Perhaps the greatest tool a film director has at their disposal is their own personal experiences. Art is all about expression and many directors have used filmmaking to express their own personal innermost feelings or depict situations born out of their very own experiences.
Each film is a chance to show audiences something the world hasn't seen before and within each filmmaker is a prism through which only they see the world. Many directors have imbued their film, from the small to the fantastical, with truths known to them that are unique as well as relatable.
10 Tetro - Francis Ford Coppola - 71%
Godfather director Francis Ford Coppola tapped into his own family history for Tetro, the story of two rival brothers reconnecting. Coppola has said that while the film is fictional, "it's all true."
The film depicts a rivalry between two brothers, which can be seen as a reference to Francis and his older brother August, whom he greatly admired. Both brothers in the film live in the shadow of their genius composer father, which inspires similarities to Coppola's own composer father, Carmine Coppola who has contributed music to his son's films in the past.
9 Crooklyn - Spike Lee - 77%
A semi-autobiographical film, acclaimed director Spike Lee took audiences to his old Brooklyn neighborhood to tell the story of a family's summer in 1973. Lee wrote Crooklyn with two of his siblings and the film focuses on a girl growing up in Brooklyn with her many brothers, which is loosely based on their lives as children.
Together they crafted an intimate and realistic portrayal of family life that up until then hadn't been seen yet on film. Many of the incidents are inspired by Lee's life, with the father character (Delroy Lindo) based on his own real-life musician father. The film details the tumultuous ups and downs of a struggling black family in Brooklyn and the love that holds them together.
8 Platoon - Oliver Stone - 88%
Director Oliver Stone served in the Vietnam War and it would be his experiences that make up the basis of his film, Platoon. The film was even marketed as the first Vietnam movie ever made by a Vietnam veteran.
After movies like Apocalypse Now and The Deer Hunter, Stone wanted to create the most realistic portrayal of the war ever seen on film and many veterans agree he did. Stone imbued the movie with instances from his own war-time experiences, and it's from the perspective of Charlie Sheen' Chris, who is really a stand-in for Stone himself.
7 Clerks - Kevin Smith - 89%
Director Kevin Smith was a movie-loving convenience store worker who never felt characters in movies ever talked like how he and his friends did, so he decided t0 change that. After raising money, he decided to use the location where he worked at the time, as well as his experiences, as the basis for his movie.
Clerks depicts the day in the life of a convenience store worker and his video store employee friend. Much of the movie is the two conversing about work, life, movies, relationships, and interacting with the characters who come through the store's doors. Smith accomplished his goal of making a movie featuring people who talked like him and judging by his massive fan base, it didn't just relate to him and his friends only.
6 Eraserhead - David Lynch - 90%
David Lynch's surrealistic nightmare movie Eraserhead, while truly bizarre, is actually very personal. It took him five years to make and the dark, moody, nihilistic atmosphere was inspired by Lynch's life in Philadephia after he bought a house in the middle of two very bad neighborhoods. The movie comes from the sense of fear and conflict in the air he felt, as well as having seen some crazy stuff.
One aspect of the movie's story concerns a father having a deformed, monstrous baby which is inspired by Lynch's own fears about fatherhood. Since its release in 1977, David Lynch's nightmare has stayed in the nightmares of audiences ever since.
5 Edward Scissorhands - Tim Burton - 90%
It's hard to believe Edward Scissorhands, a movie about a young man with scissors for hands is semi-autobiographical, but according to director Tim Burton, it is. Edward Scissorhands, of course, revolves around an unfinished humanoid who is brought to live in a suburban community.
He's treated like an outsider and a freak which reflects Burton's own upbringing. Burton has said that the movie is drawn from his feelings of isolation as a young man. The movie works as a beautiful and fantastical allegory for outcasts, and the misunderstood, that over the years many audiences have come to believe represents them as well.
4 Mean Streets - Martin Scorcese - 95%
One of Martin Scorcese's earliest films is also his most personal. Martin Scorcese grew up on the tough streets of New York's Little Italy. The street toughs portrayed in his many gangster films were the type of people he saw every day, and growing up with street violence as a daily occurrence.
He depicted this in Mean Streets, about a small-time hood caught up in the life of crime. The movie was so personal that he shot the movie in his old neighborhood, on his old streets, and in his old church, the Old St Patrick's Cathedral, which still stands today. The film put Scorcese on the map and with movies like Goodfellas and The Irishman, he's still making movies about the types of people he knew in his old neighborhood.
3 American Graffiti - George Lucas - 96%
Before George Lucas made Star Wars, a film that would change the world, he was the acclaimed filmmaker behind American Graffiti. The movie is a coming-of-age story set in Modesto, California in 1962 on the last night of summer vacation, before starting college, where three friends cruise around and listen to music.
The movie was inspired by Lucas's life growing up in Modesto and the three main characters each represent a period of Lucas' youth. American Graffiti is a snapshot of a culture, a generation, their soundtrack, all on the cusp of a changing world.
2 E.T - Steven Spielberg - 98%
When director Steven Spielberg was a boy, his parents' divorce had a profound effect on him and divorce has played a role in many of his films like War Of The Worlds, Catch Me If You Can, and of course, E.T. As a boy, Spielberg found himself very lonely as a result of the divorce and created an imaginary alien companion to help him deal with it.
Many years later, after developing a movie called Night Skies, where a group of aliens terrorize a family farm, he decided to take a subplot from that movie, about a benevolent alien befriending a boy, and use it as the basis for what would become E.T. The movie became a classic with the Washington Post review saying its, "essentially a spiritual autobiography, a portrait of a filmmaker as a typical suburban kid set apart by a mystical imagination."
1 Lady Bird - Greta Gerwig - 99%
Lady Bird tells the coming-of-age story of a teen girl in Sacramento and the strained bond she has with her mother. While the film shares some elements with Director Greta Gerwig's life, she says, "nothing in the movie literally happened in my life, but it has a core of truth that resonates with what I know."
Like the titular character, artistically inclined Gerwig grew up in Sacramento and left for New York City. Before filming began, Gerwig even took the cast and crew to her hometown, and even though the film is not exactly autobiographical, she wanted Lady Bird to feel, "like a memory."
from ScreenRant - Feed https://ift.tt/3brmaqI
0 Comments