<!--<p class="category">Film -- Biography--> <p>British filmmaker Michael Powell (1905-1990) began his career assisting director Rex Ingram in the waning years of silent film. Given a boost by Alfred Hitchcock, Powell spent much of the 1930s directing what were known as "quota quickies," low-budget B movies. <p> Later he created some of the most daring, interesting, and literate films ever made, including <I>The Edge of the World</I> (1937), <I>Peeping Tom</I> (1960), and his work with Hungarian-born filmmaker Emeric Pressburger, with whom producer/director Alexander Korda paired him. <p> Powell's conversations disclose the same intellectual and artistic range that makes his films so rewarding. This collection of interviews manifests how he imagined himself simultaneously as a classic English gentleman and as a citizen of the world, making films with social conscience about life both in England and abroad. <p> His expressions are charged with brilliance, wit, and jauntiness as he discusses his work on <I>Thief of Baghdad</I>, <I>One of Our Aircraft Is Missing</I>, <I>The Red Shoes</I>, <I>The Tales of Hoffman</I>, and <I>Black Narcissus</I>, as well as the politics of the British film industry. <p> He is candid about the controversy surrounding his thriller <I>Peeping Tom</I> (1960). Now regarded as a classic, it was so derided upon its original release that Powell could not direct in the United Kingdom for a decade. <p> This collection reveals the mind and the tactics of a master filmmaker who is woefully under-known, even as his films are widely celebrated throughout the world. Martin Scorsese, whom Powell befriended in his later years, considers him a towering genius of cinema. <p>David Lazar, an associate professor of English at Ohio University, senior editor of <I>Hotel Amerika</I>, and editor/publisher of CreativeNonfiction.com, edited <I>Conversations with M. F. K. Fisher</I> (University Press of Mississippi). He is the author of <I>The Body of Brooklyn</I> and his work has appeared in the <I>Houston Chronicle</I>, <I>Aperture</I>, <I>Southwest Review</I>, and many other journals and magazines.