Ted Kotcheff tells boisterous and insightful stories from his 60-year directing career beginning in live television drama, and including classic feature films like First Blood and North Dallas Forty, as well as 12 years executive producing Law & Order: Special Victims Unit.
Born and raised in Canada by Bulgarian immigrants, Kotcheff studied English Literature at the University of Toronto. His first job after graduating came at the nascent Canadian Broadcast Company as a stagehand. Under the tutelage of mentor Sydney Newman, Kotcheff began to write for both documentaries and live drama programs, and he was promoted to become the youngest director in Canadian television at the time.
Knowing he wanted to direct films, but desiring to work in theater as well, Kotcheff moved to London and pursued both paths, directing televised plays for shows like Armchair Theatre and TV movies for the BBC from the late 1950s through the 1960s. He also directed his first two feature films while based in London, Tiara Tahiti (1962) and Life at the Top (1965), the screenplay of which was written by fellow Canadian Mordecai Richler, who was Kotcheff’s friend and flat-mate in London.
Kotcheff travelled to Australia to film Wake in Fright (1971) about the harsh conditions in the Outback, and the film became a sparkplug for the Australian New Wave of filmmakers (Kotcheff allowed a young Peter Weir to shadow him on set). Though largely unseen in the United States for 30 years, the film earned the distinction of being named a “Cannes Classic” in 2009, when Martin Scorsese introduced a restored print of the film almost 40 years after its original premiere at the film festival.
Kotcheff re-teamed with Richler for The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz (1974), which featured Richard Dreyfuss in his first starring role and became the most successful film in Canadian history. Kotcheff worked constantly in feature films through the rest of the 1970s and 80s, helming a wide range of pictures like the comedies Fun with Dick and Jane (1977), Who Is Killing the Great Chefs of Europe? (1978), and Weekend At Bernie’s (1989), dramas such as Uncommon Valor (1983), and Winter People (1989), as well as the genre-bending classics North Dallas Forty (1979) and First Blood (1982), the action film that started the “Rambo” franchise with Sylvester Stallone. Kotcheff also directed a Mordecai Richler script for the third time on Joshua Then and Now (1985).
In the 1990s Kotcheff returned to television, directing TV movies like What Are Families For? (1993), and A Husband, A Wife, and A Lover (1996), and episodes of Red Shoe Diaries. He then brought his broad experiences as a Director to bear as the Executive Producer of Law & Order: Special Victims Unit for 12 seasons, where he estimates to have auditioned over 27,000 actors through his run on the show.