| Carroll Ballard | |
|---|---|
| Born | October 14, 1937 Los Angeles, California, USA |
| Occupation | Film director |
| Years active | 1965–2005 |
Carroll Ballard (born October 14, 1937) is an American film director.
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Carroll Ballard attended film school at UCLA, where his classmates included Francis Ford Coppola.
He started out making documentaries for the U.S. Information Agency, Beyond This Winter's Wheat (1965) and Harvest (1967). The latter was nominated for an Academy Award. He also made the documentaries The Perils of Priscilla (1969) and Rodeo (1970).[1]
He was second unit director on the George Lucas film Star Wars (1977), for which he handled many of the outdoor desert scenes.
His first solo directing job came when Coppola offered him the job of directing The Black Stallion (1979), an adaptation of the novel by Walter Farley.[2]
Ballard's second film was Never Cry Wolf (1983), based on Farley Mowat's autobiographical book of the same name, which detailed Mowat's experiences with Arctic wolves.[3]
In the 1990s, he directed two films: Wind (1992) and Fly Away Home (1996).
His most recent film is Duma (2005), about a young South African boy's friendship with an orphaned cheetah.[4]
Most of Ballard's films deal with man and his relation to nature and have a strong poetic streak. Film critic Kenneth Turan once wrote:
"[Ballard] knows how to be both caring and restrained, minimizing a movie's saccharine content while maximizing the sense of wonder."[5]
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