Livres

Five-time Oscar nominee and BAFTA winner, the only British director to have won the top prize at both Cannes (for Secrets & Lies) and Venice (for Vera Drake) – Mike Leigh is unquestionably one of world cinema’s
pre-eminent figures. Now, in this definitive career-length interview, he reflects on all that has gone into the making of his unique body of work.

In Directing Herbert White James Franco writes about making a film of Frank Bidart’s poem, Herbert White. Though the main character, Herbert White, is a necrophiliac and a killer, the poem – and the film – are an expression of life’s isolation and loneliness. A poem became a film.

In the rest of book, Franco uses poems to express what he feels about film: about acting; about the actors he admires – James Dean, Marlon Brando, Sean Penn; about the cult of celebrity and his struggles with it; about his teenage years in Palo Alto, and about mortality prompted by the death of his father.

Roeg began as a cameraman, working for such masters as Francois Truffaut and David Lean. His explosive debut as a director with Performance, established an approach to film-making that was unconventional and ever-changing, creating works such as Don’t Look Now, The Man Who Fell to Earth, Bad Timing, Insignificance, and, more recently, Puffball.

Having now reached eighty years of age, Roeg has decided to pass on to the next generations, the wealth of wisdom and experience he has garnered over fifty years of film-making.

John Ford’s many classic movies – among them Stagecoach, The Grapes of Wrath, The Quiet Man, The Searchers, and The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance – earned him worldwide praise and renown. Now Joseph McBride presents us with the definitive account of the man’s myriad complexities and contradictions, tracing Ford’s life from his modest beginnings as ‘Bull’ Feeney, the nearsighted football-playing son of Irish immigrants in Maine, to his recognition, after a long, controversial, and much-decorated career, as America’s national myth-maker. This deeply insightful and impeccably documented narrative is the epic tribute that Ford’s stature merits.

Multi-Oscar-winning and still amazingly prolific, Woody Allen remains one of the truly great figures in American humour and American cinema. This career-length interview with Stig Bjorkman - editor of a similar volume on one of Allen's own heroes, Ingmar Bergman - traces the path of his career, his motivations and inspirations, and of course his nigh-legendary anxieties. Newly updated, the book contains discussion of such recent Allen triumphs as Bullets Over Broadway, Mighty Aphrodite, Deconstructing Harry, and Sweet and Lowdown.

Adventures of a Suburban Boy is film-maker John Boorman’s vivid memoir of writing and directing films such as Deliverance and Excalibur, and working with Sean Connery, Helen Mirren and Burt Reynolds.

John Boorman is one of the cinema’s authentic visionaries, drawn to myths and dreams. The undisputed heir to David Lean, his films, such as Point Blank, Deliverance and Excalibur, exhibit a continual search for the truth that only art can convey.

In Conclusions Boorman summarises what he has learned about the craft of film-making, and wishes to pass on to the next generation of film-makers. Into this tapestry of cinematic memories, he also weaves the story of his kith and kin, including the death of his cherished elder daughter, and an evocation of the forest of trees that he has planted as his final legacy.

A rare, intimate portrait of Hollywood’s reigning ‘blockbuster auteur’ whose deeply personal billion-dollar movies have established him as the most successful director to come out of the British Isles since Alfred Hitchcock.
More than just the tinkerings of a glass watchmaker, Christopher Nolan’s films have an unerring grasp of the way time makes us feel. Time steals people away in his films, and he takes careful note of the theft. Time is Nolan’s great antagonist, his lifelong nemesis. He seems almost to take it personally.

The Pixels of Paul Cezanne is a collection of essays by Wim Wenders in which he presents his observations and reflections on the fellow artists who have influenced, shaped, and inspired him.

“How are they doing it?” is the key question that Wenders asks as he looks at the dance work of Pina Bausch, the paintings of Cezanne, Edward Hopper, and Andrew Wyeth, as well as the films of Ingmar Bergman, Michelanelo Antonioni, Ozu, Anthony Mann, Douglas Sirk, and Sam Fuller.

Wes Anderson startled audiences with his stop-motion animated film of Roald Dahl’s Fantastic Mr Fox.
He now displays his unique wit and playful visual sense in an action-filled saga of Samurai dogs.

This edition of Herzog on Herzog presents a completely new set of interviews in which Werner Herzog discusses his career from its very beginnings to his most recent productions.

Herzog was once hailed by Francois Truffaut as the most important director alive. Famous for his frequent collaborations with mercurial actor Klaus Kinski – including the epics Aguirre, the Wrath of God and Fitzcarraldo, and the terrifying Nosferatu – and more recently with documentaries such as Grizzly Man, Cave of Forgotten Dreams and Into the Abyss, Herzog has built a body of work that is one of the most vital in post-war German cinema.

Terrence Malick’s debut film, Badlands, announced the arrival of a unique talent. In the 40 years since that debut, Malick has only made 5 films, but they are distinctive in their beauty.

This book is not meant to be a biography of Terrence Malick. The purpose behind the book is to introduce readers to the extraordinary universe of his film-making and to aid them in understanding his work. And to do this through the words of his closest collaborators – cinematographers, set designers, costumers, cameramen, directors, producers, and actors such as Sean Penn, Martin Sheen, Sissy Spacek and Jessica Chastain.