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From Twinkle, with Love by Sandhya Menon

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This link will take you to an op-ed written by Davis, herself.

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It took more than 20 years to get from writing her first film to directing one of the season's most anticipated dramas. She's just getting started.

"Are you wearing a black hat?"

Boston director DeMane Davis is texting me from the other side of a restaurant near Kenmore Square. We've met a few times prior to this planned hangout and network on the socials, but I'm early and trying to avoid interrupting a meeting she's having before our interview. I can tell from afar that Davis, in fashionable thick red frames with sweeping hand gestures to rival any maestro or character, is the sort of collaborative artist who likes to hold court. But since one of the reasons I wanted to profile her in the first place is that she deserves more recognition as one of New England's most active burgeoning creative talents behind the camera today, I don't want to just walk up to her crew.

Still, Davis insists.

"Come over," she texts. "You need to meet this guy."

A few drinks later, with her friends now chatting amongst themselves, I get an opportunity to speak with Davis at length about her work in movies and television-from her start directing low-budget films in Boston to major recent gigs, including the upcoming ballyhooed Netflix series Self Made: Inspired by the Life of Madam C.J. Walker . Few cliches are more abused than claiming someone who is making big moves is down to earth, but Davis, who was born and raised in Roxbury, remains not just a resident and product of the Hub, but hopes to use her momentum to get more idiosyncratic Boston stories into Hollywood. Within minutes, we're discussing her coming of age and how she forged her 1997 feature-length debut using raw ingenuity and local friends while working as a copywriter.

"I initially thought I would write the great American novel," Davis says about her early years as a Metco student, taking buses to Wellesley and back. "What I knew, though, even back in middle school, was that writers don't make any money, but there was an art class where, for some reason, the teacher had us make advertisements. I created Elmer's Glue pancake mix and wrote a tagline, and [the teacher] said, 'You know, you could work in advertising. They make like $40,000 a year.' And that just burned in my brain. I figured I could work in advertising during the day, and write the great American novel at night."

After a brief stint studying public relations at BU-"They took all my money and I left after a year," Davis says-she moved to New York in the mid-'90s to dive into the advertising world. At the same time, she remained close with her family in Warren Gardens in Roxbury, and on one inspirational visit back home glimpsed the bedroom wall of her niece, then only a teenager, which was covered in funeral programs.

"Two girls were shot in the head as they sat in their car," Davis recalls. "One of her best friends was stabbed in school and died. She was 16 and had lost four friends in a year and a half and had never spoken about it. I was overwhelmed."

From the experience, Davis devised the concept for a screenplay: "If we continue to kill each other, there won't be any black people left." That led to writing her first script along with a business plan to help raise enough money to shoot Black & White & Red All Over , a serious but simple feature with just six characters and one location. "There were no craft services," Davis jokes. "My mother made mac and cheese."

Having left what she describes as a phenomenal apartment and ad campaigns for Snapple and other leading brands she was working with in New York, Davis jumped into her second project in 1997 after getting admitted to the Sundance Institute, a nonprofit "that actively advances the work of independent storytellers in film and theatre." On the strength of her debut, Davis and her art director were flown to Utah, where she began working on , a unique Boston drama about shoplifting that was released in 2001. With help from her original Black & White & Red All Over crew plus new collaborators from Sundance and other contacts-one friend gifted several minutes of pre-drone aerial footage he recorded during a commercial shoot he worked on-Davis returned with a solidly professional sophomore project. Lift even featured a then-unknown Kerry Washington, who went on to star as the lead Olivia Pope in the ABC drama .

"It's kind of amazing DeMane," Washington recently wrote on Twitter. "YOU gave me a shot at being a leading lady for the first time in LIFT. That eventually led to me being Olivia Pope. Ava [DuVernay] got inspired at Scandal to create her own television empire like Shonda [Rhimes]... FULL. CIRCLE."

"You know what you want as an outcome, but you have to be able to communicate that to different people," Davis says about her strategy as a director. "Then you have to allow for them to bring their expertise and their gifts, and you have to do that in a way that lifts them up, so they can do more of that work in the future."

For all the people Davis has brought into her camp-"I'm building my team every day," she says, "it's all about what kind of person you are, and who you attract"-she's also had a number of trailblazers help lift her up. Her relationship with Emmy Award-winner Ava DuVernay led to her working on the epic Oprah Winfrey Network show Queen Sugar and The Red Line on CBS. For Rhimes' Shondaland, Davis has directed episodes of , For The People , and How to Get Away With Murder !

"People want to pigeonhole you so they can make assumptions and say, I know where you fit-over here ," Davis says. "I don't want to fit in one place. I want to be able to do all of these things-they all feed into one another. Everything I've done up to this point is cumulative; I just try to find something I love in everything I do."

"Some people are driven and just won't stop," says Davis' nephew, Daniel Laurent, a well-known Boston hip-hop artist who played a small role in . "D dug into the process and the business all while freelancing and doing advertising spots and commercials-even working at the YMCA with kids, but all the while still having a kill-what-you-eat mentality, and to see her actually feasting off hunting is special. She is a woman, unapologetically, and for the advancement of her people and making real changes from the inside. I'm in awe."

After more than 20 years in the cut, networking and sharpening her skills on a range of projects, Davis was entrusted with her biggest challenge yet, to direct and produce on the set of . The story of Madam C.J. Walker, an African American hair care entrepreneur who became one of the country's first female self-made millionaires, the four-part Netflix series is based on the book, On Her Own Ground , written by Walker's great-great-granddaughter A'Lelia Bundles, and stars Academy Award-winner Octavia Spencer, as well as Tiffany Haddish, Blair Underwood, and other bigs.

"I first heard of Madam in elementary school," Davis says. "I was fascinated by her story-her parents were slaves, she was married at 14, she was widowed and a single mother at 19. ... She started going door to door at a time when black people were being lynched. ... She fucking hustled."

The project hit home. "Also," Davis says, "my first real job was as a gofer at a hair salon downtown. For a hot minute, I wanted to be a hairdresser. I liked how women would walk in head-down, with their shoulders hunched, but they would walk out transformed and full of emotion. I liked that someone I knew and worked with did that for somebody."

When Davis heard a Walker project was in development, she began to ask around. "I said, 'I'm black, I'm a woman, I have this in me, and I want to be a part of it,'" she says.

As it has in the past for Davis, initiative led to meetings, which spurred her getting the gig as one of two directors (the other director, Kasi Lemmons, recently spoke with film critic Jake Mulligan, who will publish their interview in the coming weeks). She wasn't alone in committing to for profoundly personal reasons.

"You're talking about people who turned down jobs [on other shows] with 10 or more episodes because they cared, because they wanted to do this," Davis says. "Everybody's invested-everybody knows the story, and a lot of the people on the set are black women who have black hair and know what that's like."

There's already talk about potential awards for the series. Davis, though, is too humble to go there. For now, she's hoping to find enough time between shooting other projects to watch with friends when it premieres on March 20.

"This is all a gift," Davis says. "My neighbors think I have a roommate because I will [get good news about a project] on the phone and scream out loud, 'Can you believe this shit?!?'

"Really, it's a gift."

A Queens, NY native who came to New England in 2004 to earn his MA in journalism at Boston University, Chris Faraone is the editor and co-publisher of DigBoston and a co-founder of the Boston Institute for Nonprofit Journalism. He has published several books including 99 Nights with the 99 Percent, and has written liner notes for hip-hop gods including Cypress Hill, Pete Rock, Nas, and various members of the Wu-Tang Clan.

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SELF-MADE: THE DEDICATION OF BOSTON DIRECTOR DEMANE DAVIS

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DAVIS (RIGHT) ON THE SET OF SELF-MADE WITH OCTAVIA SPENCER AS MADAM C.J. WALKER | PHOTO COURTESY OF NETFLIX It took more than 20 years to get from writing her first film to directing one of the season's most anticipated dramas. She's just getting started. "Are you wearing a black hat?"

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Here is a link to her Wikipedia page.

This is video interview with Guerrero.

