Museum of the Moving Image Pinewood Dialogues

Actor Matthew Modine gives one of his best performances in Stanley Kubrick's landmark Vietnam drama, Full Metal Jacket (1987). In the film, Modine plays Joker, a wisecracking military journalist trying to maintain his cynical veneer and his sanity amid the mayhem and carnage of warfare. In his book, Full Metal Jacket Diary (2005), he pairs his personal journal with his candid photographs from the set, offering a intimate portrait of the life-changing film production. This lively conversation with Modine at the Museum of the Moving Image, which accompanied a book signing and a screening of Full Metal Jacket as part of a Stanley Kubrick film retrospective, offers rare insight into Kubrick's techniques in directing his actors.

Robert Altman's films play with the viewer's conceptions of American film and of America itself. Altman has created a unique cinematic style, with a trademark mixture of documentary camerawork, semi-improvised performances, multi-layered dialogue, and overlapping narratives. His films reinvent Hollywood genres while revealing the layers of spectacle that make up American culture and society. A month after winning an Honorary Academy Award, Altman opened a 22-film retrospective of his career by speaking at the Museum following a screening of Kansas City, a panoramic and jazz-like melodrama about politics, race, crime, and the movies, which is set in Altman's home town.

Capote is an astonishing fiction-film debut for Bennett Miller, who spoke at Moving Image the day the film was chosen as Best Picture by the National Society of Film Critics. Miller discusses his collaboration with his longtime friends Dan Futterman (who wrote the screenplay) and Philip Seymour Hoffman (who won an Oscar for his moving portrayal of Truman Capote). He also talks about his fascination with the inevitability of Capote's decline following the success of In Cold Blood. As one listens to Miller, it becomes clear that the film reflects his personality—quiet, wry, precise, and deeply observant.

The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada was movie star Tommy Lee Jones's debut as a theatrical film director. Set in his native Texas, this provocative blend of road movie and western, partly inspired by Sam Peckinpah, is a unique and compelling drama that Jones described as "a study of the emotional, psychological, spiritual, and social implications of having an international border running through the middle of a culture." The movie had its New York premiere on a cold December night at a special screening co-hosted by the Museum of the Moving Image and Jones's Harvard roommate, former Vice President Al Gore.

The Constant Gardener, a political thriller and romantic melodrama about a British diplomat investigating his wife's murder in Kenya, was one of the biggest arthouse hits of 2005. As in his breakthrough film City of God, Brazilian director Fernando Meirelles combines a vibrant visual style, a fluid narrative structure, and acting that has the spontaneous feeling of cinéma vérité. Rachel Weisz won an Academy Award for her radiant, impassioned performance as Tessa, a young activist who speaks out against pharmaceutical companies. Meirelles and Weisz discuss the film's production and the place of socially relevant films in today's cultural climate.

Laurent Cantet, the French filmmaker who directed the Cannes Film Festival's 2008 Palme d'Or winner The Class, discussed his film Heading South (2005) at the Museum of the Moving Image, along with Karen Young, one of the lead actresses. Set in Haiti, the film follows a group of female tourists who travel to the country seeking adventure and some form of romance. They participate in the country's sex trade and, beneath the surface beauty of its lush beach front setting, the film deftly and powerfully unravels a complex web of race, sex, class, power, prostitution, and politics.

Serpico may be the quintessential Sidney Lumet film. A gritty blend of urban realism, character study, and concise storytelling, Serpico is also a great New York City film that makes expressive use of its numerous locations in Manhattan, the Bronx, Brooklyn, and Queens. Al Pacino gives a riveting performance as the idealistic yet eccentric New York City cop who exposed corruption in the police department. Lumet's engaging, unpretentious style is on full display in this wide-ranging discussion, which took place following a special screening of a new print of Serpico, just a few months after Lumet received an Honorary Academy Award.

