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Amy Heckerling is a Actor, Director, Scriptwriter and Producer American born on 7 may 1954 at the Bronx (USA)

Amy Heckerling

Amy Heckerling
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Nationality USA
Birth 7 may 1954 (69 years) at the Bronx (USA)

Amy Heckerling (born May 7, 1954) is an American film director. She is an alumna of both New York University and the American Film Institute. She is one of few female directors to have produced multiple box-office hits, including Fast Times at Ridgemont High, European Vacation, Look Who's Talking, and Clueless.

Biography

Amy Heckerling was born in The Bronx to a bookkeeper mother and a Certified Public Accountant father. She had a Jewish upbringing and remembers that the apartment building where she spent her early childhood was full of Holocaust survivors. "Most of them had tattoos on their arms and for me there was a feeling that all of these people had a story to tell. These were interesting formative experiences." Both of her parents worked full-time so she frequently moved back and forth from her home in the Bronx, where Heckerling claims she was a latchkey kid sitting at home all day watching television, to her grandmother's home in Brooklyn which she enjoyed much better. Here, she frequented Coney Island and stayed up watching films all night with her grandmother. At this time Heckerling loved television, where she watched tons of cartoons and old black and white movies. Her favorites were gangster movies, musicals, and comedies. She had a particular fondness for James Cagney.

"...when I saw Angels with Dirty Faces, Cagney was walking to the electric chair. Now I never understood what was going on in those movies, I just knew I loved them. I knew something bad was happening because of the music, so I started crying and crying. My mother told me that Cagney was going to the chair because he was a bad guy, and that he was going to die. I didn't know what that was, so she explained dying to me. It seemed pretty horrible, but then my mother told me that he wasn't really going to die because he was in a movie. Well, it just all seemed to click then! That was the way to beat it! I could see James Cagney die a million times, but he was always there. This year [1986] I didn't believe it really happened. I kept expecting Cagney to get up."

After her father passed his CPA exam, the family became more financially stable and moved to Queens, where Heckerling felt more out of place than ever. She did not get along with other kids in her school there, nor did she want to continue to be classmates with them through high school, so she enrolled at the High School of Art and Design in Manhattan. On her first day of school there, Heckerling realized that she wanted to be a film director. During their first assignment, writing about what they wanted to do in life, Heckerling wrote that she wanted to be a writer or artist for MAD Magazine, which she still reads to this day. She noticed that a boy next to her, that she claimed copied from her papers later on, wrote that he wanted to be a film director.

“I was really annoyed because I thought that if an idiot like that guy could say he wanted to be a director, then so could I, and certainly I should be a director more than he should. It had never occurred to me that that was a job possibility. He put the thought in my head because until then I would never have thought of saying that I wanted to do that; it didn’t seem to be one of the jobs in the world that could be open to me.” At this time, Heckerling also joined the Museum of Modern Art, where she frequented screenings of old movies on weekends.

She graduated from high school in 1970, now focused on directing, and went on to study film at New York University's Tisch School of the Arts. Her father made just slightly over the cut-off for financial aid for the school so Heckerling had to take out a large loan to cover her expenses, which she claims caused considerable stress in her life and she did not pay them off until the end of her twenties. When Heckerling was in high school and focused on directing, her father was opposed, wishing that she had chosen a more practical aspiration. Despite this, he gifted Heckerling Parker Tyler's book Classics of the Foreign Film: A Pictoral Legacy. Heckerling poured through the book, marking off films that she had seen as she went, until she had watched almost all of them. She claims that by the time she got to NYU, because of this book, she had seen almost all of the films that they had to watch in her classes. Though Heckerling considered her time at NYU to be a great time where she learned a lot and made great connections, such as Martin Brest and noted screenwriter and satirist Terry Southern who was one of her professors, she later reflects on her time at the school as sloppy and unprofessional, claiming that she used very low-quality equipment and had a lot of technical problems. During her time at NYU Heckerling was making mostly musicals. "I was the only one doing them and they were weird. It was the mid-70s and it was a bizarre combination of long hair with bell bottoms, the tail end of the hippie movement at its schlumpiest. With this, I sort of infused a 1930s idiotic grace that didn't go with the post-Watergate mentality that was prevalent at the time. They were weird films, but they got me into AFI."

