Alejandro Amenábar
Alejandro Fernando Amenábar Cantos ( born March 31, 1972 in Santiago de Chile ) is a Chilean- Spanish film director, screenwriter and composer.
Life
Amenábar was born the son of a Spanish and Chileans in Chile. The family emigrated in August 1973, a few weeks before Augusto Pinochet's military coup, to Madrid, where Amenábar was growing up. He began studying Information Science at the Madrid Complutense University of Madrid, but soon turned entirely to the art of film. Since 2004 Amenábar lives openly homosexual. Amenábar was awarded for several short films with film awards, such as the AICA Short Film Award for his first work, La cabeza. His first feature film Tesis - The snuff film, for which he also wrote the screenplay with Mateo Gil, was honored in 1997 with seven Goyas.
The American actor Tom Cruise bought the rights to Amenábar's second film, Virtual Nightmare - Open Your Eyes to four years later to produce the remake Vanilla Sky. Amenábar had first decided against selling the rights, but agreed finally a. As a " quid pro quo " Tom Cruise allowed him to turn the English language film The Others, and offered him the involvement of his former wife Nicole Kidman for the lead role.
For the 2004 published drama The Sea Inside, which deals with euthanasia, he won among others the European Film Award for Best Director. The film, starring Javier Bardem in the lead role won among others the Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film and the Golden Globe.