The Business

Despite a shrinking budget and difficult subject matter, director Tom McCarthy pulled together a stellar ensemble including Mark Ruffalo, Michael Keaton and Rachel McAdams to portray the unglamorous work of investigative reporting for his new movie Spotlight.

Nick Hornby has seen his novels like High Fidelity and About a Boy made into films. He's also adapted other writers' work for movies, including An Education, Wild, and now, Brooklyn, an immigrant love story already generating Oscar buzz.

Bryan Cranston and Trumbo director Jay Roach tell us how they ended up making a biopic about blacklisted screenwriter Dalton Trumbo and what drew them to the story of Hollywood’s darkest hour.

Director Leslee Udwin was in India as a court blocked the broadcast of her documentary about an infamous gang rape and murder in that country. Her film, India's Daughter, remains banned in India to this day. She tells us about putting herself at risk and in debt to make the film. 

Director Lenny Abrahamson didn’t expect author Emma Donoghue would choose him to make a film based on her bestselling novel Room. Abrahamson tells us how he made his pitch to Donoghue, and she explains why it worked.

Early in his career, Oscar-winning director Davis Guggenheim declared he would never make documentaries. He tells us about the bad experience in Hollywood that made him have a change of heart, and talks about his newest film, He Named Me Malala, which profiles activist Malala Yousafzai and her family.

The German thriller Victoria follows a bank heist in Berlin in real time. Director Sebastian Schipper shot the entire film in one long take. Schipper and actress Laia Costa tell us how you make a movie without ever saying "cut!"

With her new film Prophet's Prey, documentarian Amy Berg takes on the polygamous, fundamentalist arm of the Mormon Church. She tells us about encountering unwilling subjects and also addresses her Hollywood child sex abuse doc, An Open Secret.

Filmmaker Anna Muylaert has won acclaim at home and abroad for The Second Mother, which is Brazil's Oscar entry this year. But even with all the success, Muylaert's found that she's still not taken seriously within an industry dominated by men.

It may seem strange for the head of a cable network that's gone from two to 20 shows in the last decade to say there's officially too much TV, but that's exactly what FX's John Landgraf declared at this summer's TCA gathering. He breaks down his thinking for us.