A formidable new generation of American filmmakers are currently in their prime: Paul Thomas Anderson, Alexander Payne, Sofia Coppola, David Fincher, Spike Jonze, Wes Anderson, to name but six. Call them 'The Sundance Kids'...
A conspicuous number of these talents first kick-started their careers in the workshops of Robert Redford's Sundance Institute in Utah, or made the big time after screening their work at the Sundance Film Festival. Nowadays, acclaimed movies such as Payne's Sideways, Jonze's Adaptation and Sofia Coppola's Lost in Translation have reminded people of that great period in the 1970s spearheaded by Scorsese, Altman, and Francis Ford Coppola.
In this comprehensive study, James Mottram traces the roots of this new generation to Steven Soderburgh's Sex, Lies and Videotape - a low-budget tour deforce that premiered at Sundance en route to conquering Cannes which persuaded some of the 'Sundance Kids' to pick up a camera. Motram proceeds to analyse each director and their oeuvre, placing each carefully within the context of the ever-changing landscape of American cinema over the last fifteen years.
Mottram also explores the ambiguous meaning of 'independence' at a time when most of these young mavericks find their financing through specialist subsidiary arms of the Hollywood studios. But he also draws the needful comparisons with that 'golden age' of the 1970s, when free-thinking directors used studio funds to further their own idiosyncratic visions. As such, he poses the question - are we witnessing a new Golden Age of film-making?
