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Best known for his cerebral, often nonlinear, storytelling, acclaimed Academy Award winner writer/director/producer Sir Christopher Nolan CBE was born in London, England. Over the course of more than 25 years of filmmaking, Nolan has gone from low-budget independent films to working on some of the biggest blockbusters ever made and became one of the most celebrated filmmakers of modern cinema.
At 7 years old, Nolan began making short films with his father's Super-8 camera. While studying English Literature at University College London, he shot 16-millimeter films at U.C.L.'s film society, where he learned the guerrilla techniques he would later use to make his first feature, Following (1998), on a budget of around $6,000. The noir thriller was recognized at a number of international film festivals prior to its theatrical release and gained Nolan enough credibility that he was able to gather substantial financing for his next film.
Nolan's second film was Memento (2000), which he directed from his own screenplay based on a short story by his brother Jonathan Nolan. Starring Guy Pearce, the film brought Nolan numerous honors, including Academy Award and Golden Globe Award nominations for Best Original Screenplay. Nolan went on to direct the critically acclaimed psychological thriller, Insomnia (2002), starring Al Pacino, Robin Williams and Hilary Swank.
The turning point in Nolan's career occurred when he was awarded the chance to revive the Batman franchise in 2005. In Batman Begins (2005), Nolan brought a level of gravitas back to the iconic hero, and his gritty, modern interpretation was greeted with praise from fans and critics alike. Before moving on to a Batman sequel, Nolan directed, co-wrote, and produced the mystery thriller The Prestige (2006), starring Christian Bale and Hugh Jackman as magicians whose obsessive rivalry leads to tragedy and murder.
In 2008, Nolan directed, co-wrote, and produced The Dark Knight (2008). Co-written with by his brother Jonathan, the film went on to gross more than a billion dollars at the worldwide box office. Nolan was nominated for a Directors Guild of America (D.G.A.) Award, Writers Guild of America (W.G.A.) Award and Producers Guild of America (P.G.A.) Award, and the film also received eight Academy Award nominations. The film is widely considered one of the best comic book adaptations of all times, with Heath Ledger's performance as the Joker receiving an extremely high acclaim. Ledger posthumously became the first Academy Award winning performance in a Nolan film.
In 2010, Nolan captivated audiences with the Sci-Fi thriller Inception (2010), starring Leonardo DiCaprio in the lead role, which he directed and produced from his own original screenplay that he worked on for almost a decade. The thought-provoking drama was a worldwide blockbuster, earning more than $800,000,000 and becoming one of the most discussed and debated films of the year, and of all times. Among its many honors, Inception received four Academy Awards and eight nominations, including Best Picture and Best Screenplay. Nolan was recognized by his peers with a W.G.A. Award accolade, as well as D.G.A. and P.G.A. Awards nominations for his work on the film.
As one of the best-reviewed and highest-grossing movies of 2012, The Dark Knight Rises (2012) concluded Nolan's Batman trilogy. Due to his success rebooting the Batman character, Warner Bros. enlisted Nolan to produce their revamped Superman movie Man of Steel (2013), which opened in the summer of 2013. In 2014, Nolan directed, wrote, and produced the Science-Fiction epic Interstellar (2014), starring Matthew McConaughey, Anne Hathaway and Jessica Chastain. Paramount Pictures and Warner Bros. released the film on November 5, 2014, to positive reviews and strong box-office results, grossing over $670 million dollars worldwide.
In July 2017, Nolan released his acclaimed War epic Dunkirk (2017), that earned him his first Best Director nomination at the Academy Awards, as well as winning an additional 3 Oscars. In 2020 he released his mind-bending Sci-Fi espionage thriller Tenet (2020) starring John David Washington in the lead role. Released during the COVID-19 pandemic, the movie grossed relatively less than Nolan's previous blockbusters, though it did do good numbers compared to other movies in that period of time. Hailed as Nolan's most complex film yet, the film was one of Nolan's less-acclaimed films at the time, yet slowly built a fan-base following in later years.
