Movies trivia | 100 facts about famous film directors (part 1)

A film director is someone who controls a film’s artistic and dramatic aspects by visualizing how the script will be actually on screen.

So, the film director is very important about a movie, and this is why one of the most important categories in the Oscar Awards is the director’s one. So, let’s find out more about some of the most famous!

1. Bong Joon-ho was born on September 14, 1969
2. He is a South Korean film director and screenwriter
3. He garnered international acclaim for his second feature film Memories of Murder (2003)
4. Before achieving commercial success with his subsequent films The Host (2006) and Snowpiercer (2013)
5. Both of which are among the highest-grossing films of all time in South Korea
6. Two of his films have screened in competition at the Cannes Film Festival
7. Okja, which premiered at the 2017 Cannes Film Festival
8. And Parasite, which won the Palme d’Or at the 2019 Cannes Film Festival
9. He became the first Korean director to win the Palme d’Or
10. Parasite also won Best Foreign Language Film at the 77th Golden Globe Awards
11. With Bong nominated for Best Director and Best Screenplay for his work
12. Following the film’s nomination for Best International Feature Film at the 92nd Academy Awards, Parasite became the first South Korean film to receive an Academy Award nomination in any category
13. For his work on the film, Bong received Academy Award nominations for Best Director, Best Original Screenplay, and Best Picture
14. In 2017, Metacritic ranked Bong sixteenth on its list of the 25 best film directors of the 21st century
15. His films feature social themes, genre-mixing, black humor, and sudden mood shifts
16. Bong Joon-ho was born in Daegu, South Korea in 1969
17. He is the youngest of four children
18. His father was a graphic and industrial graphic designer, art director of the National Film Production and professor Bong Sang-gyun
19. He passed away in 2017
20. While his mother was a full-time housewife
21. But she was a second daughter of the renowned modern Korean author Park Taewon, Park Soyoung
22. Bong’s maternal grandfather, Park Taewon, was an esteemed author during the Japanese colonial period, most famous for his work A Day in the Life of Gubo the Novelist and his defection to North Korea in 1950
23. His older brother Bong Junsoo is an English professor at the Seoul National University
24. And his older sister Bong Jihee is a fashion designer and director of the International Culture Association
25. His wife is Jung Sunyoung
26. And his son is a movie director Bong Hyomin
27. While Bong was in elementary school, the family relocated to Seoul, taking up residence in Jamsil-dong by the Han River
28. Bong enrolled in Yonsei University in 1988, majoring in sociology
29. College campuses such as Yonsei’s were then hotbeds for the South Korean democracy movement
30. And Bong was an active participant of student demonstrations
31. Frequently subjected to tear gas early in his college years
32. Bong served a two-year term in the military in accordance with South Korea’s compulsory military service before returning to college in 1992
33. He co-founded a film club named Yellow Door with students from neighboring universities
34. As a member of the club, Bong made his first films
35. Including a stop-motion short titled Looking for Paradise and a 16mm short titled White Man
36. He graduated from Yonsei University in 1995
37. In the early 1990s, Bong completed a two-year program at the Korean Academy of Film Arts
38. While there, he made many 16mm short films
39. His graduation films Memory Within the Frame and Incoherence were invited to screen at the Vancouver and Hong Kong international film festivals
40. He also collaborated on several works with his classmates
41. Most notably as cinematographer on the highly acclaimed short 2001 Imagine
42. Directed by his friend Jang Joon-hwan
43. Aside from cinematography on Hur Jae-young’s short A Hat, Bong was also lighting director on an early short Sounds From Heaven and Earth by Choi Equan, and The Love of a Grape Seed
44. Parasite was released in South Korea by CJ Entertainment on 30 May 2019
45. And in the rest of the world by Neon in late-2019
46. It received widespread critical acclaim and earned $115 million at the worldwide box office