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Click here for a video ranking of some of her best work.

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Lynne Ramsay (born 5 December 1969) is a Scottish film director, writer, producer, and cinematographer best known for the feature films Ratcatcher (1999), Morvern Callar (2002), We Need to Talk About Kevin (2011), and You Were Never Really Here (2017).

Ramsay began her career by garnering attention through her short films beginning with "Small Deaths", followed by "Kill the Day" and "Gasman", all receiving awards and nominations. Gaining recognition from these films she was approached to write a treatment that would eventually become her debut feature film Ratcatcher funded by BBC Scotland and Pathé. Ramsay's Ratcatcher was given many awards along with Ramsay being awarded BAFTA's Award for Outstanding Debut by a British Writer, Director or Producer.

Her films are marked by a fascination with children and young people and the recurring themes of grief, guilt, death, and its aftermath. They are low on dialogue and explicit story exposition, and instead use images, vivid details, music, and sound design to create their worlds. In April 2013, she was selected as a member of the main competition jury at the 2013 Cannes Film Festival. In 2015, she was named as a member of the jury for the main competition at the 2015 Venice Film Festival.

Ramsay was born in Glasgow on 5 December 1969. She studied fine art and photography at Napier College, Edinburgh. Ramsay cites watching Maya Deren's film Meshes of the Afternoon in school as a turning point in her career, inspiring her to apply to film school on a whim and encouraging her turn towards filmmaking. Originally focused solely on cinematography she eventually moved toward directing feeling a stronger connection to being a director and documentarian. In 1995, she graduated from the National Film and Television School in Beaconsfield, England, where she specialised in cinematography and direction.

Ramsay won the 1996 Cannes Prix de Jury for her graduation short film, "Small Deaths". Her second short film, "Kill the Day", won the Clermont Ferrand Prix du Jury; her third, "Gasman", won her another Cannes Prix du Jury in addition to a Scottish BAFTA for Best Short Film.

"Small Deaths" (1996), is Ramsay's debut short film that she completed as her graduating film at the UK's National Film and Television School. It is a series of three vignettes of children grappling with familial realities and the repercussions of their actions. Ramsay is the writer, director and cinematographer for this film.

"Kill the Day" (1997), written and directed by Ramsay, captures a day in the life of a heroin addict recently released from jail, and in the process inventively probes the inner workings of memory.

" Gasman" (1997), also written and directed by Ramsay, is about a brother and sister who attend a Christmas party with their father, and encounter two other children who are strangely familiar with him.

" Swimmer" (2012), was co-commissioned by BBC Films, Film4 and the London Organising Committee of the Olympic and Paralympic Games. The short was nominated for the British Independent Film Awards (BIFA) in the category for Best Short Film. It won a BAFTA Award for Best Short Film at the 66th British Academy Film Awards in 2013.

Ratcatcher (1999), Ramsay's debut feature, won critical acclaim and numerous awards. It was screened at the 1999 Cannes Film Festival and opened the Edinburgh International Film Festival, winning her the Guardian New Directors prize. She also won the Carl Foreman Award for Newcomer in British Film at the 2000 BAFTA Awards, the Sutherland Trophy at the London Film Festival and the Silver Hugo for Best Director at the Chicago International Film Festival.

Morvern Callar (2002), won Samantha Morton the British Independent Film Award for Best Actress, and Kathleen McDermott the Scottish BAFTA Award for Best Actress. It also won the 2002 C.I.C.A.E. Award and the Award of The Youth at the 2002 Cannes Film Festival. The motion picture soundtrack includes tracks from Stereolab, Aphex Twin, Broadcast, Velvet Underground, and Nancy Sinatra. Ramsay is credited as the writer and director. The film is based on Alan Warner's 1995 novel of the same name, Morvern Callar. It was featured in the Directors Fortnight for the Cannes Film Festival 2002 and then went on to open the Edinburgh International Film Festival in August of the same year. The film also featured at the Telluride, Toronto, San Sebastian, Dinard and Stockholm Film Festivals of 2002. It was nominated for seven British Independent Film Awards.

In 2001, it was announced she was slated to direct the adaptation of Alice Sebold's The Lovely Bones, which she had read in a manuscript form prior to its publication. She experienced great frustration in her involvement with adapting the novel, during which personal and professional problems saw her step away from the project in 2004, with the job of directing eventually going to Peter Jackson, whose version of the film received largely negative reviews. She stated in an interview: "People started to call it 'The Lovely Money,' they were getting greedy around it. And I could feel the vibes. It became like the Holy Bible, I kept handing in drafts and I thought they were good, but it was like 'But that's not exactly like the book, the book's going to be a success.' That was the mistake they made with the project." She stated additionally that she considered Jackson's interpretation of the film, with a desire to stick as closely as possible to the original story, as partially responsible for what she considered the lacklustre quality of the finished product.

We Need to Talk About Kevin (2011), was Ramsay's next feature-length film in which she was the writer, producer and director. The film, based on Lionel Shriver's novel, is about a mother dealing with the aftermath of a school massacre committed by her son. Budgetary difficulties held the production up, but after several script drafts, the film, which employed a fragmented, elliptical narrative and starred Tilda Swinton as the tormented mother, premiered in 2011, to great acclaim at the Cannes Film Festival. Ramsay went on to receive a BAFTA nomination for Best Director as well as taking the Best Director prize at the British Independent Film Awards, and a win for Best Film Screenplay at the Writer's Guild of Great Britain.

In 2013, Ramsay was slated to direct Jane Got a Gun. Natalie Portman signed on to star and produce the film as the farmer wife of an outlaw husband, who, after his gang turns on him, she must defend with the help of an old lover. In March 2013, Ramsay left the project due to creative differences with producers and funders, including over the latter's demand for a happy ending. She was replaced by Gavin O'Connor. Actor Jude Law also left the production shortly after. This caused significant backlash towards the director, during the fallout she would go to Santorini where she worked on the script that would be her next film You Were Never Really Here.

Ramsay was planning to direct a modern adaptation of Herman Melville's . She has stated that the film will be set in space, and deal with themes of psychology and claustrophobia, quoting "So we're creating a whole new world, and a new alien. [It's] a very psychological piece, mainly taking place in the ship, a bit like , so it's quite claustrophobic. It's another monster movie, cos the monster's Ahab." The film has yet to come to fruition.

Ramsay directed You Were Never Really Here, an adaptation of Jonathan Ames's novella of the same name. It premiered to wide critical acclaim in competition at the 70th Cannes Film Festival in 2017, where it received a seven-minute standing ovation, and Ramsay won the Best Screenplay award. The film, starring Joaquin Phoenix, was released by Amazon Studios.

In 2018, she revealed she had started writing a script that she describes as an "epic environmental horror". In November 2020, it was announced Ramsay would be filming an adaptation of Stephen King's The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon. and adapted Margaret Atwood's Stone Mattress In November 2022, it was announced that Ramsay will be directing an adaptation of Ariana Harwicz's novel Die, My Love, which will be produced by Martin Scorsese and Jennifer Lawrence, the latter of whom will additionally star as a woman whose driven to insanity by her marriage and childbirth.

Ramsay directed the promotional video for the Manchester-based indie-rock band Doves' single "Black and White Town", which was released on 7 February 2005. However, Ramsay's version was re-edited and the released version was significantly different from her original piece.

Many of Ramsay's film explores themes of death, rebirth and childhood.

Ratcatcher reflects these themes through the death of a young child and rebirth for the protagonist in moving out of Glasgow.

Morvern Callar feature these themes in the visual metaphor of a maggot and carrot as a symbolization of death and transformation.

In 2007, Ramsay was rated number 12 in Guardian Unlimited's list of the world's 40 best directors working at that time.

Sean O'Hagan wrote in The Guardian that "Ramsay is entertaining company, whether talking about the art films she loves -by Bergman, Cassavetes, Fassbinder - or railing against the 'bullshitters and backstabbers' of the film industry."

