Curtis Hanson

Born on March 24, 1945 in Reno (Nevada), Curtis Lee Hanson was the son of a teacher, so respected that over time he was always stopped by his father’s former students on the street. “They always have to say good things about him,” he commented. From a very young age he devoured the great classics of cinema.

He began in the world of cinema from criticism, coming to direct Cinema magazine. He became a screenwriter after writing the chilling Dunwich Horror , an adaptation of an HP Lovecraft play starring Sandra Dee . Sweet Kill belonged to the same genre , his debut as a director, a low-budget film about a psychopath in love in his disturbed way with the women he murders. He also wrote White Dog , by Samuel Fuller , who unfairly raised controversy when accused of racism.

As a filmmaker, he had some success with the bland, hormone-ridden teen comedy Go Lose It and Get Lost in 1983, which featured a very young and as-yet-unknown actor named Tom Cruise in the cast . He also had an enormous impact, especially in the home video market, with False Witness , after which he specialized in suspense stories that were inspired by the Master of Suspense’s cinema.

It shows in his next job, Bad Influences , where Rob Lowe gets into trouble because of a new friend who is not a good choice. Or in The Hand That Rocks the Cradle , where an innocent babysitter (a role that brought the short-lived Rebecca de Mornay to fame ) turns out to be a dangerous madwoman. These titles had a disastrous influence on the cinema of the 90s, where close characters who turned out to be like a cowbell were abused, such as the roommate ( Single white woman seeks… ), a policeman ( False seduction ). etc. Even today, tabletop telefilms continue to exploit the theme over and over again.

“Every director is by nature egomaniac,” he once said. But this stereotype could not be applied to him, as he continued shooting interesting titles, some massive, without ever making any noise around his figure.

Meryl Streep had to defend her family from some crazy people in the same line in the entertaining Wild River . But the good responses from the public allowed him to disengage from the thriller, to launch a very personal project, which emerged on his own initiative, which would have his own script, co-written by Brian Helgeland , adapted from a novel by James Ellroy . This is how she paid tribute to classic film noir with LA Confidential , for which she had a truly luxurious cast (she finished consecrating Kevin Spacey and Russell Crowe , no less).

He obtained nine Oscar nominations, with such bad luck that his main competitor was a film called Kim Basinger , who, as is well known, did not do badly, ending up sweeping eleven Oscars. He was left with the crumbs, as Kim Basinger snatched the statuette from Gloria Stuart , nominated for the James Cameron film , and Hanson himself, along with Helgeland, received the one for a script based on previously produced or published material, from the hands of two of the greats, none other than Jack Lemmon and Walter Matthau . “Having the award presented to you by two actors linked to the great Billy Wilder makes it even sweeter,” he declared.

Paired with Rebecca Yeldham, producer of Comets in the Sky , with her he had his only child. He delved into drama with the excellent teacher-student relationship film Star Boys, he shot the biography of white rapper Eminen , 8 miles , again with a fit Basinger, he was responsible for the dramatic comedy about two sisters In Their Shoes , and he learned what it’s like to have commercial bad luck with Lucky You , a very conventional romantic comedy, for which he fell out of favor with Hollywood.

Thus, the financial crisis drama Bad News had a very limited release. And he didn’t make any noise either, considering who the director was, the correct but somewhat topical film about the world of surfing Chasing Mavericks , which meant his farewell from the screen.