For three decades Robert Altman has remained on the periphery of mainstream Hollywood, yet his films have continued to shake the boundaries of cinematic convention, while remaining engaging, exciting, human and comic.
All of those adjectives best describe Gosford Park, part murder mystery, part class satire.
Altman just received a Golden Globe Award and it's quite possible this could be the director's most honoured film to date.
The Lord of the Rings saga has created a fanatical following, but the New Zealand director, Peter Jackson, says he is no "slavish Tolkien interpreter".
The Vancouver Film and Television Trade Forum has been hit by the US terrorist attacks that took place earlier this month, with multiple last-minute cancellations by panellists.
Fortunately, today (26 September 2001), two local filmmakers stepped into the breach.
Robert McLachlan, director of photography on Final Destination, and made-for-television feature High Noon and production designer David Brisbin, who has worked with Gus Van Sant, among others, on My Personal Idaho and Drugstore Cowboy, talked about how to imbue a film with that elusive ingredient mood.
The production company behind the first Harry Potter film scrounged its first copy of the book, but that was long before big-shot film directors came knocking at its door.
It seems ironic that Bridget Fonda is co-starring in the new Jet Li actioner Kiss of the Dragon. Ironic, because the movie was co-written and produced by Luc Besson, and the actress appeared in the Hollywood remake of Besson’s La Femme Nikita.
Fonda merely smiles at the suggestion, but is grateful that this time around, she does very little butt-kicking.
Come wasted
Naomi Watts describes how, while filming Mulholland Drive, director David Lynch left her "weeping and falling to pieces".
Nicholas Winton is a kindly old English gentleman who likes nothing better than to potter around his garden. He is a very ordinary fellow and yet, it has only recently emerged, he was responsible for saving hundreds of children from Nazi death camps.
Sixty million dollars and 400 hours of videotape later two female filmmakers return with a compelling story of dot com burn-out.
There is a lot to be said for being in the right place at the right time. Twenty-five-year-old, Jehane Noujaim, didn't even have to leave her home for the inspiration for her first documentary.
She was sharing a flat with a twentysomething entrepreneur, Kaleil Isaza Tuzman, who had chucked in the day job at Goldman Sachs to kick off an ambitious multi-million dollar business called GovWorks.com.
Appearing opposite Leonardo DiCaprio in The Man in the Iron Mask, Laura Fraser was billed simply as "bedroom beauty", and it seemed a fair assessment of her seductive charms and of the extent of the role. She managed to reinvent herself however as a plookey teenager in Kevin and Perry Go Large. And while she might have seemed a natural for the princess-type in the Hollywood medieval romp A Knight’s Tale, she ended up as the blacksmith.
Tim Burton remains one of Hollywood’s most idiosyncratic and unique filmmakers, able to take conventional material and make it his own. His latest project sees him at the helm of one of the most talked-about films of the year, a new version of Planet of the Apes.