Filmmakers on Film: How They Create, Craft and Communicate

This brief but engaging book is a sort of primer on 50 of Jenkins’s (editor, Little White Lies) favorite filmmakers, from legends like Stanley Kubrick, Agnès Varda, and Alfred Hitchcock to contemporary standouts such as Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Sofia Coppola, and Ava DuVernay. Every page offers a new quote from a director, a still image from a key film, and brief commentary by Jenkins. Each of the commentaries is just over 200 words in length, so the subtitle is a rather bold statement for a book with so little content. Still, the entries are well crafted, offering readers a strong sense of each filmmaker’s style, intent, and time frame. Five brief interviews with mostly international directors including Isabel Sandoval and Mia Hansen-Løve do live up to the subtitle. The only real criticism might be the choice to limit the volume to just 50 directors when there are so many famous omissions (Orson Welles, François Truffaut, Akira Kurosawa, and Christopher Nolan, among others).