Brian Dannelly is a German born American film director and screenwriter best known for his work on the 2004 film Saved!
Brian Dannelly | |
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Dannelly at the 2012 Tribeca Film Festival premiere of Struck by Lightning | |
Born | Würzburg, Bavaria, Germany |
Occupation | Director, screenwriter, producer |
Years active | 2000 – present |
Dannelly was born in Würzburg, Germany before moving with his family to Baltimore, Maryland aged eleven.[1] He was raised Catholic; he attended a Catholic elementary school, Arlington Baptist High School in Baltimore, and a Jewish summer camp.[2] He was expelled from first grade for hitting a nun,[3] and later expelled from high school—which he describes as "one of the strictest schools in the nation"[4]—for excessive demerits.[2] He started questioning his sexuality in high school, claiming, "I remember I'd pray every night that I wasn't gay, and please God, please God, anything I could do—just don't make this happen."[5] He came out at the age of seventeen and was thrown out of his house by his parents, who eventually came to accept his sexuality.[5]
Dannelly graduated from the University of Maryland, Baltimore County with a degree in visual arts in 1997.[6]
Dannelly wrote and directed short film "He Bop" in 2000 before his debut with 2004's religious satire film Saved!, which he directed and co-wrote with Michael Urban. He had begun to write the Saved! script after the Columbine High School massacre in 1999, which he claims took him "back to [his] roots" in a Christian high school.[7] He and Urban began writing the script while attending the American Film Institute Conservatory.[8][9] Much of the story was drawn from his own experiences with "conservative Christian subculture", including Christian rock concerts, being "this gay kid in a Christian school"[10] and having visions of Jesus.[5] He says, "In the Baptist school there was the one Jewish girl that everyone was trying to save, there was a girl who got pregnant, there was a gay kid"—all principal characters in Saved![11] He claims that nothing in the film came from his imagination: "Everything in the movie comes from either something I experienced, or something I witnessed, or something I researched."[10]
After Saved! was released, Dannelly went on to become a regular series director on the television show Weeds.[1] He has also directed the 2006 pilot episode of Help Me Help You and Pushing Daisies' 2007 episode "Corpsicle". His most recent film, Runner Up, about a beauty pageant queen who organizes a pageant in a women's prison, is currently in production.[1] He is signed on to direct upcoming romantic comedy film The Guided Man, which he co-wrote with Michael Urban and Steve Adams based on a 1952 story by L. Sprague de Camp.[12] He has written a spec script, Army Geek, about a Texan Napoleon Dynamite-like character who joins the military.[1]
In 2017, Dannelly worked as a director on two episodes of the second season of the Netflix original series Haters Back Off, starring Colleen Ballinger (Miranda Sings), Angela Kinsey and Erik Stocklin.