47. Becoming Bong’s highest-grossing release
48. For Parasite, Bong was nominated for Best Director and Best Screenplay at the 77th Golden Globe Awards
49. With the film itself winning Best Foreign Language Film
50. After graduating, he spent the next five years contributing in various capacities to works by other directors
51. He received a partial screenplay credit on the 1996 omnibus film Seven Reasons Why Beer is Better Than a Lover
52. Both screenplay and assistant director credits on Park Ki-yong’s 1997 debut Motel Cactus
53. And is one of four writers (along with Jang Joon-hwan) credited for the screenplay of Phantom the Submarine (1999)
54. Yorgos Lanthimos was born in 1973
55. He is a Greek film, video and theatre director, producer, and screenwriter
56. Yorgos Lanthimos was born in Athens
57. He graduated from the Moraitis School
58. He went on to study directing for film and television at Hellenic Cinema and Television School Stavrakos in Athens
59. Through the 1990s he directed a series of videos for Greek dance-theater companies
60. He has directed a large number of TV commercials
61. In addition to music videos, short films and experimental theater plays
62. Yorgos Lanthimos was also a member of the creative team which designed the opening and closing ceremonies of the 2004 Summer Olympics in Athens
63. His feature film career started with the mainstream film My Best Friend
64. In that film he shared directing credits with mentor Lakis Lazopoulos
65. He followed that with the experimental film Kinetta
66. It premiered at the 2005 Toronto Film Festival
67. His third feature film Dogtooth won the Prix Un Certain Regard at the 2009 Cannes Film Festival
68. Yorgos Lanthimos’ film was nominated for Best Foreign Language Film at the 83rd Academy Awards
69. Yorgos followed Dogtooth with another greek film Alps in 2011
70. His fourth feature film Alps (2011) won the Osella Award for Best Screenplay at the 68th Venice International Film Festival
71. The script for his fifth film The Lobster was awarded with the ARTE International Award as Best CineMart Project for 2013 at the 42nd International Film Festival Rotterdam
72. The film was selected to compete for the Palme d’Or at the 2015 Cannes Film Festival
73. Yorgos Lanthimos won the Jury Prize
74. His next project was the Killing of a Sacred Deer
75. It premiered, again, at the Cannes Film Festival
76. There he won the Besr Screenplay Award
77. During the 75th Venice Film Festival, he presented his latest work The Favourite (2018)
78. Yorgos Lanthimos won the Grand Jury Prize for the film
79. His constant collaborator is Efthimis Fillipou
80. They have worked together on every one of his films except The Favourite
81. Yorgos Lanthimos is married to actress Ariane Labed
82. He moved to London after the international success of Dogtooth
83. Deborah Davis and Yorgos Lanthimos tried for a better part of a decade to make The Favourite
84. His actors talk about his peculiar rehearsal techniques
85. All of the actors that have a role in his movies go through casting
86. He has worked with Nicole Kidman, Rachel Weisz, Olivia Colman, Emma Stone and Colin Farrell
87. Yorgos Lanthimos doesn’t like to talk with his actors about the characters they are playing
88. He believes in their free reenactment of what the characters have been through
89. Yorgos Lanthimos believes his movies to be black comedies
90. And only through extreme things we can talk about our everyday lives
91. He became the sixth Greek to be nominated for Best Director
92. The Favourite is the first of his films that he doesn’t have a writting credit.
93. His film was nominated for 10 awards for the Oscars of 2019
94. 12 nominations for the Baftas
95. And won the Volpi Cup for Best Actress for Olivia Colman
96. Rachel Weisz became a great supporter of Yorgos’s vision
97. He says that he will make a Greek film again when the time is right
98. All of his films are Fresh on Rotten Tomatoes.
99. In general, Yorgos Lanthimos is said to have introduced the famous “Greek Weird Wave” with his Oscar-nominated movie “The Dogtooth”.
100. Some other famous, Greek directors deny that this Wave even exists, while others are trying too much to imitate it. It is said that the end of it was also Lanthimos’s movie “The Lobster”.