Michael Almereyda

Michael Almereyda
Born	1960 (age 56–57) Overland Park, Kansas, U.S.
Occupation	Film director, screenwriter, film producer
Years active	1985–present

Michael Almereyda (born 1960) is an American film director, screenwriter, and film producer. His most well known work is Hamlet (2000), starring Ethan Hawke.

Almereyda studied art history at Harvard but dropped out after three years to pursue filmmaking. He acquired a Hollywood agent on the strength of a spec script about Nicola Tesla. His first film as writer/director was a self-financed, black-and-white short featuring Dennis Hopper, A Hero of Our Time, based on Mikhail Lermontov’s novel of the same title. Shot in 1985, it was finished in 1987 and screened in the 1992 Sundance Film Festival.

Early screenplays include Cherry 2000 (1987), the first draft for Wim Wenders’ Until the End of the World (1991), and uncredited work on Total Recall (1990).

Almereyda’s films range across many genres, styles, and formats. His first feature, Twister (1989), based on Mary Robison’s novel Oh, was a comedy about a dysfunctional mid-Western family. Another Girl Another Planet (1992) was a romantic chamber piece, a black-and-white, one-hour featurette shot with a Fisher-Price Pixelvision camera.

Nadja (1994) was a comic vampire film shot on 35mm with Pixelvision inserts.

Hamlet (2000) was shot on Super 16mm and featured Ethan Hawke, Bill Murray, Kyle MacLachlan, Julia Stiles, Liev Schreiber and Sam Shepard. The adaptation layered a contemporary New York setting on Shakespeare’s text.

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