10 great filmmaker biopics

There’s no separating the art from the artist in Richard Linklater’s buoyant homage to Jean-Luc Godard, Nouvelle Vague. At once a masterclass on the beginnings of the French New Wave and a slice of cinephilic fanfiction, this panegyric features a series of uncannily accurate performances, from Zoey Deutch as American star Jean Seberg to a rascally Aubry Dullin as Jean-Paul Belmondo to Guillaume Marbeck, wearing sunglasses at all times as Godard himself. Linklater also pays tribute to New Wave aesthetics, but whether Godard would have given his seal of approval we’ll never know.

One of the most precarious tasks for directors, the filmmaker biopic often struggles to toe the line between reverence for its subjects and non-partisan integrity. As cinema is one of the most self-referential of art forms, the appeal of this subgenre, which allows filmmakers to revisit influential moments in film history, is obvious, but avoiding pandering to (or enraging) devotees poses a challenge. Among the earliest major examples, Clint Eastwood’s White Hunter Black Heart (1990) chose to play it safe – like Peter Viertel’s source novel – by giving its filmmaker protagonist the name ‘John Wilson’, but was an only thinly-veiled dramatisation of John Huston’s fraught shoot for The African Queen (1951).

Done badly, it can be mere cinematic mimicry or weak fan service. Done well, it can prove a fascinating balancing act in paying tribute to a filmmaker’s oeuvre while imposing one’s own signature stylistic spin. The filmmaker biopic is also often a lesson on the struggles of the profession, from financial woes to simmering frictions between cast and crew. 

Ahead of Nouvelle Vague’s arrival in UK cinemas, here are 10 previous films which offer real insight into the lives of real moviemakers.

Director: Tim Burton

Veneration for film industry flops can equal, or outstrip, that for its successes. A case in point is Edward D. Wood Jr, who – despite a string of duds and posthumously being feted the ‘worst director of all time’ – has attracted a loyal fanbase and earned himself an adoring biopic.

Tim Burton fondly inducts us into Wood’s zany world, populated by phony UFOs and plastic octopuses. Charting his early career in mid-century Los Angeles, we see Wood befriend washed-up gothic star Bela Lugosi (a formidable but world-weary Martin Landau), blag his credentials and wind up directing the groundbreaking Glen or Glenda (1953), one of the earliest films to feature a transgender protagonist. Johnny Depp envisioned this gutsy, sunnily optimistic character as a cross between The Wizard of Oz’s Tin Man and Ronald Reagan. Set during Hollywood’s golden age, and including an encounter with Orson Welles, the film ushers us through the less glamorous backdoor of the film industry. It gives us a rare glimpse of a radical alternative scene frequented by the industry’s rejects, misfits and non-conformers.

Director: Bill Condon

The final days of horror maestro James Whale, spent in the Pacific Palisades and concluding with his suicide in 1957, remain something of a mystery. It’s fairly safe to assume that Bill Condon’s account – adapted from Christopher Bram’s 1995 novel Father of Frankenstein and hinging on a wholly invented character: brawny man of the soil Clayton Boone (Brendan Fraser) – is far off the mark of reality.

But what this film lacks in historical accuracy it makes up for with incisive rumination on celebrity, scandal, sexuality and masculinity, through the prism of Whale’s ailing, volatile mind. A succession of strokes have transformed the English director’s brain into an “electrical storm”; and the story of Frankenstein (1931) will return to haunt him in other ways, as Whale reckons with his own potentially monstrous abuses of power, especially in sexual liaisons. Condon’s film is a turbulent, wayward and defiantly unflattering portrait of the Hollywood veteran, anchored by Stephen M. Katz’s stark, horror-injected cinematography.

