Film Director Services

New York's directing canon runs deep. Martin Scorsese, Spike Lee, Woody Allen, Sidney Lumet's legacy, the Coen Brothers, Jim Jarmusch, the Safdies, Greta Gerwig, Noah Baumbach, Whit Stillman, Sofia Coppola, Wes Anderson's NYC ties, Steven Soderbergh's East Coast work, Lena Dunham, Lulu Wang, and Lin-Manuel Miranda have built a directing culture rooted in character-led story and urban texture. It grew from the auteur tradition that American independent cinema was born from in Greenwich Village, Soho, and the East Village in the 1970s and 1980s.

Our roster mirrors that range. It holds DGA East-credentialed feature directors with Sundance, Tribeca Film Festival, New York Film Festival, Gotham Awards, and Independent Spirit credits. We also field prestige-series directors working inside the New York slates of A24, Killer Films, Plan B, Annapurna, Bad Robot, Imagine, Sister, and Wiip. Music-video and fashion directors bring NY Fashion Week and Brooklyn music-scene roots, while high-end commercial directors sit on rosters at the agency network on Madison Avenue.

Most directors are bilingual where shoots call for it across NYC's many-language crew base. They work smoothly with Local 600 East cinematographers like Bradford Young, Sean Bobbitt, Andrij Parekh, Adam Newport-Berra, Maryse Alberti, and Reed Morano. Each one carries the Tisch, Columbia Film, Pratt, and SVA training that the city's directing pipeline turns out.

On the production side, our directors work across Steiner Studios at the Brooklyn Navy Yard, Silvercup in Queens and the Bronx, Kaufman Astoria, Broadway Stages, and Wildflower Studios. Their location range runs from Manhattan's skyscrapers and brownstones to Brooklyn's DUMBO and Williamsburg, Queens' Astoria and Long Island City, the Bronx, and Staten Island. It also takes in Hudson Valley, Long Island, and Yonkers stages within the New York State Film Tax Credit zone.

Visiting directors who don't speak English are paired with bilingual first ADs and DGA East-credentialed line producers, so creative intent moves cleanly through Local 52 crew culture. The same call brings editors from the Thelma Schoonmaker, Sam Pollard, Tim Squyres, and Susan E. Morse lineage in Local 700 ACE East. Production designers come from USA 829, and casting at the Avy Kaufman, Ellen Lewis, and Sheila Jaffe tier stays open on call.

The New York State Film Tax Credit (up to 30% via the Empire State Film Production Credit, $700M annual cap) covers qualifying director and crew spend on episodic, feature, and commercial work. We set up each engagement to keep that eligibility intact, from prep through delivery to the NYFF, Tribeca, Sundance, Gotham, or Emmy window.