Stefan Ruzowitzky

Stefan Ruzowitzky is an Austrian film director and screenwriter.

Early life and education
Ruzowitzky was born in Vienna. He studied drama and history at the University of Vienna and started directing music videos, for example for 'N Sync, and commercials.

Movie career
In 1996, Ruzowitzky presented his first feature film, Tempo, about a group of youths living in Vienna. He was subsequently awarded with the Max Ophüls Preis.

His next feature film, The Inheritors, set in the rural Mühlviertel in Upper Austria, was released in 1998, and was awarded Best Picture at the International Film Festival Rotterdam as well as at the Flanders Film Festival. It also won a prize at the International Film Festival in Valladolid.

In 2000 he directed the successful German horror film Anatomy, starring Franka Potente, and in 2003 the equally well-received sequel Anatomy 2. Ruzowitzky's first international co-production, All the Queen's Men (2001), starring Matt LeBlanc and Eddie Izzard, was received poorly by both critics and viewers.

In 2007 Ruzowitzky's The Counterfeiters premiered at the Berlin International Film Festival and was nominated for a Golden Bear. The film is based on the memories of Adolf Burger, a Jewish Slovak typographer and Holocaust survivor involved in Operation Bernhard. The Counterfeiters, nominated on behalf of Austrian cinema, won the Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film at the 80th Academy Awards on 24 February 2008.

In 2013, he directed the 90-minute non-fiction drama Das radikal Böse, which, by means of authentic letters and interviewing psychology, military, and history experts seeks to explain the mentality of "ordinary" members of Einsatzgruppen and Wehrmacht soldiers that carried out the Holocaust. It was mainly based upon Christopher Browning's 1992 book Ordinary Men, which assigns the efficiency of the German killing machinery to social mechanisms of conformism and peer pressure rather than racial hatred.

His vampire horror film The Last Voyage of the Demeter is based on Bram Stoker's Dracula tale, and the psychological thriller Braincopy.

On 2 May 2014, Deadline Hollywood announced that Ruzowitzky would direct Screen Gems' action-thriller Patient Zero based on an original script by Mike Le. The film stars Matt Smith and Natalie Dormer.

Awards

 * 1998 - The Inheritors, Grand Prix at the 1998 edition of Film Fest Gent
 * 2007 – The Counterfeiters, Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film
 * 2007 - The Counterfeiters, Grand Prix at the 2007 edition of Film Fest Gent

Opera
In 2010, Ruzowitzky directed his first opera production, Der Freischütz, for Vienna's Theater an der Wien. The cast included his Counterfeiters star Karl Markovics in the non-singing role of Samiel; the production was conducted by Bertrand de Billy.