Museum Of The Moving Image Pinewood Dialogues

Serpico may be the quintessential Sidney Lumet film. A gritty blend of urban realism, character study, and concise storytelling, Serpico is also a great New York City film that makes expressive use of its numerous locations in Manhattan, the Bronx, Brooklyn, and Queens. Al Pacino gives a riveting performance as the idealistic yet eccentric New York City cop who exposed corruption in the police department. Lumet's engaging, unpretentious style is on full display in this wide-ranging discussion, which took place following a special screening of a new print of Serpico, just a few months after Lumet received an Honorary Academy Award.

Glenn Close's Academy Award-nominated performance as the vengeful siren Alex Forrest in the 1987 thriller Fatal Attraction ranks among one of the most memorable villains in screen history, and is the definitive depiction of the fury of a woman scorned. The hit film, directed by Adrian Lyne, captured the popular imagination and changed the cultural landscape with its terrifying take on modern sexual warfare. Glenn Close, a five-time Oscar nominee and three-time Tony Award winner, spoke at the Museum about her harrowing performance as Alex, and about how she overcame her shyness to forge her remarkable career on stage and screen.

Throughout his career, the versatile French director Francois Ozon has made a wide range of films that display varying doses of outlandish comedy, transgressive sexual politics, and Hitchcockian suspense. While his movies are stylish and liberating, they also contain a poignant awareness of loss and unfulfilled desire. Ozon spoke at the Museum after a preview screening of his deceptively simple, profoundly haunting drama 5x2, the story of a failed marriage told in reverse chronological order. Also screened at the Museum on the same day, at the conclusion of a retrospective of Ozon's films, were four of his early short works: Bed Scenes, X2000, Truth or Dare, and Little Death. In the discussion, Ozon is alternately playful and serious. One can see how his relaxed, open approach elicits such truthful, revelatory performances.

Brad Bird made his mark as an animation director with the 1999 film The Iron Giant, which has gained recognition over time as a classic of storytelling and visual style. Bird's next film, The Incredibles, won the Academy Award for Best Animated Feature. Inventive and rich in its characterizations, it is the story of a family of retired superheroes trying to settle into suburban family life. The Pixar film was an enormous critical and commercial success. Bird spoke at Moving Image as part of the Museum's annual New York Film Critics Circle series.

The immigrant's sense of dislocation resonates in the films of Mira Nair, who often focuses on different permutations of the outsider—Bombay street urchins in Salaam Bombay!, Cuban immigrants in The Perez Family, a sixteenth-century Indian servant girl in Kama Sutra: A Tale of Love—and their disconnection from the social order around them. Nair's films often focus on complex female characters, and examine the complications that arise from the intermingling of ethnicities, traditions, and classes. In this talk, Nair discusses the examination of sociopolitical exclusion in her past work and in her adaptation of William Thackeray's Vanity Fair.

Legendary maverick Melvin Van Peebles is a novelist, composer, and filmmaker who has also worked in television, popular music, and theater. After spending the 1960s in Paris, he returned to the United States and made the groundbreaking 1971 film Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song. The stunning box-office success of this subversive and sexy film paved the way for filmmakers such as Mario Van Peebles, who directed New Jack City and Panther. Mario paid tribute to his father with his 2003 movie Baadasssss; in this lively discussion, Van Peebles père et fils share a lifetime of experience and a playful father-son rivalry.

Tim Burton may be Hollywood's most childlike grown-up—or its most grown-up child. Either way, Burton's fanciful movies express both the bright and dark sides of his boundless imagination. His heroes, including Pee-wee Herman, Edward Scissorhands, and Ed Wood, are sweetly eccentric outsiders who live in their own made-up worlds. Big Fish brings to life the tall tales of an aging Alabama salesman played by Albert Finney. The film blends an intimate family drama with a gently surreal carnival story. Burton spoke at the Museum just before the film's release, and just over a month after the birth of his son.

Francis Ford Coppola's 1982 film One from the Heart, a romantic fantasy set in Las Vegas, was intended as a light, frothy venture to follow the grueling, tortured production of Apocalypse Now. Instead, the movie was a commercial and critical disaster that received inordinate negative publicity and bankrupted Coppola's Zoetrope Studios. Twenty years after its release, the movie holds up extremely well as a charming and playful reinvention of the old-fashioned musical. Coppola was in a playful mood himself, even bursting into song, when he presented the New York premiere of a restored print at Museum of the Moving Image.

Ang Lee emigrated from Taiwan to America to make films. He has worked in a wide range of genres, moving fluidly between arthouse and mainstream filmmaking. Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon was the most successful foreign-language film ever released in the United States, and Brokeback Mountain earned Lee an Academy Award for Best Director. One of the keys to Lee's accomplishments is his creative partnership with James Schamus, president of Focus Features, who has co-written and/or co-produced all of Lee's films. Lee and Schamus spoke at the Museum before the release of their live-action comic-book blockbuster The Hulk.

The versatile, often outspoken actor Tim Robbins made his debut as a director and writer with the prescient and impressive political satire Bob Roberts, a mock documentary in which he plays a right-wing, folk-singing Senate candidate who embodies the greed and self-interest of the 1980s. With its sharp views of media manipulation, corruption, and the role of money in politics, the film is as timely today as it ever was. Robbins spoke at the Museum about his career, his family's love of music, and American politics just before heading to Cannes for the premiere of Mystic River.

