Marc Forster

His dad is a doctor and his brother a lawyer. He’s 6’3” and (I'm told) handsome. He turned down offers to direct such movies as Brokeback Mountain and Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban. He went to NYU film school and, in 1998, turned down $500,000 to direct his first major feature while living off of borrowed money. He was even a student at the world-known Institut Montana Zugerberg in Switzerland.  

He is director Marc Forster (pictured at right with Halle Berry), and he is, without doubt, a film stud. Like Steven Soderbergh, we forgot to mention Forster when ranking and discussing our favorite directors of the Naughts. This mostly because Forster is something of a David Fincher-like director in that he makes great films that feel like the work of an auteur without ever writing a word in the script. He’s a pure director. A pure director who made seven very different feature-length films during the Naughts, starting the decade off with indie Everything Put Together in 2000 and finishing it with blockbuster Quantum of Solace in 2008.

We’ve ranked and rated his films below.

1. Monster’s Ball (2001) - 9.5/10

2. Stranger Than Fiction (2006) - 9/10

3. Finding Neverland (2004) - 8.5/10

4. Quantum of Solace (2008) - 8/10

5. Stay (2005) - 7.5/10

6. Everything Put Together (2000) - 7/10

7. The Kite Runner (2007) - 6.5/10

Not a bad decade for the very productive director. Just now entering his 40s, look for Forster to continue doing great work through this decade. He’s currently in the pre-production stages for his next film, The Chancellor Manuscript, based on the Robert Lundlum novel and scheduled for an early 2011 release. No word yet on who will play the lead, though we’ve heard that Gerard Butler may be considered. Meh. Enough of that guy already.

Written by G. William Locke