Anthony Minghella, Writer-Director

When I’m at work on a film, I’m much more likely to be in thrall to a painting or a poem than to a shot in another movie.

Born and raised on Great Britain’s Isle of Wight, the son of an Italian ice cream merchant, Anthony’s path to filmmaking began with a love for music, and as a teenager he performed in local folk clubs and rock venues. While still an undergraduate at the University of Hull in Yorkshire, he wrote some dialogue to connect several of his songs into a musical, and as a result was commissioned to write a play, which led to success as a playwright. Truly, Madly, Deeply, his feature film directing debut, was a surprise international hit. Anthony is the writer-director of The English Patient, The Talented Mr. Ripley, and Cold Mountain.

Kimberly Peirce, Writer-Director

You’ve subjected yourself to every character, to what they want and need . . . You follow your intuition, but you also want to know and follow your craft because making a movie is like being an archaeologist—you’ve got to dig out what’s been buried, the underlying emotional truth.

Kimberly was born in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. She earned a B.A. in English and Japanese literature from the University of Chicago, and worked in Japan for two years as a photographer, taking pictures of sumo wrestlers, geisha and yakuza. As an M.F.A. student in film at Columbia University, she learned about the murder of Brandon Teena, formerly known as Teena Brandon. Kimberly traveled to Falls City, Nebraska, where Brandon had lived, and began the research that five years later culminated in her first feature as a director, Boys Don’t Cry, co-written with Andy Bienen. She and Bienen have written a murder mystery based on a true story set in Hollywood in the 1920s, which she will also direct. She is working with writer Rafael Yglesias on Childhood’s End, and with David Mamet on Dillinger.

John Lasseter, Writer-Director-Producer

Filmmaking is the most collaborative artistic medium there is. One thing I’ve found is that you never know where the good idea is going to come from.

Executive Vice President/Creative at Pixar Animation Studios, John was born in Hollywood and grew up in Whittier, California. The director of Toy Story, Toy Story 2 and A Bug’s Life, and executive producer of Monsters, Inc., John fell in love with animation at an early age. As a high school student, he wrote a letter to The Walt Disney Studios describing his passion for drawing and cartoons. Disney was setting up an innovative program in animation at CalArts (California Institute of the Arts) and John became the second student admitted to the program. After graduation, he worked at Disney for five years before his interest in combining computer graphics and traditional animation techniques led him to Pixar.

Pamela Douglas, Writer

I’ve let go of preconceptions about what you’re supposed to write and what you’re allowed to write.

Pamela grew up in New York City with a father who always resented abandoning his creative life as a musician, a path she vowed not to follow. Some of the characters she knew struggling to survive in the city have surfaced in her just-completed book of stories. It’s the latest in a 20-year writing career that spans journalism and award-winning dramas for television. In addition to her original movies, she was a creator of the series Ghostwriter and story editor of Frank’s Place. Her many other series credits include A Year in the Life and Star Trek: The Next Generation. After majoring in English at Vassar, Pamela earned a master’s degree in art at Columbia University, and continues to paint as well as write. She has been a member of the board of directors of the Writers Guild of America, and is currently an associate professor at the University of Southern California, where she teaches screenwriting.

Hanif Kureishi, Writer

Your point of view, which is your voice, your person, isn’t something you have to get. It’s something you uncover.

Born in Bromley, England, the son of an English mother and a Pakistani immigrant father, Hanif had direct experience with the racial and cultural conflicts that inform much of his work. He knew he wanted to be a writer from a very young age, completing his first novel while still a teenager. While reading philosophy at London’s King’s College, Hanif fell in love with the theater. Soaking the Heat, his first play, was staged in 1976 at the Royal Court Theater Upstairs, and was followed by numerous other theater productions. His first screenplay was My Beautiful Laundrette, and his other film credits include Sammy and Rosie Get Laid, London Kills Me (which he also directed), My Son the Fanatic, Intimacy (based on his stories) and the BBC drama The Buddha of Suburbia. He has also published several novels and a collection of short stories.

John Wells, Writer-Producer

There were five or six people centrally involved in creating ER. We got excited and we started bouncing off each other. It’s like a basketball team where it’s all working, people are passing, everybody’s hitting shots, and you feel the rhythm. It’s selfless.

