Roman Polanski fits it in the most literal of ways.
Just clicked on this thread to add Polanski’s name and see he’s the only one actually mentioned so far. Great minds…
Terry Gillliam – only because he consistantly gets screwed by the studios on his films. Has he ever made a film that wasn’t altered by the studio in an attempt to make it more commercial?
Rainer Werner Fassbinder. Completed 41 film projects from 1969 to 1982, but was dead by the age of 37 from a combination of cocaine, sleeping pills, and alcohol.
When Terry Gilliam did the weird cartoons for Monty Python they definitely didn’t try to make those commercial.
Bergman is the first that comes to mind, purely in a psychological aspect. Orson Welles is probably the most tortured director with all his problems with studios and rights, etc. Watch the documentary, One-Man Band where Welles drives out to the side of the highway and tearfully recites a scene from Merchant of Venice. It’s an amazing short performance that shows his frustration and love for his art.
No director who has ever completed a film (and, I suppose, released it) can be called a “tortured artist.” They may be tortured souls, but they nevertheless have produced their art. The “tortured artists” are all the Rupert Pupkins of the world in basements and attics dreaming away, never producing anything.
^ Not necessarily. Being a “tortured artist” could be anyone that’s tortured inside, it doesn’t mean that you never complete anything, that has nothing to do with it. Anyway, it seems to have a subjective meaning since almost every post here implies something different.
I agree with Bergman
Fassbinder yes.
How about Kubrick? Rod Steiger screwed up his chances at getting his Napolean film made and Spielberg stole the Holocaust from him. Doesn’t get much more tortured than that.
Philippe Garrel hands down.
His romance with self-destructive Nico, his slip into heroin addiction in the 70’s, his deep depressions, his electro-shock therapy treatments, etc.
Jean Eustache and Sergei Parajanov to add some more…
Donald Cammel, Pierpaolo Pasolini…
great call on Donald Cammell, perhaps the epitome of the tortured filmmaker
I’d add Derek Jarman (he fought the good fight) & Hal Ashby (read the new bio on him)
Co-sign, Grey Daisies.
Certainly Pasolini, and Godard too.
Werner Herzog is right up their.
I’d have to go with Bergman and Fassbinder. Korine too.
Nobody for Lars Von Trier? He seems almost as obvious as Polanski.
Sam Peckinpah might be considered a candidate for that title.
Tony Kaye, Sam Peckinpah is about right. How bout Tim Burton although he gets alot of mainstream studio work thte mans mind must surely be haunting in some way! Todd Haynes!
Erich von Stroheim.
It can easily be said he brought it upon himself (in some ways like Welles) but it is hard not to see him as someone who was so uncompromising that again and again his films got taken away and butchered by others, and yet he kept going in that style until he couldn’t get directorial work anymore.
I believe it was when he had seen what remained of “Greed” at the Cinemateque Francaise that he uttered the famous phrase about how it was like opening a coffin and seeing the bones of his child.
>>Spielberg stole the Holocaust from him<<
Fredo, Fredo, Fredo …
Considering the vast number of Holocaust films & TV miniseries that were made in the same general period as SCHINDLER’S LIST, isn’t this a bit of an overstatement?
Sam Peckinpah or Philippe Garrel, that’s a toughie. Heroin addiction and electro-shock therapy vs heavy drinking and prodigious amounts of blow. Damn.
Michael Reeves
Or Yukio Mishima if his one co-directing stint counts
Francis Ford Coppola. An artist of brilliant talent and skill who was aesthetically frustrated by the limitations of budget and schedule, then creatively sidelined by debt from which he admirably and honorably dug himself out.
Tarkovsky. Read his diaries, heartbreaking stuff. Death in exile.
Donald Cammell — whose career as a director was largely tortured by his own unwillingness to compromise, but what’s more artistic than burning the bridge to wealth and popular success?
User de Faux-Fuyants
I’d have to say Roman Polanski for evident reasons.