This image is the cover for the book Moviemakers' Master Class

Moviemakers' Master Class

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

Laurent Tirard

Laurent Tirard was born in 1967. He studied filmmaking at New York University, from which he graduated with honors in 1989. After a year as a script reader for the Warner Bros. studio in Los Angeles, he became a journalist for the French film magazine Studio. There, over the course of seven years, he screened and reviewed more than a hundred films per year. He also had the opportunity to interview all the great directors of the day, including Martin Scorsese, Jean-Luc Godard, John Woo, Steven Spielberg, Woody Allen, and many others, engaging them in lengthy discussions on the most practical aspects of filmmaking for a series called Leçons de Cinéma. For the last four years, he has put all his lessons into practice, first as a screenwriter on French features and TV movies, then as the director of two short films, Reliable Sources and Tomorrow is Another Day. The first received the 1999 Panavision Award at the Avignon/New York Film Festival; the second was selected for the 2000 Telluride Film Festival. Laurent Tirard is currently working on his first feature film as a director. He lives in Paris with his wife and son.

Farrar, Straus and Giroux