The Action Shooters

Undoubtedly one of the most influential film personalities in the history of film, Steven Spielberg is perhaps Hollywood's best known director and one of the wealthiest filmmakers in the world. Spielberg has countless big-grossing, critically acclaimed credits to his name, as producer, director and writer...

Guillermo del Toro was born October 9, 1964 in Guadalajara Jalisco, Mexico. Raised by his Catholic grandmother, del Toro developed an interest in filmmaking in his early teens. Later, he learned about makeup and effects from the legendary Dick Smith (The Exorcist) and worked on making his own short films...

Director, writer and producer Andy Wachowski was born in 1967 in Chicago and is the son of Lynne, a nurse and painter and Ron, a businessman. Andy was educated at Kellogg Elementary School in Chicago, before moving on to Whitney Young High School. After graduating from high school, he attended Emerson College in Boston, but dropped out...

Tsui Hark recently became the fourth Chinese film director to join the board of judges for the 57th Cannes Film Festival in the feature films category this year. An internationally acclaimed visionary director, Hark started making experimental movies with 8mm film when he was only 13. After graduating from the University of Texas in Austin...

Peter Hyams was born in New York on July 26, 1943, and attended Hunter College Elementary School. He studied art and music at the Art Students League and the High School of Music and Art as well as at Syracuse University, where he majored in music and art. Before he became a CBS News news anchor in...

Sergio Leone was virtually born into the cinema - he was the son of Roberto Roberti (aka Vincenzo Leone), one of Italy's cinema pioneers, and actress Bice Valerian. Leone entered films in his late teens, working as an assistant director to both Italian directors and American directors working in Italy (usually making Biblical and Roman epics...

Born in Hong Kong, Sammo Hung's acting career began while he was training in acrobatics, martial arts and dance as a child at the China Drama Academy, and he received acclaim for his performance with a troupe called "The Seven Little Fortunes." He made his feature film debut as an actor at the age of 12...

After training as a painter (he storyboards his films as full-scale paintings), Kurosawa entered the film industry in 1936 as an assistant director, eventually making his directorial debut with Sanshiro Sugata. Within a few years, Kurosawa had achieved sufficient stature to allow him greater creative freedom...

What do the classic and near-classic films I Was a Male War Bride, Scarface, Twentieth Century, Bringing Up Baby, Only Angels Have Wings, His Girl Friday, Sergeant York, Ball of Fire, Air Force, To Have and Have Not, The Big Sleep, Red River and Rio Bravo have in common with such first-rate entertainments as I Was a Male War Bride...

Chang Cheh was the leading Martial Arts director in Hong Kong in the 1970s, now with close to 100 films to his name. His has influenced other directors such as John Woo and Liu Chiau Liang, and made famous such Hong Kong stars as Philip Kwok, Fu Sheng and Lung Ti. Chang has declared that he will stop working after he has made his 101st film...

Emmerich began his career in his native Germany. In his youth, he pursued painting and sculpting. While enrolled in the director's program at film school in Munich, his student film Das Arche Noah Prinzip went on to open the 1984 Berlin Film Festival. The feature became a huge success and was sold to more than 20 countries.

Martin Campbell knows how to entertain an audience when he steps behind the camera. When he directed The Mask of Zorro, the movie earned Academy Award and Golden Globe nominations and launched the international careers of Antonio Banderas and Catherine Zeta-Jones. Next, when he helmed Vertical Limit, the film was well received by the critics and earned over $200 million in worldwide box-office sales...

Among the handful of screenwriters whose films have earned over $2 billion at the box office, Steven de Souza was introduced to Hollywood on camera--as a contestant on an L.A. game show. There the Philadelphia-based writer for PBS, "The New York Times", "Premiere" and other media outlets won a car and...

Best known for his cerebral, often non-linear storytelling, acclaimed writer-director Christopher Nolan was born on July 30, 1970 in London, England. Over the course of a decade plus of filmmaking, Nolan has gone from low-budget independent films to working on some of the biggest blockbusters ever. At an early age...

"If they move", commands stern-eyed William Holden, "kill 'em". So begins The Wild Bunch, Sam Peckinpah's bloody, high-body-count eulogy to the mythologized Old West. "Pouring new wine into the bottle of the Western, Peckinpah explodes the bottle", observed critic Pauline Kael. That exploding bottle...