In July 2023, Nolan released his highly acclaimed biographic drama Oppenheimer (2023) starring Nolan's frequent collaborator Cillian Murphy- in the lead role for the first time in a Nolan film. The movie was a cultural phenomenon that on top of grossing almost 1 billion dollars at the Worldwide Box office, also swept the 2023/2024 award-season and gave Nolan his first Oscars, BAFTAs, Golden Globes, D.G.A. and P.G.A. Awards, as well as a handful of regional critics-circles awards and a W.G.A. nomination. Cillian's performance as quantum physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer was highly acclaimed as well, and became the first lead performance in a Nolan film to win the Academy Award.
During 2023, Nolan also received a fellowship from the British Film Institute (BFI). In March 2024, it was announced that Nolan is to be knighted by King Charles III and from now on will go by the title 'Sir Christopher Nolan'.
Nolan resides in Los Angeles, California with his wife, Academy Award winner producer Dame Emma Thomas, and their children. Sir Nolan and Dame Thomas also have their own production company, Syncopy.- Producer
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Quentin Jerome Tarantino was born in Knoxville, Tennessee. His father, Tony Tarantino, is an Italian-American actor and musician from New York, and his mother, Connie (McHugh), is a nurse from Tennessee. Quentin moved with his mother to Torrance, California, when he was four years old.
In January of 1992, first-time writer-director Tarantino's Reservoir Dogs (1992) appeared at the Sundance Film Festival. The film garnered critical acclaim and the director became a legend immediately. Two years later, he followed up Dogs success with Pulp Fiction (1994) which premiered at the Cannes film festival, winning the coveted Palme D'Or Award. At the 1995 Academy Awards, it was nominated for the best picture, best director and best original screenplay. Tarantino and writing partner Roger Avary came away with the award only for best original screenplay. In 1995, Tarantino directed one fourth of the anthology Four Rooms (1995) with friends and fellow auteurs Alexandre Rockwell, Robert Rodriguez and Allison Anders. The film opened December 25 in the United States to very weak reviews. Tarantino's next film was From Dusk Till Dawn (1996), a vampire/crime story which he wrote and co-starred with George Clooney. The film did fairly well theatrically.
Since then, Tarantino has helmed several critically and financially successful films, including Jackie Brown (1997), Kill Bill: Vol. 1 (2003), Kill Bill: Vol. 2 (2004), Inglourious Basterds (2009), Django Unchained (2012) and The Hateful Eight (2015).- Writer
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Probably the most ambitious and visually distinctive filmmaker to emerge from Denmark since Carl Theodor Dreyer over 60 years earlier, Lars von Trier studied film at the Danish Film School and attracted international attention with his very first feature, The Element of Crime (1984). A highly distinctive blend of film noir and German Expressionism with stylistic nods to Dreyer, Andrei Tarkovsky and Orson Welles, its combination of yellow-tinted monochrome cinematography (pierced by shafts of blue light) and doom-haunted atmosphere made it an unforgettable visual experience. His subsequent features Epidemic (1987) and Europa (1991) have been equally ambitious both thematically and visually, though his international fame is most likely to be based on The Kingdom (1994), a TV soap opera blending hospital drama, ghost story and Twin Peaks (1990)-style surrealism that was so successful in Denmark that it was released internationally as a 280-minute theatrical feature.- Director
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Denis Villeneuve is a French Canadian film director and writer. He was born in 1967, in Trois-Rivières, Québec, Canada. He started his career as a filmmaker at the National Film Board of Canada. He is best known for his feature films Arrival (2016), Sicario (2015), Prisoners (2013), Enemy (2013), and Incendies (2010). He is married to Tanya Lapointe.- Producer
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Darren Aronofsky was born February 12, 1969, in Brooklyn, New York. Growing up, Darren was always artistic: he loved classic movies and, as a teenager, he even spent time doing graffiti art. After high school, Darren went to Harvard University to study film (both live-action and animation). He won several film awards after completing his senior thesis film, "Supermarket Sweep", starring Sean Gullette, which went on to becoming a National Student Academy Award finalist. Aronofsky didn't make a feature film until five years later, in February 1996, where he began creating the concept for Pi (1998). After Darren's script for Pi (1998) received great reactions from friends, he began production. The film re-teamed Aronofsky with Gullette, who played the lead. This went on to further successes, such as Requiem for a Dream (2000), The Wrestler (2008) and Black Swan (2010). Most recently, he completed the films Noah (2014) and Mother! (2017).- Director
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Nora Fingscheidt was born on 17 February 1983 in Braunschweig, Lower Saxony, Germany. She is a director and writer, known for System Crasher (2019), The Unforgivable (2021) and Ohne diese Welt (2017).- Production Designer
