British Film Directors You Should Know
The 2017 awards season has just wound down and to be honest I’m still a bit knackered from watching the Oscars. If you didn’t let this year’s Best Picture debacle distract you too much, you might recall that this year La La Land’s Damien Chazelle became the youngest nominee in the history of the Academy Awards to be honored for Best Achievement in Directing.
While no British directors were nominated for an Oscar this year, there are plenty working today who are making their presence felt in the UK and around the world. Veterans like Ken Loach, Mike Leigh, Stephen Frears and Oscar-winner Danny Boyle are active and continue to tell important and innovate stories. For this post, however, I’d like to concentrate on a younger generation of influential British filmmakers you may want to check out. Here are five under 50 that you might see holding that golden statuette one day.
Gareth Edwards
At 41, Edwards has directed three sci-fi pictures in seven years. He started with the low budget but critically successful indie film Monsters but quickly graduated to proper Hollywood action adventure with the 2014 incarnation of Godzilla starring Aaron Taylor-Johnson and Elizabeth Olsen. Gareth’s star continued to rise when he was tapped to helm the Star Wars spin-off Rogue One released just last December.