After graduating from NYU, Heckerling decided that she wanted to follow her friend Martin Brest to the American Film Institute in Los Angeles where she felt there would be more opportunities to break into the business. Heckerling experienced severe culture shock upon moving to LA from NYC, especially because she had never learned to drive before but was still used to navigating the city, free to go wherever she wanted due to NYC's public transportation. When she did eventually learn to drive, she came around to LA life and started working. Her first studio job was lip-syncing dailies for a television show, where she started making connections in the business. During her second year at AFI, Heckerling made her first short film, Getting it Over With, about a girl that wants to lose her virginity before she turns twenty and the adventures she has before midnight of her twentieth birthday. Heckerling continued to work on the film after she graduated from AFI with her MFA, using the editing studios at night to finish the project after work. As soon as she finished the edit and sent it away to be precessed, she was in a car collision with a drunk driver who hit the side of her car, landing her in the hospital with a collapsed lung, bruised kidney, and mild amnesia, causing her to be fired from her editing job because she could not remember where certain footage was. In an interview with Michael Singer, when asked about film's ability to grant a form of immortality, Heckerling describes the experience during the accident as: “There was the whole thing-the yellow light and all that stuff-and what went through my mind right then was, ‘Well, at least I got the film to the lab.’ So it’s not going to save you from anything, obviously, but something about it pulls you forward.” Eventually, she finished the film and held a screening that gained a very positive response, causing Heckering to call it one of the best days of her life. Her next step was to use the film to get a job. Tom Mount, president of Universal Pictures, showed a lot of interest in Heckerling but because she was not backed by an agent they could not hire her. After months of struggling to find an agent, Mount called Heckerling up on the phone and asked her to make a film.

Heckerling dated friend and fellow film director Martin Brest briefly when she first moved to Los Angeles. Though they later broke up, they remained good friends. Heckerling has married twice, first to David Brandt in 1981, who Heckerling claimed yelled at her a lot, especially while editing Fast Times at Ridgemont High. "I was fighting with my husband all the time, so the main thing was getting the phone out of the editing room, because he kept calling me and harassing me, then he'd come stomping in unannounced and yell at me." They were divorced in 1983. In 1984, Heckerling briefly married director Neal Israel, though they divorced soon after. The couple had a daughter, Mollie Israel, in 1985. Heckerling has included Mollie in some of her films in bit parts, including Look Who's Talking and Loser, though Heckerling claims that her daughter never wanted to be a "girly girl" and distanced herself from much of her work, never adding any input to the lives of characters such as those in '’Clueless'’. Despite this, the two get a long very well and Mollie frequently introduces her mother to new music, such as OK Go and films. Today Mollie sings in the band The Lost Patrol. Heckerling lives in both Los Angeles and New York and continues to make films and do what she loves. Heckerling is one of the few women to have directed multiple box-office hits. When asked about the fact that only 5% of movies are directed by women, Heckerling states:

"It's a disgusting industry. I don't know what else to say. Especially now. I can't stomach most of the movies about women. I just saw a movie last night. I don't want to say the name – but again with the fucking wedding and the only time women say anything is about men."

Best films

Look Who's Talking (1989)
(Director)
National Lampoon's European Vacation (1985)
(Director)
Look Who's Talking Too (1990)
(Director)

Usually with

Twink Caplan
Twink Caplan
(6 films)
Wallace Shawn
Wallace Shawn
(3 films)
Scott Thomson
Scott Thomson
(4 films)
Neal Israel
Neal Israel
(3 films)
Source : Wikidata

Filmography of Amy Heckerling (14 films)

Display filmography as list

Actress

Clueless
Clueless (1995)
, 1h37
Directed by Amy Heckerling
Origin USA
Genres Drama, Comedy, Romantic comedy, Romance
Themes L'adolescence, Films about education, Films about children, Films about sexuality, LGBT-related films, Buddy films, Teen movie, LGBT-related films, LGBT-related film
Actors Alicia Silverstone, Stacey Dash, Brittany Murphy, Paul Rudd, Donald Faison, Breckin Meyer
Roles Maid of Honor (uncredited)
Rating69% 3.453163.453163.453163.453163.45316
Cherilyn "Cher" Horowitz is a good-natured but superficial girl who is attractive, popular, and extremely wealthy. A few months shy of her sixteenth birthday, she has risen to the top of the high school social scene. She lives in a Beverly Hills mansion with her father Mel, a ferocious $500-an-hour litigator; her mother died from a freak accident during a routine liposuction procedure when Cher was a baby. Cher's best friend is Dionne Davenport, who is also rich, pretty, and hip, and understands what it's like to be envied. Though Dionne has a long-term relationship with popular student Murray, Cher claims that it is a pointless endeavor.
Into the Night, 1h55
Directed by John Landis
Origin USA
Genres Drama, Thriller, Comedy, Action, Crime, Romance
Actors Jeff Goldblum, Michelle Pfeiffer, Richard Farnsworth, Dan Aykroyd, David Bowie, David Cronenberg
Roles Ships Waitress
Rating64% 3.200713.200713.200713.200713.20071
Upon discovering that his wife is having an affair, depressed insomniac Ed Okin (Jeff Goldblum) drives to LAX on his friend Herb's (Dan Aykroyd) suggestion. There he is surprised by a beautiful jewel smuggler, Diana (Michelle Pfeiffer), who lands on his car and begs him to drive her away from four Iranians who are chasing her. She persuades him to drive her to various locations, and he becomes embroiled in her predicament. After becoming increasingly exasperated with her demands, he discovers that Diana has smuggled priceless emeralds from the Shah of Iran's treasury into the country, and is being pursued by various assorted assailants, including the aforementioned agents of a criminal Iranian expatriate and a British hitman (David Bowie).

