Museum of the Moving Image Pinewood Dialogues

The versatile, often outspoken actor Tim Robbins made his debut as a director and writer with the prescient and impressive political satire Bob Roberts, a mock documentary in which he plays a right-wing, folk-singing Senate candidate who embodies the greed and self-interest of the 1980s. With its sharp views of media manipulation, corruption, and the role of money in politics, the film is as timely today as it ever was. Robbins spoke at the Museum about his career, his family's love of music, and American politics just before heading to Cannes for the premiere of Mystic River.

Irish-born director Neil Jordan's film The Good Thief is an English-language homage to a French classic, Jean-Pierre Melville's Bob le flambeur, that was itself an homage to American film noir. Something like a remake of a remake, its storyline is fittingly about art forgery and theft. Above all, it is a romantic thriller with a soulful jazz style. In this discussion following a screening of The Good Thief, Jordan (The Crying Game, Interview with the Vampire) discusses how he transformed the Melville original and gave it a contemporary feeling inspired by the urban films of Wong Kar-Wai.

The elusive nature of reality, and the way that perception is shaped by memory and imagination, is among David Cronenberg's key subjects. Working in the supposedly lowbrow genres of horror and science fiction (Videodrome, Scanners), and in the highbrow form of literary or theatrical adaptation (Naked Lunch, M. Butterfly, Spider), Cronenberg has created a remarkably varied body of work. A decade after his complete retrospective at the Museum, Cronenberg returned to Moving Image to discuss Spider, his adaptation of Patrick McGrath's novel about a schizophrenic whose tenuous hold on reality is threatened by fragmented memories of a family trauma.

Film editor Thelma Schoonmaker's collaboration with Martin Scorsese is one of the most enduring and fruitful in the history of film. The two met at New York University in the 1960s, and Schoonmaker edited Scorsese's first feature, Who's That Knocking at My Door? (1967). She won the first of three Academy Awards for editing the masterpiece Raging Bull (1980), and she has cut all of Scorsese's films since, winning Oscars for her work on The Aviator (2005) and The Departed (2006). She spoke at the Museum of the Moving Image just before the release of Gangs of New York (2002).

Raised in Manhattan's Little Italy, Martin Scorsese is truly a New York City director. He has repeatedly captured the gritty, often brutal vitality of the city in such contemporary American classics as Mean Streets, Taxi Driver, Raging Bull, and GoodFellas. Prior to the release of his most ambitious New York City film to date, the 19th-century epic Gangs of New York, Scorsese spoke at the Museum with New York Times critic Janet Maslin about his career and about the constant struggle between commerce and art in modern Hollywood. The discussion was the opening program in a two-month Scorsese retrospective at the Museum.

Far From Heaven is Todd Haynes's most critically acclaimed film to date. Nominated for four Oscars, it swept the New York Film Critics Circle awards, including Best Film and Best Director. Both an homage to and an update of Douglas Sirk's 1955 melodrama All that Heaven Allows, the movie stars Julianne Moore as a 1950s housewife coming to terms with her husband's homosexuality and her own affair with a black man. At a special preview screening, Haynes discussed the film's astonishing craftsmanship, its political relevance for contemporary audiences, and his desire to make a film that would engage audiences intellectually and emotionally.

British director Mike Leigh's films evolve from a unique and remarkable collaborative process. The actors spend months on rehearsal, story development, dialogue, and discovering the emotional truth underlying the drama. Although often described as documentary-like and naturalistic, Leigh's films are highly crafted, precisely detailed, and deeply stylized. All or Nothing, starring Leigh's frequent collaborators Timothy Spall and Lesley Manville, was a return to the contemporary working-class milieu of Leigh's earlier films following the success of the period costume drama Topsy-Turvy. In this discussion just before the film's New York premiere, Leigh, Spall, and Manville elaborate on their creative process.

