Arthur Penn: 1922 – 2010

David Kehr, New York Times: A pioneering director of live television drama in the 1950s and a Broadway powerhouse in the 1960s, Mr. Penn developed an intimate, spontaneous and physically oriented method of directing actors that allowed their work to register across a range of mediums…

“Arthur Penn brought the sensibility of ‘60s European art films to American movies,” the writer-director Paul Schrader said. “He paved the way for the new generation of American directors who came out of film schools.”

Many of the now-classic films of what was branded the “New American Cinema” of the 1970s — including “Taxi Driver,” directed by Martin Scorsese and written by Mr. Schrader, and “The Godfather,” written and directed by Francis Ford Coppola — would have been unthinkable without “Bonnie and Clyde” to point the way.

Clip from a Q&A session with Arthur Pennn at the Morelia Film Festival in 2007, after the cut.