Return of the Secaucus 7 is a 1980 American independent drama film written and directed by John Sayles and starring Bruce MacDonald, Maggie Renzi, Adam LeFevre, Maggie Cousineau, Gordon Clapp, Jean Passanante, and others. The film tells the story of seven friends who spend a weekend together in New Hampshire. The weekend is marred by the break-up of a relationship between two of the friends. This causes a ripple effect among the group and brings up old desires and problems.
Hirokazu Kore-eda is a Japanese film director, producer, screenwriter, and editor. He began his career in television and has since directed more than a dozen feature films, including Nobody Knows (2004), Still Walking (2008), and After the Storm (2016). He won the Jury Prize at the 2013 Cannes Film Festival for Like Father, Like Son and won the Palme d'Or at the 2018 Cannes Film Festival for Shoplifters.
Christopher Walton Cooper is an American actor. He has appeared in several major Hollywood films, including A Time to Kill (1996), American Beauty (1999), October Sky (1999), The Bourne Identity (2002), Seabiscuit (2003), Capote (2005), Syriana (2005), The Kingdom (2007), Where the Wild Things Are (2009), The Town (2010), The Muppets (2011), Cars 3 (2017), A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood (2019), and Little Women (2019). He also portrayed Sheriff July Johnson in the acclaimed miniseries Lonesome Dove (1989), which became one of the most successful Westerns in history.
David Russell Strathairn is an American actor. Known for his leading roles on stage and screen, he has often portrayed historical figures such as Edward R. Murrow, J. Robert Oppenheimer, William H. Seward, and John Dos Passos. He has received various accolades including an Independent Spirit Award, a Primetime Emmy Award, and a Volpi Cup, and has been nominated for an Academy Award, a BAFTA Award, two Golden Globe Awards, and four Screen Actors Guild Awards.
Paul Joseph Schrader is an American screenwriter, film director, and film critic. He first became widely known for writing the screenplay of Martin Scorsese's Taxi Driver (1976). He later continued his collaboration with Scorsese, writing or co-writing Raging Bull (1980), The Last Temptation of Christ (1988), and Bringing Out the Dead (1999). Schrader is more prolifically a director-- his 22 films include Blue Collar (1978), Hardcore (1979), American Gigolo (1980), Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters (1985), Light Sleeper (1992), Affliction (1997), and First Reformed (2017), with the last of these earning him his first Academy Award nomination. Schrader's work frequently depicts troubled men struggling through an existential crisis that is then punctuated by a violent, cathartic event.
Passion Fish is a 1992 American drama film written and directed by John Sayles. The film stars Mary McDonnell, Alfre Woodard, Vondie Curtis-Hall, David Strathairn, Leo Burmester, and Angela Bassett. It tells the story of a soap opera star (McDonnell), who after getting paralyzed in a car accident, is forced to return to her family home and rely upon a series of nurses, forcing each of them to leave her employment until one shows up guaranteed to stay.
Sir Stephen Arthur Frears is an English director and producer of film and television often depicting real life stories as well as projects that explore social class through sharply drawn characters. He has received numerous accolades including three BAFTA Awards, and a Primetime Emmy Award as well as nominations for two Academy Awards. In 2008, The Daily Telegraph named Frears among the 100 most influential people in British culture. In 2009, he received the Commandeur de l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres. He received a knighthood in 2023 for his contributions to the film and television industries.
Lone Star is a 1996 American neo-Western mystery film written, edited, and directed by John Sayles and set in a small town in South Texas. The ensemble cast features Chris Cooper, Kris Kristofferson, Matthew McConaughey and Elizabeth Peña and deals with a sheriff's investigation into the murder of one of his predecessors. Filmed on location along the Rio Grande in southern and southwestern Texas, the film received critical acclaim, with critics regarding it as a high point of 1990s independent cinema as well as one of Sayles' best films. It was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Writing, and also appeared on the ballot for the AFI's 10 Top 10 in the western category. The film was a box office success, grossing $13 million against its $3–5 million budget.
Matewan is a 1987 American drama film written and directed by John Sayles, and starring Chris Cooper, James Earl Jones, Mary McDonnell and Will Oldham, with David Strathairn, Kevin Tighe and Gordon Clapp in supporting roles. The film dramatizes the events of the Battle of Matewan, a coal miners' strike in 1920 in Matewan, a small town in the hills of West Virginia.
James Francis Ivory is an American film director, producer, and screenwriter. For many years, he worked extensively with Indian-born film producer Ismail Merchant, his domestic as well as professional partner, and with screenwriter Ruth Prawer Jhabvala. All three were principals in Merchant Ivory Productions, whose films have won seven Academy Awards; Ivory himself has been nominated for four Oscars, winning one.
Scott Alexander and Larry Karaszewski are an American screenwriting duo, best known for writing postmodern biopics with larger-than-life characters. They coined the term "anti-biopic" to describe the genre they invented: Movies about people who don't deserve one.They are uninterested in the traditional "great man" story, focusing instead on obscure strivers in American pop culture.
William Todd Field is an American filmmaker and actor. He is known for directing In the Bedroom (2001), Little Children (2006), and Tár (2022), which were nominated for a combined fourteen Academy Awards. Field has personally received six Academy Award nominations for his films; two for Best Picture, two for Best Adapted Screenplay, one for Best Director, and one for Best Original Screenplay.
Luke Davies is an Australian writer of poetry, novels and screenplays. His best known works are Candy: A Novel of Love and Addiction and the screenplay for the film Lion, which earned him a nomination for the Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay. Davies also co-wrote the screenplay for the film News of the World.
Debra Granik is an American filmmaker. She is most known for 2004's Down to the Bone, which starred Vera Farmiga, 2010's Winter's Bone, which starred Jennifer Lawrence in her breakout performance and for which Granik was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay, and 2018's Leave No Trace, a film based on the book My Abandonment by Peter Rock.
Ramin Bahrani is an Iranian-American director and screenwriter. Film critic Roger Ebert ranked Bahrani's Chop Shop (2007) as the sixth-best film of the 2000s, calling him "the new director of the decade". Bahrani was the recipient of the 2009 Guggenheim Fellowship. Bahrani is a professor of film directing at his alma mater, the Columbia University School of the Arts.
Men with Guns is a 1997 American political drama film written and directed by John Sayles, inspired by the 1992 novel The Long Night of White Chickens by Francisco Goldman. It stars Federico Luppi, Damián Delgado, Damián Alcázar and Mandy Patinkin. The executive producers were Lou Gonda and Jody Patton.
Hossein Amini is an Iranian-born British screenwriter and film director. Amini has worked as a screenwriter since the early 1990s. He was nominated for numerous awards for the 1997 film The Wings of the Dove, including an Academy Award for Best Writing – Adapted Screenplay. He also won a "Best Adapted Screenplay" award from the Austin Film Critics Association for his screenplay adaptation of Nicolas Winding Refn's Drive (2011), based on the novel by James Sallis. For his directorial debut, he both wrote and directed The Two Faces of January, an adaptation of the Patricia Highsmith novel.
Harriet Frank Jr. was an American screenwriter and producer. Working with her husband Irving Ravetch, Frank received many awards during her career, including the New York Film Critics Circle Awards and the Writers Guild of America Award, and several nominations.
Vulcan Productions produced documentary films, television programming and virtual reality experiences that drove awareness around environmental and social issues. The company was founded in 1997 by late Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen and his sister Jody Allen. It closed in 2021.
Sarah Green is an American film producer. She currently sits on the National Board of Directors for the Producers Guild of America. On January 24, 2012, she was nominated for an Academy Award for the film The Tree of Life.
