Carroll Ballard | |
|---|---|
| Born | October 14, 1937 Los Angeles, California, U.S. |
| Education | University of California, Los Angeles |
| Occupations |
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| Years active | 1965–2005 |
Carroll Ballard (born October 14, 1937) is an American filmmaker. Originally a documentarian, he became known for directing sweeping, visually striking films with natural and ecological themes. His body of work includes the films The Black Stallion (1979), Never Cry Wolf (1983), and Fly Away Home (1996).
Ballard was born in Los Angeles in 1937. After serving in the U.S. Army, Ballard attended film school at UCLA, where one of his classmates was Francis Ford Coppola. He made a well received student film called Waiting for May in 1964.
His early credits include the documentaries Beyond This Winter's Wheat (1965) and Harvest (1967), both of which he made for the U.S. Information Agency. The latter was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature Film.
He directed a short subject called The Perils of Priscilla (1969), which was filmed from the point of view of a cat who escapes from home. Rodeo (1970) provided an intimate look at the 1968 National Finals Rodeo in Oklahoma City.
He shot the title sequence of Coppola's 1968 musical Finian's Rainbow and was second unit cinematographer on Star Wars (1977), for which he handled many of the outdoor desert scenes.
Ballard finally got the chance to make a feature film when Coppola offered him the job of directing The Black Stallion (1979), an adaptation of the children's book by Walter Farley. The film was nominated for two Academy Awards, including Best Supporting Actor (Mickey Rooney). In 2002 the Library of Congress added it to the National Film Registry.
He then directed Never Cry Wolf (1983), based on Farley Mowat's autobiographical book of the same name, which detailed Mowat's experiences with Arctic wolves.
In the 1990s, he made two films: Wind (1992) and Fly Away Home (1996). In 2002, Ballard completed The Cruelest Winter, a film written by David Assael about Yukon sled dogs and their handlers, which remains unreleased as of 2026. The film never made it to theaters because it did not receive the backing or respect of the studio, leading to it being effectively shelved.
His most recent film is Duma (2005), about a South African boy's friendship with an orphaned cheetah. Duma had tested badly and Warner Bros. planned to not release this film in the United States theatrically, but the film received acclaim from influential film critics like Scott Foundas and Roger Ebert, and it led Warner Bros to reconsider. Warner Bros. finally gave Duma a limited theatrical release in the US.
Ballard has received acclaim from film critics. Pauline Kael was an early admirer. Kenneth Turan once wrote: "[Ballard] knows how to be both caring and restrained, minimizing a movie's saccharine content while maximizing the sense of wonder."
After the release of Never Cry Wolf, Ballard spent a decade trying to get a total of fourteen separate film projects off the ground—to no avail—before he agreed to Wind. When later asked what had led him to choosing to direct Duma despite repetitive themes, Ballard responded, "Well, I mean, the fact is I was having trouble getting a film. You know, I went for five years and I couldn't get a picture off the ground. So, this was a project that Warner Brothers had been fooling with for a while, and they called me about it and I went down, I talked to 'em and it was the deal I could make. It was, you know, they'd decided they were probably gonna make the film... so I went for it." Speaking about his relatively small output when compared to that of his colleagues, he reasoned:
"Forty-five years I've been trying to make films, and five years I've actually made films; shows you the attrition rate. But, you know, I'm sort of a... not a typical case because I'm a lousy salesman, an even worse politician, and, in film school, those are the two things they should teach you more than anything else – how to sell your ideas, how to sell your notions, and how to 'play the game' once you get the deal going. 'Cause you have to deal with a lot of people, and it's a very, very political situation, in terms of somebody investing millions of their dollars in your ideas, you know? So, it's a lot easier for certain kinds of personalities than it is for others. In my case it's been exceedingly difficult. I've had fifty, sixty films that I've prepaired and wanted to do and, you know, begged and hollered and screamed and did everything I could and... had no takers. And I've never made a film that I wanted to make from the get-go. All the films I've made are films that somebody came to me and said, 'Oh, would you make this film?'"
| Year | Title | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| 1965 | Pigs! | Documentary short |
| Beyond This Winter's Wheat | ||
| 1967 | Harvest | Documentary |
| 1969 | Rodeo | Documentary short |
| The Perils of Priscilla | ||
| 1971 | Seems Like Only Yesterday | |
| 1974 | Crystalization | |
| The Hello Machine | ||
| 1979 | The Black Stallion | |
| 1983 | Never Cry Wolf | |
| 1986 | Nutcracker: The Motion Picture | |
| 1992 | Wind | |
| 1996 | Fly Away Home | |
| 2002 | The Cruelest Winter | Unreleased |
| 2005 | Duma | |
| Year | Title | Director | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1964 | 3 Nuts in Search of a Bolt | Tommy Noonan | Production designer |
| 1968 | Finian's Rainbow | Francis Ford Coppola | Second unit cinematographer |
| 1977 | Star Wars | George Lucas | |
| 1995 | My Family | Gregory Nava | Cinematographer: River crew |
| Award | Year | Category | Work | Result |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Academy Award | 1968 | Best Documentary Feature Film | Harvest | Nominated |
| Christopher Award | 1997 | Best Motion Picture | Fly Away Home | Won |
| Los Angeles Film Critics Association | 1980 | New Generation Award | The Black Stallion | Won |
| Western Heritage Award | 1984 | Best Theatrical Motion Picture | Never Cry Wolf | Won |
Amidst the [cruelest] winter in fifty years, the greatest sled dog drivers in the history of the Yukon, set about to save Nome, Alaska from a diphtheria epidemic.
