The Director

Alan William Parker was born on February 14, 1944 in Islington, London, England. He started out his career as a copywriter for advertising agencies in the '60s which led him to writing television commercial scripts.  Alan was knighted in 2002, and publicly announced that he got offended when he wasn't properly addressed as so. Those that know him describe him as a "character". He is known to be very opinionated, no matter the subject, and is very direct and rude, but in a laughable way.

Much of his criticism about this movie came from the fact that he was British. It's hard for people to feel that he had a full understanding of what actually went on in the southern United States when he wasn't physically there. He was also criticized about how fictionalized his film turned out. He countered the critiques in an interview with The New York Times saying, ''I'm trying to reach an entire generation who knows nothing of that historical event to cause them to react to it viscerally, emotionally, because of the racism that's around them now. And that's enough of a reason, a justification, for the fictionalizing.''