Film Makers

MARCO KREUZPAINTNER (Director)

MARCO KREUZPAINTNER (Director) Although only 28 years old when producers Roland Emmerich and Rosilyn Heller selected him to take the reins of Trade, director MARCO KREUZPAINTNER had already established himself as one of the leading young directors in his native Germany. His second feature, the coming-out and coming-of-age German feature, Summer Storm, won him the German Film Award (Germany's version of the Oscar) for Best Young Director and earned him a nomination for Best Director and Best Screenplay (which he co-wrote). The movie's lead was also nominated for Best Actor. Distributed by Warner Bros., the film was an official selection at over 50 film festivals worldwide, including Toronto, Berlin, London and Palm Springs.

So impressed was Emmerich with Kreuzpaintner's work on Summer Storm --notably his work with the young cast of actors, many of them non-professionals--that he invited the young director to come to Los Angeles under his aegis to select his next project. That trip resulted in Kreuzpaintner directing his first American-produced project, Trade, for which he imported several of Summer Storm's crew as well as his lead actress, Alicja Bachleda (Veronica). Kreuzpaintner's first full-length feature, Breaking Loose, garnered the best actor prize at the Max Ophuls Festival in Saarbruecken in 2004. For the German television network ZDF he helmed the experimental movie Rec., which was shot without a script and completely improvised with his actors. In 2000, he formed his own production company FilmManufaktur, and also shot The Breathing Artist, which he produced, wrote and directed and which followed his 1999 short Entering Reality. For theatre, Kreuzpaintner directed the Friedrich Schiller play Die Raeuber, for Munich's Volkstheater in 2003. A graduate of the University of Salzburg, Kreuzpaintner is a visiting professor at the Film Academy BadenWurtemberg and was the youngest member of Germany's Regional Parliament. He is a member of the German Film Academy, the German Directors Guild and the Directors Guild of America. Since finishing Trade, Kreuzpaintner has completed a new film, Krabat, a fantasy based on Otfried Preussler's 1971 literary adaptation of a 17th Century legend, The Curse of the Darkling Mill. Germany's biggest domestic production of 2007, Krabat will open in October in Germany on 900 screens (the maximum number).

ROLAND EMMERICH (Producer)

ROLAND EMMERICH (Producer) Known as one of Hollywood's top-grossing and most bankable directors, producer ROLAND EMMERICH began his career as a student in his native Germany. While studying directing at the Munich Film and Television School, his feature, The Noah's Ark Principle, became the most expensive student project ever produced in Germany and was screened at the 1984 Berlin Film Festival, selling to more than 20 countries. Following the success of his student film, Emmerich formed Centropolis Film Productions, producing and directing the features Joey, Hollywood Monster and Moon 44. In 1992, Emmerich directed his first American feature, Universal Soldier, starring Jean-Claude Van Damme. His 1994 sci-fi film Stargate lead to a hit spin-off television series and gave Hollywood the confidence to back Roland's next effort, the huge special-effects driven sci-fi feature Independence Day, starring Will Smith. The film grossed over $800 million worldwide and seated Emmerich among Hollywood's most bankable directors.

Emmerich went on to direct and executive produce Godzilla in 1998 and The Patriot, starring Mel Gibson, in 2002. Two years later, his movie about an abrupt climate shift, the blockbuster The Day After Tomorrow, starring Dennis Quaid and Jake Gyllenhall, inspired him to become involved in a variety of environmental concerns. Emmerich's epic drama 10,000 B.C. is scheduled for release in early 2008.

ROSILYN HELLER (Producer)

ROSILYN HELLER (Producer) With her unique ability to discover new talent, producer ROSILYN HELLER has helped develop, produce and distribute the work of some of the most important executives, directors, writers, and actors working in Hollywood today. She began her motion picture career as a creative executive for Palomar/ABC Pictures in New York before moving to Los Angeles to join Peter Guber at Columbia Pictures as a production executive. At Columbia, she became the first female Vice President of a major Hollywood studio, serving under studio heads Peter Guber, David Begelman, Stanley Jaffe and Danny Melnick. Among the many award-winning films she developed and supervised are Taxi Driver, Julia, Close Encounters of the Third Kind and The China Syndrome. Heller then became an independent producer at Columbia where she executive-produced the feature Ice Castles. She went on to produce Who's That Girl, starring Madonna, for Guber-Peters at Warner Bros., American Heart, starring Jeff Bridges, for Avenue/World Pictures, and The Beans of Egypt, Maine, starring Martha Plimpton, Kelly Lynch and Rutger Hauer for American Playhouse Films. For Guber-Peters Entertainment, Heller served as executive vice president when the company was housed at Warners’, later moving to Kings Road Productions in the same position.

