Age: 61
male
Alan Taylor (born January 13, 1959) is an American television director, film director, screenwriter, and television producer. He is best known for his work on television series such as The Sopranos, Sex and the City, Mad Men, and Game of Thrones. He also directed films such as Palookaville, Thor: The Dark World, Terminator Genisys, and The Many Saints of Newark. In 2007, Taylor won a Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Directing for a Drama Series for The Sopranos episode "Kennedy and Heidi." In 2008 and 2018, he was also nominated in the same category for the Mad Men episode "Smoke Gets in Your Eyes" and the Game of Thrones episode "Beyond the Wall," respectively. Taylor's father, James J. Taylor, was a private in the U.S. Army translating for Voice of America, stationed in Yokohama, who subsequently held numerous jobs before becoming a videographer in Washington, D.C. Taylor's mother, Mimi Cazort, was curator emerita for the National Gallery of Canada. His sister is the indie rock musician Anna Domino. He spent part of his life in Manor Park, Ottawa, Canada, and attended Manor Park Public School and Lisgar Collegiate Institute high school. As part of the Communications Club at Lisgar, he acted in its production of The Mouse That Roared. He went on to major in history at the University of Toronto and then at New York City's Columbia University before transferring to New York University in his late 20s to study film under instructors including director Martin Scorsese. Taylor has directed for numerous programs on both network television and premium cable, most often on HBO. Taylor's early work on television includes work on The Sopranos, Sex and the City, and The West Wing. Taylor joined the crew of the HBO western drama Deadwood as a director for the first season in 2004. Taylor directed the pilot episodes of Mad Men ("Smoke Gets in Your Eyes") and Bored to Death, as well as subsequent episodes of each. He joined the HBO series Game of Thrones, directing seven episodes, including the critically acclaimed season 1 episode "Baelor." He worked on a television adaptation of the Strugatsky brothers' 1971 science fiction novel Roadside Picnic for the WGN America network. Besides his television work, Taylor's early films include Palookaville, The Emperor's New Clothes, and Kill the Poor. In the 2010s, Taylor began working on large-budget blockbuster films. He was hired to direct Thor: The Dark World (2013), a superhero film and sequel to 2011's Thor. He was approached by Marvel producer Kevin Feige following director Patty Jenkins's exit from the project and hoped he would inject a darker tone into the project after seeing Taylor's work on Game of Thrones. Taylor's next film was Terminator Genisys, a film that Taylor hoped to fix following his reading of the script, citing his love of the first two Terminator films. After directing nine episodes for the HBO series The Sopranos, Taylor was approached by show creator David Chase to return to direct the 2021 prequel film The Many Saints of Newark. In August 2022, it was announced that Taylor was hired to direct multiple episodes of the second season of House of the Dragon. Description above from the Wikipedia article Alan Taylor, licensed under CC-BY-SA, full list of contributors on Wikipedia.
Alan Taylor
Director
for Director in Marvel Television's Venom: Lethal Protector
Suggested by deadalusae
As New York attempts to heal the wounds left by Avengers: Secret Wars, Peter Parker rejects the black symbiote suit; the sentient symbiote then latches onto another Eddie Brock variant (Tom Hardy), ripping the fragile peace of Eddie’s wife Annie (Michelle Williams) and son Dylan (Roman Griffin Davis) apart. The neighborhood grocer Kimi Schafer’s wry humanity, Annie’s fierce protectiveness, and Wanda Maximoff’s (Elizabeth Olsen) mystical mentorship push Eddie into a dilemma that is at once deeply human and cosmically fraught. Wilson Fisk and Carlton Drake move to exploit symbiotic energy as both propaganda and weapon, and Drake’s experiments with a Riot V2 variant leak Knull’s low-frequency echoes into the city; during a skirmish, a fragment of the symbiote infects Dylan, and Teen-Venom is born — a new guardian who bonds with the family’s darkness and learns with frightening speed. The stakes rapidly escalate as hives and swarms of Grendels and Xenophages spill into the streets; Fisk’s media machine attempts to cast the Brock family as “alien terrorists,” while Wanda makes a tremendous psychic sacrifice to cleanse Teen-Venom of Knull’s influence. The uneasy new father-and-son balance between Eddie and Teen-Venom coalesces into Venom’s role as protector even as Riot V2 and Fisk’s schemes are exposed; in the climactic battle beneath a blood-red sky, New York is saved, but the burning sigil of Knull in the heavens whispers that this victory is only temporary.
