Jeremy Podeswa

Jeremy Podeswa

Jeremy Podeswa, screenwriter, producer, director (born at Toronto 1962). Jeremy Podeswa is one of those rare Canadian filmmakers who, as well as being an A-list director of "quality" American television, is internationally recognized as a creator of distinctive Canadian feature films. He graduated from Ryerson's film program in 1983 and immediately fell in with a group of local film graduates (Atom EGOYAN, Peter METTLER and Patricia ROZEMA among them) who would become the principal players in what has now become known as the Ontario New Wave - an especially productive period in English-Canadian filmmaking. With the self-explanatory short film David Roche Talks to You About Love (1983), Podeswa garnered numerous awards on the international film festival circuit and the film helped earn him admission to the American Film Institute's prestigious Center for Advanced Film Studies, from which he graduated in 1984.

Jeremy Podeswa spent the next decade helping his friends in supporting crew roles on their productions, and completing his own short films In the Name of Bobby (1985), Standards (1992) and Caveman Rainbow (1993) that defined his early obsession with the themes of alienation and sexuality among twenty-somethings in urban Toronto. In 1994 Podeswa braved the world of feature filmmaking with his debut feature Eclipse. An impressive subversion of norms on love and promiscuity jarringly intercut with interviews about the title's astronomical event, Eclipse achieved the reception of many debuts from promising young Canadian directors: seen as bold and original from audiences abroad, but attacked at home for being overly introspective and didactic. It was successful, however, in marking Podeswa as a talent to watch. His second feature, The Five Senses, came 5 years later and was told in a more accessible narrative style with a separate character representing each of the 5 senses in the service of a larger metaphor about love. The film performed well commercially after its premiere at the Directors' Fortnight program at the Cannes Film Festival and earned 9 GENIE AWARD nominations, with Podeswa winning 2 for direction and production.

Since his directorial work on the pilot episode of the American television series Six Feet Under in 2001, a Jeremy Podeswa credit has become the mark of smart television in Hollywood. Podeswa has expressed weariness, however, of the kind of anonymity that a career in that medium can bring and in 2007 earned an international hit with the feature Fugitive Pieces. Set in Canada and on the Greek island Hydra, his third film is about a Canadian writer's struggle to historicize his family's suffering and near obliteration at the hands of the Nazis, a story that mirrors Jeremy Podeswa's father's childhood. Based on the novel by Canadian poet Anne MICHAELS, Fugitive Pieces is an epic production typical of a collaboration with Canadian movie mega-producer Robert LANTOS. The film won the coveted opening night gala presentation at the Toronto International Film Festival and earned 6 nominations at the 2009 Genie Awards.

Jeremy Podeswa has directed episodes of TV series such as The Riches (2007), John from Cincinnati (2007), Dexter (2007), Weeds (2009), The Tudors (2008-10), The Pacific (2010), Rubicon (2010), Boardwalk Empire (2010), The Newsroom (2012) and Homeland (2012), earning Emmy nominations for his work on The Pacific and Boardwalk Empire.