What contemporary influential directors do I need to know about?
A lot of contemporary directors get their influences from seventies filmmakers. In the case of someone like Sofia Coppola, she is a direct descendant of Francis Ford Coppola. Her movies have pissed some people off, they're like these strange visual tone poems, but she has a really unique sensibility. Some other people who have that seventies influence, that Hal Ashby sensibility, or that seventies Woody Allen sensibility certainly, are people like Alexander Payne, who has done some wonderful Picaresque comedies about ideosyncratic, loser types and underdogs. David O. Russell has done some really interesting things, he's worked in the studios sometimes with movies like Three Kings that was critical of the Gulf War, and was a big George Clooney vehicle at the same time. It was a really interesting film. There are some directors out there that are really shocking in the way they push the envelope, the salon types, they really tackle taboo subjects. There are female directors. We have already mentioned Sofia Coppola, but there's Allison Anders who has done really interesting work. Jane Campion's The Piano. Nicole Holofcener's movies are about women and deal with them in a very unique way. She gets into the subjects of class and and things that real women face. We didn't mention Spike Lee, but Spike Lee ushered in a whole wave of black filmmakers, and while there haven't been as many filmmakers to have had the same success as he has, maybe John Singleton has in a mainstream way. Spike Lee is constantly challenging himself. He'll do genre movies. He'll do big studio movies. He'll do documentaries. You never know what you're going to get from him and he does wonderful work. I also think Spike Jonze and Michel Gondry take romantic comedies and take them to dizzying heights. They both do strange and wonderful things with movies. They make funny, sad movies like no one's seen before. They cut their teeth in music videos. There are a lot of interesting filmmakers out there.
