The story of the making of Robert Rodriguez’ first feature, El Mariachi, is one of those infamous guerrilla filmmaking stories and is chronicled in the excellent book Rebel Without A Crew. The film was shot in numerous locations in Acuña, Coahuila, located in Northeastern Mexico. Rodriguez had a…

Some interesting comments from fabled German filmmaker Werner Herzog during the making of Fitzcarraldo: “Kinski says [the jungle] is full of erotic elements. It’s not so much erotic, but full of obscenity. Nature here is vile and base. I wouldn’t see anything erotic here. I…

Darren Aronofsky is known throughout the world as the celebrated director of such films as Black Swan, The Foundation and Requiem For a Dream. But he didn’t always have big budgets to use. Like every filmmaker, he had to start somewhere. Aronofsky’s debut feature, Pi (also known as π), was…

You may have heard some of the crazy stories from Francis Ford Coppola’s frenzied production of Apocalypse Now. It’s lauded as one of the great films of the 1970s now, but during production many people didn’t even believe the film would ever see the light…

Continuing from yesterday’s piece about directors and how they made it, we continue the list of interesting cases of filmmakers making their start in the business… Christopher Nolan As a dual citizen of the United Kingdom and the United States, he spent his childhood in…

I wanted to investigate how various directors broke into film, how they “made it.” I tried to select filmmakers from a wide breadth of backgrounds, nationalities and experiences. Obviously, this won’t be a comprehensive list of everything that’s possible, but these examples cover many of…

“Don’t think that because you haven’t heard from me for a while that I went to sleep. I am still here, like a spirit roaming the night. Thirsty, hungry, seldom stopping to rest.”