The film unfolds to offer an engaging balance between Peck’s public persona and his private life, using excerpts from a number of Peck’s recent one-man shows and the well-known clips from many of his great movies. At each stop fans ask new questions, and some tell how Peck’s film characters inspired their careers. Some have even named their children after him. It isn’t just ordinary citizens who appreciate Peck’s contributions to American culture, as Peck is filmed being presented with the National Medal for the Arts from President Clinton.
When it comes to the personal side of things, the film offers snapshots from his youth and old home movie footage. As well as wonderfully funny and intimate moments with Peck’s family ans closest friends like Lauren Bacall, Martin Scorsese and President Chirac. –Cannes Film Festival
Barbara Kopple (born July 30, 1946) is an American film director, primarily known for her work in documentary film.
She grew up in Scarsdale, New York, the daughter of a textile executive and studied psychology at Northeastern University, after which she worked with the Maysles Brothers.
Kopple has won two Academy Awards, the first in 1976 for Harlan County, USA, about a Kentucky miners’ strike, and the second in 1991 for American Dream, the story of the Hormel Foods strike in Austin, Minnesota in 1985-86. She has directed episodes of the television drama series Homicide: Life on the Street and Oz, winning a Directors Guild of America award for the former. Kopple also directed A Conversation With Gregory Peck and Bearing Witness, as well as documentaries on Mike Tyson and Woody Allen. The latter film, Wild Man Blues, focuses on his Dixieland jazz tour and on Allen’s relationship with Soon-Yi Previn.
Her first non-documentary feature film, Havoc, starred Anne Hathaway… read more