Director

Vamps
Vamps (2012)
, 1h32
Directed by Amy Heckerling
Origin USA
Genres Comedy, Horror comedy, Horror, Romance
Themes Films about magic and magicians, Vampires in film, Comedy horror films
Actors Alicia Silverstone, Krysten Ritter, Sigourney Weaver, Dan Stevens, Wallace Shawn, Richard Lewis
Rating53% 2.650682.650682.650682.650682.65068
Stacy (Krysten Ritter) and Goody (Alicia Silverstone), are two socialite vampires living the good life in New York City. Goody was turned in 1841 by the vampire queen Ciccerus (Sigourney Weaver). She struggled with her life as a vampire until Stacy was turned by Ciccerus sometime during the early 1990s. Goody was able to teach Stacy how to use her new abilities, like sustaining themselves on rat blood, but keeps her actual age a secret because she is afraid of being viewed as old.
I Could Never Be Your Woman, 1h37
Directed by Amy Heckerling
Origin USA
Genres Drama, Comedy, Romantic comedy, Romance
Actors Michelle Pfeiffer, Paul Rudd, Sarah Alexander, Stacey Dash, Jon Lovitz, Fred Willard
Rating59% 2.9988752.9988752.9988752.9988752.998875
Rosie (Michelle Pfeiffer), is a 40-year-old divorced mother who works as a scriptwriter and producer for a TV show You Go Girl. Rosie is insecure about her age, and uses cosmetics to maintain her appearance. She has a very close relationship with her thirteen-year-old daughter, Izzie (Saoirse Ronan), which becomes even closer when she learns that she has fallen for a boy in her class named Dylan (Rory Copus). Despite her ex-husband's urging that she start dating again, she has no man in her life. To the dismay of Rosie and David (David Mitchell), her British co-writer, her boss, Marty (Fred Willard) decides that the show may no longer cover controversial subjects, so Rosie decides to cast a new character for the show. She is taken by Adam (Paul Rudd), a bright and charming young man from one of her auditions, and decides to cast him as a new, nerdy character to fall for the character played by her arrogant and self-centred lead actress, Brianna (Stacey Dash). Adam's character is well received by test audiences, and Rosie persuades Marty to give him a chance.
Loser
Loser (2000)
, 1h32
Directed by Amy Heckerling
Origin USA
Genres Drama, Comedy, Romantic comedy, Romance
Actors Jason Biggs, Mena Suvari, Greg Kinnear, Jimmi Simpson, Zak Orth, Thomas Sadoski
Rating53% 2.6505852.6505852.6505852.6505852.650585
Paul Tannek, (Jason Biggs) a small-town, intelligent kid from Upstate New York is accepted into NYU on an academic scholarship. Trying to follow the advice of his father (Dan Aykroyd) he tries to gain friends by trying to be polite and interested in others. His attempts are noticed by his new roommates Chris (Thomas Sadoski), Adam (Zak Orth) and Noah (Jimmi Simpson), three rich, spoiled, obnoxious city boys who consider his polite behavior, small-town background and determination to education lame and brand him a loser. To salvage their reputation the trio concoct a false story to the housing administration about Paul's attitude and have him thrown out of the dorm. Paul takes residence in a veterinary hospital. Chris meets Paul and again concocts another story about how they were trying to help him as a ploy for Paul to let them use the hospital to throw parties since a resident at the dorm fell into sickness due to excessive alcohol, forbidding them to hold any parties thereon.
A Night at the Roxbury, 1h22
Directed by John Fortenberry, Amy Heckerling
Origin USA
Genres Comedy, Musical, Romance
Themes Buddy films
Actors Molly Shannon, Loni Anderson, Dan Hedaya, Jennifer Coolidge, Chris Kattan, Will Ferrell
Rating62% 3.102273.102273.102273.102273.10227
Wealthy Yemeni-American brothers Steve and Doug Butabi enjoy frequenting nightclubs, where they bob their heads in unison to Eurodance, a subgenre of dance music, commonly doing it to Haddaway's hit song "What Is Love" and also fail miserably at picking up women. Their dream is to party at the Roxbury, a fabled Los Angeles nightclub where they are continually denied entrance by a hulking bouncer. By day, the brothers work at an artificial plant store owned by their wealthy father, Kamehl. They spend most of their time goofing off, daydreaming about opening a club as cool as the Roxbury together, and Doug using credit card transactions as an excuse to flirt with a card approval associate via telephone that he calls "Credit Vixen." The store shares a wall with a lighting emporium owned by Fred Sanderson. Mr. Butabi and Mr. Sanderson hope that Steve and Emily, Sanderson's daughter, will marry, uniting the families and the businesses to form the first plant-lamp emporium.
Clueless
Clueless (1995)
, 1h37
Directed by Amy Heckerling
Origin USA
Genres Drama, Comedy, Romantic comedy, Romance
Themes L'adolescence, Films about education, Films about children, Films about sexuality, LGBT-related films, Buddy films, Teen movie, LGBT-related films, LGBT-related film
Actors Alicia Silverstone, Stacey Dash, Brittany Murphy, Paul Rudd, Donald Faison, Breckin Meyer
Rating69% 3.453163.453163.453163.453163.45316
Cherilyn "Cher" Horowitz is a good-natured but superficial girl who is attractive, popular, and extremely wealthy. A few months shy of her sixteenth birthday, she has risen to the top of the high school social scene. She lives in a Beverly Hills mansion with her father Mel, a ferocious $500-an-hour litigator; her mother died from a freak accident during a routine liposuction procedure when Cher was a baby. Cher's best friend is Dionne Davenport, who is also rich, pretty, and hip, and understands what it's like to be envied. Though Dionne has a long-term relationship with popular student Murray, Cher claims that it is a pointless endeavor.