Glenn Close's Academy Award-nominated performance as the vengeful siren Alex Forrest in the 1987 thriller Fatal Attraction ranks among one of the most memorable villains in screen history, and is the definitive depiction of the fury of a woman scorned. The hit film, directed by Adrian Lyne, captured the popular imagination and changed the cultural landscape with its terrifying take on modern sexual warfare. Glenn Close, a five-time Oscar nominee and three-time Tony Award winner, spoke at the Museum about her harrowing performance as Alex, and about how she overcame her shyness to forge her remarkable career on stage and screen.

Throughout his career, the versatile French director Francois Ozon has made a wide range of films that display varying doses of outlandish comedy, transgressive sexual politics, and Hitchcockian suspense. While his movies are stylish and liberating, they also contain a poignant awareness of loss and unfulfilled desire. Ozon spoke at the Museum after a preview screening of his deceptively simple, profoundly haunting drama 5x2, the story of a failed marriage told in reverse chronological order. Also screened at the Museum on the same day, at the conclusion of a retrospective of Ozon's films, were four of his early short works: Bed Scenes, X2000, Truth or Dare, and Little Death. In the discussion, Ozon is alternately playful and serious. One can see how his relaxed, open approach elicits such truthful, revelatory performances.

Brad Bird made his mark as an animation director with the 1999 film The Iron Giant, which has gained recognition over time as a classic of storytelling and visual style. Bird's next film, The Incredibles, won the Academy Award for Best Animated Feature. Inventive and rich in its characterizations, it is the story of a family of retired superheroes trying to settle into suburban family life. The Pixar film was an enormous critical and commercial success. Bird spoke at Moving Image as part of the Museum's annual New York Film Critics Circle series.

The immigrant's sense of dislocation resonates in the films of Mira Nair, who often focuses on different permutations of the outsider—Bombay street urchins in Salaam Bombay!, Cuban immigrants in The Perez Family, a sixteenth-century Indian servant girl in Kama Sutra: A Tale of Love—and their disconnection from the social order around them. Nair's films often focus on complex female characters, and examine the complications that arise from the intermingling of ethnicities, traditions, and classes. In this talk, Nair discusses the examination of sociopolitical exclusion in her past work and in her adaptation of William Thackeray's Vanity Fair.

Legendary maverick Melvin Van Peebles is a novelist, composer, and filmmaker who has also worked in television, popular music, and theater. After spending the 1960s in Paris, he returned to the United States and made the groundbreaking 1971 film Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song. The stunning box-office success of this subversive and sexy film paved the way for filmmakers such as Mario Van Peebles, who directed New Jack City and Panther. Mario paid tribute to his father with his 2003 movie Baadasssss; in this lively discussion, Van Peebles père et fils share a lifetime of experience and a playful father-son rivalry.

Tim Burton may be Hollywood's most childlike grown-up—or its most grown-up child. Either way, Burton's fanciful movies express both the bright and dark sides of his boundless imagination. His heroes, including Pee-wee Herman, Edward Scissorhands, and Ed Wood, are sweetly eccentric outsiders who live in their own made-up worlds. Big Fish brings to life the tall tales of an aging Alabama salesman played by Albert Finney. The film blends an intimate family drama with a gently surreal carnival story. Burton spoke at the Museum just before the film's release, and just over a month after the birth of his son.

Francis Ford Coppola's 1982 film One from the Heart, a romantic fantasy set in Las Vegas, was intended as a light, frothy venture to follow the grueling, tortured production of Apocalypse Now. Instead, the movie was a commercial and critical disaster that received inordinate negative publicity and bankrupted Coppola's Zoetrope Studios. Twenty years after its release, the movie holds up extremely well as a charming and playful reinvention of the old-fashioned musical. Coppola was in a playful mood himself, even bursting into song, when he presented the New York premiere of a restored print at Museum of the Moving Image.

Ang Lee emigrated from Taiwan to America to make films. He has worked in a wide range of genres, moving fluidly between arthouse and mainstream filmmaking. Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon was the most successful foreign-language film ever released in the United States, and Brokeback Mountain earned Lee an Academy Award for Best Director. One of the keys to Lee's accomplishments is his creative partnership with James Schamus, president of Focus Features, who has co-written and/or co-produced all of Lee's films. Lee and Schamus spoke at the Museum before the release of their live-action comic-book blockbuster The Hulk.