Director: Benjamin Ross

The making of Citizen Kane (1941) is subject to much cinematic mythology and a handful of films have attempted to dramatise Orson Welles’s directorial origin story. Before David Fincher’s Mank (2020), which focuses on screenwriter Herman J. Mankiewicz, Benjamin Ross’s relatively obscure TV movie for HBO sought to delve behind the scenes with the egotistical auteur Welles (Liev Schrieber), co-writer Mankiewicz (John Malkovich) and their creatively productive beef with media mogul William Randolph Hearst.

The fabled story of the film’s titular production is given impressively even-handed treatment by Gladiator (2000) screenwriter John Logan, with our sympathies herded towards both Hearst and Melanie Griffith’s Marion Davies. Welles is cast as villain as much as hero. Based loosely on the documentary The Battle over Citizen Kane (1996), it also brings to light the ambient backdrop of rising fascism in Hollywood and the strain it put on studios. Producer Ridley Scott was refused access to the tycoon’s real-life Xanadu, the self-named Hearst Castle, so LA’s splendour was replicated on set in London.

Director: E. Elias Merhige

As much about the shadowy figure of Max Schreck – here a career-cresting performance from Willem Dafoe – as the mastermind behind his legacy, director F.W. Murnau (John Malkovich), E. Elias Merhige’s second feature rests on a simple premise: what if the vampire depicted in Nosferatu (1922) was real?

A decidedly silly, often absurdist, tragicomic send-up of method acting and the parasitic nature of filmmaking, Steven Katz’s script dispatches the bloodsucker and Murnau to 1920s Czechoslovakia, where the megalomaniac director has made a Faustian contract with Schreck, and his cast and crew are picked off one by one. Delivering on the blood, eroticism and japes you’d expect from such a feature, the film matches the schlock of many of the vampire flicks Murnau’s landmark film has spawned. Intertitles, iris lenses and grainy stock combine to replicate the feel of German expressionist silent film.

Director: Martin Scorsese

Although film directing was only one string to Howard Hughes’s bow, Martin Scorsese’s sweeping epic about the life of the oil tycoon is a fascinating window into pre-Code Hollywood, the Big Five studios and how the scene became an empire for the uber-rich.

Leonardo DiCaprio anchors the film as the plucky, all-American business mogul turned producer and director. Fusing his two passions, motion pictures and airplanes, The Aviator begins as Hughes sinks his millions into perfecting his war drama Hell’s Angels (1930), for which he has nonchalantly hired a whole fleet of aircrafts. During the shoot, two of his cast plummet to their deaths. Despite Hughes’ megalomania and profligacy, Scorsese makes a sympathetic figure out of the magnate, mapping out his relationship with Katharine Hepburn (Cate Blanchett), his smaller battles with censors and all-out war with Pan Am Airways.

Director: Abel Ferrara

Abel Ferrara’s paean to Italian auteur Pier Paolo Pasolini spent decades in the pipeline; unsurprisingly, the Ms .45 (1981) director felt an affinity with a fellow provocateur. The elegant eulogy of sorts that finally emerged follows an anti-narrative structure and is peppered with a succession of fantasy sequences that try to tap into Pasolini’s mentality in the lead-up to his still unsolved murder in 1975.

This film sidesteps the swirl of conspiracies still surrounding that event. It’s more interested in the next project that Pasolini had in the works but would never complete: Porno-Teo-Kolossal, a queer, hedonistic, messianic vision that he was on the cusp of shooting following Salò, or The 120 Days of Sodom (1975). Ferrara’s long-gestating film also contains segments adapted from Pasolini’s lascivious novel Petrolio – imaginary worlds into which the filmmaker is retreating from his detractors, including public, press and politicians. Ferrara and screenwriter Maurizio Braucci tentatively gesture towards the output Pasolini could have had if his life was not cut short.

Directors: Peter Greenaway

An impassioned knee-bend to Sergei Eisenstein, Peter Greenaway’s biopic about the Soviet auteur enjoys testing the limits of the medium, with frenzied split screens, archival cutaways and unsynchronised sound galore – one innovator celebrating another. But in Greenaway’s typically incendiary style, this film is no simple glorification, containing an unholy tidal wave of piss, diarrhoea and porn.

