TODD SOLONDZ : BIOGRAPHY

“I AM OFTEN UNSETTLED BY THE RESPONSES SOME PEOPLE HAVE HAD TO MY MOVIES, AND THAT INCLUDES MANY PEOPLE WHO LIKE THEM.”

Disliking: Victim stories
Losing anonymity : People who laugh at the expense of others
Censorship : Pretty waitresses who call you “Sweetie”

Todd Solondz was born in 1959 in Newark, New Jersey, and grew up in the suburbs. As a student at NYU film school, he made several shorts, one of which in particular attracted enough attention to get him a three-picture deal with Twentieth-Century Fox.

Unfortunately, the experience of making his first feature, Fear, Anxiety, and Depression (“I’m asking you, as my friend, don’t rent it, don’t try to see it”), was enough to turn him from filmmaking for years. During that time, he took a job teaching English to Russian immigrants at a school in New York where I too was teaching and where, in 1993, we first met.

Three years later, “in part to redeem myself from the horror of my first feature experience,” Solondz returned to filmmaking with a low-budget independent feature, Welcome to the Dollhouse, after securing another three-picture deal with Columbia. The film received the Grand Jury Prize at the Sundance Film Festival, as well as an award at the Berlin International Film Festival. Dollhouse was followed by Happiness (1998), which won the International Critics Prize at the Cannes International Film Festival and was nominated for a Golden Globe Award for Best Screenplay. Solondz’s next film, Storytelling (2001), premiered at Cannes and was also included in the New York and Sundance film festivals.

Palindromes, Solondz’s new film, premiered in fall 2004 at the Venice International Film Festival. It was also included in the Toronto International Film Festival and the New York Film Festival. A story about a young girl who seeks to fill her emotional emptiness by becoming pregnant, Palindromes has divided festival audiences and provoked extreme responses. Critics have described it variously as “enthralling,” “tasteless and exploitative,” “a film without scruples,” “Solondz’s best film yet,” and his one film “most likely to piss people off.” Palindromes opens in U.S. theaters in April, 2005.