serious points."

Theo Angelopoulos is a modern Homer, a Greek director as acclaimed as he is challenging with his stately, complex film odysseys. His latest, Greece's official Oscar entry, is the elegiac "Eternity and a Day," and it screens tonight at 8 at the Palm Springs International Film Festival. "Eternity" stars veteran German actor Bruno Ganz as an acclaimed writer and poet facing death, overcome by memories of the past and longing to come to terms with his fate.

When the cast of producer David Puttnam's WWII movie "Memphis Belle" signed on, they knew they would be spending weeks in tight quarters in a mock-up of a B-17 bomber. What they didn't know was that before filming began, they would go through basic training--swimming through rat-infested waters and running through the woods trying to avoid stun grenades.

Sometimes success can come at the beginning of one's career, other times much later on. Director Edward Yang has known both. From his first feature-length film, "That Day on the Beach" (1983), he was hailed by film critics as a founder, along with Hou Hsiao-hsien, of Taiwan's New Wave in the early 1980s. Then he had a series of ups and downs with several films.

In his long career as a politically conscious filmmaker, Costa-Gavras has studied the ways of military dictators, assassins, clandestine intelligence operatives, war criminals and neo-Nazi extremists. But his new film took him into an even more unnerving terrain--the world of local TV news.

Herbert Ross shrugs off the mantle of "women's director." After all, there have been 25 very diverse films including "Pennies From Heaven" and "The Goodbye Girl." Still, at 67, he deserves credit for taking on many feminine--and feminist--issues onscreen. Which brings us to "Boys on the Side," which opens Friday.