David Gordon Green

David Gordon Green's early directorial style had an emotionally haunting Southern Gothic edge to it. His films "George Washington" (2000), "All the Real Girls" (2003), and "Snow Angel" (2007) feature images of hospital clowns, gunshots at high school band practices, and a young boy whose skull never hardened. Green transitioned into comedic directing in 2008, but the craftsmanship and rural emphasis of his dramatic work remains in his more humorous work.

Green was born on April 9, 1975 in Little Rock, Arkansas. He attended the North Carolina School of the Arts, where he majored in film directing, graduating in 1998. It was there that Green met Paul Schneider, an actor and director best known for playing city planner Mark Brendanawicz on the first season of cult favorite sitcom "Parks and Recreation" (NBC 2009-15). Schneider starred in "George Washington," a film about a group of children struggling in a small North Carolina town that Green wrote, produced, and directed. The film met with critical acclaim, and Green received several festival recognitions as a rising young filmmaker. So began Green's career of creating emotional films featuring lost characters in rural American towns.

Green became known for casting comedic actors, such as Sam Rockwell and Amy Sedaris, in dramatic roles. His transition to comedic directing began with the commercially successful "Pineapple Express" (2008). The film starred James Franco and Seth Rogen as stoners on the run, and it received fairly positive reviews. It also met with far more commercial success than Green's previous films. Green went on to direct twelve episodes of the baseball comedy "Eastbound & Down" (HBO 2009-2013), which starred "Pineapple Express" co-star Danny McBride, another friend from Green's college days. McBride starred in Green's next feature, a stoner comedy called "Your Highness" (2011), while "The Sitter" (2011) was a vehicle for Rogen and Franco's friend Jonah Hill.

Green moved back into the quieter, more dramatic style of his earlier films with "Prince Avalanche" (2013), a road trip comedy-drama starring Paul Rudd and Emile Hirsch, and "Joe" (2014), a drama starring Nicolas Cage. He followed this with the character study "Manglehorn" (2014), starring Al Pacino, and the political satire "Our Brand Is Crisis" (2015). The fraternity hazing drama "Goat" (2016) and Boston Marathon drama "Stronger" (2017) continued Green's path toward small, intimate films, but he returned to a higher profile with "Halloween" (2018), a sequel to the 1980 original that ignored all of the several intervening films to pick up the story of Laurie Strode (Jamie Lee Curtis), 40 years after the events of the first film.