Share on Facebook Share on Twitter Email
Answers.com

Carroll Ballard

 
Director: Carroll Ballard
  • Born: Oct 14, 1937 in Los Angeles, California
  • Occupation: Director, Actor
  • Active: '60s-2000s
  • Major Genres: Adventure, Children's/Family
  • Career Highlights: The Black Stallion, Star Wars, Fly Away Home
  • First Major Screen Credit: Harvest (1967)

Biography

Contemporary filmmaker Carroll Ballard has not made many films, but the ones he has are memorable. The son of a boatwright, Ballard was raised at Lake Tahoe. He experimented with his father's trade after high school and built a catamaran before enlisting in the army where he served in the South as a cameraman. Three films inspired Ballard to enroll in the UCLA film school in the early 1960s: Teinosuke Kinugasa's Gate of Hell (1953), Kubrick's Paths of Glory (1957) and Ordet (1955) by Danish filmmaker Carl Dreyer. In school, where Francis Ford Coppola was one of his classmates, he made several short fiction and documentary films, most of which were about animals. In 1967, he earned his first Oscar nomination for producing the documentary Harvest. He made his directorial debut with The Black Stallion (1979) and followed it with another outdoor film in 1983, Never Cry Wolf. His films are noted for their exquisite use of cinematography. The painting-like images he uses do as much to tell his stories as does the dialog. His 1996 effort Fly Away Home is no exception; while it received mixed-reviews for its content, was hailed for its breathtaking shots of geese flying in formation with an ultralight plane. ~ Sandra Brennan, All Movie Guide
Search unanswered questions...
Enter a question here...
Search: All sources Community Q&A Reference topics
Wikipedia: Carroll Ballard
Top
Carroll Ballard
Born October 14, 1937 (1937-10-14) (age 72)
Los Angeles, California, USA
Occupation Film director
Years active 1979 – 2005

Carroll Ballard (born October 14, 1937 in Los Angeles, is an American film director.

He started out making documentaries for the U.S. information agency, Beyond This Winter's Wheat (1965) and Harvest (1967); the latter was nominated for an Academy Award. He also made the documentaries The Perils of Priscilla (1969), and Rodeo (1970).

He was second unit director on George Lucas' Star Wars for which he handled many of the outdoor desert scenes. His first solo directing job came when Francis Ford Coppola, a former UCLA classmate, offered him the job of directing The Black Stallion (1979), an adaptation from the novel of the same name by Walter Farley. He went on to direct Never Cry Wolf (1983), a film based on Farley Mowat's autobiographical book of the same name. experiences with Arctic wolves. He also directed the film Wind (1992).

He later directed the film Fly Away Home (1996), which was nominated for an Academy Award for best cinematography. His most recent film is Duma (2005), about a young South African boy's friendship with an orphaned cheetah. Most of Ballard's films deal with man and his relation to nature and have a strong poetic streak. They are often subtle and understated in their execution.

Filmography

External links


 
 
Learn More
Duma (2005 Adventure Film)
The Black Stallion (1990 Children's/Family Film)
Fog City Mavericks: The Filmmakers of San Francisco (2007 Film, TV & Radio Film)

Where was robert ballard when he discovered the titanic? Read answer...
Who is mike carroll? Read answer...
Who is alex carroll? Read answer...

Help us answer these
What is the ballard locks?
How do you define a ballard?
What is the feature of a ballard?

Post a question - any question - to the WikiAnswers community:

 

Copyrights:

Director. Copyright © 2009 All Media Guide, LLC. All rights reserved.  Read more
Wikipedia. This article is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License. It uses material from the Wikipedia article "Carroll Ballard" Read more