Hal Hartley was born on November 3,1959 and is an American film director, screenwriter, producer and composer who became a key figure in the American independent film movement of the 1980s and '90s.
20 Facts About Hal Hartley
1.
2.
Hal Hartley is best known for his films The Unbelievable Truth, Trust, Simple Men, Amateur and Henry Fool, which are notable for deadpan humour and offbeat characters quoting philosophical dialogue.
3.
Hal Hartley's films provided a career launch for a number of actors, including Adrienne Shelly, Edie Falco, James Urbaniak, Martin Donovan, Karen Sillas and Elina Lowensohn.
4.
Hal Hartley was born in Lindenhurst on southern Long Island, New York, the son of an ironworker.
5.
Hal Hartley had an early interest in painting and attended the Massachusetts College of Art in Boston where he studied art and developed an interest in filmmaking.
6.
Hal Hartley shot his first feature film, The Unbelievable Truth, in 1988.
7.
Hal Hartley developed Flirt as an extension of his short film of the same name made in 1993.
8.
Hal Hartley achieved his greatest commercial and critical success with his next feature, Henry Fool, a darkly comic drama about a near-catatonic garbageman, Simon Grim, and his sister Fay, who meet Henry Fool, a libertine and aspiring novelist who inspires Simon to write and seduces Fay and her depressed mother.
9.
The film garnered positive reviews and was entered into competition at the 1998 Cannes Film Festival, where Hal Hartley won the Best Screenplay Award.
10.
Hal Hartley was invited to contribute the American entry to a series of films financed by French television to celebrate the 2000 millennium.
11.
Some sources state that William Burroughs is featured, but according to Hal Hartley, this is actually a shot of the film's production manager doing a Burroughs impression.
12.
In late 2005, Hal Hartley moved from New York to Berlin and began preparing Fay Grim, an intended sequel to Henry Fool.
13.
Since 1999, Hal Hartley's films have predominantly been shot with digital cameras, including the features The Book of Life, The Girl from Monday, Fay Grim and Meanwhile, in addition to his short films.
14.
The hour-long feature was released on DVD in 2012 following a successful funding campaign by Hal Hartley using the Kickstarter website.
15.
In November 2013, Hal Hartley funded Ned Rifle, the third film in the trilogy that began with Henry Fool and Fay Grim, via a Kickstarter campaign.
16.
Between 2015 and 2017, Hal Hartley directed eight episodes of Red Oaks, an Amazon Studios comedy streaming television series.
17.
In 1996, Hal Hartley was made Chevalier of the Order of Arts and Letters of the French Republic.
18.
From 2001 through 2004, Hal Hartley was a visiting lecturer at Harvard University while simultaneously editing No Such Thing, shooting The Girl From Monday and writing Fay Grim.
19.
Hal Hartley was awarded a fellowship by The American Academy in Berlin in late 2004, where he did research related to a proposed large-scale project concerning the life of French educator and social activist Simone Weil.
20.
In 1996, Hal Hartley married the Japanese dancer and actress Miho Nikaido, one of the stars of his film Flirt.