My Favorite Writers & Directors Of Right Now
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1.
Edward Burns
Actor, Saving Private Ryan
Edward Burns was born on January 28th 1968 in Woodside, Queens New York. The second of three children of Irish-Catholic immigrants. His father Edward J. Burns was a police sergeant and active spokesperson for the New York Police Dept. His mother, Molly, worked for the Federal Aviation Administration at Kennedy Airport...
4.
Brit Marling
Actress, Another Earth
Brit Marling graduated from Georgetown University, with a bachelor's in economics, and was offered a job with Goldman Sachs, which she turned down in favour of a career as an artist. She moved to Los Angeles to act and, after spending a couple of years exploring the movie industry and being offered roles as "the cute blonde in horror movies"...
5.
Woody Allen
Writer, Midnight in Paris
Woody Allen was born on December 1, 1935, as Allen Konigsberg, in Brooklyn, New York. At the age of 15, he started selling one-liners to gossip columns. After working a while as a stand up comedian, he was hired to write What's New Pussycat in 1965. He directed his first film a year later, What's Up, Tiger Lily? in 1966.
7.
Jay Duplass
Writer, Jeff, Who Lives at Home
Jay Duplass, along with his brother Mark, first made a name for himself writing and directing several award-winning short films. His first feature film was the Sundance 2005 breakout hit "The Puffy Chair," which went on to win the Audience Award at SXSW and receive two Independent Spirit Award nominations...
9.
Colin Trevorrow
Director, Safety Not Guaranteed
Born in San Francisco and raised in Oakland, Colin Trevorrow started making short films when he was 12 years old. He studied film and dramatic writing at New York University. After graduation, he wrote and directed "Home Base" a digital short that became one of the early viral successes on the internet...
12.
Charlie Kaufman
Avid reader Charlie Kaufman wrote plays and made short films as a young student. He moved from Massapequa, New York to West Hartford, Connecticut in 1972 where he attended high school. As a comedic actor, he performed in school plays and, after graduation, he enrolled at Boston University but soon transferred NYU to study film...
13.
Kelly Reichardt
Director, Wendy and Lucy
Kelly Reichardt was born and raised in Miami-Dade Country, Florida to a family of police officers. Had an interest in photography from a very young age. She started by used her father's camera, which he used for photographing crime scenes. Went to the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, Massachusetts...
15.
Seth MacFarlane
Writer, Ted
Seth MacFarlane was born in the small New England town of Kent, Connecticut where he lived with his father (Ron), mother (Perry) and sister Rachael MacFarlane. He attended and studied animation at the Rhode Island School of Design and, after he graduated, he was hired by Hanna-Barbera Productions (Now...
18.
Jim Jarmusch
Director, Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai
Moved to New York City at the age of seventeen from Akron, Ohio. Graduated from Columbia University with a B.A. in English, class of '75. Without any prior film experience, he was accepted into the Tisch School of the Arts, New York.
19.
Miranda July
Writer, Me and You and Everyone We Know
Filmmaker Magazine rated her #1 in their "25 New Faces of Indie Film" in 2004! She is a performance artist and published short story writer. Since becoming a filmmaker, her debut feature, Me and You and Everyone We Know (2005) has won several film awards. Daughter of Lindy Hough and Richard Grossinger, writers and publishers who founded North Atlantic Books.
20.
Derek Cianfrance
Director, The Place Beyond the Pines
Derek Cianfrance began making movies at age 13. He later attended The University of Colorado where he studied under avant-garde film legends Stan Brakhage and Phil Solomon. His first three films, 'Five O'clock Shadow', 'Raw Footage', and Brother Tied, won consecutive Goldfarb Awards for best film...
23.
Paul Thomas Anderson
Director, There Will Be Blood
Like Jean Renoir and Max Ophüls, most of Paul Thomas Anderson's films are characterized by a constantly moving camera. Like François Truffaut and Martin Scorsese, his films are the work of a man with an encyclopaedic knowledge of film and film technique, who is able to make tried and true techniques as fresh and as vibrant as when D.W. Griffith first started to discover them...
24.
Alexander Payne
Producer, The Descendants
Director, producer and screenwriter Alexander Payne was born in Omaha, Nebraska. Of Greek descent (the family name was changed from Papadopoulos), his parents George and Peggy ran a Greek restaurant. He has two older brothers. Alexander attended Stanford University, where he majored in Spanish and History...
25.
Kenneth Lonergan
Writer, Analyze This
Kenneth Lonergan is a playwright, screenwriter and director. His film You Can Count On Me, which he wrote and directed, was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Screenplay, won the Sundance 2000 Grand Jury Prize and the Waldo Salt Screenwriting Award, the NY Film Critics Circle, LA Film Critics Circle...
26.
Lena Dunham
Writer, Girls
New Yorker Lena Dunham is the daughter of a painter, Carroll Dunham and Laurie Simmons, a designer and photographer. Dunham was educated at Oberlin College, Ohio, graduating with a creative writing degree. It was while at Oberlin that she began writing shorts and feature films. In 2009, Dunham created the web series Delusional Downtown Divas, which gained a cult following...
28.
Nicolas Winding Refn
Director, Drive
Writer, Director, Producer. Nicolas Winding Refn was born in Copenhagen, Denmark, in 1970. Aged 8 he moved to New York with his parents where he lived out his teenage years. New York quickly became his city and soon began to shape Nicolas's future. At 17, Nicolas moved back to his native Copenhagen to complete his Gymnasium (High School) Education...
31.
Jennifer Jason Leigh
Actress, The Machinist
Born in Los Angeles, Jennifer Jason Leigh - the daughter of actor Vic Morrow - worked in her first film at the age of nine, in a nonspeaking role for the film Death of a Stranger (The Spy Who Never Was). At 14 she attended summer acting workshops given by Lee Strasberg and landed a role in the Disney TV movie The Young Runaways...
33.
Terry Zwigoff
Director, Ghost World
Born in Appleton, Wisconsin, Zwigoff held several jobs before making his breakthrough feature: the documentary Crumb (1994) in 1994. His previous jobs included musician, shipping clerk, printer and welfare office worker. In fact, Zwigoff traces his film career back to discovering a rare blues recording by an unknown Chicago blues musician he discovered in 1978...
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