{{cite news}}: CS1 maint: deprecated archival service (link)Carroll Ballard was deeply into [Joseph] Conrad's Heart of Darkness and was planning to put it in production. [...] There is no question that Carroll's interest in the Conrad story was in the air and influenced John [Milius], although John said he was always planning that structure. [...] Warner Brothers sponsored American Zoetrope for a short time, and with the money that it made available, I doled out fees to all, so that John could write Apocalypse Now, George [Lucas] could make THX 1138, and Carroll could write an original screenplay he called Vesuvia.
At that point it was just before the celebration of the Bicentennial. I had been trying to make a film about the writing of the Declaration of Independence – which is an incredible story if you've ever really gone through it. You know, the money guys just wouldn't buy it; they didn't care, [and] didn't wanna do that project. So I thought, 'Well, I'll send you something else,' and I suggested this film [Seems Like Only Yesterday] about the old people. [...] Yep. Any day... any time that that film [The Monkey Wrench Gang] becomes a reality. But I can tell you, until there's a revolution in this country, that is not gonna happen. [...] 'cause the powers are too great. There's too much money behind keeping the status quo. There is unlimited billions of dollars poured into seeing that the... you know, that we don't start talking about things like The Monkey Wrench Gang.
Los Angeles: ABC Pictures, Circa 1970s. First Draft script for an unproduced film.
A story about an old man named Doc, his days as a horse thief, and the young boy and his mother who give Doc a new outlook.
there are two or three films that [Coppola] won't direct but that we're going to produce with his company. Another film with Carroll Ballard called The Secret Garden, and Brotherhood of the Grape, for which we're in contact with Robert Towne, the screenwriter of Shampoo, Chinatown, and The Last Detail. Towne was going to write the screenplay, but now he's very busy. Do you know who [Harry] Houdini was? He was a magician. You could lock him up, but he was always there. It's a book called The Escape Artist. It features a 16-year-old boy who is an expert in locks and magic. Carroll Ballard will probably be the director.
And then I heard that [The Black Stallion] was talked about and [that] it was a number, you know, 'cause I'd figured that that was it, you know? And then within a couple days later I get a message from Zoetrope saying that I'm fired off of Secret Garden because... whatever. [...] I took [Never Cry Wolf] because I didn't have anything else. And at that time I was reading a book which I thought would make a wonderful movie; Peter Matthiessen, The Snow Leopard, which is a movie about his... death of his wife, and this midlife crisis he's going through, and so on and so forth. Would make a really good movie. I liked it because it was an internal movie. Was about what's going on inside the guy. And I thought, 'Well Never Cry Wolf is a guy who goes out and, you know, hangs out with the wolves. Maybe something similar happens.' So I said I was interested. [...] [Steven] Spielberg developed a whole series of projects that had to do with fathers and sons. This was one of 'em; A Story Like the Wind [by] Laurens van der Post. [...] It was the next in line following Empire of the Sun, and Empire of the Sun tanked, and that was the end of it. Good script. It was a good project, but I ended up stealing a little bit from it in Duma. [...] After Never Cry Wolf, I couldn't get work for a couple of years. Many years. I had a lot of projects there, but one of the projects I was trying to do was a highly controversial and difficult project, that I would have loved to have made, called The Monkey Wrench Gang, Edward Abbey's book. [...] [Maurice Sendak] had another project that was at Disney, which I felt could have been one of the great movies ever. I mean, if ever I had a chance to make a great movie, that was it, because it's a great idea for a film. It's called Very Far Away. [...] Yeah, there was like three projects I tried to get off the ground with Maurice, but we couldn't. We couldn't budge anybody. It was just closed doors.
The project went dormant, however, until the early 1980s, when a 3 Aug 1982 HR news item reported that Carroll Ballard was on board to direct what seems to have been anticipated as a live-action production. Ballard did not stay with the project and received no onscreen credit.
The 15 Aug 1988 DV 'Short Takes' column announced that Tom Selleck would star in Hard Rain, which would be directed by Carroll Ballard. However, less than a month later, the 9 Sep 1988 DV noted that Ballard was leaving the production 'due to the usual creative differences.' On 12 Jan 1989, DV noted that Peter Yates was 'readying to start,' and the title was changed to An Innocent Man before the film's release.
Also to be released next summer is Hard Rain, an action-thriller starring Tom Selleck. Last seen in the Disney/Touchstone comedy Three Men and a Baby, Selleck will play an innocent man sent to prison. Carroll Ballard (The Black Stallion) directs.
When asked why he constantly returns to stories of children-with-animal movies, Ballard simply states that he's making the kinds of movies Hollywood will allow him to make, though he would like to tell other stories. Such as? Like the story of Claudius and Gertrude, he says. Pausing, Ballard says, 'You don't know who Claudius and Gertrude are, right?' He explains they're characters from [William] Shakespeare's Hamlet, and he wants to direct a prequel to that story. He seems pessimistic about his chances, though.
All the projects that I've developed based on American history have... but I'm still working on, I'm working on one right now for a... what do you call 'em? Long-form television. How the country actually came together. Not the story of Plymouth Rock and Myles Standish, but the story that happened fifty years before that with the Spanish, and the runaway slaves, and you know all the craziness that now is beginning to be understood about what really happened. The Roanoke, the Lost Colony, etcetera. [...] This story, see, it bridges... you know, what happened in England and what happened here. You know, it goes back and forth. [...] We're about to go out with it. I'm developing [it] with Francis [Ford Coppola].
