Always a bit ahead of the curve in his 40-year career, Jonathan Demme pioneered the psychological thriller in The Silence of the Lambs, caught a band at its peak in Stop Making Sense, and tackled social issues in Philadelphia. For his next act? Meryl Streep as a rock star.
Cary Fukunaga
In the towering TV series
True Detective and in his features, Cary Fukunaga researches like crazy so that once he gets to the set he can really let fly.
Elementary
Director-producer John Polson and his crack team of directors help Sherlock Holmes and a female Watson solve cerebral mysteries in modern-day New York. It may be
Elementary, but it’s never simple.
Marco Polo
With the 13th-century adventures of
Marco Polo, a skilled group of directors gets a chance to make the kind of grand-scale epic rarely seen today. But not for theaters—it’s for Netflix.
The Bourne Ultimatum
With this rooftop chase in
The Bourne Ultimatum—all jolting camerawork and spiky editing—Greengrass redefined the punch and power of action filmmaking.
Karen Gaviola
Karen Gaviola learned her craft as an AD and has now directed almost 100 TV episodes. For her, it’s all about exercising different muscles.
Jill Soloway
Jill Soloway took the genre into new territory with her groundbreaking transgender series,
Transparent. The content might be different, but the emotions are real.
Werner Herzog
For almost half a century, Werner Herzog has been circling the globe capturing extraordinary images for both documentaries and features. Look closely and you can see the wonder of it all.
Neil LaBute
Neil LaBute pays tribute to the precision and boldness of Mike Nichols’ vision in
Carnal Knowledge—a film he admits he has borrowed from freely.
Nancy Utley and Stephen Gilula
Fox Searchlight Co-Presidents Nancy Utley and Stephen Gilula talk about the challenges of the marketplace and making movies with a vision.
Depicting the machinations of filmmaking
With so much raw material all around them, directors can’t resist the temptation to depict the machinations of filmmaking—both on the set and in studio executive suites. The result is often great entertainment.