The Harvard Film Archive describes Ramsay as "an uncompromising filmmaker fascinated by the tremendous power of cinema to appeal directly to the senses and awaken new depths in our audio-visual imagination. Immersive and at times almost overwhelming, Ramsay's films abound with uncommon imagery arresting for its remarkable use of texture, composition, color, music and sound."

In her The New York Times biography, Ramsay's work is described as having a "gritty, realistic visual style that demands attention."

Tilda Swinton, whom Ramsay directed in We Need to Talk About Kevin, called her "the real McCoy", saying, "She is one of those rare directors who creates the kind of films that just would not be there if she didn't make them."

British film critic Jonathan Romney, when speaking on We Need to Talk About Kevin, opined "Ramsay thinks not in concepts but in images. She doesn't make intellectual films, but ones that are close to music, taking visuals to the point of abstraction."

Los Angeles Times columnist Mark Olsen considered Ramsay "one of the leading lights of young British cinema", describing her additionally as "among the most celebrated British filmmakers of her generation."

"Black and White Town" (2005)

On 8 October 2013, Ramsay was awarded an honorary doctorate by the University of Edinburgh for her contribution to British film.

Ramsay was previously married to Rory Stewart Kinnear, a writer and musician. She has one daughter.

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Lynne Ramsay (born 5 December 1969) is a Scottish film director, writer, producer, and cinematographer best known for the feature films Ratcatcher (1999), Morvern Callar (2002), We Need to Talk About Kevin (2011), and You Were Never Really Here (2017).

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Here is a video interview with Rees on The Today Show.

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Dee Rees and the Art of Surviving as a Black Female Director (Published 2020)

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From her Oscar-nominated “Mudbound” to her new foray into blockbuster cinema, she is trying to create a new kind of Hollywood empire.

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This link will take you to an interview with Faris and her husband about directing together.

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Valerie Faris. Director: Little Miss Sunshine. Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris have built an impressive body of work by perpetually seeking innovative projects in a variety of mediums. After introducing bands such as REM and The Red Hot Chili Peppers on their ground breaking MTV show The Cutting Edge, Jonathan and Valerie continued to work in music television directing music videos and documentaries for bands such as The Smashing Pumpkins, Jane's...

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Click here to see 17 of her movies ranked and discussed.

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In "High Life," the filmmaker's English-language début, Denis set out to tell the story of the last person in the world.

One night many years ago, a French family was driving through the North Region of Cameroon when they ran out of gas. As they scrambled to refill the tank, the car was surrounded by a pride of lions. To protect their young daughter, the parents locked her in a metal trunk. The animals circled the vehicle continuously, and to distract herself from danger the girl repeated her own name. Over the years, the story of the little blond French girl besieged by lions became something of a legend in the area. It was said by some that she had survived for fifteen days under the hot African sun.

Decades after the story first circulated, the little girl returned to Cameroon from Paris, where she had come of age. She was still small, and her hair remained blond, but she was now in her sixties. She had become a director and was there to work on a feature film. Sometimes, when scouting locations in the bush with her camera-laden crew, she would come upon locals and introduce herself. "Oh, but it's you," they would say. "The girl with the lions."

Only as an adult did Claire Denis realize that she hadn't been afraid of the lions all those years ago. She suspects that she was too young to be frightened, she has said, and remembers instead a feeling of calm remove from the world, as though she were "in a different time frame." She recalls how the animals, aglow in the headlights, appeared pale, almost white. "I thought it was the most beautiful sight," she told me. She rolled her hips from side to side. "They were so cool and so slow."

The incident could be a scene from one of Denis's films. The dialogue is sparse, and the cast of characters is limited. The themes are there, too: the refusal of victimhood, the embrace of solitude amid chaos, and race as an unremarked on but glaring element of a situation that is easy to imagine but impossible to fully explain.

"Chocolat," Denis's first feature, from 1988, was also shot in Cameroon. It tells the story of a complicated friendship between a white girl, named France, and Protée, her family's black adult servant, in the years leading up to the country's independence, in 1960. Protée is France's only companion, and through their asymmetrical alliance we feel the creeping evil of colonialism. Like water, it finds its way into even the most hidden interpersonal crevices, which no amount of good will or innocence or even love can caulk. In almost every shot, Denis acknowledges the cultivated ignorance and cruel indifference of whiteness. Protée rarely speaks, and in one scene, in which he serves dinner, the camera cuts off his body at the neck. Denis has said, of "Chocolat," "I think I had a desire to express a certain guilt I felt as a child raised in a colonial world."

Denis's films can be hard to find in the United States, but she is beloved by many young American filmmakers for, among other things, her artful confrontations with race. Barry Jenkins, the director of "Moonlight," which won last year's Academy Award for Best Picture, told me, "I get the sense that she truly just doesn't give a shit, that it doesn't occur to her that she shouldn't be 'allowed' to handle this material. It's not a foreign world to her, in a way it might appear to be when you look at her and see a white Frenchwoman." He continued, "You watch 'Chocolat,' and it's remarkable. This is a first movie by someone who has not one question about what her rights are as a storyteller."

Since "Chocolat," Denis has directed a handful of shorts and documentaries and a dozen feature films. These include a drama about cockfighting in Paris ("No Fear, No Die," 1990); a vampire thriller that French audiences booed for its extreme violence and deviant sexuality ("Trouble Every Day," 2001); and a dreamy reimagining of the philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy's account of his heart transplant, shot in locations including Tahiti and Switzerland ("The Intruder," 2004). "White Material," released in the U.S. in 2010, was many Americans' introduction to Denis's work. A sort of companion piece to "Chocolat," it tells the story of a Frenchwoman, played by Isabelle Huppert, who refuses to leave her family's coffee plantation in an unnamed African country, despite the rebel violence erupting just outside its walls.

Denis's films are filled with lush scenes of the natural world-African deserts, snowy Alpine fields, and the mineral-green waters of the South Pacific-and characters who tend to reveal themselves not through dialogue but through how they move and look. Alex Descas, one of the actors with whom Denis has worked longest, and who credits her with writing complicated, realistic roles for black actors at a time when few others did, described her artistic mode succinctly: "Film is not theatre," he told me. Last month, at a screening of her latest movie, "Let the Sunshine In," at the IFC Center, in Manhattan, Denis said, "I once read that I like to film bodies. No! But, if you choose someone, that person has a body. They have feet, hands, hair, breasts, ass-all of that is part of what is important." The film stars Juliette Binoche, as a divorced painter who dates men she shouldn't: a married banker, a narcissistic actor, a standoffish curator. "She wanted my character to be beautiful and desirable and luminous," Binoche told me. In the final shot, the camera-which one critic described as "smitten"-stays on her smiling face, which is ablaze with delusion and hope. Denis, according to Binoche, "works like a portrait painter."

Wesley Morris, a cultural critic for the Times, compared Denis's work to a stew that's been cooking all week-a reduced and potent pleasure. "My favorite image in any of her movies, or maybe in all movies, is from 'The Intruder,' " he said. He went on to describe the scene in which Beatrice Dalle, who plays a dog breeder living in the Jura Mountains, is pulled by huskies through a snowy forest on a sled. "She's in utter ecstasy," he said. "Very few women in the history of cinema have ever looked that happy doing anything." Careening through the snow, she shouts commands. "Faster!" she yells. "Go, go, go, go, go!" Her grin is wide but in flashes looks more like a grimace. As with many of Denis's heroines, and Denis herself, the pleasure Dalle's character experiences is not far from fear.

When I met Denis in Paris, in late March, it was just warm enough to forgo a winter coat but still cold enough to regret it. Denis, who turned seventy-two last month and can't weigh much more than a hundred pounds, wore stiff selvedge jeans and a Levi's denim jacket buttoned all the way up, like a tiny Edwardian greaser.

We walked from her editing suite, in a newly gentrified neighborhood in the Twelfth Arrondissement, to a brasserie down the street that she and her producers rag on constantly but patronize regularly. A recent throat surgery had roughened Denis's already gravelly voice-it sounded at times as though she were impersonating a sexily androgynous Frenchwoman, instead of merely being one.

