Movies trivia | 100 facts about famous film directors (part 2)

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. So, let’s find out more about some of the most famous!

1. His full name is J. J. Abrams
2. He is a famous director
3. He has directed two Star Wars movies
4. He has a production company named Bad Robot
5. Abrams has created numerous television series
6. Including Felicity (co-creator, 1998–2002), Alias (creator, 2001–2006), Lost (co-creator, 2004–2010), and Fringe (co-creator, 2008–2013)
7. He won two Emmy Awards for Lost
8. These are for Outstanding Directing for a Drama Series and Outstanding Drama Series
9. His directorial film work includes Mission: Impossible III (2006), Star Trek (2009), Super 8 (2011), Star Trek Into Darkness (2013), and Star Wars: The Force Awakens (2015)
10. He also directed, produced and co-wrote The Force Awakens
11. The seventh episode of the Star Wars saga and the first film of the sequel trilogy
12. The film is also his highest-grossing, as well as the fourth-highest-grossing film of all time not adjusted for inflation
13. He returned to Star Wars by co-writing, producing and directing the ninth and final installment of the saga, The Rise of Skywalker
14. Abrams’s frequent collaborators include producer Bryan Burk, producer/director Tommy Gormley, actors Greg Grunberg, Simon Pegg and Keri Russell, composer Michael Giacchino, writers Alex Kurtzman and Roberto Orci, cinematographers Daniel Mindel and Larry Fong, and editors Maryann Brandon and Mary Jo Markey
15. Abrams was born and raised in New York City
16. He is the son of television producer Gerald W. Abrams (born 1939) and executive producer Carol Ann Abrams (1942–2012)
17. His sister is screenwriter Tracy Rosen
18. He attended Palisades High School
19. After graduating from high school, Abrams planned on going to art school rather than a traditional college
20. But eventually enrolled at Sarah Lawrence College, following his father’s advice
21. His father’s advice was: “it’s more important that you go off and learn what to make movies about than how to make movies”
22. Abrams is married to public relations executive Katie McGrath
23. He has three children
24. He resides in Pacific Palisades, Los Angeles, California
25. He is Jewish and his wife is Roman Catholic
26. He sometimes takes his children to religious services on Jewish holidays
27. Abrams serves on the Creative Council of Represent.Us, a nonpartisan anti-corruption organization
28. In 1989, Abrams met Steven Spielberg at a film festival
29. There Spielberg spoke about a possible Who Framed Roger Rabbit sequel, with Abrams as a possible writer and with Robert Zemeckis as producer
30. Nothing came up from this project, although Abrams has some storyboards for a Roger Rabbit short
31. In July 2002, Abrams wrote a script for a possible fifth Superman film entitled Superman: Flyby
32. Brett Ratner and McG entered into talks to direct
33. Although Abrams tried to get the chance to direct his own script
34. However, the project was finally cancelled in 2004
35. Instead Superman Returns was released in 2006
36. In November 2009, it was reported that Abrams and Bad Robot Productions were producing, along with Cartoon Network Movies, Warner Bros., Frederator Films and Paramount Pictures, a film adaptation of Samurai Jack
37. However, in June 2012, series creator Genndy Tartakovsky stated that the production of the film was scrapped after Abrams’ departure from the project to direct Star Trek
38. For this and other reasons, Tartakovsky decided to make a new season instead of a feature film
39. Also in 2009, it was reported that Abrams and Bad Robot Productions would produce a film based on the Micronauts toy line
40. However, a film has never gone into production.
41. His full name is Sir Samuel Alexander Mendes CBE
42. He was born on August 1, 1965
43. He is an English film and stage director, producer and screenwriter
44. He is best known for his directoral debut film American Beauty (1999)
45. It earned him the Academy Award and Golden Globe Award for Best Director
46. He is also known for the crime film Road to Perdition (2002), the James Bond films Skyfall (2012) and Spectre (2015), and the war film 1917 (2019)
47. He also is known for dark re-inventions of the stage musicals Cabaret (1994), Oliver! (1994), Company (1995), and Gypsy (2003)
48. He directed an original West End stage musical for the first time with Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (2013)
49. For directing the play The Ferryman, Mendes was awarded the Tony Award for Best Direction of a Play in 2019
50. In 2000 Mendes was appointed a Commander of the Order of the British Empire by Queen Elizabeth II for “services to drama”
51. In the same year was awarded the Shakespeare Prize by the Alfred Toepfer Foundation in Hamburg, Germany
