Items14The creator’s order
  1. 1Robert RedfordRobert RedfordBorn 18 Aug 1936Robert Redford's Sundance Institute took over a small Utah film festival in the 1980s and turned it into the main marketplace for American independent cinema, where Sex, Lies, and Videotape, Reservoir Dogs, Little Miss Sunshine and Whiplash found distributors. The festival's buyers, not Redford,…0i
  2. 2Roger EbertRoger EbertBorn 18 Jun 1942Roger Ebert, the Pulitzer Prize-winning critic, used his television show with Gene Siskel to push small films into national conversation, naming the documentary Hoop Dreams the best film of 1994 and championing Errol Morris's Gates of Heaven for decades. In 1999 he founded his own festival in…0i
  3. 3Robert De NiroRobert De NiroRobert De Niro co-founded the Tribeca Film Festival in 2002 with producer Jane Rosenthal and Craig Hatkoff, partly to bring people back to lower Manhattan after the September 11 attacks. It has since premiered thousands of independent features and documentaries and built year-round programmes…0i
  4. 4Quentin TarantinoQuentin TarantinoBorn 27 Mar 1963Quentin Tarantino ran Rolling Thunder Pictures, a Miramax label, in the mid-1990s, using his post-Pulp Fiction fame to release Wong Kar-wai's Chungking Express in American cinemas and to bring Takeshi Kitano's Sonatine and forgotten grindhouse films such as Switchblade Sisters to new audiences. For…0i
  5. 5Martin ScorseseMartin ScorseseMartin Scorsese founded The Film Foundation in 1990 to restore neglected films, and its World Cinema Project, launched in 2007, has restored classics from Africa, Asia and Latin America such as Ousmane Sembène's Black Girl and Djibril Diop Mambéty's Touki Bouki, making them available on disc and…0i
  6. 6Francis Ford CoppolaFrancis Ford CoppolaBorn 7 Apr 1939Francis Ford Coppola, with George Lucas, helped secure international financing and release for Akira Kurosawa's Kagemusha (1980), and put his name above the title of Godfrey Reggio's wordless Koyaanisqatsi (1982), which reached cinemas as "Francis Ford Coppola presents". He also backed the 1981…0i
  7. 7Steven SoderberghSteven SoderberghSteven Soderbergh's Sex, Lies, and Videotape won the Palme d'Or in 1989 and is often credited with starting the American independent boom of the 1990s. He has kept experimenting with how small films reach people: Bubble (2005) opened in cinemas, on cable and on DVD almost simultaneously, and his…0i
  8. 8Rita WilsonRita WilsonBorn 26 Oct 1956Rita Wilson saw Nia Vardalos's one-woman show in Los Angeles and persuaded her husband Tom Hanks's company, Playtone, to produce it as a film. My Big Fat Greek Wedding (2002), made for a few million dollars with a cast of little-known actors, built slowly through word of mouth and became one of the…0i
  9. 9Kevin SmithKevin SmithBorn 2 Aug 1970Kevin Smith made Clerks (1994) for under 30,000 dollars on credit cards, and its success at Sundance became a blueprint for no-budget filmmakers. He later self-distributed Red State (2011) with a roadshow of live screenings and Q&As instead of selling it to a studio, and has used his podcasts and…0i
  10. 10Mark DuplassMark DuplassBorn 7 Dec 1976Mark Duplass, with his brother Jay, became the face of micro-budget American filmmaking and then a producer for others, backing small films by new directors and signing a multi-film deal with Netflix to give them a home. He is unusually open about money, publicly advising young filmmakers to keep…0i