Denis was carrying a backpack in lieu of a purse, and she flung it carelessly into the banquette. "Time is very slow and yet very fast," she said, without making eye contact. "Astrophysicists say it does not even really exist." (We conducted all our conversations in English, which Denis speaks fluently, with some odd turns of phrase.) She was in the final weeks of editing "High Life," her English-language début, about a band of convicts sent into space to harvest energy from a black hole, and had rescheduled our plans several times. I was left with the impression of trying to coax, cajole, and ultimately capture a particularly dexterous pet-and with the sense that she felt my presence was a waste of time, at a moment when she needed all that she could get.

"High Life," which cost millions more to make than any of Denis's previous films, seems, on its surface, dramatically divergent from the rest of her body of work, yet versions of its premise swirled inside Denis's mind for more than a decade. For years, she had wanted to tell the story of the last person in the world. In the film, the galactic convicts perish one by one. Only a single felon survives, along with his daughter, who was born on the spaceship. (Olafur Eliasson, the Danish-Icelandic conceptual artist who a decade ago erected waterfalls in the East River, designed the spaceship for the movie.) Their relationship-literally forged in a vacuum, with a whiff of the taboo-was her primary interest in the story. "It's feminine and masculine," Denis said. "It's family blood but it's not the same sex."

The script, which Denis wrote with her longtime screenwriter, Jean-Pol Fargeau, took years to complete. (Zadie Smith and Nick Laird worked on a draft that Denis ultimately rejected.) Though Denis treats scripts as provisional and merely suggestive documents, hers are full of vivid sensory detail. When "High Life" 's main character, played by Robert Pattinson, is introduced, he is "pressed against the exterior of the spaceship, like a mountain climber against a sheer cliff face." Later, when he changes out of his spacesuit, he does so "like a knight removing armor."

Denis saw Pattinson in "Twilight," she said, and was struck by his "heartrending charisma." She had wanted someone older for "High Life"-she thought at one point of Philip Seymour Hoffman-but after meeting with Pattinson in Los Angeles and Paris she realized that "he was already in the film." She went on, "When he said to me, 'Are you sure?' I said, 'It's already too late. It's you or nobody else.' " She chose "High Life" 's other stars, including Juliette Binoche and the English model and actress Mia Goth, with similarly instinctual possessiveness. In the summer of 2015, Denis and her producer, Oliver Dungey, flew to Atlanta to meet André Benjamin, the rapper, actor, producer, adroit hat-wearer, and all-around cultural icon, better known by his stage name, André 3000, and for his flamboyant role in the Atlanta hip-hop duo OutKast. Denis had enjoyed Benjamin's lead performance in "All Is by My Side," a 2014 biopic of Jimi Hendrix, and she had got it in her mind that he should play a part in "High Life."

The three had agreed to meet at the St. Regis Hotel's restaurant for lunch. "Here we are," Dungey recalled, "me-this sort of posh, square English guy-and Claire-this scorny French lady-and in walks André." Benjamin said, "I'll be honest with you. I don't know who you are or what you want, but everyone is telling me I have to meet with you and I've got to do this film."

"They immediately hit it off," Dungey said. "I'm just sitting there, picking at grits. The purpose of the trip was accomplished within thirty seconds."

The only other people in the restaurant were two Gambian ladies visiting from, of all places, the Cotswolds. "Why were they there?" Dungey said. "I don't know. But, then again, why were we there?

"Claire and André were talking about eating snake," he continued. He shrugged in a manner that suggested his exclusion from the conversation had been so profound as to be painless. "Claire was saying how it gives you this vitality, this life force. And one of these women from Gambia turns around and says, 'She's right!' "

Moments later, a statuesque woman arrived. "She waltzes in and apparently knows André," Dungey said. "She hugs him, asks how he's been, blah, blah, blah. This woman looks fantastic: she has ribbons in her hair, lots of beads, she's colorfully dressed. André introduces her to us as Dana." Here Dungey paused, smiled, and shook his head. "This is not Dana. This is Queen Latifah.

"Claire is obviously taken with this woman while having no idea who she is. She just kept telling her she looked like a queen," he continued. (Denis insists that she was well aware of Dana's identity.) "The ladies from Gambia know who she is, though, and they also know who André is, and they ask for a photo. Queen Latifah ended up paying for all our lunches without saying anything."

Dungey added, "It was really one of the most charming and weird moments of my entire life."

Claire Denis was eight weeks old when she and her mother moved from Paris to Cameroon, where her father was serving as a French colonial administrator. In the course of the next thirteen years, the family expanded to include several more children, and lived in territories that would become Mali, Djibouti, and Burkina Faso. Denis's parents supported decolonization, and she is adamant that "Chocolat" is not autobiographical. "My parents would certainly not have had someone serve them meals. I wasn't raised like that," she told me. "I was raised in a world that probably never actually existed, the world my parents hoped for . . . where there was no separation between people. I was raised in a dreamland." Denis was at times the only white child in her class. "It was very embarrassing," she said. "Not because I was white, but because I was not black."

Like the space-born girl in "High Life," Denis grew up knowing little about the place her family came from. They returned to France when Denis was thirteen, after she and her sister contracted polio. She has said that she arrived "already nostalgic for another world." In Paris, she read the postcolonial theorist Frantz Fanon's masterpiece, "The Wretched of the Earth." The book, written in the middle of the Algerian war, argues that colonial subjects suffer not just from material indignities and humiliations but also, more painfully and perversely, from an internalized inferiority, which Fanon believed only violence could dismantle. Denis once said, "When you are fourteen or fifteen and you read 'Les Damnés de la Terre,' and you've been raised in the midst of the African colonies, it shocks you. Really, that experience will stay with me for the rest of my life."

She left home at seventeen, married a much older man, a photographer, and moved to London. They separated after a few years, but he encouraged her to return to Paris to study filmmaking at the Institute for Advanced Cinematographic Studies, the rigorous and highly technical film school where Louis Malle and Alain Resnais were trained. After graduating, in the early seventies, Denis began a traditional apprenticeship, assisting mostly on films shot in Paris.

Unlike her characters, who tend to be laconic and aloof, and her narratives, which are elliptical and enigmatic, Denis speaks fluently, linearly, and sometimes at great length, with an instinctual command of pacing, foreshadowing, and suspense. Much of what she said to me was expressed in the form of stories, which she delivered as if for the first time.

One winter, Denis said, she was living alone in a sixth-floor studio apartment "in a good district of Paris," as she put it, "not a poor little dimly lit street in a vague suburb." She was working on a movie, and, after a long day, a co-worker dropped her off at home. It was freezing cold, she recalled, "and I was wearing those eight clothes you wear when you're working nights in film." Beneath her military parka were three sweaters and a large scarf.

When she reached her building, "I went to the elevator, and I pressed the button, and the elevator never arrived," she said. "So I opened the door to the staircase and started climbing, and then I realized the light in the staircase was not functioning-but there was a window, and I knew my building by heart." She was between the second and third floors when, "suddenly, somebody took me by the hood of my coat, and I saw a knife in front of my eyes and then saw it come to my throat. And then very quickly-you become Einstein at that moment-I realized the elevator was not working, the light was not working, and now this knife: this is a setup." Denis went on, "I start talking to the guy, keep pretending I was accepting." He cut her hand and told her he wanted to cut her eyes. "I knew, all the time, if I lost control at that moment I was dead, or wounded so bad it was the same. In the end, after having accepted certain things, I escaped him and ran to the sixth floor with my bag, bleeding." The man chased her up the stairs but she made it into her apartment.

"It took me one or two hours before I could call the police," she continued. "My nervous system had done so much." They took her to the station, where, she said, the officer who helped her file a report commented, " 'I don't know what you're doing in your life to be out at 1 A.M., wandering alone . . . I have to tell you, if you were my daughter, I would have preferred that my daughter accept to be killed than to be sullied.' " Denis "realized that no one believed in my dignity, in my strength, in my lucidity," she said. The last time she saw the officer, she said to him, "In a way, you insulted me more than I was hurt by the rapist." Denis told me, "I did recover. I did recover."

