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Michael Almereyda
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Michael Almereyda (born 1960) is an American film director. His most well known work is Hamlet (2000), starring Ethan Hawke.
Early life
Born in Overland Park, Kansas, Almereyda took an early interest in drawing and painting. His family moved from Kansas to Orange County, California and the young Almereyda took advantage of his proximity to Los Angeles and its film culture. He read books on film, visited revival houses, and attended talks held by the likes of Howard Hawks and John Huston at community colleges. He met Manny Farber at age sixteen, when the latter presented a Fassbinder film at Orange Coast College. The meeting left an impression on Almereyda, who had then just read Farber's book Negative Space, and he cited the American painter and film critic as a formulative influence in a 1999 interview with Filmmaker. [1]
He later studied
art history at
Harvard but grew impatient with academia. Convinced that he should be making movies, he dropped out and moved to
New York to pursue
screenwriting. He met Tom Pope, who had written a draft of
Hammett for
Wim Wenders, and the scribe put him in touch with his
literary agent. Almereyda would get signed on the strength of a spec script about inventor
Nikola Tesla.
Writing career
Almereyda got his start as a Hollywood script doctor. His first assignment, which he received within two weeks of signing with his agency, was a rewrite of Mandrake the Magician for Embassy Pictures. He booked a room at the Chelsea Hotel and churned out a new draft in three weeks, but the film was just as soon dropped after the studio changed heads. Some of Almereyda's dialogue from his writing sessions with Bruce Beresford in Australia remains in Total Recall (1990) and the writer retains a credit for Cherry 2000 (1987). A script for David Lynch went unmade but Almereyda would work again with the director on the film Nadja (1994). His last studio writing job was for a Tim Burton passion project, one based on a Nathaniel Hawthorne story, at Warner Brothers. The film was never made. Almereyda's additional unproduced works include biopic scripts on James Dean (based on the Rick Moody story "The James Dean Garage Band") and Amelia Earhart, and an Edgar Allan Poe screenplay that borrows elements from the writer's life and stories.
Recent work
Almereyda recently profiled American photographer William Eggleston in the documentary William Eggleston in the Real World (2005). His previous film, This So-Called Disaster (2004), also a documentary, followed Sam Shepard as he mounted a production of his play The Late Henry Moss with Woody Harrelson, Cheech Marin, and Nick Nolte in the cast. Almereyda recently completed filming of New Orleans, Mon Amour, starring Christopher Eccleston and Elisabeth Moss, with producer Edith LeBlanc and executive producer Michael Arata. This twisted love story is set in post-Hurricane Katrina New Orleans, and features stunning use of the apocalyptic destruction of the city.
Director style
The director is noted for his use of the
Fisher-Price PixelVision camera. He used the format, which records video onto
audiocassettes, most prominently in his 1992 film
Another Girl, Another Planet, which won an award for "expanding the possibilities of experimental film." The camera was also used for subjective perspective sequences in
Nadja and
Hamlet.
Partial director filmography
References
See also