John was a writer, supervising producer and then co-executive producer of the television series China Beach and is executive producer of ER, The West Wing and Third Watch. John has been president of the Writers Guild of America, West, playing a central role in contract negotiations between studios and writers in the summer of 2001. Born in Alexandria, Virginia, he completed his undergraduate degree at Carnegie-Mellon University in Pittsburgh. He went on to graduate studies at the University of Southern California School of Cinema-Television and is currently a member of its Television Executive Advisory Council. Although best known for his television work, John has served as producer or executive producer on several features, including White Oleander, One Hour Photo and Far From Heaven.

Renee Tajima-Peña, Director-Producer

Most times, I’m really pissed off and that’s why I make a movie. I was pissed off about race, probably from the time I was very young. It really just drove everything I did. So I made films dealing with race.

Renee’s documentary credits include Who Killed Vincent Chin?, My America . . . or, Honk if You Love Buddha, The Last Beat Movie, The Best Hotel on Skid Row and Jennifer’s in Jail. Her work has been broadcast on PBS, HBO, The Sundance Channel and Lifetime. Born in Chicago and raised in Southern California, Renee graduated cum laude in East Asian Studies and Sociology from Harvard-Radcliffe College. In addition to her film work, she has been a commentator for National Public Radio, a film critic for The Village Voice and associate editor of The Independent Film & Video Monthly. Renee writes and lectures on Asian-American and independent film, and she is currently working on two documentaries about immigrant labor.

Ismail Merchant, Producer

We share the sensibilities and the creativity together, but we never impose our will, that this has to be done this way, because each artist has an independent idea, and their contribution is larger if they’re left free.

Born in Bombay, India, Ismail has spent most of his adult life in the West, with his formal education culminating in an M.B.A. from New York University. On his way to the Cannes Film Festival in 1961 with his short film The Creation of Woman, he met James Ivory, and the two started a partnership, Merchant Ivory Productions, that has been in operation for over forty years and produced dozens of internationally acclaimed films, most of them written by Ruth Prawer Jhabvala. His credits include Shakespeare Wallah, Roseland, The Europeans, Heat and Dust, The Bostonians, Maurice, A Room with a View, Howards End and The Remains of the Day. He has also written several books, including cookbooks such as Ismail Merchant’s Florence: Filming and Feasting in Tuscany and Ismail Merchant’s Passionate Meals.

Jeannine Claudia Oppewall, Production Designer

Designers are sort of shamans. You can walk by a rock, a tree, a building and they each have a spirit. If you’re sensitive and aware, you know what that spirit is and you respond to it, you know when to use it, know how to manipulate elements that add to that spirit. It’s something that comes from years of being an observer, a careful observer of life and nature and the constructed universe.

Jeannine grew up in Massachusetts and earned her master’s degree in medieval studies at Bryn Mawr. She started out working with the famed designers Charles and Ray Eames. Her film credits include Tender Mercies, Corrina, Corrina, Maria’s Lovers, Ironweed, The Bridges of Madison County, Pleasantville, L.A. Confidential, Snow Falling on Cedars, Wonder Boys, The Sum of All Fears, and Catch Me if You Can. Jeannine has produced radio documentaries about the Calvinist faith she grew up with. She also has an avid interest in entomology and has written scholarly articles about insects.

Conrad L. Hall, ASC, Cinematographer (1926 - 2003)

It’s finding the soul of the story, and deciding what that is. And then all of the scenes develop from the roots of this tree.

Conrad was born into a storytelling tradition—his father, James Norman Hall, coauthored Mutiny on the Bounty. Conrad at first thought he might follow in his father’s footsteps as a writer, but changed course after taking a cinema class at the University of Southern California. Upon graduation, he and two fellow students started their own production company and bought the rights to a story for their first feature, Running Target. They drew lots to decide who would be the producer, director, and cinematographer and Conrad drew the cinematographer’s lot. His use of desaturated color, lens flares and other innovative techniques in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid greatly influenced subsequent films. His many other credits include Morituri, Incubus, The Professionals, In Cold Blood, The Day of the Locust, Cool Hand Luke, Marathon Man, Searching for Bobby Fischer, A Civil Action, American Beauty and Road to Perdition.

