Mark Cousins
Mark Cousins is an author, film critic, producer and documentary director. He is Honorary Lecturer in Film and Media Studies at the University of Stirling and teaches The Aesthetics of World Cinema at Edinburgh College of Art.
As Director of the Edinburgh International Film Festival in the 1990s, he pioneered the Scene by Scene discussion format, later adapting it into a celebrated BBC television series and book of the same name. Among those who gave career interviews were Martini Scorsese, Roman Polanski, Woody Allen, Shohei Imamura, Bernardo Bertolucci, Jeanne Moreau, Kirk Douglas and the Coen brothers.
The subjects of his documentary films have included neo-Nazis, the first Gulf War and Mikhail Gorbachev. His other publications include the acclaimed Imagining Reality: The Faber Book of Documentary and an introduction to the screenplay of Billy Wilder’s The Apartment.
Cousins is a regular contributor to Sight and Sound, Prospect and The Times. His production credits, through his company 4Way Pictures, include Irvine Welsh’s first original screenplay Meat Trade and Sylvain Chomet’s follow-up to the Oscar-nominated Les Triplettes de Belleville, and co-producing John Sayles’ Jamie MacGillivray, starring Robert Carlyle.