Réalisateurs

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.