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Robert Houston Eggers is an American filmmaker and production designer. He is best known for writing and directing the historical horror films The Witch (2015) and The Lighthouse (2019), as well as directing and co-writing the historical fiction epic film The Northman (2022). His films are noted for their folkloric elements, as well as his efforts to ensure historical authenticity.- Producer
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Joel Daniel Coen is an American filmmaker who regularly collaborates with his younger brother Ethan. They made Raising Arizona, Barton Fink, Fargo, The Big Lebowski, True Grit, O Brother Where Art Thou?, Burn After Reading, A Serious Man, Inside Llewyn Davis, Hail Caesar and other projects. Joel married actress Frances McDormand in 1984 and had an adopted son.- Director
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Shion Sono is a Japanese director, writer and poet. Born in Aichi Perfecture in 1961 he started his career working as a poet before taking his first steps in film directing. As a student he shot a series of short films in Super 8 and managed to make his first feature films in the late 80s and early 90s, in which he also starred. The film that helped him reach a wider international audience and establish himself as a cult director is Love Exposure (2008) , released in 2008. Ai no mukidashi is the first installment of Sono's Trilogy of Hate followed by Cold Fish (2010) and concluded with Guilty of Romance (2011). The films of Shion Sono often tell the stories of socially marginalized teenagers or young adults who end up engaging in activities that involve murders, sexual abuse and criminal behavior. Sono's films in most of the cases contain scenes filled with graphic violence and blood that echo the long pinku eiga and anime tradition of Japanese cinema.- Producer
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Ari Aster is an American film director, screenwriter, and producer. He is known for writing and directing the A24 horror films Hereditary (2018) and Midsommar (2019). Aster was born into a Jewish family in New York City on July 15, 1986, the son of a poet mother and musician father. He has a younger brother. He recalled going to see his first movie, Dick Tracy, when he was four years old. The film featured a scene where a character fired a Tommy gun in front of a wall of fire. Aster reportedly jumped from his seat and "ran six New York City blocks" while his mother tried to catch him. In his early childhood, Aster's family briefly lived in England, where his father opened a jazz nightclub in Chester. Aster enjoyed living there, but the family returned to the U.S. and settled in New Mexico when he was 10 years old.- Writer
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Quentin Dupieux was born on 14 April 1974 in Clamart, Hauts-de-Seine, France. He is a writer and director, known for Rubber (2010), Deerskin (2019) and Reality (2014).- Director
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Jordan Peele is an Oscar- and Emmy-winning director, writer, actor, producer, and founder of Monkeypaw Productions. Peele's first feature film, "Get Out," was a critically acclaimed blockbuster, recognized with four Academy Award nominations, including Best Picture. The film would earn Peele the Oscar for Best Original Screenplay. His second feature, "Us," broke numerous box-office records, becoming the biggest opening for an R-rated original film in history when released in March of 2019 to widespread critical praise. Peele's third feature, the original horror epic, "Nope," opened in the summer of 2022 to rave reviews, the No. 1 slot at the box office, and once again becoming a widely discussed cultural phenomenon. Five years in the making, Peele produced and co-wrote Henry Selick's stop-motion animated feature, "Wendell & Wild," to which he also lent his voice as one of the title characters. Under the Monkeypaw banner, Peele co-wrote and produced Nia DaCosta's "Candyman" which made history as the first film helmed by a Black woman director to open at No. 1 at the box office. He also produced Spike Lee's "BlacKkKlansman," which earned a nomination for Best Picture and won an Oscar for Best Adapted Screenplay. He has also served as executive producer for numerous television series, including "Hunters" (Amazon), "Lovecraft Country" (HBO), and "The Twilight Zone" (CBS). Prior to becoming a filmmaker, Peele was a celebrated comedian who was the co-star and co-creator of "Key & Peele" on Comedy Central.- Producer
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David Fincher was born in 1962 in Denver, Colorado, and was raised in Marin County, California. When he was 18 years old he went to work for John Korty at Korty Films in Mill Valley. He subsequently worked at ILM (Industrial Light and Magic) from 1981-1983. Fincher left ILM to direct TV commercials and music videos after signing with N. Lee Lacy in Hollywood. He went on to found Propaganda in 1987 with fellow directors Dominic Sena, Greg Gold and Nigel Dick. Fincher has directed TV commercials for clients that include Nike, Coca-Cola, Budweiser, Heineken, Pepsi, Levi's, Converse, AT&T and Chanel. He has directed music videos for Madonna, Sting, The Rolling Stones, Michael Jackson, Aerosmith, George Michael, Iggy Pop, The Wallflowers, Billy Idol, Steve Winwood, The Motels and, most recently, A Perfect Circle.
