Beginning in 1957 with the release of his directorial debut The Left-Handed Gun, Arthur Penn (b. 1922) quickly became an iconoclastic and influential American film director. Moving deftly between comedy and tragedy, realism and absurdity, his films Mickey One, Bonnie and Clyde, Alice’s Restaurant, Little Big Man, and Night Moves speak to the troubled times—the 1960s and 1970s—in which they were made while remaining timeless in their unsettling portrayal of characters on the margins of society.
Arthur Penn: Interviews is the first collection to explore every stage of the director’s career. These conversations span forty-five years, from his first in-depth discussion with Cahiers du cinema in 1963 to a new interview from 2007, and reveal Penn’s ever-changing ideas on the nature of film and filmmaking. This volume also presents newly translated interviews from European film periodicals, published in English for the first time.
Michael Chaiken is director of film and new media at the Maysles Institute and has published in Film Comment. Paul Cronin is founder and director of Sticking Place Films and lives in London. He is author of Herzog on Herzog and editor ofAlexander Mackendrick’s On Film-Making: An Introduction to the Craft of the Director.