In subsequent years, Denis was an extra in Robert Bresson's "Four Nights of a Dreamer" and cast a movie for Andrei Tarkovsky. She also worked as an assistant director for Jacques Rivette and Costa-Gavras, and travelled through the Southwest with Wim Wenders, for "Paris, Texas" and "Wings of Desire," and the Louisiana bayou with Jim Jarmusch, for "Down by Law." Wenders had wanted someone "strong and tough," he told me. He recalled that when he met Denis at the Houston airport, in 1983, a "fragile and relatively petite blond young woman came out of the gate." Denis said, "At the very beginning, they would say, Can you drive? I said yes. Can you do this? I said yes. Can you jump? I said yes. I said yes to everything, and sometimes it wasn't true. It wasn't that I was eager to prove that a woman could be as strong as a man, but I thought, If I say no, then it's finished."

In 1994, a few months after Nelson Mandela was elected President of South Africa, Denis was invited to a film festival in Johannesburg. She travelled there with Alex Descas, and they decided to make a detour to Durban, the childhood home of the Portuguese poet Fernando Pessoa. Speaking of his poems, Denis said, "There was something I could always read in between the lines. I think because we had both been babies in these faraway countries-far from our language and our grandparents and our food."

They stayed at a hotel in Durban with a view of the ocean. "Now, when I see the sea, I simply must swim, even if it is winter," Denis said. "I put on my swimming costume and ran to the beach. And now that Mandela was elected, I thought, no longer would the beach be separated between blacks and whites. Alex asked me, 'Are you sure?' I said, 'Yes!' I ran down there. I was alone on the beach, I swam. And I rested in the sand, and suddenly I saw a teacher with little children, little black boys and girls, walking at the edge of the waves and singing. They began playing in the water, and I was in the exaltation of being in the Indian Ocean in Durban in South Africa at the bottom of the earth, so I ran! I ran to the teacher and the little children and I said, 'Good morning! Good morning!' I jumped into the water next to them, and they screamed of fear. I politely moved away and excused myself. I suddenly realized it had been only two months and it was not the proper thing to do."

The encounter, as Denis described it, features the sublime natural landscape and stark colors of some of her most vivid scenes. Less a storyteller than she is an image-maker, she once became fixated on re-creating the painter Francis Bacon's "very peculiar" colors, which make it impossible to tell whether the flesh he depicts is "raw or rotten." Another time, to prepare Descas for a role she took him to a Jean-Michel Basquiat exhibition, to point out the paintings' "deathlike smiles."

"She's creating her own world," Vincent Maraval, a co-founder of Wild Bunch, a European company that has distributed Denis's films, said. "She doesn't really look at what other people think or do. She's never fashionable. She just describes her obsessions the way they are, not the way they should be, or in a way that might be palatable. She isn't trying to represent France or women or her era." Maraval cited as an example "35 Shots of Rum," from 2008, which depicts a college-aged girl and her loving father, an African immigrant and widower: "They're not rich, but they're not gangsters. She made a movie about what is probably the majority of France, and she just looked at these people in a human way." Almost the entire cast is black, and although students in a classroom scene chatter about Frantz Fanon, there are few explicit allusions to race. It's as if the matter were both too obvious and too beside the point to bother addressing at all.

Similarly, in "High Life," some of the convicts are black, but they are not a message-telegraphing majority. When the film's American producers read the script, they urged Denis to change the fact that the first character to die was a black man. In the U.S. today, they told her, this was just not done. For Americans, Denis said, the problem of racism "is buried so deep. For me, it was not deep." She refused to change the plot, writing in more dialogue instead. In the final version, André Benjamin's character says, "See? Even in outer space, the black ones are the first to die."

With "High Life," Denis will inevitably receive more international attention than she ever has, but for years many filmmakers have spoken of her as a sort of secret saint. Along with Barry Jenkins, the director Josh Safdie is an admirer, and Greta Gerwig has said that seeing Denis's "Beau Travail" (1999) made her want to make movies of her own. Based impressionistically on Melville's "Billy Budd," "Beau Travail," shot in Djibouti, follows a group of French legionnaires. Stationed near the salt flats of Lake Assal, without imminent assignment, they alternate between aggression and existential futility. We watch them perform an endless series of almost absurdist rituals: peeling vegetables, ironing creases into trousers that nobody but themselves will see, performing military exercises that resemble ballet choreography.

"It's such a macho, minimalist film," said Andrew Lauren, one of the producers of "High Life" and its financier, who saw "Beau Travail" years ago, on the recommendation of his father, the designer Ralph Lauren. "When this new project came to us, and I went back through Denis's filmography, I was, like, 'Wait, she did "Beau Travail"?' I would have sworn that a man made it. She's like the precursor to Kathryn Bigelow."

Barry Jenkins told me, "There were sequences of 'Moonlight' that just would not have been filmed the way they were had I not been familiar with Claire's work. Certain things about framing the men and the pace at which we edited their interactions share a lot with 'Beau Travail.' " He laughed as he admitted that, without realizing it, he had shot a scene in "Moonlight" that almost exactly re-created one in "Beau Travail." In both, men stand alone, languorously smoking cigarettes, as plumes of smoke intermittently float across the frame. "Her metaphors are so delicately constructed," Jenkins said. "Not every audience member is going to get them, and that's O.K. She places a tremendous amount of trust in the audience."

Unlike Denis's past movies, which were shot on location, mostly in France and Africa, "High Life" was largely filmed at a studio in Cologne, during two months last fall. The cast and Denis stayed at a hotel thirty minutes away. The drive, made each morning and night-often with a P.A. behind the wheel who was described to me as "the worst driver in the history of mankind"-took them past oil refineries, sausage factories, and tractor-trailer bordellos that were parked, with German efficiency, along the highway exits.

By all reports, it was a trying experience. Denis was unused to filming in a studio. She made scene changes constantly and with little warning, sometimes by text message. Benjamin described an atmosphere of inadvertent method acting. "These convicts are all supposed to be from different places-they don't know one another at first, and they're just trying to make it," he said. "And, on set, it was the same! I'm this guy from Atlanta, Claire's French, obviously, most of the guys on set are German, the actors didn't know each other. It was a trip." Robert Pattinson, who, several people said, spent much of his time on set asking existential questions- Wait, who am I in this movie? What are we making here?-told me, "It's a very abstract way of working. It feels like experimental theatre, frankly."

Lauren said, "A lot of people were thinking, This is good for my résumé, but I wish I weren't here." He continued, "I think, if you make a movie with Claire, you can make any movie." He compared the process to over-preparing for the SATs, or training at high altitudes, so that your performance at sea level feels easier on game day. At an early color-test screening, held at an ornate theatre in Cologne, Denis's voice was the only one in the room, saying, "Merde! Crap! What are we doing? Why am I here?" Lauren said he thought "everyone sort of took it personally."

At the end of each day, the cast and crew convened at the hotel bar. "Everyone would sort of be sitting at different parts of the bar, and she'd walk in and it was, like, Shit! Claire's here!" Lauren recalled. "I saw a lot of people wanting to leave many, many times, but they stayed. They stay because they love her-even though they can't stand her."

Denis does not deny such behavior. "I can be the worst person, the meanest person on a set," she said. "Shouting, screaming, complaining. I don't have a lot of respect for myself as a director. People accept me the way I am, because they know I'm not faking. Probably."

When I described these accounts to the filmmaker Olivier Assayas, a close friend of Denis's, he laughed. "There's a certain form of chaos in the way she works," he said. "When you make movies, it's always disturbing how confident everyone involved is that they know how things should be done. And you have to constantly remind them, No, you don't know how it's done, I don't know how it's done, nobody knows how it's done. You create chaos as a way of destabilizing the surroundings that could bring you to make something that would otherwise be conventional."

