Directors Close Up: Interviews With Directors Nominated for Best Film By the Directors Guild of America

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Summary: Personal insights that go far beyond most books on directing
Review: Interviews with the DGA Award nominees provide important keys to understanding the directing process, with Steven Spielberg, Cameron Quintin Tarantino, Barbara Streisand, Neil Jordan and other personalities contributing their insights on what a director does and how he does it. These personal insights go far beyond most books on directing, providing keys to understanding the underlying technical, personal and political influences on directing choices and results. The interview structure allows for far more depth and focus than most outsider's analyses can produce. Recommended for any library collection with a film or arts department.

Rating:
Summary: Fascinating, informative, insightful, highly recommended.
Review: Jeremy Kagan's Directors Up Close is a compendium of engaging, informative, insightful interviews with film directors who were each nominated for "Best Film" by the Directors Guild of America. A highly recommended addition to any academic, professional, and community library film studies collection, Directors Up Close is a fascinating and informative work will entertain film buffs, educate film school students, and tutor aspiring directors.

Rating:
Summary: Fascinating, informative, insightful, highly recommended.
Review: Jeremy Kagan's Directors Up Close is a compendium of engaging, informative, insightful interviews with film directors who were each nominated for "Best Film" by the Directors Guild of America. A highly recommended addition to any academic, professional, and community library film studies collection, Directors Up Close is a fascinating and informative work will entertain film buffs, educate film school students, and tutor aspiring directors.

Rating:
Summary: Fascinating, informative, insightful, highly recommended.
Review: Jeremy Kagan's Directors Up Close is a compendium of engaging, informative, insightful interviews with film directors who were each nominated for "Best Film" by the Directors Guild of America. A highly recommended addition to any academic, professional, and community library film studies collection, Directors Up Close is a fascinating and informative work will entertain film buffs, educate film school students, and tutor aspiring directors.

Rating:
Summary: An exceptional chance to learn how great directors work
Review: This book is for all who are interested in what a director does and how the best of them do it. You can read it from beginning to end or dip in almost anywhere to taste the personalities and practices of outstanding contemporary directors including Steven Spielberg, Clint Eastwood, Oliver Stone, Mel Gibson,James Cameron, Quentin Tarantino, Anthony Minghella, Rob Reiner, Peter Weir, James Brooks, Barry Levinson, Gus Van Sant and many more. I am glad that this book is now available via Amazon though I hope you'll be able to get it faster than 2 weeks! The director Steven Sodenbergh has said " this book is pure gold from beginning to end. It's an absolute must for any serious filmmaker" and Richard Schikel wrote "These superbly edited interviews put you in intimate touch with some of the film world's most gifted spirits as they tell, in rich anecdotal and often humorous fashion, how they created their most memorable works." I am a film director and professor at USC and have read most of the books out on the subject of directing, and I believe this one is exceptional in its insight and information. I hope you enjoy it. I hope you buy it!

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Summary: Joseph Gelmis' 1970 "The Film Director as Superstar" Again?!
Review: Though many of the entries in Jeremy Kagan's DIRECTORS CLOSE UP provide readers interesting anecdotes from well-known and highly successful directors, Jeremy Kagan's book suffers from being a thinly, if at all, veiled celebration of the now outdated and refuted "auteur theory" of film, first dreamed up by WRITER-director Francois Truffaut in Cashiers Du Cinema in 1954. Simply put, the auteur [author] theory, places "authorship" of a film in the hands of only one film-maker, the director. Thus a film like PLAY IT AGAIN, SAM -- starring Woody Allen, screenplay by Woody Allen, from a play by Woody Allen, becomes a "A HERBERT ROSS FILM" in the 1970s.

Why anyone would try to adulate the director's "vision" as supreme in filmmaking, especially PARASITIC NON-WRITING DIRECTORS who spout on about their "vision" of a film on Jay Leno, when another person (usually, the screenwriter) created the characters, action, and dialogue of the film -- i.e. the complete movie before it was transferred by a PRODUCTION TEAM onto celluloid -- is beyond me.

Directors Close Up seems more like a paid commercial for the "Directors Guild of America" rather than a genuine exploration of the genuine contributions of one member of the filmproduction collaborative family: the screenwriter (usually the film's true and unheralded "author" in the sense of "aueteur", the cinematographer and editors (who usually create the visual look which is often heralded as the director's own), set designers, composers, and let's not forget, the actors!

Kagan's DIRECTOR'S CLOSE UP is worth reading if one keeps in mind he writes and edits from an outdated adulation of the director as primary author in filmmaking. Hey, even a director has some kind of job on the set, so why not read about some of the things they do on the set, and some of the things they wish to take credit for -- even though they are not responsible for the work?

NOTE: Any NON-WRITING DIRECTOR who dares to embrace "A FILM BY" vanity credit at the start of a film deserves to be laughed at and scorned by astute and informed readers of the filmmaking process. "Directed By" is just one job in filmmaking, albeit an important one, but no more important than the many other roles in filmmaking. Kagan's book lacks a balanced sense of the authentic collaborative roles in filmmaking. Actors shop for great scripts, not directors. When push comes to shove, we follow the lines of a script and not the director if we think the director doesn't understand the script -- which is a commonplace occurrence. So read Kagan's book with caution. You only have part of the creative filmmaking process -- a limited, but important part far grossly exaggerated by popular entertainment personalities seeking to talk up a film prior to or at the film's release. It's less complicated to deal with one personality -- the director -- than the true collaborative nature in filmmaking. Don't be fooled! Read cautiously!