52. In 2005, he received a lifetime achievement award from the Directors Guild of Great Britain
53. In 2008 The Daily Telegraph ranked him number 15 in their list of the “100 most powerful people in British culture”
54. Mendes was born in Reading, Berkshire
55. His father, who is from Trinidad and Tobago, is a Roman Catholic of Portuguese Creole descent
56. His mother is an English Jew
57. His grandfather was the British Trinidadian writer Alfred Hubert Mendes
58. Mendes’s parents divorced when he was a child
59. He grew up in Oxfordshire and attended Magdalen College School and Peterhouse, Cambridge
60. There he graduated with a first in English
61. While at Cambridge, he was a member of the Marlowe Society and directed several plays
62. Including a production of Cyrano de Bergerac with Tom Hollander among the cast member
63. He was also a “brilliant” schoolboy cricketer
64. According to Wisden and played for Magdalen College School in 1983 and 1984
65. He also played cricket for Cambridge University
66. Aged 24 Mendes directed a production of Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard in the West End that starred Judi Dench
67. Soon he joined the Royal Shakespeare Company
68. There his productions, many of them featuring Simon Russell Beale, included Troilus and Cressida, Richard III and The Tempest
69. He worked at the Chichester Festival Theatre in 1988 as assistant director on a number of productions
70. Including Major Barbara, and directing in “The Tent”, the second venue
71. He later directed at the Royal National Theatre
72. Helming Edward Bond’s The Sea, Jim Cartwright’s The Rise and Fall of Little Voice, Harold Pinter’s The Birthday Party, and Othello with Simon Russell Beale as Iago
73. Mendes and actress Kate Winslet met in 2001
74. Then Mendes approached her about appearing in a play at the Donmar Warehouse Theatre, where he was then artistic director
75. They married in May 2003, on what they characterised as a whim, while on holiday in Anguilla
76. Their son Joe Alfie Winslet Mendes was born on 22 December 2003 in New York City
77. Mendes also had a stepdaughter, Mia
78. From Winslet’s first marriage to filmmaker Jim Threapleton
79. Amid intense media speculation of an affair between Mendes and actress Rebecca Hall, he and Winslet announced their separation in 2010
80. They divorced in 2011
81. Mendes and Hall were in a relationship from 2011 to 2013
82. Mendes married trumpeter Alison Balsom in January 2017
83. Their daughter was born in September 2017
84. He was born on July 30, 1970.
85. His middle name is Edward.
86. He is one of the highest-grossing directors in history, and among the most successful and acclaimed filmmakers of the 21st century.
87. Christopher Nolan was born in London.
88. His English father, Brendan James Nolan, was an advertising executive, and his American mother, Christina, worked as a flight attendant and an English teacher.
89. His childhood was split between London and Chicago, and he has both British and American citizenship
90. He has an older brother, Matthew, and a younger brother, Jonathan
91. He began making films at age seven, borrowing his father’s Super 8 camera and shooting short films with his action figures.
92. Growing up, Nolan was a great admirer of Star Wars (1977), and around the age of eight he made a stop motion animation homage called Space Wars.
93. His uncle who worked at NASA, building guidance systems for the Apollo rockets, sent him some launch footage. “I re-filmed them off the screen and cut them in, thinking no-one would notice,” Nolan later remarked.
94. From the age of 11, he aspired to be a professional filmmaker.
95. When Nolan’s family relocated to Chicago during his formative years, he started making films with Adrien and Roko Belic.
96. He has continued his collaboration with the brothers, receiving a credit for his editorial assistance on their Oscar-nominated documentary Genghis Blues (1999).
97. Christopher Nolan also worked alongside Roko (and future Pulitzer Prize winner Jeffrey Gettleman) on documenting a safari across four African countries, organized by the late photojournalist Dan Eldon in the early 1990s.
98. Christopher Nolan was educated at Haileybury and Imperial Service College, an independent school in Hertford Heath, Hertfordshire, and later read English literature at University College London (UCL).
99. He chose UCL specifically for its filmmaking facilities, which comprised a Steenbeck editing suite and 16 mm film cameras.
100. Christopher Nolan was president of the Union’s Film Society, and with Emma Thomas (his girlfriend and future producer) he screened 35 mm feature films during the school year and used the money earned to produce 16 mm films over the summers.

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