Nimrod Antal

30 Nov, 1973 | Los Angeles, California

Director

Biography

Antal Nimród (pronounced: Neemrode) is a Hungarian American film director. Life and career Nimród was born in Los Angeles, California of Hungarian ancestry. Antal moved to Hungary in 1991 to study at the Hungarian Film Academy. After graduating, he went on to work in the film and television industry. In 2005, he moved back to his hometown of Los Angeles to pursue success in Hollywood. Directing He is best known for writing and directing the film Kontroll (2003), which won numerous awards, including the Award of the Youth at the Cannes Film Festival and the Golden Hugo (main prize) at the Chicago International Film Festival, as well as a European Film Award nomination for Best Director. The backdrop of the film is the Budapest Metro subway system. Kontroll, refers to the act of ticket inspectors checking to ensure a rider has paid their fare. Since the early 1990s, Antal has been a prolific and highly-successful director of music videos and televisions commercials in Hungary. He has also been hired to direct commercials in other Central European countries such as the Czech Republic. His American sensibilities, particularly a comfort with combining humour and graphic violence have been perceived as a breath of fresh air by Hungarian fans from the time of his very first low-budget efforts. His most famous commercial was the Holsten beer commercial where a policemen tries to dissuade a suicidal man from jumping by helping himself to the man's ice-cold Holsten beer. The ad was shot in a Budapest dentist's office. The dentist's father and Antal's studied dentistry together prior to the latter's emigration to the United States. The much-loved punchline to the ad, "Nem ugrunk le egy sörért?" (literally "What say we hop down for a beer?"), doesn't really work in English, but was considered a very clever word-play on a typical Hungarian expression, and has entered the local catch-phrase lexicon. Antal's first American feature film Vacancy, starring Kate Beckinsale and Luke Wilson, was released on April 20, 2007. His second film, Armored is scheduled to be released this December. He has been selected by Robert Rodriguez to direct the film Predators. Acting Antal has also appeared in acting roles in numerous Hungarian films. Best known among these are András Salamon's Közel a szerelemhez (1999) and Balra a nap nyugszik (2000), directed by András Fésös. Antal had major supporting parts in both of these films.