Look Who's Talking Too, 1h21
Directed by Amy Heckerling
Origin USA
Genres Comedy, Romance
Themes Films about children, Pregnancy films, Films about sexuality
Actors John Travolta, Kirstie Alley, Olympia Dukakis, Elias Koteas, Twink Caplan, Gilbert Gottfried
Rating47% 2.3607652.3607652.3607652.3607652.360765
The movie picks up where it left off, where Mikey is expecting a sister and being the big brother. James and Mollie Ubriacco, now happily married, are preoccupied by Mikey's fear of monsters. When they get him to settle down, the two of them manage to have sex and conceive a second child; this time a girl. Mikey is excited at the prospect of being a big brother, but is also hampered by having to go through potty training. When Mollie goes into labor, her umbilical cord puts the baby in distress and the doctors have to perform a C-Section to save her life and Julie is born. She and Mikey do not get along as he imagined when they meet, and Mikey instead becomes jealous of the attention Julie is given.
Look Who's Talking, 1h38
Directed by Amy Heckerling
Origin USA
Genres Drama, Comedy, Romantic comedy, Romance
Themes Films about children, Pregnancy films, Films about sexuality, Transport films, Films about the labor movement, Films about automobiles
Actors John Travolta, Kirstie Alley, Olympia Dukakis, George Segal, Abe Vigoda, Twink Caplan
Rating59% 2.954642.954642.954642.954642.95464
Mollie is an accountant living in New York City who has an affair with Albert, a womanizing executive who is married with two children, and becomes pregnant. During her pregnancy, Mollie and Albert keep their indiscretion secret, under the idea she was artificially inseminated, and that Albert plans to leave his wife Beth and their two children to be with her. Mollie and her friend Rona happen to catch Albert fooling around with his interior decorator Melissa and he admits he is planning on living with her after his divorce is finalized. Mollie leaves upset, and immediately goes into labor. She gets into a cab where the driver, James Ubriacco, recklessly speeds through downtown traffic in order to get her to the hospital on time, and he is inadvertently a witness to her son Mikey's birth. Mikey then begins to make commentary on his life and interacts with things through an inner voice which can also communicate with other babies.
National Lampoon's European Vacation, 1h34
Directed by Amy Heckerling
Origin USA
Genres Comedy, Adventure, Crime, Romance
Themes Transport films, Le thème des vacances, Road movies
Actors Chevy Chase, Beverly D'Angelo, Dana Hill, Jason Lively, Victor Lanoux, Eric Idle
Rating61% 3.099873.099873.099873.099873.09987
The Griswold family competes in a game show called Pig in a Poke and wins an all-expenses-paid trip to Europe. In a whirlwind tour of western Europe, chaos of all sorts ensues. They stay in a fleabag London hotel with a sloppy, tattooed Cockney desk clerk (Mel Smith). While in their English rental car, a yellow Austin Maxi, Clark drives the family endlessly around the busy Lambeth Bridge Roundabout for hours, unable to maneuver his way out of traffic. His tendency to drive on the wrong side of the road causes frequent accidents, including accidentally knocking over a bicyclist (Eric Idle), who reappears throughout the film. At Stonehenge, Clark backs the car into an ancient stone monolith, toppling all the stones like dominoes, which they do not even notice as they happily leave the scene.
Johnny Dangerously, 1h27
Directed by Amy Heckerling
Origin USA
Genres Thriller, Comedy, Action, Crime
Themes Mafia films, Children's films, Gangster films
Actors Michael Keaton, Joe Piscopo, Marilu Henner, Maureen Stapleton, Peter Boyle, Griffin Dunne
Rating64% 3.248493.248493.248493.248493.24849
1935. A pet shop owner catches a young boy shoplifting a puppy. To discourage the kid from a life of crime, the owner tells a story.
Fast Times at Ridgemont High, 1h30
Directed by Amy Heckerling
Origin USA
Genres Drama, Comedy, Romance
Themes L'adolescence, Films about education, Films about children, Pregnancy films, Films about sexuality, Erotic films, Teen movie, Films about virginity
Actors Sean Penn, Jennifer Jason Leigh, Judge Reinhold, Phoebe Cates, Brian Backer, Robert Romanus
Rating70% 3.548473.548473.548473.548473.54847
Brad Hamilton is a popular senior who is looking forward to his last year of school and almost has his 1960 Buick LeSabre paid off. He has a part-time job at a burger joint, "All American Burger" where his girlfriend, Lisa, also works. This esteemed establishment has a strict policy of etiquette: "No Shirt, No Shoes, No Dice". He is pondering how to end his relationship with Lisa so he can play the field during his senior year. However, Brad is fired for losing his temper at an obnoxious customer; when he tries to tell Lisa how much he needs her, she says she is dumping him to see other guys. Brad quits his next job at Captain Hook Fish & Chips because of the humiliation of having to wear a pirate costume when delivering food. He gets a job at a convenience store, Mi-T-Mart, where he successfully thwarts an attempted robbery and is promoted to store manager.