A few days after meeting Denis, I accompanied her on a train trip from Paris to Rennes, where she was serving on the jury of a film festival. It was a dreary morning, the sky damp and rat-colored. "I am covered, as if on the North Pole," Denis told me, pointing at her coat. We passed through the kind of semirural landscape that surrounds major cities all over the world, and which appears quaint only in countries that are not one's own. Before settling into conversation, Denis braved the café car, where an excruciatingly slow-moving line had formed before the train even left the station. She stood behind a family, cooing at a baby in Breton stripes.

After buying coffee and taking her seat, Denis began to talk about her mother, who had died, at the age of ninety-four, six months earlier, during the filming of "High Life." Still in mourning, Denis seemed incapable of avoiding the topic, turning to it in many of our conversations, with little or no segue. "When she was pregnant with my little brother, she had a bad pregnancy and had to stay in bed," Denis said. After giving birth, her mother became depressed. "I remember very well, this little boy was my son, for a long time, until she recovered and took over. I remember when she was an old lady and she would say, 'My son, my son!' She was really in love with her son. And I had to tell her, 'You know, in the beginning, he was mine!' And it's true that at that moment I realized how beautiful it was to see a new baby born, the changes every day."

Denis, who never remarried, also never had children. Earlier, when we spoke about the decision, or nondecision, she told me, "It was a pain, and then it was a memory, and now I have accepted it." She added, "Maybe this is just convenient for me, but I never thought of being a mother as an accomplishment for a woman." At the same time, "loneliness, independence, solitude-it's heavy," Denis said. Since her divorce, a half century ago, she has had two long-term companionships. One lasted for twelve years, and the other, with a man whom she would not identify beyond confirming that he's "also in film," is, as she put it, "still going on." She continued, "It's also heavy to be a couple, but solitude is something very special that clearly tells you at some moments, in the day or night, that if you were to die in the next moment you wouldn't ever again see a human face."

We had been speaking for almost two hours, and Denis's throat was beginning to strain. There were quiet patches in her speech that made her exhaustion sound like sadness, even when she was recounting joy. Denis, as many people told me, takes real pleasure from the world. Long after she had finished working with Aurelien Barrau, a French astrophysicist with whom she consulted on "High Life," Denis continued to call him, to describe beautiful sights she had encountered while walking-once, a tree shivering in the wind in a way she thought he would enjoy. Des Hamilton, Denis's casting director, told me about her devotion to a particular brand of Eccles cakes, and about how she adored a silk scarf she had bought while in his company. "You know when you purchase something, you can get a little high?" he said. "Well, with Claire, her high is sustained for far longer than most people's."

Denis's sensuality may play some part in explaining her relationships with actors, which nearly everyone I spoke with described in romantic terms. "It has a taste of eroticism rather than psychology," Agnes Godard, Denis's longtime cinematographer, told me. Hamilton recalled witnessing the initial meeting between Denis and Pattinson, in Los Angeles, and feeling like "these are two people on a date, and I really shouldn't be here, maybe I should actually remove myself?" With obvious pride, Denis recounted how Pattinson took the train from London to visit her in Paris. "He came to me like a friend," she told me. "You know, in London, Robert has to hide because of girls?" (A representative for Pattinson said, "He doesn't hide from anyone.") Lauren told me, "Claire likes to be wooed. She wants her actors and actresses to want her as much as she wants them." He said that on set "they become, metaphorically, either her babies or her lovers-it's a bit hard to tell which."

The adoration is reciprocal, in large part because of the sustained and obsessive attention Denis pays her actors, an absorption that resembles love. "I got the sense she was contemplating everything about me at all times," the actress Tricia Vessey, who appeared in "Trouble Every Day," told me. "You feel like you're being thought of in ways that people don't usually think of you." Thought of, but also felt. "I touch them," Denis told me. "I have to." She worries sometimes that actors find the approach "shocking" and too French. "Instead of telling them, 'Can you please move your head two centimetres to the left,' it can be so much better to come and slightly move the head. And I know it's not normal, but I feel like I have to do that."

Onscreen, Denis can make even the oddest-looking faces appear iconic. "Whatever happens in a film, the minimum of the minimum for the director and for the D.P. is to see the real beauty in the actress or actor," she told me. "And by beauty of course I don't mean perfection." She went on, "I know that maybe the script is not perfect, maybe I am not the greatest director, but at least I know I'm looking for something, that little shine."

When she finds it, she is overcome. She nearly fainted when she saw Beatrice Dalle emerge on the set of "Trouble Every Day" in her wardrobe and makeup. "We had to stop shooting," Denis recalled. "I couldn't breathe." Even twenty years later, when she speaks with Dalle, she sees that night as though it were just five minutes ago. "She walked through these neon lights. Everything was white and red. It was too much, it was too great." "35 Shots of Rum" was the same. Near the end of the film, the daughter, played by Mati Diop, appears in a white dress. It seems that she is getting married. She looks like a woman but also like a child, and her father knows that he'll soon lose her. "It was a sequence shot," Denis said, "and we made two takes and I was crying. Not one tear-it was rivers. But, of course, it's fiction." ♦

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In "High Life," the filmmaker's English-language début, Denis set out to tell the story of the last person in the world.

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Click here to see filmlifestyle.com rank her 10 best movies.

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How Kathryn Bigelow changed the face of cinema forever

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Here is an article about her work as a Saudi Filmmaker.

Click here for a video interview with al-Mansour.

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Click here to read an additional article from the New York Times about her.

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For a time, it seemed as though Jane Campion wasn't receiving the respect she deserved. After considerable success in the early '90s, including a critical and commercial smash that won her the Palme D'Or, the New Zealand director released three movies that divided critics and baffled audiences. Had her moment passed? No, thank heavens. After a stint making television with the miniseries Top of the Lake, Campion has returned to cinema in a big way. She's become the first woman to be nominated for Best Director at the Oscars twice. A new generation of female filmmakers, including newly-minted Oscar nominee Maggie Gyllenhaal, have spoken glowingly of her influence; even her most divisive films have enjoyed critical re-appraisal. Jane Campion is increasingly recognized as not just one of the finest female directors, but one of the finest living directors, period.

There are a number of recurring themes in Campion's work: sensuality, sexuality, complex women, fraught family dynamics. Most of all, however, her work is defined by a sort of grace, an ease with itself that's evident even in her most alienating films. There are a number of shocking, upsetting moments throughout her filmography, but not once does she come across as a base provocateur. Her technical mastery - her unerring gift for composition and atmosphere - holds everything together, providing a beautiful logic for her films to run on. Even the ugly parts feel necessary and true.

Here are all eight of Campion's feature films, ranked from weakest to strongest.

8. Holy Smoke! (1999)

has an intriguing premise: Ruth ( Kate Winslet) has been swept up in an Indian new age cult, and her parents stage an intervention with the help of P.J. Waters ( Harvey Keitel), a hotshot cult deprogrammer. As the goofy exclamation point in its title suggests, Holy Smoke! is more comedic than Campion's other work, and it pulls it off surprisingly well. The very idea of a hotshot cult deprogrammer is pretty funny, and even the dramatic scenes have a certain camp sensibility: where else can one see Harvey Keitel in a red dress punch a woman in the face? But the film falters when its cult-deprogramming premise turns into a battle of the sexes that undermines what came before it. As Ruth uses her confidence and intensity to unravel P.J., she seems more likely to start a cult than join one. Still, it's a unique film, both generally and in Campion's filmography, and strong performances make it worth a watch.

7. In the Cut(2003)

When a movie gets an "F" grade from audiences surveyed by CinemaScore, it means one of two things: either the movie is genuinely bad (Alone in the Dark, Disaster Movie), or it's an art movie marketed as something more conventional (, ). , Campion's incisive, feminist take on the psychological thriller, was sold as a movie like . But while In the Cut also features a hunt for a serial killer in a gritty, noir-ish city, it's far less conventional than Se7en. The movie is told not from the point of view of Malloy, Mark Ruffalo's detective, but from his lover Frannie Avery. Played with brittle subtlety by Meg Ryan, Frannie begins to suspect Malloy of the murders. In fact, almost every man she meets becomes a suspect, and she's not paranoid to think so. In the Cut is occasionally too abstract for its own good, but it succeeds as a lurid thriller that understands women's terror rather than wallowing in it. Those arguing in bad faith might call it "misandrist," but Campion's perspective isn't one of hatred towards men so much as sympathy for women who never feel truly safe.

