Each year, Festival Directors Bill Pence and Tom Luddy invite one of the world’s great film lovers to join them in the creation of the Telluride Film Festival. The Guest Director serves as a key collaborator in all of the Festival’s programming decisions, bringing new ideas and overlooked films to Telluride. Past Guest Directors include Salman Rushdie, Buck Henry, Laurie Anderson, and Stephen Sondheim. This year, we are proud to collaborate with a major figure in contemporary literature, author Don Delillo.
In DeLillo’s first novel, Americana (1971), the narrator wanders the country with a 16mm camera, thinking of himself as a “child of Godard and Coca-Cola.” In The Names (1982), set in Greece and the Middle East, a film director tries to locate the members of a mysterious cult. And in DeLillo’s novel The Body Artist (2001), a film director says, “The answer to life is the movies.”

The power of the image and the presence of film culture have been consistent elements in DeLillo’s fiction. That’s in part due to his appreciation of great cinema. In 1988 he described in an interview the qualities he enjoyed in films by Godard, Antonioni, Fellini, Bergman, Kubrick and Howard Hawks: “They seem to fracture reality. They find mystery in commonplace moments. They find humor in even the gravest political acts.”

Each of these qualities also is evident in DeLillo’s works. The author of 13 novels and three stage plays, DeLillo is one of the world’s most celebrated authors. He has won the National Book Award (for White Noise, 1985), the PEN/Faulkner Award (for Mao II, 1991), the Jerusalem Award (he was the first American so honored, in 1999) and the William Dean Howells Medal (for Underworld, 2000). Other novels include Players (1977), Running Dog (1978), Libra (1988) and Cosmopolis (2003).

DeLillo’s other film writing includes a screenplay (Game 6) and an essay entitled “Counterpoint” for the magazine Grand Street. “Counterpoint” is a meditation on solitude and introspection that was largely inspired by the films STRAIGHT NO CHASER, THE FAST RUNNER and THIRTY TWO SHORT FILMS ABOUT GLENN GOULD. DeLillo’s article on the film WANDA, a film that he will present at this year’s Festival, will appear later this year in the arts journal Black Clock. DeLillo’s latest play, Love-Lies-Bleeding, will premiere at Steppenwolf in Chicago in the spring of 2006. He is currently at work on a novel.