Scriptwriter

Vamps
Vamps (2012)
, 1h32
Directed by Amy Heckerling
Origin USA
Genres Comedy, Horror comedy, Horror, Romance
Themes Films about magic and magicians, Vampires in film, Comedy horror films
Actors Alicia Silverstone, Krysten Ritter, Sigourney Weaver, Dan Stevens, Wallace Shawn, Richard Lewis
Roles Writer
Rating53% 2.650682.650682.650682.650682.65068
Stacy (Krysten Ritter) and Goody (Alicia Silverstone), are two socialite vampires living the good life in New York City. Goody was turned in 1841 by the vampire queen Ciccerus (Sigourney Weaver). She struggled with her life as a vampire until Stacy was turned by Ciccerus sometime during the early 1990s. Goody was able to teach Stacy how to use her new abilities, like sustaining themselves on rat blood, but keeps her actual age a secret because she is afraid of being viewed as old.
I Could Never Be Your Woman, 1h37
Directed by Amy Heckerling
Origin USA
Genres Drama, Comedy, Romantic comedy, Romance
Actors Michelle Pfeiffer, Paul Rudd, Sarah Alexander, Stacey Dash, Jon Lovitz, Fred Willard
Roles Writer
Rating59% 2.9988752.9988752.9988752.9988752.998875
Rosie (Michelle Pfeiffer), is a 40-year-old divorced mother who works as a scriptwriter and producer for a TV show You Go Girl. Rosie is insecure about her age, and uses cosmetics to maintain her appearance. She has a very close relationship with her thirteen-year-old daughter, Izzie (Saoirse Ronan), which becomes even closer when she learns that she has fallen for a boy in her class named Dylan (Rory Copus). Despite her ex-husband's urging that she start dating again, she has no man in her life. To the dismay of Rosie and David (David Mitchell), her British co-writer, her boss, Marty (Fred Willard) decides that the show may no longer cover controversial subjects, so Rosie decides to cast a new character for the show. She is taken by Adam (Paul Rudd), a bright and charming young man from one of her auditions, and decides to cast him as a new, nerdy character to fall for the character played by her arrogant and self-centred lead actress, Brianna (Stacey Dash). Adam's character is well received by test audiences, and Rosie persuades Marty to give him a chance.