A student of London's International Film School, Michael Mann began his career in the late 70s, writing for TV shows like Starsky and Hutch. He directed his first film, the award-winning prison drama The Jericho Mile, in 1979. He followed that in 1981 with his first theatrical release, Thief starring James Caan as a safe-cracker who falls under the spell of the mob...

A very talented painter, Kathryn spent two years at the San Francisco Art Institute. At 20, she won a scholarship to the Whitney Museum's Independent Study Program. She was given a studio in a former Offtrack Betting building, literally in an old bank vault, where she made art and waited to be criticized by people like Richard Serra...

Barry Sonnenfeld was born and raised in New York City. He graduated from New York University of Film School in 1978. After refining his craft on several hard-core pornographic films, he started work as director of photography on the Oscar-nominated In Our Water. Then Joel Coen and Ethan Coen hired him for Blood Simple....

Peter Jackson was born as an only child in a small coast-side town in New Zealand in 1961. When a friend of his parents bought him a super 8mm movie camera (because she saw how much he enjoyed taking photos), the then eight-year-old Peter instantly grabbed the thing to start recording his own movies...

Peter Berg is an American actor, director, writer, and producer. His first role was in the Adam Rifkin road movie Never on Tuesday. He went on to star in the Word War 2 film A Midnight Clear. Roles in Fire in the Sky and Cop Land followed, and the Tom Cruise films Collateral and Lions for Lambs...

Filmmaker Len Wiseman's career began through his work in the art department on the blockbuster hits like Godzilla, Men in Black, and Independence Day. His design talents soon got him behind the camera directing commercials for PlayStation, Time Warner, Oracle, Intel, and Activision, and quickly lead to work in music videos...

Jonathan Liebesman was born in Johannesburg, South Africa on September 15, 1976. He would remain in his home country, studying filmmaking at the South African School of Motion Picture Medium and Live Performance, until 1996; that year, he traveled to New York City to visit his cousin who was attending New York University. Soon after the visit, Jonathan enrolled at NYU's Tisch School of the Arts...

Highly inventive U.S. film director/producer/writer/actor Sam Raimi first came to the attention of film fans with the savage, yet darkly humorous, low-budget horror film, The Evil Dead. From his childhood, Raimi was a fan of the cinema and, before he was ten-years-old, he was out making movies with an 8mm camera...

Timur Bekmambetov is a Russian-Kazakh film director known for vampire franchise Night Watch and Day Watch. He was born Timur Nuruakhitovich Bekmambetov on June 25, 1961, in Guryev, Soviet Union (now Atyrau, Kazakhstan). His father, Nuruakhit Bekmambetov, is a manager at Guryev Energy company; his mother...

Perhaps the icon of macho movie stars, Clint Eastwood has become a standard in international cinema. Born in San Francisco on May 31, 1930 to a steel worker and a factory worker, Eastwood grew up around Northern California before the family moved to Oregon during his teen years. A slow bloomer in almost every regard...

Born in Shanghai and Cambridge-educated, Terence Young began in the industry as a scriptwriter. In the 1940s he worked on a variety of subjects, including the hugely popular wartime romance Suicide Squadron, set to Richard Addinsell's rousing "Warsaw Concerto". His original story was devised while listening to a concert in an army training camp...

Panna Rittikrai is the man behind Thai action star Tony Jaa, whose work in Ong-Bak, astounded viewers across the globe. Panna Rittikrai was born in the small village of Khon Kaen in Thailand. At a young age, he was a fan of martial arts films and he knew it would be his dream to become involved in the martial arts industry...

Initially grew up wanting to be a violinist, but while at the University of Vienna decided to study law. While doing so, he became increasingly interested in American film and decided that was what he wanted to do. He became involved in European filmaking for a short time before going to America to study film.

Ratner grew up in Miami Beach, the only child of a famous Jewish socialite mother. He attended Miami Beach Senior High and was President of the Leo Club in 1986. He was also a member of the "fraternity" Royal Palm. He attended NYU film school currently lives in a $3.6 M house in Beverly Hills. Ratner is also a good friend of Def Jam mogul Russell Simmons...

Born in Norwalk, Connecticut, Caruso came west to play tennis and study Television Production at Pepperdine University. Interned at Disney Studios in the Product Placement department and later hooked up with Director John Badham, who mentored him into a second-unit director, after Badham lost his 2nd-unit director Rob Cohen to a first-unit directing career...