As a film director, he has achieved huge success with Se7en (1995), Fight Club (1999) and, Panic Room (2002).- Director
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Daniel Francis Boyle is a British filmmaker, producer and writer from Radcliffe, Greater Manchester. He is known for directing 28 Days Later, 127 Hours, Trainspotting, T2 Trainspotting, Slumdog Millionaire, Millions, Shallow Grave, The Beach, Yesterday, and Steve Jobs. He won many awards for Slumdog Millionaire. He was in a relationship with Gail Stevens and had three children.- Director
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Edgar Howard Wright (born 18 April 1974) is an English director, screenwriter, producer, and actor. He is best known for his comedic Three Flavours Cornetto film trilogy consisting of Shaun of the Dead (2004), Hot Fuzz (2007), and The World's End (2013), made with recurrent collaborators Simon Pegg, Nira Park and Nick Frost. He also collaborated with them as the director of the television series Spaced.- Producer
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Self-taught writer-director Richard Stuart Linklater was born in Houston, Texas, to Diane Margaret (Krieger), who taught at a university, and Charles W. Linklater III. Richard was among the first and most successful talents to emerge during the American independent film renaissance of the 1990s. Typically setting each of his movies during one 24-hour period, Linklater's work explored what he dubbed "the youth rebellion continuum," focusing in fine detail on generational rites and mores with rare compassion and understanding while definitively capturing the 20-something culture of his era through a series of nuanced, illuminating ensemble pieces which introduced any number of talented young actors into the Hollywood firmament. Born in Houston, Texas, Linklater suspended his educational career at Sam Houston State University in 1982, to work on an offshore oil rig in the Gulf of Mexico. He subsequently relocated to the state's capital of Austin, where he founded a film society and began work on his debut film, 1987's It's Impossible to Learn to Plow by Reading Books (1988). Three years later he released the sprawling Slacker (1990), an insightful, virtually plotless look at 1990s youth culture that became a favorite on the festival circuit prior to earning vast acclaim at Sundance in 1991. Upon its commercial release, the movie, made for less than $23,000, became the subject of considerable mainstream media attention, with the term "slacker" becoming a much-overused catch-all tag employed to affix a name and identity to America's disaffected youth culture.- Director
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Gaspar Noé is an Argentinian filmmaker and screenwriter who lives in France. He is the son of Luis Felipe Noé, an Argentinian artist. He directed I Stand Alone, Irréversible, Enter the Void, Love, Climax, Carne, Lux Æterna, Sodomites and Vortex. His films are known for having a sensory overload style, most notably in Enter the Void. He is married to Lucile Hadzihalilovic.- Producer
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Alexandre Aja was born on 7 August 1978 in Paris, France. He is a producer and director, known for High Tension (2003), The Hills Have Eyes (2006) and Piranha 3D (2010). He is married to Laïla Marrakchi.- Writer
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S. Craig Zahler was born on 23 January 1973 in Miami, Florida, USA. He is a writer and director, known for Bone Tomahawk (2015), Dragged Across Concrete (2018) and Brawl in Cell Block 99 (2017).- Producer
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Park Chan-wook was born on 23 August 1963 in Seoul, South Korea. He is a producer and writer, known for Oldboy (2003), The Handmaiden (2016) and Decision to Leave (2022). He is married to Eun-hee Kim. They have one child.- Writer
