Barbet Schroeder

Biography

Date of Birth 26 August 1941, Teheran, Iran Barbet Schroeder is a Franco-Swiss movie director and producer who started his career in French cinema in the 1960s, working together with directors such as Jean-Luc Godard and Jacques Rivette. Schroeder was born in Tehran, Iran, the son of Ursula, a German-born physician, and Jean-William Schroeder, a Swiss geologist.[1][2] Schroeder's production company "Les Films du Losange", founded by him at age 23, produced some of the best-known films of the French New Wave. His directorial debut, More (1969), about heroin addiction, became a hit in Europe. Pink Floyd wrote music for this movie and released the album, Soundtrack from the Film More. They also wrote the soundtrack for his 1972 film La Vallée, released as the album Obscured by Clouds. He later went on to direct more mainstream Hollywood fare, such as Barfly (1987) starring Mickey Rourke, Single White Female (1992), and Reversal of Fortune (1990), for which Jeremy Irons as Claus von Bülow received an Academy Award. Despite his many commercially successful films, Schroeder continues to be interested in making smaller films with a more limited audience, such as the adaptation of Colombian writer Fernando Vallejo's controversial novel La virgen de los sicarios (2000) or the 1974 documentary General Idi Amin Dada, about the titular Ugandan dictator and Terror's advocate (2007) about terrorism in the last 50 years seen through the eyes of a lawyer, Jacques Vergès, and his clients. Schroeder has also made some acting appearances, such as his cameo as the President of France in Mars Attacks! (1996), a hair products salesman in Paris, je t'aime (2006) and the mechanic in The Darjeeling Limited (2007).