About the Author

Mark Cousins is an author, film critic, producer, and documentary director. He is Honorary Lecturer in Film and Media Studies at the University of Stirling and teaches The Aesthetics of World Cinema at Edinburgh College of Art. As director of the Edinburgh International Film Festival in the 1990s, he pioneered the Scene by Scene discussion format, later adapting it into a celebrated BBC television series and book of the same name. Among those who gave career interviews were Martin Scorsese, Roman Polanski, Woody Allen, Shohei Imamura, Bernado Bertolucci, Jeanne Moreau, Kirk Douglas, and the Coen brothers. The subjects of his documentary films have included neo-Nazis, the first Gulf War, and Mikhail Gorbachev. His other publications include the acclaimed Imagining Reality: The Faber Book of Documentary and an introduction to the screenplay of Billy Wilder's The Apartment.