Todd Field

Todd Field
Field at the Deauville American Film Festival press conference on September 5, 2006
Born	(1964-02-24) February 24, 1964 (age 57) Pomona, California, U.S.
Alma mater	Mount Hood Community College Southern Oregon University AFI Conservatory
Occupation	Actor Film director Film producer Screenwriter
Years active	1985–present
Spouse(s)	Serena Rathbun ​ ​ (m. after 1986)​
Children	4
Awards	Best Director & Screenplay National Board of Review[1]

William Todd Field (born February 24, 1964) is an American actor and filmmaker. He directed In the Bedroom and Little Children, which received a combined eight Academy Award nominations.

Early life[]

Field was born in Pomona, California, where his family ran a poultry farm.^[2] When Field turned two, his family moved to Portland, Oregon, where his father went to work as a salesman, and his mother became a school librarian. At an early age, he became interested in performing sleight-of-hand and later music.^[3]

As a child in Portland, Field was a batboy for the Portland Mavericks, a single A independent minor league baseball team owned by Hollywood actor Bing Russell. Kurt Russell, Bing's son and later an acclaimed Hollywood actor in his own right, also played for the Portland Mavericks during this time.^[4] Field and Maverick Pitching Coach Rob Nelson created the first batch of Big League Chew in the Field family kitchen. In 1980 Nelson and former New York Yankees all-star Jim Bouton sold the idea to the Wrigley Company. Since that time over 800 million pouches have been sold worldwide.^[5][6][7]

Education[]

A budding jazz musician, at the age of sixteen Field became a member of the Big Band at Mount Hood Community College in Gresham, Oregon. Headed by Larry McVey, the band had become a proving-ground and regular stop for Stan Kenton and Mel Tormé when they were looking for new players. It was here Field played trombone along with his friend, trumpeter and future Grammy Award Winner Chris Botti. During this same time he also worked as a non-union projectionist at a second-run movie theater. Field graduated with his class from Centennial High School on Portland's east side and briefly attended Southern Oregon State College (now Southern Oregon University) in Ashland on a music scholarship, but left after his freshman year favoring a move to New York to study acting with Robert X. Modica at his renowned Carnegie Hall Studio.^[8] Soon after, Field began performing with the Ark Theatre Company as both an actor and musician.^[9] He received his Master of Fine Arts from the AFI Conservatory.

Career[]

Field worked in varying capacities as an actor, director, producer, composer, and screenwriter,^[10] and began making motion pictures after he was cast by Woody Allen in Radio Days (1987). He went on to work with some of America's greatest film makers including Stanley Kubrick, Victor Nuñez, and Carl Franklin. It was Franklin and Nunez (both AFI alumni) who encouraged Field to enroll as a Directing Fellow at the AFI, which he did in the fall of 1992. Since that time he has received the Franklin J. Schaffner Fellow Award from the AFI, the Satyajit Ray Award from the British Film Institute, a Jury Prize from the Sundance Film Festival, and his short films have been exhibited at various venues overseas and domestically at the Museum of Modern Art. To date, unadjusted box office receipts for the films in which Field has participated exceed a billion dollars worldwide.^[11]

In the Bedroom[]

Field became one of Hollywood's hottest new writer/directors with the release of In the Bedroom, a film based on the short story “Killings” by author Andre Dubus. (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 nomination), Supporting Actress (Marisa Tomei, her second nomination), and Best Adapted Screenplay. The film was shot in Rockland, Maine, a New England town in which Field resides—the house where he, his wife (Serena Rathbun), and their four children live was even used as the setting for one sequence.^[12]

Rathbun and Sissy Spacek did a portion of the set designing and Field handled the camera himself on many of the shots. The result, critics said, was stunning: 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.."^[13][14] Anthony Quinn of The Independent also praised the director, "Field has pulled off something here I thought no American filmmaker would ever manage again: he makes violence feel genuinely shocking."^[15]

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 went on to win Best Picture of the Year by the Los Angeles Film Critics Association, and the New York Film Critics Circle awarded Best First Film to Field. 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 both as Screenwriter and Producer. The American Film Institute honored Field with the Franklin Schaffner Alumni Medal. With the exception of the AFI Life Achievement Award, the Schaffner Award is the highest honor an individual can achieve.

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."^[16]

Little Children[]

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 his 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 leading role in over fifteen 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, personally. The film, based on the novel of the same name by Tom Perrotta, premiered at the 2006 New York Film Festival. In his end-of-year 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”^[17]

International Cinephile Society's Matt Mazur described the film as "subversive" and designed to intentionally disorient the viewer using "seemingly non-connected imagery to suggest a tone and a mood of disquiet." Mazur goes on to compare Field's technique with that of Sergei Eisenstein, D.W. Griffith, Georges Melies, and Edwin S. Porter.^[18]

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 Rathbun was the reason he quit acting and began making his own films after she told him to "Do what you want to do. Don't get distracted."^[19] Later that year on the Charlie Rose show, 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.”^[20]

Announced projects[]

From 2008 to 2016 it was purported that Field was involved with a film set in the Mexican Revolution starring Leonardo DiCaprio,^[21] a coming of age minor league baseball story set in the 1970s Northwest,^[22][23] and novel adaptations with Field co-writing alongside such literary luminaries as Cormac McCarthy,^[24][25] Joan Didion,^[26] and Jonathan Franzen^[27] who in 2016 stated on the Diane Rehm show that he was "learning" about the art of adaptation from Field who he considered to be a "master" of the form.^[28]

In 2016, Daily Variety reported that Franzen's novel Purity was in the process of being adapted into a 20-hour limited series for Showtime by Field who would share writing duties with Franzen and the playwright Sir David Hare. It would star Daniel Craig as Andreas Wolf and be executive produced by Field, Franzen, Craig, Hare and Scott Rudin.^[29] However, in a February 2018 interview with The Times London, Hare said that, given the budget for Field's adaptation ($170 million), he doubted it would ever be made, but added, “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.”^[30]

There was speculation as far back as 2010 that the filmmaker had become somewhat of a recluse. That year the Playlist's Kevin Jagernauth wrote, "It’s four long years since Todd Field’s extraordinary and excellent Little Children, and we’ve heard very little from the director since."^[31] And Nicholas Bell in his 2015 Ioncinema piece, "Top 10 American Indie Filmmakers Missing in Action," states "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."^[32]

In April 2021, Deadline reported that Field would be directing TAR, based on his own screenplay and starring Cate Blanchett, with production to begin in September 2021. The film is set in Berlin.^[33]

Filmography[]

Writer/director/producer[]

Feature films[]

Short films[]

Actor[]

References[]

External links[]

• Todd Field at IMDb
• Todd Field at the TCM Movie Database
• Todd Field at AllMovie