In the Bedroom

Field began his filmmaking career in 2001 when he wrote and directed In the Bedroom, a film based on Andre Dubus's short story "Killings". (Kubrick and Dubus were among Field's mentors; both died right before the production of In the Bedroom.) In the Bedroom was nominated for five Academy Awards including Best Picture, Best Actor (Tom Wilkinson, his first nomination), Best Actress (Sissy Spacek, her sixth), Supporting Actress (Marisa Tomei, her second), and Best Adapted Screenplay. The film was shot in Rockland, Maine, a New England town where Field resides. The house where he, his wife (Serena Rathbun), and their four children live was even used as the setting for one sequence.^[14] Rathbun and Spacek did some of the set design and Field handled the camera himself on many of the shots.

In the Bedroom made its debut at the 2001 Sundance Film Festival. Dennis Lim wrote in the Village Voice:

Todd Field's debut feature, In the Bedroom, alighted on the snowy peaks of Sundance last January as if from another universe. Here was a small miracle of patience and composure, so starkly removed from everything the festival had come to represent that it seemed almost to herald the overdue coming-of-age of American independent film.^[15]

Upon the film's release David Ansen of Newsweek wrote:

Todd Field exhibits a mastery of his craft many filmmakers never acquire in a lifetime. With one film he's guaranteed his future as a director. He has the magnificent obsession of the natural-born filmmaker^[16][17]

Anthony Quinn of The Independent stated,

"Field has pulled off something here I thought no American filmmaker would ever manage again: he makes violence feel genuinely shocking."^[18]

For his work on In the Bedroom, Field was named Director of the Year by the National Board of Review, and his script was awarded Best Original Screenplay. The film was named Best Picture of the Year by the Los Angeles Film Critics Association, and the New York Film Critics Circle awarded Field Best First Film. In the Bedroom received six American Film Institute Awards, including Best Picture, Director, and Screenplay, three Golden Globe nominations, and five Academy Award nominations, including Best Picture, Actor, Actress, Supporting Actress, and two individually for Field as screenwriter and producer. The American Film Institute honored Field with the Franklin Schaffner Alumni Medal.

The March 2023 issue of New York magazine listed In the Bedroom alongside Citizen Kane, Sunset Boulevard, Dr. Strangelove, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, The Conversation, Nashville, Taxi Driver, The Elephant Man, Pulp Fiction, There Will Be Blood, Roma, and Tár, also directed by Field, as "The Best Movies That Lost Best Picture at the Oscars".^[19]

Little Children

After months spent doing research for a biopic of 19th-century stage actor Edwin Booth titled Time Between Trains, Field resurfaced with Little Children in 2006.^[20][21] The film was nominated for three Academy Awards, including two for the actors: Kate Winslet (her fifth nomination, and with it a record for the youngest actor to be nominated for five Academy Awards) and Jackie Earle Haley (his first nomination and first major role in over 15 years). With just two films, Field had garnered five Academy Award nominations for his actors and three for himself. Initially conceived as a miniseries,^[22] the film, based on Tom Perrotta's novel of the same name, made its premiere at the 2006 New York Film Festival. In his roundup "Best of 2006", A.O. Scott of The New York Times wrote:

The first time you see Todd Field's adaptation of Tom Perrotta's novel, you may remark on the director's impressive control over the unruly source material and the emotional agility of the cast, Kate Winslet in particular. The second time, the film's lurid, crazy side is more apparent, and the intensity of the supporting performances—Noah Emmerich, Jackie Earle Haley, Phyllis Somerville—creep into the foreground. This movie, Mr. Field's second feature...is a complicated blend of gothic, melodrama and sexual comedy, unerringly attuned to the varieties of human failure.^[23]

International Cinephile Society's Matt Mazur called the film "subversive" and designed to disorient the viewer with "seemingly non-connected imagery to suggest a tone and a mood of disquiet." Mazur compared Field's technique with that of Sergei Eisenstein, D. W. Griffith, Georges Méliès, and Edwin S. Porter.^[24]

Many members of Field's creative team on In the Bedroom returned to work with him on the film, including Serena Rathbun. In a 2006 interview with The Hollywood Reporter's Anne Thompson, Field said he quit acting and began making his own films after Rathbun told him, "Do what you want to do. Don't get distracted."^[25] Later that year, Field spoke extensively about the importance of Rathbun as his creative partner, describing a conversation he had with her where she gave him the most pivotal scene: "for me, the film is unthinkable without it."^[26]