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Born in precisely the kind of small-town American setting so familiar from his films, David Lynch spent his childhood being shunted from one state to another as his research scientist father kept getting relocated. He attended various art schools, married Peggy Lynch and then fathered future director Jennifer Lynch shortly after he turned 21. That experience, plus attending art school in a particularly violent and run-down area of Philadelphia, inspired Eraserhead (1977), a film that he began in the early 1970s (after a couple of shorts) and which he would work on obsessively for five years. The final film was initially judged to be almost unreleasable weird, but thanks to the efforts of distributor Ben Barenholtz, it secured a cult following and enabled Lynch to make his first mainstream film (in an unlikely alliance with Mel Brooks), though The Elephant Man (1980) was shot through with his unique sensibility. Its enormous critical and commercial success led to Dune (1984), a hugely expensive commercial disaster, but Lynch redeemed himself with the now classic Blue Velvet (1986), his most personal and original work since his debut. He subsequently won the top prize at the Cannes Film Festival with the dark, violent road movie Wild at Heart (1990), and achieved a huge cult following with his surreal TV series Twin Peaks (1990), which he adapted for the big screen, though his comedy series On the Air (1992) was less successful. He also draws comic strips and has devised multimedia stage events with regular composer Angelo Badalamenti. He had a much-publicized affair with Isabella Rossellini in the late 1980s.- Actor
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David Cronenberg, also known as the King of Venereal Horror or the Baron of Blood, was born in Toronto, Ontario, Canada, in 1943. His father, Milton Cronenberg, was a journalist and editor, and his mother, Esther (Sumberg), was a piano player. After showing an inclination for literature at an early age (he wrote and published eerie short stories, thus following his father's path) and for music (playing classical guitar until he was 12), Cronenberg graduated from the University of Toronto with a degree in Literature after switching from the science department. He reached the cult status of horror-meister with the gore-filled, modern-vampire variations of Shivers (1975) and Rabid (1977), following an experimental apprenticeship in independent film-making and in Canadian television programs.
Cronenberg gained popularity with the head-exploding, telepathy-based Scanners (1981) after the release of the much underrated, controversial, and autobiographical The Brood (1979). Cronenberg become a sort of a mass media guru with Videodrome (1983), a shocking investigation of the hazards of reality-morphing television and a prophetic critique of contemporary aesthetics. The issues of tech-induced mutation of the human body and topics of the prominent dichotomy between body and mind were back again in The Dead Zone (1983) and The Fly (1986), both bright examples of a personal film-making identity, even if both films are based on mass-entertainment materials: the first being a rendition of a Stephen King best-seller, the latter a remake of a famous American horror movie.
With Dead Ringers (1988) and Naked Lunch (1991), the Canadian director, no more a mere genre movie-maker but a fully realized auteur, got the acclaim of international critics. Such profound statements on modern humanity and ever-changing society are prominent in the provocative Crash (1996) and in the virtual reality essay of eXistenZ (1999), both of which well fared at the Cannes and Berlin Film Festivals. In the last two film projects Spider (2002) and A History of Violence (2005), Cronenberg avoids expressing his teratologic and oneiric expressionism in favor of a more psychological exploration of human contradictions and idiosyncrasies.- Director
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Eli Raphael Roth was born in Newton, Massachusetts, to Cora (Bialis), a painter, and Sheldon H. Roth, a psychoanalyst, psychiatrist, and clinical professor. His family is Jewish (from Austria, Hungary, Russia, and Poland). He began shooting Super 8 films at the age of eight; after watching Ridley Scott's Alien (1979) and vomiting, and deciding he wanted to be a producer/director. With his brothers and friends, ketchup for blood, and his father's power tools, he made over 50 short films before attending film school at NYU, where he won a student Academy Award and graduated summa cum laude in 1994.
