As Director
While working as a film editor, Wise was called on to shoot additional scenes for Orson Welles's The Magnificent Ambersons (1942). He got his first credited directing job in 1944 by replacing the original director on the stylish horror film The Curse of the Cat People, for Hollywood horror producer Val Lewton. Lewton promoted Wise to his superiors at RKO, beginning a collaboration which would produce the notable horror film The Body Snatcher starring Bela Lugosi and Boris Karloff, a film which in its stylization and atmosphere deliberately evoked the groundbreaking horror films of the 1930s, while presenting a psychological horror film more in tune with the uncertainty of the 1940s.
In 1947, Wise directed the Lawrence Tierney noir classic Born to Kill and two years later directed the boxing movie The Set-Up, where his direction of the real-time setting got him noticed. Wise's use and mention of time in this film would find echos in later noir films such as Stanley Kubrick's The Killing and Quentin Tarantino's Pulp Fiction.
In the 1950s, Wise proved adept in several genres, from the science fiction of The Day the Earth Stood Still to the melodramatic So Big, to the 1954 boardroom drama Executive Suite, to the epic Helen of Troy based on Homer, to Susan Hayward's Oscar winner in I Want to Live!, for which he was nominated for Best Director.
In 1961, teamed with Jerome Robbins, he won the Academy Award for Best Director for West Side Story, which he also produced. In 1963, he directed the horror film The Haunting, with Julie Harris. He won the Academy Award for Best Director and Best Picture again in 1965 with The Sound of Music.
The Sound of Music was an interim film for Wise, produced to mollify the studio while he developed the difficult film The Sand Pebbles, starring Steve McQueen, Richard Attenborough and Candice Bergen. Set in the late 1920s in China, this was an early entry in a series of Vietnam war era films (Catch-22, M*A*S*H), which, though set in other periods of wartime, nevertheless sounded with its depictions of gunboat diplomacy what would come to be recognized as timeless themes. Wise would later speak of The Sand Pebbles as the film he most wanted to direct, though he had earlier explored such anti-war themes in The Day the Earth Stood Still.
In the 1970s, he directed such films as The Andromeda Strain, The Hindenburg, the horror film Audrey Rose, and the first Star Trek film, Star Trek: The Motion Picture. By this time, Wise's style included much use of split-diopter lenses to create a deep focus effect across the widescreen frame.
In 1989, he directed Rooftops, his last theatrical feature film.
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Famous quotes containing the word director:
“He wrote me sad Mother’s Day stories. He’d always kill me in the stories and tell me how bad he felt about it. It was enough to bring a tear to a mother’s eye.”
—Connie Zastoupil, U.S. mother of Quentin Tarantino, director of film Pulp Fiction. Rolling Stone, p. 76 (December 29, 1994)
“The director is simply the audience. So the terrible burden of the director is to take the place of that yawning vacuum, to be the audience and to select from what happens during the day which movement shall be a disaster and which a gala night. His job is to preside over accidents.”
—Orson Welles (1915–1984)