Todd Field

Field directing In the Bedroom

Field began his filmmaking career in 2001 when he wrote and directed In the Bedroom, a film based on Andre Dubus's short story "Killings". (Kubrick and Dubus were among Field's mentors; both died right before the production of In the Bedroom.) In the Bedroom was nominated for five Academy Awards including Best Picture, Best Actor (Tom Wilkinson, his first nomination), Best Actress (Sissy Spacek, her sixth), Supporting Actress (Marisa Tomei, her second), and Best Adapted Screenplay. The film was shot in Rockland, Maine, a New England town where Field resides. The house where he, his wife (Serena Rathbun), and their four children live was even used as the setting for one sequence.[14] Rathbun and Spacek did some of the set design and Field handled the camera himself on many of the shots.

In the Bedroom made its debut at the 2001 Sundance Film Festival. Dennis Lim wrote in the Village Voice:

Todd Field's debut feature, In the Bedroom, alighted on the snowy peaks of Sundance last January as if from another universe. Here was a small miracle of patience and composure, so starkly removed from everything the festival had come to represent that it seemed almost to herald the overdue coming-of-age of American independent film.[15]

Upon the film's release David Ansen of Newsweek wrote:

Todd Field exhibits a mastery of his craft many filmmakers never acquire in a lifetime. With one film he's guaranteed his future as a director. He has the magnificent obsession of the natural-born filmmaker[16][17]

Anthony Quinn of The Independent stated,

"Field has pulled off something here I thought no American filmmaker would ever manage again: he makes violence feel genuinely shocking."[18]

For his work on In the Bedroom, Field was named Director of the Year by the National Board of Review, and his script was awarded Best Original Screenplay. The film was named Best Picture of the Year by the Los Angeles Film Critics Association, and the New York Film Critics Circle awarded Field Best First Film. In the Bedroom received six American Film Institute Awards, including Best Picture, Director, and Screenplay, three Golden Globe nominations, and five Academy Award nominations, including Best Picture, Actor, Actress, Supporting Actress, and two individually for Field as screenwriter and producer. The American Film Institute honored Field with the Franklin Schaffner Alumni Medal.

The February 2020 issue of New York magazine lists In the Bedroom alongside Citizen Kane, Sunset Boulevard, Dr. Strangelove, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, The Conversation, Nashville, Taxi Driver, The Elephant Man, Pulp Fiction, There Will Be Blood, and Roma as "The Best Movies That Lost Best Picture at the Oscars."[19]

Tom Perrotta and Field working on the script for Little Children, 2005

Field followed In the Bedroom with Little Children, which was nominated for three Academy Awards, including two for the actors: Kate Winslet (her fifth nomination, and with it a record for the youngest actor to be nominated for five Academy Awards) and Jackie Earle Haley (his first nomination and first major role in over 15 years). After having written, directed and produced just two feature films, Field had garnered five Academy Award nominations for his actors and three for himself. The film, based on Tom Perrotta's novel of the same name, premiered at the 2006 New York Film Festival. In his roundup "Best of 2006", A.O. Scott of The New York Times wrote:

The first time you see Todd Field's adaptation of Tom Perrotta's novel, you may remark on the director's impressive control over the unruly source material and the emotional agility of the cast, Kate Winslet in particular. The second time, the film's lurid, crazy side is more apparent, and the intensity of the supporting performances—Noah Emmerich, Jackie Earle Haley, Phyllis Somerville—creep into the foreground. This movie, Mr. Field's second feature...is a complicated blend of gothic, melodrama and sexual comedy, unerringly attuned to the varieties of human failure.[20]

International Cinephile Society's Matt Mazur called the film "subversive" and designed to disorient the viewer with "seemingly non-connected imagery to suggest a tone and a mood of disquiet." Mazur compared Field's technique with that of Sergei Eisenstein, D. W. Griffith, Georges Méliès, and Edwin S. Porter.[21]

Many members of Field's creative team on In the Bedroom returned to work with him on the film, including Serena Rathbun. In a 2006 interview with The Hollywood Reporter's Anne Thompson, Field said he quit acting and began making his own films after Rathbun told him, "Do what you want to do. Don't get distracted."[22] Later that year, Field spoke extensively about the importance of Rathbun as his creative partner, describing a conversation he had with her where she gave him the most pivotal scene: "for me, the film is unthinkable without it."[23]

After Little Children, Field went fifteen years without directing anything, which various film journalists lamented.[24] In his 2015 Ioncinema piece "Top 10 American Indie Filmmakers Missing in Action", Nicholas Bell wrote, "It is definitely time for Field to throw one down the middle. In the meantime, we'll just have to watch In the Bedroom for the umpteenth time."[25]

During that time, Field was attached to a number of film projects, including a film adaptation of the 2009 Boston Teran novel The Creed of Violence, set during the Mexican Revolution, which at different times was set to star Leonardo DiCaprio,[26] Christian Bale[27] and Daniel Craig;[28] a coming-of-age Minor League Baseball story set in the 1970s Northwest;[29][30] an adaptation of the 1985 Cormac McCarthy novel Blood Meridian;[31][32] a political thriller called As It Happens, co-written by Joan Didion;[33] an adaptation of Jess Walter's novel Beautiful Ruins;[34] and a film about U.S. soldier Bowe Bergdahl.[35]

