TSPDT

Key Production Country: USA
Key Genres: Drama, Psychological Thriller, Thriller, Mystery, Crime, Paranoid Thriller, Romantic Comedy, Comedy, Romance
Key Collaborators: George Jenkins (Production Designer), Gordon Willis (Cinematographer), Michael Small (Composer), Evan Lottman (Editor), Kevin Kline (Leading Actor), Stephen Goldblatt (Cinematographer), Sam O'Steen (Editor), John W. Wheeler (Editor), Marvin Hamlisch (Composer), Hume Cronyn (Character Actor), Anthony Heald (Character Actor)

"A curious hybrid in Hollywood terms, Pakula started out as a producer then turned to directing, when he was more than forty. Occasionally misled by his own intelligence, Pakula directed two of the best thrillers of the 1970s - The Parallax View (1974) and All the President's Men (1976) - both of which were marred by an overly self-conscious use of film trickery to obtain their effects (form over substance, if you like)." - Mario Reading (The Movie Companion, 2006)

"Known for drawing Oscar caliber performances out of his actors while helming suspenseful, moody thrillers, director Alan J. Pakula emerged from the theater world to produce a number of quality films in the 1960s with director Robert Mulligan, most notably the iconic adaptation of Harper Lee's novel To Kill a Mockingbird (1962). He went on to produce another six films with Mulligan during the decade before stepping into the director's chair himself for the low-key melodrama The Sterile Cuckoo (1969). But with his next picture, Klute (1971), Pakula began cementing his reputation as a fine practitioner of the conspiracy thriller while showcasing exemplary performances from his leading actors." - Turner Classic Movies

"Just as Pakula seemed very close to the jittery pulse of America in the seventies, so in the eighties a gap opened up. Good as he had been at conveying paranoia, he seemed less interested in other moods. Sophie’s Choice was his only success, and that had literary prestige, a fine cast, and Meryl Streep at her most virtuoso moment." - David Thomson (The New Biographical Dictionary of Film, 2010)

"Pakula made his directorial debut with 1969’s The Sterile Cuckoo and soon joined the ranks of A-list filmmakers with Klute, the first of a “paranoia trilogy” that also included The Parallax View and All the president's Men, which brought him another Oscar nomination. Though he had considerable success with thrillers (The Pelican Brief, Presumed Innocent), Pakula was above all an actor’s director, inspiring the likes of Jane Fonda, Meryl Streep, Jason Robards and Robert Redford to some of their best performances." - American Cinematheque, 2022

"In the early 70s, Pakula made a trio of taut thrillers notable for deft characterisation and a paranoid sense of conspiracy and cover-up. For all the intelligence of their scripts and performances, what distinguished them was their precise deployment of light and space… Sadly, this imaginative conflation of visual style with dramatic meaning declined in Pakula's work as he became a journeyman director." - Geoff Andrew (The Director's Vision, 1999)

"I am oblique, I think that has to do with my own nature. I like trying to do things which work on many levels, because I think it is terribly important to give an audience a lot of things they might not get as well as those they will, so that finally the film does take on a texture and is not just simplistic communication." - Alan J. Pakula