Conversations with Directors

Founded in 1973, the journal Literature/Film Quarterly has featured interviews with some of the most prominent and influential filmmakers from around the world. In Conversations with Directors: An Anthology of Interviews from Literature/Film Quarterly, the journal's coeditors have assembled an exciting collection of interviews spanning 35 years of the internationally-renowned publication and representing a broad spectrum of artistic approaches, industrial contexts, and cultural concerns. Interviewees include classic Hollywood directors like Robert Wise, Billy Wilder, and Frank Capra; European auteurs such as Eric Rohmer, Federico Fellini, and Louis Malle; New Hollywood directors such as William Friedkin, John Schlesinger, and Robert Altman; women directors such as Martha Coolidge and Patricia Rozema; contemporary filmmakers like Richard Linklater and Baz Luhrmann; and documentary and avant-garde filmmakers. Organized chronologically, each interview is preceded by a short introduction that establishes a contemporary context, along with providing the reader with a clear sense of the interview's primary concerns, usefully illuminating the many fascinating, and sometimes surprising, points of connection and difference between the directors. The editors of this collection explore these connections for the reader, with a particular emphasis on such recurring subjects as auteurism, realism, editing, cinematography, soundtracks, budgets, documentary versus narrative film, mainstream versus avant-garde cinema, processes of adaptation, collaborations with actors, and issues of artistic control. By assembling this collection, the editors have provided a single volume where readers may access the best interviews from the journal's pages over the last several decades. Ultimately, Conversations with Directors will prove to be an invaluable resource to both scholars and film fans who are eager to gain further insight into these directors and their work.