When Bill Forsyth was turning out gems in the 1980's, first quirky Scottish films like "Local Hero" and then offbeat Hollywood productions like the Burt Reynolds vehicle "Breaking In," we had reason to look forward to him enjoying a long and successful career. Things didn't work out that way, alas. In spite of strong reviews for "Breaking In" and "Housekeeping," commercial success eluded him in America. And then his cosmic Robin Williams drama "Being Human" was universally panned– after which, save for a so-so sequel to "Gregory's Girl," his "marvelously cockeyed" coming of age comedy, as one critic described it, he disappeared from the scene. But when I spoke to Forsyth in Chicago in 1981, he was riding a wave of enthusiasm for "Gregory's Girl," which was just out. In our chat, he talks about how he went from school dropout to filmmaker, the lessons he learned from the French New Wave – and his hopes for the future.

"There's nothing more pathetic than the level of emotion in films like Star Wars." When Arthur Penn said that during our 1985 interview, which you can hear on the latest episode of Sachs and the Cinema, he did so as a director who got carved up critically himself – for Bonnie and Clyde, now regarded as one of the masterpieces of American cinema. Regarded as an intellectual artist – in a good way! – he turned out other gems including Mickey One, Little Big Man, Alice's Restaurant and Night Moves. But he increasingly found himself frustrated by Hollywood's dumb-down ways and spent much of his later period in the theater. Hear him candidly discuss his experiences during a trip to Chicago to promote the espionage thriller Target.

No one, but no one, made movies like Michael Powell, the visionary British director known for such classics as The Red Shoes, Black Narcissus, and, most infamously, Peeping Tom. With his Hungarian screenwriting partner Emeric Pressburger, he took you places only he could imagine, whether turning a British backlot into the Himalayas or staging a courtroom trial in heaven. It was a thrill to chat with Powell in Chicago back in 1986, when he was in town working on his memoirs while his wife the great film editor Thelma Schoonmaker worked on his friend Martin Scorsese's "The Color of Money." If you've seen his films, be prepared to watch them again!