Hamlet

Michael Almereyda (born 1960) is an American film director, screenwriter, and producer. His most well known work is Hamlet (2000), starring Ethan Hawke.

Born in Overland Park, Kansas, Almereyda took an early interest in drawing and painting. His family moved from Kansas to Orange County, California and the young Almereyda took advantage of his proximity to Los Angeles and its film culture. He read books on film, visited revival houses, and attended talks held by the likes of Howard Hawks and John Huston at community colleges. He met Manny Farber at age sixteen, when the latter presented a Fassbinder film at Orange Coast College. The meeting left an impression on Almereyda, who had then just read Farber’s book Negative Space, and he cited the American painter and film critic as a formulative influence in a 1999 interview with Filmmaker.

He later studied art history at Harvard but grew impatient with academia. Convinced that he should be making movies, he dropped out his senior year and moved to New York to pursue screenwriting. He met Tom Pope, who had written a draft of Hammett for Wim Wenders, and the scribe put him in touch with his literary agent. Almereyda would get signed on the strength of a spec script about inventor Nikola Tesla.

Almereyda got his start as a Hollywood screenwriter. His first assignment, which he received within two weeks of signing with his agency, was a rewrite of Mandrake the Magician for Embassy Pictures. He booked a room at the Chelsea Hotel and churned out a new draft in three weeks, but the film was dropped after the studio changed heads. Some of Almereyda’s dialogue from his writing sessions with Bruce Beresford in Australia remains in Total Recall (1990) and the writer retains a credit for Cherry 2000 (1987). A script for David Lynch went unmade but Almereyda would work again with the director on the film Nadja (1994). His last studio writing job was for a Tim Burton passion project, one based on a Nathaniel Hawthorne story, at Warner Brothers. Almereyda edited and wrote assorted chapters for “Night Wraps the Sky: Writings by and about Mayakovski,” an anthology published by Farrar, Straus and Girux in 2008.

Almereyda recently profiled American photographer William Eggleston in the documentary William Eggleston in the Real World (2005). The film premiered at The Museum of Modern Art, New York in 2005, and was distributed by Palm Pictures. Almereyda also contributed an essay to a book of Eggleston photographs 5X7, published by Twin Palms in 2006. His previous film, This So-Called Disaster (2004), also a documentary, followed Sam Shepard as he mounted a production of his play The Late Henry Moss with Woody Harrelson, Cheech Marin, and Nick Nolte in the cast. Almereyda recently completed filming of New Orleans, Mon Amour, starring Christopher Eccleston and Elisabeth Moss, with producer Edith LeBlanc and executive producer Michael Arata. This twisted love story is set in post-Hurricane Katrina New Orleans, and features stunning use of the apocalyptic destruction of the city.

The director is noted for his use of the Fisher-Price PixelVision camera. He used the format, which records video onto audiocassettes, most prominently in his 1992 film Another Girl, Another Planet, which won an award for “expanding the possibilities of experimental film.” The camera was also used for subjective perspective sequences in Nadja and Hamlet. —Wikipedia