Who hasn’t had a day where “everything breaks down in a bucket of hell”? We’ve all had such an experience. But what are the odds that two people move into a NYC apartment and the very next day have four uninvited guests ring the doorbell and be systematically annihilated in the dining area, right before the flabbergasted couple’s eyes? Well, you say, it is New York City after all. But still …

The magician behind this “bucket of hell” is Danish-born Joachim Back, the seriously hilarious director of the 2010 Academy Award-winning short “The New Tenants.” Back’s ability to find humor in adversity comes from overcoming personal tragedy. “When I recall the absurdity of my own existence, I understand life better. I lost my dad at an early age. In fact, death played a major role throughout my life. The way I look at it, everyone will end up in a box someday, so we need to find humor in this!”

Lovers Ray Yale (David Roberts) and Carla Smith (Claire van der Boom), both trapped in loveless marriages, plan to run away together. Ray insists they delay their plans until he acquires enough money to ensure financial security in their new life. As Carla grows impatient, the duo devises a strategy to steal money from Carla's husband (Anthony Hayes), a small-time gangster. After Ray hires Billy (Joel Edgerton) to burn down Carla's home to cover the theft, things go horribly awry.

Though littered with standard noir tropes, the Edgertons anchor their tale with an engaging parallel plot line involving two canines. According to director Nash: “Really, it's a dog love story with a bunch of humans added around it. I love dogs. Joel does, too. In the first draft he wrote, the dog love story was in the film. … I added more. … It's definitely satisfying to see how well it worked.”

Director James Ivory talks about “The City of Your Final Destination” and literary adaptations of great novels. “[This film] was born in a very simple way — someone put this book in my pocket, thinking that I would have liked it and that maybe I would possibly stretch a film of it. And he was right. Apart from the time beyond history, the characters and the scenes, … I was impressed by the South American setting. At that time, Ismail was still with us [Ismail Merchant, the Indian producer and Ivory’s lifelong assistant, who passed away on May 25, 2005] and we thought it would be easy to find important actors for this film — a necessary condition to sell it, as you know. I hadn't read anything by him, but since that day I have read all his works. Together with screenwriter Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, we started to conceive the film.”

In 1957, a ragtag boy’s baseball team from the wrong side of the border crossed into the U.S. with little more than the uniform on their backs. They had never played a real Little League game. Yet, inspired by their coach — whose career in the big leagues was short-lived due to discrimination — and their priest, they embarked on an unprecedented winning streak, all the way to the Little League World Series. There, they were the first team to win the championship by pitching a perfect game — a record that still stands.

Astoundingly, the Monterrey Industrials’ story had never been filmed (aside from a 1960 documentary called “Little Giants”) when W. William Winokur, an investment banker with no experience in the film industry, brought his script “The Perfect Game” to producers David Salzberg and Christian Tureaud. “We’re always looking for a great story, and we had someone come into the office that pitched us an idea about these kids,” says Salzberg.

“You’re my first-ever interview — can you believe it?” Julie Anne Robinson says very early on in the promotional cycle for “The Last Song.” “It was a little bit scary, but I’m sure I’ll gain confidence.”

“The Last Song” marks a number of firsts. Set in a Southern beach town as warm and inviting as fresh-baked peach cobbler, the romance about a rebellious teenager (Miley Cyrus) who falls in love with a local boy (Liam Hemsworth) while forced to spend the summer with her estranged father (Greg Kinnear) was Robinson’s first studio movie after having directed almost every other format.

“You can see from my file that I’ve done half hour, I’ve done hour, I’ve done lots of pilots,” she says. “And then I did this indie film in the U.K. [‘Coming Down the Mountain’ starring Nicholas Hoult]. I was ready and really wanted to start working within the studio system.”

Here was the opportunity to refocus the eye of every viewer onto what they had missed when the hurricane destroyed New Orleans. It was a chance to retell the story with the hope that the nation would wake up and commit to the reconstruction and preservation of this city’s rich cultural heritage.

From a practical point of view, the main challenge was to accurately create an emotional canvas for the story to unfold onto by recreating New Orleans in the days before, during and after Hurricane Katrina.

What I found three years after the tragedy were entire neighborhoods completely erased from the map except for a few dilapidated structures struggling to stand among hundreds of vacant lots.

For the “before Katrina” scenes, we selected a block in Old Algiers Point that had escaped unscathed and, coincidentally, where I had once lived. It’s a block of classic “shotgun” houses nestled among Magnolia trees and lush gardens, full of New Orleans charm.

"Tales from the Script" is culled from exclusive conversations with more than 45 working writers: darkly funny anecdotes and no-nonsense advice.

“I cannot recommend the road I have taken,” Paul Schrader said with a heavy sigh. “It’s just too much damn work.” Seated in his cluttered office near Times Square, the revered writer-director made this remark during an interview for “Tales from the Script,” the documentary I just directed about the lives of Hollywood screenwriters. Given that Schrader has written towering films, including “Taxi Driver” and “The Last Temptation of Christ,” and directed such challenging pictures as “Affliction and Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters,” the fatigue in his voice was sobering. If a career filled with historic accomplishments can sap an artist’s strength, then what sort of dangers await mere mortals who wish to follow in Schrader’s path? Questions like that drove me throughout the making of “Tales from the Script.”

Director Conor McPherson has a straightforward philosophy on how to learn to make movies: “You’ve got to make a few bad films first.”

Sharing this, the Irish filmmaker recalls his first cinematic directorial attempt, which came in the form of a feature film entitled “Endgame” instead of through the more common route of making a short film. McPherson, a playwright and stage director at the time, had gotten the job to direct after writing the screenplay for the 1997 film “I Went Down.” “Playwrights who direct [film] don’t trust the image,” says McPherson. “At first, I wanted to get the characters to talk as much as possible.”

McPherson has come a long way since then, evidence his most recent film, the supernatural horror/romance “The Eclipse.” The film is filled with breathtaking vistas of a picturesque Irish seaside town and elaborate long takes. In fact, dialogue is subdued and used sparingly.

When we hatched our plan to “make a feature film a little at a time with no money,” it didn’t take long for us to place our finger on the motel. “Rent a room and you have a location,” we conspired, “and with an anthology, we don’t have to shell out a whole production all at once. A little at a time. Week by week. Year by year. Until we capture the ghost or give it up.” We spit in our palms and shook.

Then we had to get down to the business of where to start. The bottom was as good a place as any, so we started digging:

Since its emergence as a cultural institution in the 1940s, the motel promised respite for the weary traveler who had no need for the formality and expense of the city-centric grand hotels of the day. But almost from their inception, motels were perceived with suspicion, as a “place between places” where the potential for unlawful activity loomed large.

How does one begin to adapt such a seemingly uncinematic — yet wildly popular — “novel in cartoons” for the big screen?

 “Literally, you can open [the book] at any page and you can find a completely independently existing little story that happens to Greg that day. You’ll be entertained, and you’ll laugh,” says director Thor Freudenthal. “[In] the movie you can’t really do that, so you have to create a character arc. You have to develop a throughline that creates a structure that you can hang those episodes onto.”

That throughline, Freudenthal says, is the bromance between Greg (Zachary Gordon), a lazy, selfish, judgmental yet still likable sixth grader, and his clueless best friend Rowley Jefferson (Robert Capron): “Friends together, friend loses friend, and friend has to win back his friend.” Along the way, though, fans of the book are going to want to see their favorite scenes brought to life.