Roberto Benigni | Director, Actor

Roberto Benigni Interview

Adrian Wootton Before we talk about Life is Beautiful, I want to go back to your early career and how you became a comedian. You grew up in Tuscany, and am I right in thinking that you started out by working in a circus? Can you tell us about your experience?

Roberto Benigni: Thank you. Thank you for giving me the opportunity to be here! Thank you Adrian. So, how are you?

AW: I'm very well.

RB: I like to be here because this is my first question and answer session in London and my heart is in turmoil. I'm flabbergasted. It's a gift to me, and I have to thank everybody.

The Director's Chair
0 comments
Danny Boyle | Director

Danny Boyle - On Trainspotting

The "Trainspotting" machine, which started rolling as a cult novel in Scotland's slums (passed hand-to-hand at outlawed raves) and gathered steam as a controversial West End play, is now in full locomotion, a wildly successful movie in Europe with raging fires of hype being stoked for its arrival on our shores. But will a movie about a bunch of toilet-diving Scottish heroin addicts play in Peoria?

A few months ago, director Danny Boyle didn't think so. "I doubt it'll do any business in America," he said. Was he prepared to alter that prediction now, after a staggering pre-release campaign and stories in every major magazine?

The Director's Chair
0 comments
Robert Altman, Director | "Aria" (1987)

Robert Altman on "Kansas City" (and Jazz)

Robert Altman:

Kansas City became the hub of the music world at that time because it was the port for the center of the continent, the crossroad of commerce for one-sixth of America. All the airlines went through there, all the trains. You went from East to West, you went through Kansas City. It was the base for all musicians who traveled in what was called "The Territories", the Western territories. ..
The Director's Chair
0 comments
John Cassavetes | Director, Writer, Actor

John Cassavetes - In Quotations

quote-leftI like to act in films, I like to shoot 'em, I like to direct 'em, I like to be around 'em. I like the feel of it and it's something I respect. It doesn't make any difference whether it's a crappy film or a good film. Anyone who can make a film, I already love. But I feel sorry if they don't put any thought in it because then they missed the boat. ..."

The Director's Chair
0 comments
Olivier Assayas | Director

Seven Questions for Olivier Assayas

indieWIRE: Does "Irma Vep" belong to an aesthetic tradition?

Olivier Assayas: That's tough to answer because for the first time I've made a film which fit into a genre, which is movies about movies. I knew that I was on ground that had already been covered so that encouraged me to be as radical as I could, to invent my own way of thinking about cinema and not do it like Truffaut when he did "Day For Night". I tried to make something I'm not used to doing, which is comedy, but at the same time I thought this could be a comedy about an ambitious subject-- the creative process. It's like an exercise in film schizophrenia, and in that sense the film tries to move away from looking like anything else.

The Director's Chair
0 comments
Director, Woody Allen

Woody Allen: He's No Dustin Hoffman

Woody Allen

"People think my movies are exact copies of my private life, but they're totally made up," insists Woody Allen. Okay, maybe not totally. Speaking from a swank Manhattan hotel, the writer-director-actor who celebrates his sixty-first birthday today admits that his new comedy, Mighty Aphrodite, was inspired by his real-life adopted daughter Dylan. (Mia Farrow accused Allen of sexually abusing Dylan in 1992, but the charges were dismissed.)
The Director's Chair
0 comments
Subscribe to Directing