Sam Mendes was an acclaimed British theater director before making an astonishing screen debut with American Beauty (1999), a satirical, compassionate, highly theatrical dark comedy set in contemporary American suburbia. The film, starring Kevin Spacey and Annette Bening, won five Academy Awards, including Best Director and Best Picture. For his second film, Road to Perdition, Mendes ventured into a mythological American landscape to create a 1930s period film about gangsters, fathers and sons, violence, and redemption. Exquisitely crafted and deeply felt, Road to Perdition further establishes Mendes as a distinctive cinematic stylist, and as a remarkable collaborator. He talks about working with two screen icons—Tom Hanks and Paul Newman—and about his creative partnership with the great cinematographer Conrad Hall, who received a posthumous Academy Award for Road to Perdition.

Boys Don't Cry marked the arrival of three major talents: its two stars, Hillary Swank (who won the Oscar for Best Actress) and Chloë Sevigny, and its ferociously gifted director, Kimberly Peirce. Dramatizing the true story of Brandon Teena, a woman who was raped and killed by friends because she lived as a man, Boys Don't Cry is a gripping, tender, and sad love story with a deep feeling for the story's rural Midwestern location. Peirce talks about researching and preparing the film, making an engrossing drama on a tight budget, and being true to Brandon's heartbreak and compelling story.

Willem Dafoe is an off-Broadway theater actor turned film star who went from playing the heavy in movies like To Live and Die in L.A. and Streets of Fire to a saintly Army officer in Platoon and, even more saintly, Jesus in Martin Scorsese's The Last Temptation of Christ. At the time of this interview, Dafoe was winning acclaim for his performance as the notorious film star Max Schreck in Shadow of the Vampire, an inventive behind-the-scenes movie about the making of Nosferatu. Dafoe talked about the process of film acting, including the startling physical transformation he had undergone for this role.

British director Terence Davies's highly personal early films, including Distant Voices, Still Lives and The Long Day Closes, contrasted the gloomy, repressed atmosphere of his provincial small-town childhood with a longing for the freedom represented by movies and popular songs. Davies turned to literary adaptation with The Neon Bible and The House of Mirth, an emotional, exquisite adaptation of the Edith Wharton novel, starring Gillian Anderson. This discussion took place just before the movie's U.S. release. Because of the quiet intensity of his films, the biggest surprise here may be the mischievous humor that Davies displays throughout the talk.

A college football player, a boxer, and a bullfighter, Budd Boetticher lived a life as full of adventure as the westerns that he directed. He was one of a select group of American filmmakers whose artistry wasn't fully appreciated until the rise of auteurist criticism in the 1960s. Boetticher's best films were the seven westerns he made with actor Randolph Scott and screenwriter Burt Kennedy, including Seven Men from Now, which was restored and presented at the 2000 New York Film Festival. In conjunction, Moving Image presented a retrospective of Boetticher's films; this was one of his last personal appearances before his death in 2001.

As a teenager growing up in the Bronx, George A. Romero was arrested for hurling a flaming dummy off a roof while filming his 8mm epic The Man from the Meteor. Always a resourceful provocateur, Romero virtually invented the independent horror movement with his ultra-low-budget zombie film Night of the Living Dead (1968). Having lived and worked in Pittsburgh since the 1960s, Romero is a true maverick, making funny, scary, thoughtful films outside of the Hollywood system. He spoke on the opening day of a Moving Image retrospective of his films.

Canadian director Patricia Rozema made her name with the quirky, contemporary independent features I've Heard the Mermaids Singing and When Night Is Falling. She changed direction with the period film Mansfield Park, an adaptation of Jane Austen's most difficult novel. "It's a tangled and dark work with a kind of atmosphere of sexuality and menace on the whole," says Rozema, as she talks candidly and intelligently about how she created a film that brought a modern perspective to its interpretation of the Jane Austen novel, while remaining true to the spirit of the book.

Paul Schrader made his mark as a film critic with a definitive essay about film noir. As a filmmaker, he received widespread attention for his screenplays for Martin Scorsese's Taxi Driver and Raging Bull. Since his directorial debut with the incisive working-class drama Blue Collar, Schrader has made some of the most austere and rigorous movies to emerge from contemporary Hollywood. His biggest critical success to date, which he discusses here, is the independent film Affliction, a lean and unrelenting version of Russell Banks's novel, a father-son drama featuring a riveting central performance by Nick Nolte.