Moviemakers' Master Class: Private Lessons from the World's Foremost Directors

Interviews with Scorsese, Lynch, Godard, Woo, the Coen brothers, and more of the world’s greatest directors on how they make films—and why.

Every great filmmaker has a secret method to his moviemaking—but each of them is different. In Moviemaker Master Class, Laurent Tirard talks to twenty of our era’s most important filmmakers to get to the core of each director’s approach to film, exploring the filmmaker’s vision as well as his technique, while allowing each to speak in his own voice.

Martin Scorsese likes setting up each shot very precisely ahead of time—so that he has the opportunity to change it all if he sees the need. Lars Von Trier, on the other hand, refuses to think about a shot until the actual moment of filming. And Bernardo Bertolucci tries to dream his shots the night before; if that doesn’t work, he roams the set alone with a viewfinder, imagining the scene before the actors and crew join him.

In these interviews with David Cronenberg, Pedro Almodovar, Tim Burton, Wim Wenders, and more—which originally appeared in the French film magazine Studio and are being published here in English for the first time—enhanced by exceptional photographs of the directors at work, Laurent Tirard has succeeded in finding out what makes each filmmaker, and his films, so extraordinary, shedding light on both the process and the people behind great moviemaking.

“Tirard’s healthy balance of nuts-and-bolts information and conceptual musings should be of interest to lay readers as well as would-be auteurs.” —Publishers Weekly

“[An] excellent resource.” —Library Journal

© 2024 Farrar, Straus and Giroux (Ebook): 9781429934367

Release date

Ebook: 4 June 2024