Curated playlist
American action film directors
- Simon KinbergSimon Kinberg has a small cameo in one of his own scripts. In Mr. & Mrs. Smith, he plays the banker who chats with John Smith at a dinner party. He had started the screenplay years earlier, as his thesis project in film school. That scene…
- Steven SpielbergSteven Spielberg was born on the 18th of December 1946, in Cincinnati, Ohio, and by the time he was twelve years old, he had already staged and filmed a train wreck with his Lionel set. That eight-millimeter camera, borrowed from his…
- Robert RodriguezRobert Rodriguez made his first feature film for $7,000. That budget covered the entire production of El Mariachi, an action film shot in Spanish in 1992. It went on to gross $2.6 million at the box office. The money to make it came from a…
- J. J. AbramsJ. J. Abrams wrote his first film score at age 16 for a low-budget horror movie called Nightbeast. That was 1982, and it was not the work of a film student or an intern. It was the work of a teenager from Los Angeles who had already…
- Russo brothersThe Russo brothers directed Avengers: Endgame on a budget paid in part by student loans and credit cards. That credit card film came first. Before the billion-dollar box office receipts, before the Marvel Cinematic Universe, Anthony and…
- John SingletonJohn Daniel Singleton walked into the Cannes Film Festival in 1991 as a 23-year-old first-time director, his debut feature Boyz n the Hood already drawing the world's attention to a neighborhood most of Hollywood preferred to ignore. A…
- Patty JenkinsPatty Jenkins was seven years old when her father died during a NATO mock dogfight. He was thirty-one years old, a U.S. Air Force fighter pilot who had earned a Silver Star in Vietnam. Not long after, her mother was driving the family from…
- Colin TrevorrowColin Trevorrow grew up singing in the chorus of the San Francisco Opera, a detail that seems almost too cinematic for a boy who would later direct one of the highest-grossing films in history. Born on the 13th of September, 1976, in San…
- James MangoldJames Mangold grew up in Washingtonville, New York, a small Hudson Valley town, but his ambitions pointed far beyond it. He was born on the 16th of December 1963 in New York City, the son of two artists: Robert Mangold and Sylvia Plimack…
- Jon FavreauJon Favreau grew up in Flushing, Queens, the only child of a schoolteacher mother who died of leukemia when he was just twelve years old. His mother was Ashkenazi Jewish, his father a Catholic of Italian and French-Canadian ancestry. After…