In search of revolutionary Mexico, and disillusioned with Hollywood, the Russian director (Elmer Bäck) decamps to a resplendent hotel in the titular South American city in 1931 to embark on the project that would test his mettle – his unfinished film ¡Que viva México! There, he is instantly smitten with his swoony guide Palomino Cañedo (Luis Alberti) and embarks on an odyssey of queer sexual discovery – rather than spending his time filming, much to the ire of his employer Upton Sinclair, Stalin and the Mexican gangsters who hope to abduct him. Avant-garde and off-the-wall, this is an eclectic palimpsest of past and present filmmaking.

Director: James Franco

It’s perhaps unsurprising that what happened on the set of one of the most colossal cinematic misfires of all time, Tommy Wiseau’s The Room (2003), has become the stuff of legend. James Franco’s meta-movie seeks to go behind the scenes of that melodrama and spin a heartfelt, uplifting narrative from a notorious filmic trainwreck.

At the crux of this story is a burgeoning bromance between Wiseau (Franco) and Greg Sestero (James’s sibling Dave Franco is a stroke of casting genius), on whose book the film is based. Roadtripping to LA, the undynamic duo struggle to get their footing in showbiz, resorting instead to writing, producing and directing their own haphazard feature. A rollicking, comedic tribute to the third-rate multihyphenate, the film raises questions about the unifying potential of laughter and the treatment of Hollywood outsiders. Its post-credit sting also expertly demonstrates the thin line between originals and parody.

Director: Salvador Simó

After the maelstrom of controversy surrounding his debut feature L’Age d’or (1930), Luis Buñuel found himself marooned: his upcoming projects were halted, financiers avoided him and his funds were drying up. Reconnecting with his old chum, the anarchist Ramón Acín – a recent lottery winner – at the urging of anthropologist Maurice Legendre, the surrealist headed to the rugged mountain region of Las Hurdes, using Acin’s dosh to make a documentary about its impoverished denizens. Land Without Bread (1933), a sombre meditation on human suffering and mortality, which cemented Bunuel’s reputation as a fearless portraitist of his contemporary Spain, was the result.

An exquisite adult animation from Salvador Simó, this adaptation of Fermín Solís’s 2008 graphic novel Buñuel en el laberinto de las tortugas homes in on a Buñuel who is plagued by memories of his stern father, anxious about being overshadowed by his former L’Age d’or collaborator Salvador Dalí and is coming to terms with the fallout of meddling with reality for his own ends.

Director: Craig Brewer

Cinema can often be a vehicle for inflated egos, a fact not shied away from in Dolemite Is My Name. But it’s near impossible not to root for Eddie Murphy’s rendering of comedian, filmmaker and ‘godfather of rap’ Rudy Ray Moore, whose foolhardy climb to fame, despite his many detractors, is well worthy of admiration.

Co-written by Scott Alexander and Larry Karaszewski, the film introduces us to Moore when he is working at a neighbourhood record store, trying to break his way into the music and comedy scenes simultaneously. A serendipitous encounter with a homeless wordsmith named Ricco (Ron Cephas Jones) catalyses Moore’s career, giving him his alias, the bardic pimp Dolemite. Murphy effortlessly carries this ode to the late filmmaker and the blaxploitation genre as a whole – which begot such icons as Pam Grier, Jim Brown and Richard Roundtree – with a riotous performance, with solid support from a cast including Da’Vine Joy Randolph, Snoop Dogg, Keegan-Michael Key, Wesley Snipes and Chris Rock.

Nouvelle Vague is in cinemas from 30 January. Preview screenings begin at BFI Southbank from 23 January.

Ensemble: The Filmmakers from Richard Linklater’s Nouvelle Vague plays at BFI Southbank in January.