6. The Portrait of a Lady (1996)

Coming on the heels of Campion's greatest success, expectations were high for The Portrait of a Lady. An adaptation of a Henry James novel, it promised to lean into the Gothic elements of its predecessor, and it boasted an excellent cast ( Nicole Kidman, John Malkovich, and Barbara Hershey, to name just a few.) But critics and audiences were left cold; the Rotten Tomatoes consensus reads "Beautiful, indulgently heady, and pretentious, The Portrait of a Lady paints Campion's directorial shortcomings in too bright a light." But if anything, Portrait highlights her strengths. The production and costume design display her typically sharp attention to detail, with every setting fully realized. She continues to get excellent performances from her cast, especially a nuanced, fascinating turn from Hershey. And while individual plot developments might raise eyebrows (like how Kidman's Isabel blithely ignores the multitude of red flags Malkovich's Gilbert sets off), the whole of the eerie, gaslighting experience remains effective. Recommended for those who like their period pieces darker and weirder than most.

5. Bright Star (2009)

Campion had made period pieces before, but never one so understated as Bright Star. There's no gothic melodrama, and not a single finger gets chopped off. Instead, it tells the true story of the young, doomed poet John Keats ( Ben Whishaw) and his romance with the stylish, surprisingly sensitive Fanny Brawne ( Abbie Cornish). As a period romance and a biopic, Bright Star hits familiar story beats, but it's subtler and more restrained. John and Fanny aren't constantly gushing about their love for each other, just as the script doesn't make a fuss over Keats' genius. The score is lush, but not overwhelming, and many pivotal scenes (such as John and Fanny's first kiss, as well as the final scene) have no score at all. The film is a treat to look at, thanks to the late Janet Patterson's artful costumes and gorgeous cinematography from a then-unknown Greig Fraser (, ), but it never feels like a romance novel fantasy. These are real people, with real love for each other, which makes Keats' death so painful - and the final scene, where Fanny walks through the snow mournfully reciting the titular sonnet, so breathtaking.

RELATED: Jane Campion Becomes First Woman to Earn Two Oscar Nominations for Directing

4. An Angel at My Table (1990)

An Angel at My Table was Campion's first trip into the past, which she's returned to often over her career. By making period pieces, her feminist eye and fascination with power dynamics allow her to explore different facets of history, from the perspective of those who might have been otherwise ignored. Janet Frame ( Kerry Fox), the acclaimed writer whose autobiography inspired Angel, wasn't ignored, but she had to fight to be heard. Shy, depressed, but otherwise sane, Frame was involuntarily committed to a psychiatric hospital for eight years, where she wrote to keep her wits about her; the day before a scheduled lobotomy, she won a prestigious literary prize, and the procedure was called off. A less curious filmmaker might have only dramatized her time in the asylum, but Campion doesn't reduce Frame to the worst things that happened to her. Over 30 years and three different actresses, Campion charts her development as a writer and a person: she stubbornly defends her word choices in a grade school poem, she connects with her New Zealand homeland, and she experiences a delayed coming of age. All of this is depicted with Campion's typical empathy and grace.

3. Sweetie (1989)

There's something queasily prescient about , Campion's caustic, darkly comic debut. The titular Sweetie ( Genevieve Lemon) is a childish, unstable thirty-something with delusions of stardom, whose coddled upbringing turned her into a tyrant. She holds her exhausted, dysfunctional family hostage, demanding constant attention and viciously lashing out when she doesn't receive it. It must have seemed outsized and grotesque when it first came out; now, the internet is full of Sweeties. Sweeties populate YouTube and Tik Tok, black holes of drama who are convinced of their own brilliance. For four years, there was even a Sweetie in the White House. Lemon, in brilliant form, embodies the behavior of a malignant narcissist, and Campion nails the soul-sucking cycle of dealing with a person who seems to be pure id. As ruthless as it may seem, however, Sweetie is not heartless: it understands the good intentions behind indulgent parenting, and even finds a bit of sympathy for Sweetie herself. She's obnoxious at best and terrifying at worst, but in the end she's just an excitable girl who doesn't know any better.

2. The Power of the Dog(2021)

Almost 10 years to the day after her last film premiered at Cannes, Jane Campion's return to the movies was announced. Two years later, The Power of the Dog premiered to critical raves, racking up countless awards and reinforcing Campion's reputation as a master filmmaker. It's worth the hype: Power has been described as Campion's "victory lap," but there's nothing easy or complacent about it. A character drama set on a Montana ranch at the tail end of the Old West, Power shows that neither her visual style nor her writing talents have diminished. Adapted from the Thomas Savage novel, Campion has penetrating insight into the psychology of these characters. The sadistic rancher Phil ( Benedict Cumberbatch) is a self-loathing homosexual, but Campion doesn't leave it at that: she understands that he's deeper than a gay-cowboy archetype, so she makes Phil a complicated mess of various insecurities and coping mechanisms. Just as compelling is one of Phil's favorite targets, Peter ( Kodi Smit-McPhee), a boy whose initial gentle awkwardness hides something more complex and dangerous. Add in painterly cinematography, a dissonant Jonny Greenwood score, and a poignant supporting performance from Kirsten Dunst, and Power has the makings of a modern classic.

1. The Piano (1993)

It was impossible to follow up . It made Jane Campion the first woman to ever win the Palme D'Or at the Cannes Film Festival. It made her only the second woman to be nominated for Best Director at the Oscars. (She could have easily won, too, if Schindler's List didn't come out the same year.) She won Best Original Screenplay, Holly Hunter won Best Actress, and 11-year-old Anna Paquin won Best Supporting Actress. It was adored by critics, and grossed over 20 times its budget. To make a film more successful than The Piano would require the kind of artistic compromise Campion had no truck with, so she didn't bother trying. This approach frustrated critics, but it only made The Piano more special in hindsight.

The Piano tells the story of Ada McGrath (Hunter), a mute Scottish woman who moves to New Zealand with her daughter Flora (Paquin) as part of an arranged marriage. She has no love for her husband Alisdair ( Sam Neill), but eventually falls for George Baines (Harvey Keitel), the man to whom Alisdair trades her beloved piano. An arrangement for her to earn the piano back turns into a slow, seductive romance, so convincing and erotic that one can look past the questionable implications of the "deal." What follows is a story of love, repression, and loneliness.

The Piano could have easily become an overheated melodrama, were it not for the fact that everyone involved did their job perfectly. The sweeping cinematography by Stuart Dryburgh captures a world of color in a craggy, remote setting, and Michael Nyman 's score (one of the most inexplicable snubs in Oscar history) swirls and swoons with elegant beauty. Every performance, even Neill's villainous Alisdair, contains multitudes; the expressive Hunter and the perfectly intuitive Paquin are the best of them all. And it's all held together by an exquisite craftswoman with a singular vision.

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Every Jane Campion Film, Ranked: From 'The Piano' to 'Power of the Dog'

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We rank two-time Oscar nominee Jane Campion's movies from The Piano to The Power of the Dog.

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And here is a link to some of her cinematic trademarks - read an article or watch a video.

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Learn from one of the most inspirational directors out there.

Ava DuVernay is a celebrated director known for her poignant storytelling and powerful visual language. Throughout her career, she has tackled important social issues and given a voice to underrepresented communities through her films and documentaries.

From Selma to The 13th, her work has been recognized with critical acclaim and numerous awards.

As a director, there are many lessons we can learn from her approach to filmmaking, from attention to detail to collaboration with her cast and crew.

In this article, we will explore some of the directing lessons we can glean from Ava DuVernay's films, and how we can apply them to our own work to create impactful and authentic stories.

Let's dive in.

