Ismailos’s Great Directors

A lifelong cinephile, filmmaker Angela Ismailos spent five years working on Great Directors, a documentary that celebrates the work of ten of the world’s most acclaimed, groundbreaking, and provocative living directors. 

Ismailos, a first-time filmmaker, delves deep into conversation with iconic directors Bernardo Bertolucci, David Lynch, Stephen Frears, Agnes Varda, Ken Loach, Liliana Cavani, Todd Haynes, Catherine Breillat, Richard Linklater, and John Sayles. Premiering at the 2009 Venice Film Festival, Great Directors received an extended standing ovation.

“These directors, for me, represent independent filmmaking,” Ismailos explains. “They have all the characteristics of a great director; they’re constantly asking their audience to grow with them and face the uncertainty of the unpredictability of life. They have not surrendered to the industrial filmmaking industry and they’re uncompromising and don’t care about popularity.”

Ismailos recalls first being introduced to the glories of international cinema by her father, whom she describes as a “passionate cineaste,” noting, “From a young age I was exposed to the great directors of all time, like Renoir, Bergman, Antonioni, and De Sica. So when I ,was preparing the script for my next feature, The City of a Dead Woman, I was exploring for years different cinematic styles. And I had so much archival work that I decided to put it into a film.”

For Ismailos, who studied ballet and then opera (her grandmothers were an opera singer and a “great pianist”), the arts have always been a close ally, ever since her father started her off with Renoir’s first silent film when she was just a child.

Examining the work of her 10 living legends — in some cases their films have been censored, banned, and considered extremely controversial — Ismailos acknowledges she faced some hurdles interviewing her chosen subjects.

‘My biggest challenge was to get the directors to open up. They did not see my as a journalist, they saw me as another filmmaker. When Bernardo said, ‘Don’t sit behind the camera, come sit next to me, that changed the film.’”

Raised in New York, where, Ismailos observes, “Every corner is a cinematic scene,” there is also a wonderful form of escape in a darkened movie theater.

“When the lights go down, this warm, liquid darkness unites us all. There may be a person sitting next to you that you don’t know, but it’s like we’re all sharing the same dream. That emotion and that feeling, that sensitivity of watching all of us together in a theater is something endless and powerful.”

That said, don’t expect to find Ismailos (who hopes to start shooting The City of a Dead Woman, a psychological drama, in February 2011) at a multiplex this summer watching the latest popcorn studio film.

“It’s torture to go watch these movies,” she confesses. “I just cannot watch them. They do nothing for me.”

As for moviegoers seeing Great Directors, Ismailos hopes in some way that they’ll be inspired: “I want the audience to always feel creative and never lose hope for the arts.” ▼