Carroll Ballard

Carroll Ballard (born October 14, 1937, in Los Angeles) is an American film director. He started out making documentaries for the U.S. information agency, Beyond This Winter’s Wheat (1965) and Harvest (1967); the latter was nominated for an Academy Award. He also made the documentaries The Perils of Priscilla (1969), and Rodeo (1970).

He was second unit director on George Lucas’ Star Wars for which he handled many of the outdoor desert scenes. His first solo directing job came when Francis Ford Coppola, a former UCLA classmate, offered him the job of directing The Black Stallion (1979), an adaptation from the novel of the same name by Walter Farley. He went on to direct Never Cry Wolf (1983), a film based on Farley Mowat’s autobiographical book of the same name, detailing his experiences with Arctic wolves. He also directed the film Wind (1992).

He later directed the film Fly Away Home (1996), which was nominated for an Academy Award for best cinematography. His most recent film is Duma (2005), about a young South African boy’s friendship with an orphaned cheetah. Most of Ballard’s films deal with man and his relation to nature and have a strong poetic streak. —Wikipedia