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.
18 Facts About Hal Hartley
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Hal Hartley's films include The Unbelievable Truth, Trust, Simple Men, Amateur and Henry Fool, which are notable for deadpan humour and offbeat characters quoting philosophical dialogue.
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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.
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Hal Hartley was born in Lindenhurst, New York, the son of an ironworker.
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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.
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Amateur marked a change of pace for Hal Hartley, exploring somber themes.
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Hal Hartley developed Flirt as an extension of his short film of the same name made in 1993.
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Hal Hartley achieved his greatest commercial and critical success with Henry Fool, a 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.
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The film garnered positive reviews, and it was entered into competition at the 1998 Cannes Film Festival, where Hal Hartley won the Best Screenplay Award.
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Hal Hartley was invited to contribute the American entry to 2000, Seen By.
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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.
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In late 2005, Hal Hartley moved from New York to Berlin and began preparing Fay Grim, an intended sequel to Henry Fool.
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The hour-long feature was released on DVD in 2012 following a successful funding campaign by Hal Hartley using the Kickstarter website.
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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.
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From 2015 to 2017, Hal Hartley directed eight episodes of Red Oaks.
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In 1996, Hal Hartley was made Chevalier of the Order of Arts and Letters of the French Republic.
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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.
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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.