About the Author

Laurent Tirard was born in 1967. He studied film-making at New York University, from which he graduated with honours in 1990. 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 a year. He also had the opportunity to interview all the great directors of the day, engaging them in lengthy discussions on the most practical aspects of film-making for a series called 'Lessons in Cinema'. For the last four years he has put all his lessons into practice, first as a screenwriter on French feature films and television movies, then as a 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.

Reviews

Twenty top directors (including Woody Allen, Martin Scorsese, David Lynch, the Coen brothers, Tim Burton, Pedro Almodovar, Lars von Trier, John Woo, Wong Kar-Wai and Jean-Luc Godard) talk about the nuts and bolts of their craft.