Irish-born director Neil Jordan's film The Good Thief is an English-language homage to a French classic, Jean-Pierre Melville's Bob le flambeur, that was itself an homage to American film noir. Something like a remake of a remake, its storyline is fittingly about art forgery and theft. Above all, it is a romantic thriller with a soulful jazz style. In this discussion following a screening of The Good Thief, Jordan (The Crying Game, Interview with the Vampire) discusses how he transformed the Melville original and gave it a contemporary feeling inspired by the urban films of Wong Kar-Wai.

The elusive nature of reality, and the way that perception is shaped by memory and imagination, is among David Cronenberg's key subjects. Working in the supposedly lowbrow genres of horror and science fiction (Videodrome, Scanners), and in the highbrow form of literary or theatrical adaptation (Naked Lunch, M. Butterfly, Spider), Cronenberg has created a remarkably varied body of work. A decade after his complete retrospective at the Museum, Cronenberg returned to Moving Image to discuss Spider, his adaptation of Patrick McGrath's novel about a schizophrenic whose tenuous hold on reality is threatened by fragmented memories of a family trauma.

Film editor Thelma Schoonmaker's collaboration with Martin Scorsese is one of the most enduring and fruitful in the history of film. The two met at New York University in the 1960s, and Schoonmaker edited Scorsese's first feature, Who's That Knocking at My Door? (1967). She won the first of three Academy Awards for editing the masterpiece Raging Bull (1980), and she has cut all of Scorsese's films since, winning Oscars for her work on The Aviator (2005) and The Departed (2006). She spoke at the Museum of the Moving Image just before the release of Gangs of New York (2002).

Raised in Manhattan's Little Italy, Martin Scorsese is truly a New York City director. He has repeatedly captured the gritty, often brutal vitality of the city in such contemporary American classics as Mean Streets, Taxi Driver, Raging Bull, and GoodFellas. Prior to the release of his most ambitious New York City film to date, the 19th-century epic Gangs of New York, Scorsese spoke at the Museum with New York Times critic Janet Maslin about his career and about the constant struggle between commerce and art in modern Hollywood. The discussion was the opening program in a two-month Scorsese retrospective at the Museum.

Far From Heaven is Todd Haynes's most critically acclaimed film to date. Nominated for four Oscars, it swept the New York Film Critics Circle awards, including Best Film and Best Director. Both an homage to and an update of Douglas Sirk's 1955 melodrama All that Heaven Allows, the movie stars Julianne Moore as a 1950s housewife coming to terms with her husband's homosexuality and her own affair with a black man. At a special preview screening, Haynes discussed the film's astonishing craftsmanship, its political relevance for contemporary audiences, and his desire to make a film that would engage audiences intellectually and emotionally.

British director Mike Leigh's films evolve from a unique and remarkable collaborative process. The actors spend months on rehearsal, story development, dialogue, and discovering the emotional truth underlying the drama. Although often described as documentary-like and naturalistic, Leigh's films are highly crafted, precisely detailed, and deeply stylized. All or Nothing, starring Leigh's frequent collaborators Timothy Spall and Lesley Manville, was a return to the contemporary working-class milieu of Leigh's earlier films following the success of the period costume drama Topsy-Turvy. In this discussion just before the film's New York premiere, Leigh, Spall, and Manville elaborate on their creative process.

Sam Mendes was an acclaimed British theater director before making an astonishing screen debut with American Beauty (1999), a satirical, compassionate, highly theatrical dark comedy set in contemporary American suburbia. The film, starring Kevin Spacey and Annette Bening, won five Academy Awards, including Best Director and Best Picture. For his second film, Road to Perdition, Mendes ventured into a mythological American landscape to create a 1930s period film about gangsters, fathers and sons, violence, and redemption. Exquisitely crafted and deeply felt, Road to Perdition further establishes Mendes as a distinctive cinematic stylist, and as a remarkable collaborator. He talks about working with two screen icons—Tom Hanks and Paul Newman—and about his creative partnership with the great cinematographer Conrad Hall, who received a posthumous Academy Award for Road to Perdition.

Boys Don't Cry marked the arrival of three major talents: its two stars, Hillary Swank (who won the Oscar for Best Actress) and Chloë Sevigny, and its ferociously gifted director, Kimberly Peirce. Dramatizing the true story of Brandon Teena, a woman who was raped and killed by friends because she lived as a man, Boys Don't Cry is a gripping, tender, and sad love story with a deep feeling for the story's rural Midwestern location. Peirce talks about researching and preparing the film, making an engrossing drama on a tight budget, and being true to Brandon's heartbreak and compelling story.

Willem Dafoe is an off-Broadway theater actor turned film star who went from playing the heavy in movies like To Live and Die in L.A. and Streets of Fire to a saintly Army officer in Platoon and, even more saintly, Jesus in Martin Scorsese's The Last Temptation of Christ. At the time of this interview, Dafoe was winning acclaim for his performance as the notorious film star Max Schreck in Shadow of the Vampire, an inventive behind-the-scenes movie about the making of Nosferatu. Dafoe talked about the process of film acting, including the startling physical transformation he had undergone for this role.

British director Terence Davies's highly personal early films, including Distant Voices, Still Lives and The Long Day Closes, contrasted the gloomy, repressed atmosphere of his provincial small-town childhood with a longing for the freedom represented by movies and popular songs. Davies turned to literary adaptation with The Neon Bible and The House of Mirth, an emotional, exquisite adaptation of the Edith Wharton novel, starring Gillian Anderson. This discussion took place just before the movie's U.S. release. Because of the quiet intensity of his films, the biggest surprise here may be the mischievous humor that Davies displays throughout the talk.