2006–2021: Unrealized projects

After Little Children, Field went fifteen years without directing another film, which various journalists lamented.^[27] In his 2015 Ioncinema piece "Top 10 American Indie Filmmakers Missing in Action", Nicholas Bell wrote, "It is definitely time for Field to throw one down the middle. In the meantime, we'll just have to watch In the Bedroom for the umpteenth time."^[28]

During this period, Field worked on a number of film and television projects that never came to fruition, including adaptations of the novels Blood Meridian,^[29][30] Beautiful Ruins^[31] and Purity.^[32] He also worked for almost a decade on a film adaptation of the 2010 Boston Teran novel The Creed of Violence, set during the Mexican Revolution, which at different times was set to star Leonardo DiCaprio,^[33] Christian Bale^[34] and Daniel Craig.^[35] It had also been reported that Field might direct a coming-of-age script set in the 1970s Northwest based on his experiences with the Minor League Baseball team the Portland Mavericks, that Kurt Russell was involved in.^[7][36]

Speaking publicly for the first time in sixteen years, Field told The New York Times in 2022, "I set my sights in a very particular way on certain material that was probably very tough to get made."^[37] Later, when asked if he would ever consider reviving any of his past projects, Field replied "[They're] kind of like a family plot. You have these little headstones, and you have a passing acquaintance with and occasionally drop flowers on, but I don't want to dig any of them up."^[38]

Over those same years Field also worked in advertising, directing spots for such brands as Xbox,^[39] Captain Morgan,^[40] Corona,^[41] BMW,^[42] NASCAR^[43] and GE.^[44] Reflecting on his advertising work over these years he stated "I've been directing constantly, I feel much stronger as a director than I ever felt with those previous films."^[45]

Tár

Field's third film, Tár, starring Cate Blanchett as the fictional conductor/composer Lydia Tár, premiered at the 79th Venice International Film Festival, where it competed for the Golden Lion and Queer Lion, with Blanchett winning the Volpi Cup for Best Actress.^[46] The film had a limited theatrical release in the United States on October 7, 2022, before its wide release on October 28, 2022, and International theatrical release that began first in the UK on 13 January 2023.^[47] Tár received six nominations for the 95th Academy Awards, including Best Picture, Best Director and Best Original Screenplay for Field, and Best Actress for Blanchett, and five nominations from the 76th British Academy Film Awards, including Best Picture, Best Director, Best Actress, Best Sound, and Best Screenplay of the Year.^[48][49]

For his work on Tár, Field was nominated by the Directors Guild of America for Best Director, the Producers Guild of America for Best Film, and the Writers Guild of America for Best Original Screenplay.^[50][51][52] He was named Best Director of the Year by the London Film Critics' Circle and Los Angeles Film Critics Association, and his script named Best Original Screenplay.^[53][54]

Tár is the fourth film in history to be named Best of the Year by the New York Film Critics Circle, the Los Angeles Film Critics Association, the London Film Critics' Circle as well as the National Society of Film Critics.^[55] More critics listed the film Best of the Year than any other released in 2022, including The Atlantic, Entertainment Weekly, The Guardian, The Hollywood Reporter, Screen Daily, Vanity Fair, and Variety; plus, IndieWire's annual poll of 165 critics worldwide who also named Field "Best Director of the Year" and his script "Best Screenplay."^[56][57][58]

Owen Gleiberman in his Venice Film Festival Daily Variety review wrote:

"Let me say right up front: It's the work of a master filmmaker... Tár is not a judgement so much as a statement you can make your own judgment about. The statement is: We're in a new world."^[59]

A. O. Scott of The New York Times writing from the Telluride Film Festival and later from the New York Film Festival stated,

"I'm not sure I've ever seen a movie quite like Tár. Field balances Apollonian restraint with Dionysian frenzy. Tár is meticulously controlled and also scarily wild. Field finds a new way of posing the perennial question about separating the artist from the art, a question that he suggests can only be answered by another question: are you crazy? We don't care about Tár because she's an artist. We care about her because she's art."^[60][61]

Martin Scorsese presenting Best Film of the Year to Field at the 2022 New York Film Critics Circle Awards, praised Field's filmmaking saying,

"For so long now, so many of us see films that pretty much let us know where they're going... but that's on dark days. The clouds lifted when I experienced Todd's film, Tár."^[62]

Paul Thomas Anderson also praised Field's Tár when presenting him with his Director Medallion at the 75th annual DGA Awards saying,

"Every detail matters in this film. Nothing is not deliberate or full of intention. It's directed with such perfectly controlled mayhem and glee by Todd, it's really hard not to drool as another director."^[63]

Actor

Filmmaker