Although he made a number of other acclaimed films such as Wonder Boys and 8 Mile, it was his bravura adaptation of Jame Ellroy’s noir novel that located Hanson on the Hollywood A-list.
Russell Crowe, who got his Hollywood break as the indestructible detective Bud White in L.A.Confidential, tweeted that he was ‘obviously distracted & upset” at the news.
A native of Reno, Nevada who grew up in the San Fernando Valley in Los Angeles, Hanson dropped out of high school to work as a photographer.
He began screenwriting and directing in the early 1970s, but didn’t see serious success until directing the 1992 psychological thriller The Hand That Rocks The Cradle. The film starring Rebecca De Mornay as a revenge-seeking nanny became a major hit.
Hanson went on to direct 1994’s The River Wild with Meryl Streep and Kevin Bacon but his biggest success came three years later with L.A. Confidential, which featured Guy Pearce, Russell Crowe and Kevin Spacey alongside Oscar-winning Kim Basinger in the complex tale of police corruption.
Hanson, who won an Oscar for the screenplay with Brian Helgeland but was denied best director and producer by the huge success of Titanic at the 1998 Academy Awards, said in an interview in 2001 that he had always wanted to tell a story that was set in Los Angeles in the 50s “because that’s where I grew up”.
“I wanted to deal with that and also pursue this theme that interested me, which is the difference between illusion and reality, the way people and things appear to be versus how they really are. And Hollywood, of course, is the city of illusion. So that was near and dear to me, and extremely personal.”
Hanson explored a different sort of darkness in 8 Mile, the film starring Eminem that explored the gritty streets and trailer parks of Detroit and closely mirrored the rapper’s own younger life.
Hanson chose to shoot the movie in the actual burned-out homes and vacant storefronts of the real city.
“Everything about the story felt better to tell it here in Detroit,” Hanson told the AP in 2002.
Hanson said he had only a passing knowledge of hip-hop when he entered the project, and that he and Eminem “had to convince each other” they could both handle the movie as each envisioned it.
“While I was checking him out, he was certainly checking me out,” Hanson said in the Guardian interview. “We spent a lot of time together and we then made a somewhat educated leap of faith.”
Hanson most recently directed the 2011 HBO movie on the financial crisis Too Big To Fail and the 2012 Gerard Butler surfing movie Chasing Mavericks.
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