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Above the Line

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Director

Ernie Barbarash

Bio

recently wrote and directed two back-to-back features for Lionsgate Films Stir Of Echoes: The Homecoming, starring Rob Lowe, and his directorial debut, Cube Zero, which was selected as the opening night film by Stan Winston's Screamfest L.A., and went on to win prizes at Screamfest as well as at the New York Horror Film Festival, the Rhode Island Horror Film Festival and Sci-Fi London. Barbarash has traveled as far and wide as Yalta, Berlin, Luxembourg, Paris, Montreal, Toronto and New Orleans to produce and co-produce numerous features over the last decade, including American Psycho with Christian Bale, Willem Dafoe and Reese Witherspoon, and the Peter Bogdanovich Hollywood thriller The Cat's Meow, starring Kirsten Dunst, Jennifer Tilly and Eddie Izzard. Prior to working in film, Ernie directed and designed theatre and opera in North America and Europe. He was a frequent collaborator with such luminaries as director Andrei Serban and jazz legend Max Roach. Despite a busy film schedule, he tries to return to the theatre as often as he can, and recently directed the New York premiere of Jim Henerson's controversial American Macabee, one of the first new plays to examine the Arab Israeli conflict post 9/11. In Europe, Barbarash worked at the Opera de la Bastille and La Villette in Paris, and the Umbria Jazz Festival in Italy. In the U.S., he has directed and designed for numerous New York and regional theatres, such as Playwrights Horizons, Circle Rep, Intar, Ensemble Studio Theatre, American Jewish Theatre, Double Image, Manhattan Punch Line, the West Bank, New Dramatists, nada, the Ohio, the Open Eye, Downtown Art, and Westbeth. Ernie Barbarash graduated cum laude with a Bachelor of Art degree in Theatre Studies from Yale University in 1990, where he received the V. Irish Browne Prize for Excellence in the Performing Arts, and received his Master of Arts degree in Theatre Directing from Columbia University in 1995, where he was awarded the Bernard Beckerman Prize for Outstanding Achievement in Directing. Born in the former Soviet Union (Odessa, Ukraine), Ernie and his family immigrated to Montreal, Quebec when he was nine years old. He currently lives in Los Angeles with his wife Greer Kent, and their children Betty and Reuben.

Director- Job Description

The principal creative artist on a movie set. A director is usually (but not always) the driving artistic source behind the filming process, and communicates to actors the way that he/she would like a particular scene played. A director's duties might also include casting, script editing, shot selection, shot composition, and editing. Typically, a director has complete artistic control over all aspects of the movie, but it is not uncommon for the director to be bound by agreements with either a producer or a studio. In some large productions, a director will delegate less important scenes to a second unit director 2UD.