In 2016, Field worked on a planned television adaptation of the 2015 Jonathan Franzen novel Purity, which was to be a 20-hour limited series for Showtime.[36] The series was to be co-written by Field, Franzen and playwright David Hare. It would have starred Daniel Craig as Andreas Wolf and been executive produced by Field, Franzen, Craig, Hare and Scott Rudin.[37] In 2016 Franzen said on The Diane Rehm Show that he was learning the art of adaptation from Field, whom he considered a "master" of the form.[38] But in a February 2018 interview with The Times, Hare said that, given the budget for the adaptation ($170 million), he doubted it would ever be made. "It was one of the richest and most interesting six weeks of my life, sitting in a room with Todd Field, Jonathan Franzen and Daniel Craig bashing out the story. They're extremely interesting people", Hare added.[39]

Speaking publicly for the first time in 16 years, Field told the New York Times in 2022, "I set my sights in a very particular way on certain material that was probably very tough to get made."[40]

Todd Field, Cate Blanchett, Sophie Kauer and Nina Hoss at Berlinale 2023

Field's third film, Tár, starring Cate Blanchett as the fictional conductor/composer Lydia Tár, premiered at the 79th Venice International Film Festival, where it competed for the Golden Lion and Queer Lion, with Blanchett winning the Volpi Cup for Best Actress.[41] The film had a limited theatrical release in the United States on October 7, 2022, before its wide release on October 28, 2022, and International theatrical release that began first in the UK on 13 January 2023.[42]

For his work on Tár, Field was nominated by the Directors' Guild of America for Best Director, the Producers Guild of America for Best Film, and the Writers Guild of America for Best Original Screenplay.[43][44][45]

Tár received five nominations from 76th British Academy Film Awards, including Best Picture, Best Director, Best Actress, Best Sound, and Best Screenplay of the Year, and six nominations for the 95th Academy Awards, including Best Picture, Best Director and Best Original Screenplay for Field, and Best Actress for Blanchett.[46][47]

Tár was named Best Picture of the year by the London Film Critics' Circle with Field being named Best Director of the Year and Blanchett Best Actress.[48] Field was named Best Director by The Los Angeles Film Critics Association, and his script Best Original Screenplay of the Year, as did the National Society of Film Critics.

Tár was selected Best Film of the Year by the New York Film Critics Circle, Los Angeles Film Critics Association, London Film Critics' Circle, and the National Society of Film Critics, becoming only the fourth film in history named as such from the world's top critics' groups. The previous films being Schindler's List, L. A. Confidential, and The Social Network,[49] Tár was named "Best Picture of the Year" by Vanity Fair, The Atlantic, The Guardian, Daily Variety, The Hollywood Reporter, Screen Daily, Entertainment Weekly, and IndieWire's annual poll of 165 critics worldwide.[50][51] The American Film Institute named it one of the top 10 films of the year.

Owen Gleiberman in his Venice Film Festival Daily Variety review wrote

"Let me say right up front: It's the work of a master filmmaker... Field's script is dazzling in its conversational flow, its insider dexterity, its perception of how power in the world actually works... Tár is not a judgement so much as a statement you can make your own judgment about. The statement is: We're in a new world."[52]

A. O. Scott of The New York Times writing from the Telluride Film Festival and later from the New York Film Festival stated,

"I'm not sure I've ever seen a movie quite like Tár. Field balances Apollonian restraint with Dionysian frenzy. Tár is meticulously controlled and also scarily wild. Field finds a new way of posing the perennial question about separating the artist from the art, a question that he suggests can only be answered by another question: are you crazy? We don't care about Tár because she's an artist. We care about her because she's art."[53][54]

Martin Scorsese presenting Best Film of the Year to Field at the 2022 New York Film Critics Circle Awards, praised Field's filmmaking saying,

"For so long now, so many of us see films that pretty much let us know where they're going... I mean, they take us by the hand and, even if it's disturbing at times, sort of comfort us along the way that it will be all okay by the end. Now this is insidious, as one can get lulled into this and ultimately get used to it, leading those of us who've experienced cinema in the past – as much more than that – to become despairing of the future of the art form, especially for younger generations. But that's on dark days. The clouds lifted when I experienced Todd's film, Tár. What you've done, Todd – is that the very fabric of the movie you created doesn't allow this. All the aspects of cinema and the film that you've used, attest to this. The shift in locations for example, the shift in locations alone do what cinema does best, which is to reduce space and time to what they are, which is nothing... all of this is conveyed through a masterful mise-en-scène, as controlled, precise, dangerous, precipitous angles and edges geometrically kind of chiseled into a wonderful 2:3:5 aspect ratio of frame compositions. The limits of the frame itself, and the provocation of measured long takes all reflecting the brutal architecture of her soul – Tár's soul."[55]

Paul Thomas Anderson also praised Field's work when presenting him with his Director Medallion at the 75th annual DGA Awards saying,

"The last time that Todd Field made a movie, George Bush was president and there was no iPhone. There were rumors that he was playing graveyards, secretly performing for corpses, but it turns out he was waiting to pounce on us and make this beast of a film called ‘TÁR.’ We’ve all agreed it was worth the wait. Every detail matters in this film. Nothing is not deliberate or full of intention. It’s directed with such perfectly controlled mayhem and glee by Todd, it’s really hard not to drool as another director. For me it was just magical as an audience member to watch. He made a film which for some years was considered a very dirty word. He made an art film. It’s art that is not fussy or pretentious. It’s just razor-sharp, pitch black, and hilarious. It’s a very focused mirror that it holds up to some of the worst of our human behaviors. It’s also a blast."[56]