Eli worked in film and theater production in New York City for many years, doing every job from production assistant to assistant editor to assistant to the director. At the age of 20, Roth was development head for producer Fred Zollo, a position he soon left to write full time. To earn a living, Roth did budgets and schedules for the films A Price Above Rubies (1998) and Illuminata (1998), and often worked as a stand-in, where he could watch directors work with the actors. In 1995, Roth co-wrote the script that would eventually become Cabin Fever (2002) with friend Randy Pearlstein, and the two spent many years unsuccessfully trying to get the film financed. Roth left New York in 1999 to live in Los Angeles, and within four months got funding for his animation series Chowdaheads (1999). Roth and friend Noah Belson (Cabin Fever (2002)'s Guitar Man) wrote and voiced the episodes, which Roth produced, directed, and designed. The episodes were due to run on WCW's #1 rated series WCW Monday Nitro (1995) but the CEO was fired a day before they were scheduled to air, and the episodes never ran. Roth used the episodes to set up a stop motion series called The Rotten Fruit (2003) which he produced, directed, and animated, as well as co-wrote and voiced with friend Belson. Between the two animated series, Roth worked closely with director David Lynch, producing content for the website davidlynch.com.
In 2001, Roth filmed Cabin Fever (2002) on a shoestring budget of $1.5 million, with private equity he and his producers raised from friends and their family. The film was the subject of a bidding war at the 2002 Toronto Film Festival, eventually won by Lion's Gate, instantly doubling their investors' money. It went on to not only be the highest-grossing film for Lion's Gate in 2003, but the most profitable horror film released that year, garnering critical acclaim from The New York Times, Rolling Stone, Empire Magazine, and such filmmakers as Peter Jackson, Quentin Tarantino, and Tobe Hooper. Roth used the film's success to launch a slew of projects, including The Box (2009), a horror thriller he co-wrote with Richard Kelly. In May 2003, Roth joined forces with filmmakers Boaz Yakin, Scott Spiegel, and Greenestreet Films in New York to form Raw Nerve, LLC, a horror film production company.
In 2014, Eli married Chilean model and actress Lorenza Izzo.- Producer
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Drew Goddard was raised in Los Alamos, New Mexico. He attended Los Alamos High School in Los Alamos, New Mexico and graduated in 1993. He then attended the University of Colorado, and worked as a production assistant in L.A. after graduation. A spec script Drew wrote based on Six Feet Under (2001) came to the attention of both Marti Noxon at Buffy the Vampire Slayer (1997) and David Greenwalt at Angel (1999). Both wanted him but because Marti found him first, Joss Whedon determined Drew would go to "Buffy". He became a staff writer for Season 7 (2002-2003), writing five episodes. Once "Buffy" was over, Drew moved over to "Angel" and became the executive story editor for Season 5 (2003-2004), writing four episodes. Drew also found time to write the introduction for a book of essays about Buffy, "Seven Seasons of Buffy", and to contribute two stories to the "Tales of the Vampires" comic series. In the summer of 2003, Drew received his first screenwriting award, along with co-writer Jane Espenson, when the Hugos honored "Conversations with Dead People" from "Buffy" with an award for Best Dramatic Presentation/Short Form. That episode was also honored with a SyFy Portal Genre Award for Best Episode/Television; another of Drew's "Buffy" episodes, "Lies My Parents Told Me" (co-written with David Fury), was nominated for the same award.- Director
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In early high school, Jon began developing his filmmaking craft. After gaining experience in directing, producing, camera, writing, and editing, Jon completed the Film Foundation program at the Vancouver Film School. Jon's first short film Apt. 310 played eleven film festivals and garnered two awards for Best Short Film. In 2004 Jon received a grant from the Ontario Arts Council to direct the short film The Other Celia. He followed this experience with the critically acclaimed short film Still Life. Each film played numerous festivals and Jon was awarded Best Director for both films at the Malibu Film Festival in 2006. After the successes of his short films, Jon parlayed his experience into his first feature film Jack Brooks: Monster Slayer. The film gained considerable attention throughout the festival circuit and received rave reviews. His second feature, The Shrine, premiered at the 2010 FanTasia Int'l Film Festival and won the Audience Award for Best Canadian Feature. Jon's latest feature film is a psychological thriller called Goddess of Love, starring Alexis Kendra.