Credit: Paramount Pictures

7 Directing Lessons From Ava Duvernay Films

DuVernay is an accomplished filmmaker who has directed several critically acclaimed films and documentaries. Her work often explores themes of race, identity, and social justice. Here are some directing lessons we can learn from her films:

1. Authenticity is key: DuVernay's films often feature characters and stories that are authentic and relatable. As a director, it's important to create a world that feels authentic to your characters and their experiences.

2. Use visuals to convey emotion: DuVernay is known for using visuals to convey the emotions of her characters. Whether it's through close-ups or long shots, she is able to evoke powerful emotions in the audience through her use of imagery.

3. Attention to detail: DuVernay is known for her attention to detail, and her films reflect that. As a director, it's important to pay attention to every detail, from the costumes to the lighting, in order to create a cohesive and compelling story.

4. Collaboration is key: DuVernay has a reputation for being a collaborative director, and she often works closely with her actors and crew to bring her vision to life. It's important to create a collaborative environment on set in order to bring out the best in your team.

5. Make bold choices: DuVernay is known for taking risks and making bold choices in her films. As a director, it's important to be willing to take risks and make bold choices in order to create something unique and memorable.

6. Use music to set the tone: Music is an important element in DuVernay's films, and she uses it to set the tone and create an emotional connection with the audience. As a director, it's important to choose the right music to enhance the emotional impact of your film.

7. Highlight the voices of underrepresented communities: DuVernay's films often center around underrepresented communities and highlight their stories. As a director, it's important to use your platform to amplify the voices of those who are often marginalized or ignored in mainstream media.

Credit: Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures

Summing Up Directing Lessons From Ava Duvernay Films

Ava DuVernay's films offer a wealth of directing lessons that can be applied to a range of projects. From her attention to authenticity and detail to her willingness to make bold choices, her approach to filmmaking has earned her critical acclaim and the admiration of audiences around the world.

By studying her work, we can learn how to create powerful, emotionally resonant stories that have a lasting impact on our audiences. So whether you're just starting out in your directing career or looking to take your work to the next level, there are many lessons to be learned from the films of Ava DuVernay.

Let me know what you think in the comments.

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7 Directing Lessons From Ava Duvernay Films

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Learn from one of the most inspirational directors out there.

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Click here for an article about Ephron's work.

Click to read or listen to an analysis of Ephron's work from a film critic.

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Check out this video for some of Coppola's filming trademarks.

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Sofia Coppola was destined to be a part of Hollywood. The director, screenwriter, and producer is the daughter of Francis Ford Coppola, the director of "The Godfather" trilogy, and Eleanor Coppola, documentary filmmaker. Not unlike the Corleone family, the Coppolas are powerful and dynastic in their own right. Perhaps her astute connections to Hollywood are best illustrated through the Coppola family's six-month quarantine at their Napa Valley estate where three generations of Coppola's watched each other's films.

While Sofia Coppola may have gotten her start in Hollywood through nepotism, she has established a unique and talented voice of her own since then. Though she boasts a diverse filmography, it is clear that Coppola's upbringing defines her cinematic perspective, and her films explore shared themes: the mundane aspects of the celebrity, concurring feelings of isolation and invasiveness, and the relationship between father and daughter.

Coppola was first thrust into the spotlight by her father. Following Winona Ryder's sudden departure from the role of Mary Corleone during the filming of "The Godfather Part III," Francis Ford Coppola enlisted a then 18-year-old Sofia Coppola to fill the role. However, Coppola never aspired to be an actress; in describing her motivation for filling the role, Coppola has said, "It seemed like he was under a lot of pressure and I was helping out." Sofia Coppola's part was terribly received, with several critics scapegoating her role for issues with the overall film.

Following this controversial acting experience, however, Coppola had no shortage of alternative venues to experiment in. Through her family's connections, Sofia Coppola had the freedom to try a variety of fields: she starred in a Madonna music video, attempted modelling and photography, and even designed a Japanese clothing line. However, the pivotal moment in her career came when Sonic Youth's Thurston Moore recommended that she read "The Virgin Suicides" by Jeffrey Eugenides, which she eventually adapted into her first feature film as director.

"I just feel like I have a feminine point of view and I'm happy to put that out there," Coppola has said. Certainly in "The Virgin Suicides" (1999) Coppola captures the haziness of distant memories and the idealism of teenage romantic affection. Though the film revolves around the alluring and enigmatic Lisbon sisters, it is told from the outsider perspective of the neighborhood boys. With an intrigue that borders on obsession, the boys attempt in vain to understand the Lisbon sisters and the complexity of female adolescence. The film is gruesome and features the premeditated suicide of all the Lisbon sisters. Nevertheless, "The Virgin Suicides" is a love letter to female adolescence. Coppola manages to capture the warm intimacy between the Lisbon sisters through a pastel color palette and handheld videography.

"The Virgin Suicides" marked the emergence of Sofia Coppola's individual artistic voice, but the film would not have been possible without Francis Ford Coppola's assistance. In the film, the younger Coppola uses a cool filter to create an oppressive foreboding atmosphere. This same technique is a Francis Ford Coppola staple, most notably used in his 1983 film "Rumble Fish." Additionally, the elder Coppola also produced the movie under his own company, American Zoetrope.

In later films, Sofia Coppola managed to establish an identity even more her own. However, her lifelong proximity to Hollywood still looms large in her perspective as a director.

Fame's paradoxical sensation of isolation and invasiveness are illustrated in Coppola's 2003 film "Lost in Translation," which centers around Bob Harris, a movie star in the twilight of his career, spending time in Japan while in between movies. As a celebrity, Harris inevitably lives with a compromised sense of privacy. Yet, being in a foriegn country, Harris is disoriented and lonely.

Once again, Coppola focused on themes of the celebrity experience in her 2010 film "Somewhere," which follows a celebrity on the rise. However, rather than exploring the more glamorous aspects of celebrity life, Coppola hones in on the mundane, centering the movie around the relationship between the protagonist and his eleven-year-old daughter and the passionless vices he relies on to pass the time.

Coppola is undeniably at the forefront of female directors in Hollywood. In 2003, she was the first female director to be nominated for an Academy Award for "Lost in Translation." In 2017, Coppola's film "The Beguiled" made her the second female to win Best Director at the Cannes Film Festival. However, because of her filial ties, Coppola's success should not necessarily be used as a metric of progress for women in the film industry.

Currently, Coppola is shifting her direction toward television. In a partnership with Apple and A24, Coppola will be creating an episodic television series for Edith Warton's novel "The Custom of the Country." Fans look forward to seeing how she will translate her signature themes and styles to the small screen.

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Woman Director Spotlight: Sofia Coppola | Arts | The Harvard Crimson

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Though she boasts a diverse filmography, it is clear that Coppola's upbringing defines her cinematic perspective, and her films explore shared themes: the mundane aspects of the celebrity, concurring feelings of isolation and invasiveness, and the relationship between father and daughter.

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Visit this link to learn more about her life.

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Mira Nair

Mira Nair is a filmmaker completely grounded within the world she lives. Her films often explore the conflicts inherent with families of recent immigration and ways to bridge the gap between cultures, races, and genders. They challenge stereotypes and generational assumptions, while remaining grounded in the values she holds close.

Born in India and educated at Delhi University and Harvard, her debut feature film, Salaam Bombay! (1988) was nominated for an Academy Award® for Best Foreign Language Film after winning the Camera D'Or at the Cannes Film Festival. Her next film, Mississippi Masala (1991), premiered at the Venice Film Festival. In 2001, Monsoon Wedding won the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival and went on to receive a Golden Globe® nomination for Best Foreign Language Film. With 12 feature films to her credit, her work continues to push boundaries and explore the human spirit.

Ever sensitive to social issues, Mira Nair shares her energies between filmmaking and the two non-profit organizations she founded. In 1988, with the proceeds from Salaam Bombay!, she established the Salaam Baalak Trust, which offers a safe and welcoming environment to thousands of street children every year. In 2005, Nair founded Maisha, a center in East Africa providing film labs and workshops for aspiring screenwriters, directors, actors, technicians, and documentary makers coming from Uganda, Tanzania, Kenya, and Rwanda.