Bigshot

Directing Sinatra

Working with temperamental, high-profile stars is never easy for a director, but Frank Sinatra took it to a new level. The war stories are legendary. Here are some of the best.

Features

Feature stories about the craft and challenges of directors and their teams working on feature films.

DGA Quarterly Magazine Summer 2020 Cinema Healing Paths of Glory Kubrick
Summer 2020

Even during the worst of times, directors all around the globe found ways of coping with crisis by holding a mirror to society—for good and bad.

Spring20Cover
Spring 2020

Directors Damien Chazelle, Jon M. Chu, Bill Condon, Dexter Fletcher, Adam Shankman, Barbra Streisand and Julie Taymor tackle the genre's suspension of disbelief in varying ways, making the internal external and lifting our spirits in the process

Scott Z Burns directing The Report
Winter 2020

For directors of fact-based dramas, fighting the good fight means knowing when to fortify the storytelling and when to pull their punches.

DGA Quarterly Winter 2020 Music Legends
Winter 2020

Far beyond the promo reels once popularized by MTV, the most penetrating documentaries underscore psychological insight and socio-political context.

Love and Basketball
Winter 2020

Michael Mann, Gina Prince-Bythewood and Ang Lee expound on their opening sequences for The Last of the Mohicans, Love & Basketball and Sense and Sensibility.

DGA Quarterly Magazine Fall 2019 Francis Ford Coppola The Cotton Club
Fall 2019

Francis Ford Coppola's controversial, Prohibition Era mashup of entertainers and gangsters achieves the balance between two sets of characters that the filmmaker originally intended.

DGA Quarterly Magazine Fall 2019 Visual History Archives
Fall 2019
Visual History

According to directors Mira Nair, Milos Forman and Jim Sheridan, all of whom were interviewed for the DGA's Visual History program, landing the right actor is key to getting the best performance.

DGA Quarterly Magazine Summer 2019 Beyond Score The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel
Summer 2019

Feature and television directors talk about needle drops as character-builders and scene-setters.

DGA Quarterly Spring 2019 VFX Wonder Woman directed by Patty Jenkins
Spring 2019

Directors Patty Jenkins, Colin Trevorrow and Rupert Wyatt each navigated the leap from intimate to VFX-heavy productions in their own way.

DGA Quarterly Magazine Winter 2019 BlackKKlansman Spike Lee
Winter 2019

As recent films by Spike Lee, Barry Jenkins and George Tillman Jr. have shown us, the fissures of the Civil Rights Movement of the '60s continue to spread, providing dramatic fuel for their unique visions.

DGA Quarterly Magazine Fall 2018 Horror
Fall 2018

In uncertain times, directors Fede Alvarez, Ana Lily Amirpour, Susanne Bier, James DeMonaco, David Gordon Green, John Krasinski, Andy Muschietti, Jordan Peele and James Wan update and elevate a time-tested genre with works that invite audiences to confront their fears.

DGA Quarterly Magazine Landline Robespierre
Fall 2017

Directors Nicole Holofcener, Gillian Robespierre, Valerie Faris and Jonathan Dayton discuss how intimate family dramas about dysfunctional families continue to assert their place at the big-screen table.

DGA Quarterly Magazine Stanley Kubrick
Fall 2017

As we approach the late filmmaker's 90th birthday, directors Jonathan Glazer, Nicholas Winding Refn and others wax poetic on why the legendary perfectionist behind 2001 and Barry Lyndon still matters

DGAQ Magazine Summer 2017 Jerry Schatzberg Scarecrow
Summer 2017

Through their work with actors, directors Ulu Grosbard, Jerry Schatzberg and Michael Ritchie raised the bar on realism during Hollywood's '70s renaissance.

DGAQ Magazine Summer 2017 Fast and Furious
Summer 2017
Need for Speed

Edgar Wright directs an action-movie musical fueled by his love of heist movies and crime thrillers.

DGAQ Magazine Summer 2017 WWII Dunkirk Christopher Nolan
Summer 2017

Christopher Nolan mixes formalism and spontaneity to create a 'you are there' experience with Dunkirk.

DGA Quarterly Spring 2017 Re-Animated Bill Condon Beauty and the Beast
Spring 2017

Directors such as Bill Condon, Jon Favreau and Kenneth Branagh breathe live-action life into animated Disney classics.

DGA Quarterly Spring 2017 Breaking the Mold Logan
Spring 2017

Logan director James Mangold explains how to reinvigorate the superhero genre.

DGAQ Biopics Mira Nair
Fall/Winter 2016-17

In magnifying their subjects, filmmakers also hold up a mirror to society.

DGA Quarterly Fall 2014 Indie to Mainstream
Fall 2014
Four Indie Directors Working on Studio Films

So your independent movie was a hit. What comes next? For some, it’s a leap to studio filmmaking. Here’s how four directors moved up, and what they found once they got there.

DGA Quarterly Women's Movement 2014
Summer 2014
Female Feature Film Directors

The numbers are appalling. In 2013, only nine percent of DGA features released in theaters were directed by women. To inspire, encourage, and hopefully promote change, we interviewed some of those who succeeded in getting their films made. Here are their stories.

kubrick
Spring 2013
James Harris on Stanley Kubrick

James B. Harris produced three films with his friend Stanley Kubrick. In this interview, he offers a rare glimpse of life on the set with Kubrick— not as a legend but a working director.

Fall 2012
All The President's Men

Alan J. Pakula talks about directing All the Presidents Men, adapted from a 1976 story in the DGA's Action magazine.