In addition to her feature films, Heller produced the six-hour NBC miniseries, Celebrity, based on the novel by the late Tommy Thompson, and several television and cable movies, including Callie & Son, starring Lindsay Wagner and Michelle Pfeiffer; The Killing of Randy Webster, starring Hal Holbrook, Dixie Carter, Sean Penn and Jennifer Jason Leigh; and the Lifetime movie Better Off Dead with Mare Winningham, produced with her friend and creative partner Gloria Steinem. Heller currently has numerous features at various stages of development and pre-production. She has also written a number of screen adaptations, among them The Gilded City, to be directed by Academy-Award-winning Production Designer, Eugenio Zanetti, at Fox Searchlight; Fathers & Sons, based on the Ivan Turgenev novel and to be directed by Michael Hoffman; and a true World War II coming-of-age story, The Defiant, based on the book by Shalom Yoran and to be directed by award-winning German director Tomy Wigand (The Flying Classroom) and executive produced by Roland Emmerich. Recently she completed an original romantic comedy, Poles Apart. Before her career in the motion picture industry, Heller held various positions in New York publishing, including senior editor for New American Library.

JOSE RIVERA (Screen Play)

JOSE RIVERA (Screen Writer) Playwright and screenwriter JOSE RIVERA earned an Academy Award nomination for Best Adapted Screenplay for Motorcycle Diaries, directed by Walter Salles, as well as a British Academy of Film and Television Arts Award and a Writers Guild Award. The screenplay also garnered Spain's Goya Award and Argentina's top award for screenwriting. The Puerto-Rican born Rivera is a recipient of two Obie Awards for playwriting, for Marisol and References to Salvador Dali Make Me Hot, both produced at The Joseph Papp Public Theatre/New York Shakespeare Festival. His other honors include the Imagen Foundation's 2005 Normal Lear Writing Award, a Fulbright Arts Fellowship in Playwriting, and a Rockefeller Foundation grant. Rivera's plays have been produced worldwide and translated into seven languages, including Cloud Tectonics, Each Day Dies with Sleep, Sonnets for an Old Century, Sueno, Giants Have Us in Their Books, Marciela de la Luz Lights the World, Adoration of the Old Woman and Massacre (Sing to Your Children). His School of the Americas premiered at the Public Theatre in New York in July of 2006 in a co-production with the LAByrinth Theatre Company. Rivera is currently writing The Untranslatable Secrets of Orlando Corona and a screen adaptation of Jack Kerouac's On the Road for Walter Salles. He will make his feature film directing debut with Celestina, based on his play Cloud Tectonics.

PETER LANDESMAN (Story)

PETER LANDESMAN (Writer) is a screenwriter, producer, award-winning investigative staff journalist for the New York Times Magazine and novelist. He has written scripts for Michael Mann, Cruise/Wagner, Oliver Stone, and the adaptation of 'Who Killed Daniel Pearl?' for Beacon Pictures. He is currently writing a movie about Watergate's Deep Throat, Mark Felt, for Universal and Tom Hanks. His investigative journalism, appearing regularly in the New York Times Magazine, includes cover stories on weapons trafficking, sex slavery and drug and refugee smuggling. He has also covered the war in Kosovo and post-9/11 Pakistan and Afghanistan for the NY Times Magazine, the New Yorker and the Atlantic Monthly. His April 2002 article on refugee smuggling and people trafficking for the New York Times Magazine, "Light at the end of the Chunnel," won the Overseas Press Club prize for best magazine reporting from abroad. His 2004 for article on sex trafficking, "The Girls Next Door", was cited by the Overseas Press Club for best international reporting on human rights issues. His first novel, 'The Raven', was awarded the best first fiction prize by the American Academy of Arts and Letters.