Todd Field - Literary Cinema

Todd Field Fiction into Film - Saturday 3:30 PM Todd Field began making motion pictures in 1985 when he was cast by Woody Allen inRadio Days. He went on to work with some of America's greatest film makers including Stanley Kubrick, Victor Nuñez, and Carl Franklin. Franklin and Nuñez encouraged Field to enroll as a directing fellow at the American Film Institute (AFI), which he did in 1992. Since that time he has received the Franklin J. Schaffner Fellow Award from the AFI, the Satyajit Ray Award from the British Film Institute, a Jury Prize from the Sundance Film Festival, and his short films have been exhibited at various venues overseas and domestically at the Museum of Modern Art. Field became one of Hollywood's hottest new writer/directors with the release of In the Bedroom, a film based on a short story by Andre Dubus. For Field's work on In the Bedroom, he was named Director of the Year by the National Board of Review, and his script was awarded Best Screenplay. The film went on to win Best Picture of the Year from the Los Angeles Film Critics Association, and the New York Film Critics Circle awarded Best First Film to Field. In the Bedroom also received six AFI, three Golden Globe, and five Academy Award nominations including Best Picture of the Year. In 2006, Field cowrote and directed Little Children, based on a novel by Tom Perrotta. For this film, director Field and Perrotta intended to take the story in a separate and somewhat different direction than the novel. The film, starring Kate Winslet, Patrick Wilson, Jennifer Connolly, and Jackie Earl Haley, is set in an upper-middle class bedroom community outside of Boston, and tells the story of several seemingly unrelated characters and how their lives connect in surprising, and potentially dangerous, ways. Little Children won numerous awards from the nation's critics associations including writing awards for Field and Perrotta. The movie received three Golden Globe nominations including Best Picture of the Year, and was nominated for three Academy Awards.