Taylor Hackford
Taylor Hackford
Taylor Edwin Hackfordis an American film director and former president of the Directors Guild of America. He won the Academy Award for Best Live Action Short Film for Teenage Father. Hackford went on to direct a number of highly regarded feature films, most notably An Officer and a Gentlemanand Ray, the latter of which saw him nominated for the Academy Award for Best Director and Academy Award for Best Picture...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionDirector
Date of Birth31 December 1944
CitySanta Barbara, CA
CountryUnited States of America
It's much easier to work with an unknown.
I love actors and I understand what has to happen within a scene. Any scene is an acting scene and actors never act alone, so there has to be an interchange. If it's a dialog scene, if it's a love scene, it doesn't matter because you need to establish a situation.
If people are worried about the size of their trailers, I kind of say their priorities are off.
I'm not in front of the camera, they are. I encourage them; I build up as much of their confidence and ego as possible. They've got to take control; I can't act it out.
I try to get the best performance an actor can give.
The most disgusting, appalling horror of our world that we live in, to me, is sex trafficking and the enslavement of men and women, boys and girls, in the sex industry. That is the most horrific, horrific thing that's happening and it's happening in all of our towns here in Los Angeles, in New York, in London, in Paris, all over the world, and I think that's really what has to be addressed.
I make films about working class people.
But a writer's contribution is literary and a film is not literary. When you take that stuff off the page, and cast the people who are going to fit into those roles, that's what being a director is.
I make films about working class people. All my films have always been about that. For example, the brothel is a workplace. It's aberrant, but a workplace nonetheless. I was more interested as opposed to glamorizing and saying, oh, this is a great erotic place, it's a place of business. The commodity is sex.
An actor has to embody a role.
It was the era of Tab Hunter and Rock Hudson; they all had a certain look.
Because when you have millions of people with this kind of need for gratification, and the culture is saying that it's possible for everyone to satisfy all of their needs and desires all of the time, there are obviously going to be clashes - clashes of ego.
If you are making a film about a very famous individual you live or die by the person that's going to play the main role, ... In this film I'm in big trouble because everyone knows what Ray Charles looks like. Everyone knows his movements, everyone knows his vocal patterns.
The SAS is the most elite of the special forces in the world. They are not people who go out and advertise; they keep it inside. They don't want anybody to know about them.