Fall 2012
Political Films

American movies have been portraying politicians on screen since the populist heroes of John Ford and Frank Capra. But it wasn’t until the advent of TV that filmmakers learned to capture the drama of the game.

DGA Qaurterly Fall 2011 Indie Film
Fall 2011
Independent Filmmakers

Independent directors have helped create an industry and a staggering range of films over the last 30 years.

DGA Quarterly Summer 2011 Blaxploitation
Summer 2011
Blaxploitation

With sexy urban stories not seen before on American screens, blaxploitation pictures wowed a new audience in the ’70s. Behind the flashy clothes and cool music, directors helped create the genre’s unmistakable style.

DGA Quarterly Summer 2011 New Hollywood
Summer 2011
New Hollywood in the Late 60s and 70s

Following the lead of the French New Wave, a restless generation of directors took Hollywood by storm in the late ’60s and ’70s, reflecting the climate of the country.

DGA Quarterly Spring 2011 Film Noir
Spring 2011
Film Noir

Film noir thrived in the dark of postwar America. But from the first flashing neon to the last crazy camera angle it was a director’s medium.

DGA Quarterly Winter 2010-11 John Ford Stagecoach
Winter 2011
Serious Westerns

In an excerpt from a 1971 story in the DGA's Action magazine, John Ford and cast and crew reminisce about the making of Stagecoach.

Spring 2010
Directing Sinatra

Working with temperamental, high-profile stars is never easy for a director, but Frank Sinatra took it to a new level. The war stories are legendary. Here are some of the best.

Fall 2009
Activist Documentaries

With the decline of investigative journalism on TV and in newspapers, social activist documentarians are filling the holes. It's not always glamorous but getting the story has its own rewards.

Summer 2009
Collaborating on Comedy

Judd Apatow and a group of like-minded directors have created a run of raunchy films that have turned R-rated comedies into big business.

Winter 2009
Directing James Bond

For 47 years and 22 films, James Bond has escaped countless close calls thanks to the deft hand of its directors. We caught up with the eight surviving filmmakers to find out how they've kept 007 alive all these years.

DGA Quarterly Fall 2007 Action Directors
Fall 2007
Directing Action Films

Directors of action films create some of the most spectacular-and innovative-footage on screen. All it takes is preparation, imagination and nerves of steel.

DGA Quarterly Magazine Fall 2006 William Friedkin
Fall 2006
The French Connection

Thirty-five years after it was made, The French Connection still features the mother-of-all-chase-scenes. The director takes us back and explains how it all came together.

DGA Quarterly Spring 2006 Citizen Cane
Spring 2006
Cast & Crew

In 1969, the cast and crew of Citizen Kane were interviewed for the DGA's Action magazine about their experience working with the iconoclastic Orson Welles on his masterpiece.

DGA Magazine July 2004
Reconstructing The Big Red One

Details DGA member Richard Schickel's efforts to assemble a complete version of director Sam Fuller's The Big Red One.

DGA Magazine May 2004

The origin of the one director to a film policy.

DGA Magazine January 2004

Movies trade in primal emotions, and fear is right at the top of the list. While critics downplay horror films as guilty pleasures, their popularity is so enduring they literally reach back to the dawn of cinema.

DGA Magazine November 2003

Geographical stand-ins, doublings, have a winning way about them even when they get all dressed up with nowhere to go.

DGA Magazine November 2003

The following is an excerpt from a speech Wim Wenders presented at this year's PHOTO L.A.

DGA Magazine November 2003

When is a visual effect not a visual effect? The answer is simple: When the audience doesn't notice it.

DGA Magazine September 2003
The Art of Directing Musicals

From classics like Cabaret to recent successes such as Chicago and Moulin Rouge, musicals are a recurring theme in American moviemaking history.

DGA Magazine September 2003
Conversations with a Director and His Team

In the March-April 1973 Action magazine, Clint Eastwood wrote about helming films in the 1970s.

DGA Magazine September 2003

Few locations can impact the look and feel of an indie film like shooting inside a prison. The process, and the product, often changes lives — filmmakers, actors, and audiences alike leave the experience transformed and affected.

DGA Magazine September 2003

Jerry London, Daniel Petrie and Gary Ross are three uncompromising filmmakers who, as someone once described, "know history is not contained in thick books but lives in our very blood."

DGA Magazine September 2003

Lately, Hollywood is throwing around the word epic. Lots of movies are coming out with the word attached. Thank Heaven there are people working to sell movies, so that we who love to make them can have better tools and bigger audiences.

DGA Magazine July 2003

The business of trying to make people laugh, whether the medium be theatrical film, television sitcom or TV commercial, is surely no joke. It makes undergoing root canal work seem positively light and breezy by comparison.

DGA Magazine July 2003
Champlin on Chaplin

In Chaplin's last film, A Countess From Hong Kong, he plays a steward in a scene which borders on self-effacement. Entering a room with his tray of drinks, he seems to stumble, but recovers with a grace that is charming to watch.

DGA Magazine May 2003
Chris Rock Crosses the Transom to Directing

A look at Chris Rock's first time in the director's chair.

DGA Magazine March 2003

There's commitment, and then there's real commitment. Ron Maxwell became so deeply involved in researching and realizing two authentically precise Civil War movies that they may end up as the legacy of his filmmaking life.

DGA Magazine March 2003

Various colleges, universities, institutes, centers, museums, academies, and libraries in the U.S. house important materials of from historic directors that can be viewed on the premises.

DGA Magazine January 2003
Chris Columbus & Directing Harry Potter

Harry Potter is one of the most successful series of books in recent memory. Taking those tales from printed word to motion picture screen was a formidable undertaking for director Chris Columbus.