The Power List 2012
Andrea Arnold Director
This TV-presenter-turned-director’s star has continued to rise over the past year, with her daring adaptation of Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights winning an award for cinematography at the Venice International Film Festi- val. The fi lm was praised for its coura- geous interpretation, a trait that has earned Andrea Arnold (right) a clutch of awards already – including an Oscar for short Wasp, Baftas and Cannes jury prizes for her debut Red Road (2006) and her follow-up project Fish Tank (2009). Her version of Wuthering Heights lasts for more than two hours, casts non-professional actors, opts for pared-back dialogue and no accom- panying music, and is shot in impres- sionistic, handheld style. Arnold’s inclusion in this list is recognition of her willingness to challenge the boundaries of the fi lm genre.
Vanessa Berlowitz BBC Natural History Unit series producer
Two decades of working at the BBC's Natural History Unit has made Vanessa Berlowitz (below) a pretty bold natural history producer. She over- came her arachnophobia by making the award-winning short Spiders From Mars and almost came to blows with a voodoo priestess at Miami Airport while fi lming a documentary on wild- life smugglers. Her biggest challenge has to be series producing the epic Planet trilogy – Blue Planet, Planet Earth and, most recently, Frozen Planet. The latter attracted record-breaking audiences and Berlowitz and her pro- duction team slaved in temperatures as low as -30°C to capture the changing landscapes of both the Arctic and the Antarctic. “It’s getting messages across to a mass audience that drives us,” she says. “And there’s an added sense of poignancy – in less than 50 years’ time, elements of these worlds will have disappeared altogether.”
HBO co-pro has been conceived as a returning series, an ambition that is sure to be helped by Clarkson’s fl air, which she honed on Whitechapel, Life On Mars and Toast. She’s certainly come a long way since directing Doctors for BBC Birmingham back in the early 2000s.
SJ Clarkson Director
How do you know when you’ve cracked America as a director? When your credits include some of the US’s most popular and acclaimed shows. Step forward SJ Clarkson (above), whose 2011 roll call includes directing episodes of Fox’s House and Show- time’s Dexter, having worked on Ugly Betty and Heroes in 2010. And Clarkson has already kicked off what could prove a major trans- Atlantic project for the BBC this year – directing Kudos’s eight-part espionage thriller Nemesis. Written by The X-Files' Frank Spotnitz and starring Melissa George, the
12 | The Power List | March 2012
Finola Dwyer Producer
All eyes are on this internationally suc- cessful fi lm producer as she works with veteran actor Dustin Hoffman on his directorial debut Quartet. The fi lm, which is in post-production, is set in a home for retired opera singers and features a stellar line-up of British actors including Maggie Smith, Michael Gambon and Billy Connolly. Dwyer’s (left) work on An Education (which she produced with Amanda Posey) garnered three Academy Award nominations including Best Picture, and the producing duo are also developing an adapta- tion of Nick Hornby’s 2005 novel A Long Way Down, which is being written by Skins scribe Jack Thorne. Dwyer relocated to the UK from
Producers & Directors
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