Kathy Baker, Actor

I decided when I was five that I wanted to be an actor . . . It wasn’t about performance—it came from the written word. We always had books around. I wanted to be the people in the stories my mother was reading to me.

Kathy played Dr. Jill Brock on the long-running television series Picket Fences and Mrs. Peters on Boston Public. Her many film credits include The Right Stuff, Street Smart, Clean and Sober, Jacknife, Edward Scissorhands, The Cider House Rules, and Cold Mountain. On stage, she originated the role of May in Fool for Love. Born in Midland, Texas and raised in Albuquerque, New Mexico, Kathy earned a degree in French at the University of California Berkeley and studied cooking at Le Cordon Bleu in Paris.

Walter Murch, Sound Designer-Editor

Something deep in me responds to sound as a language, as a way of communicating with people. It’s a mystery where that comes from.

Walter was studying art history and romance languages in Paris when his passion for French New Wave cinema convinced him to enroll in USC’s School of Cinema-Television. He earned his first feature credits doing the sound for Francis Ford Coppola’s The Rain People (1968) and George Lucas’s THX 1138 (1970). In 1969, the three filmmakers formed their own production company, American Zoetrope, and based themselves in the San Francisco Bay Area. Walter is one of the few filmmakers to master both sound design and picture editing. Among his films are The Conversation, Apocalypse Now, Julia, American Graffiti, The Rain People, The Unbearable Lightness of Being, Crumb, The Godfather Part III, The English Patient, The Talented Mr. Ripley, Apocalypse Now Redux and the revised version of Touch of Evil. Walter also co-wrote and directed Return to Oz.

Lisa Fruchtman, Editor

If you allow yourself to fool around with the material, put it together in a way that isn’t the most obvious, and then it clicks, there’s that tremendous ‘aha’ moment like they talk about in science.

Lisa graduated from the University of Chicago with a B.A. in the history and philosophy of science. She began her professional career in film as a documentary editor at the National Film Board of Canada. After moving to San Francisco, Lisa was hired as an assistant editor on The Godfather, Part II. Her credits as editor include Apocalypse Now, The Right Stuff, The Godfather, Part III, Heaven’s Gate, Children of a Lesser God, The Doctor, My Best Friend’s Wedding, and the HBO features Truman, Witness Protection and Normal. Lisa has participated in the American Film Institute’s Directing Workshop for Women and is developing several projects as a producer and director.

Kate Amend, Editor

I love those hours of just poring over the material and looking at it over and over and over again . . . You’re outside of time, just totally focused on the creative process, making something exist that didn’t exist before.

Among Kate’s credits are the documentaries Into The Arms of Strangers: Stories of the Kindertransport, The Long Way Home, Skinheads, USA, The Girl Next Door and Pandemic: Facing AIDS. Her work has appeared on PBS, HBO, NBC, Lifetime, the History Channel and the Sundance Channel. Kate is also an administrator and historian for Judy Chicago’s monumental art exhibit The Dinner Party, and has produced several videos about Chicago’s art, including From Darkness into Light, Creating the Holocaust Project. She holds degrees from San Francisco State University and the University of California, Berkeley, and is an adjunct professor at the University of Southern California.

James Newton Howard, Composer

I think a big part of it for me has been recognizing that moment when you've written something promising, and not letting it escape . . . That one little moment of spark is where a lot of the magic lives.

James’ grandmother played violin in the Pittsburgh Symphony, and he began playing classical music at an early age, later studying at Santa Barbara’s Music Academy of the West and the University of Southern California School of Music. James has scored over seventy feature films, but his career did not begin with film music. After playing with the band Mama Lion in the early 1970s, James became Elton John’s regular album keyboardist. He went on to produce recordings for Cher, Barbra Streisand, Randy Newman and many others, and didn’t try film composing until 1985. His film credits include The Fugitive, The Prince of Tides, My Best Friend’s Wedding, Grand Canyon, Snow Falling on Cedars, The Sixth Sense, and the theme for the television series ER.