Bill Guttentag

Bill Guttentag is a double Oscar-winning dramatic and documentary film writer-producer-director. His films have premiered at the Sundance, Cannes, Telluride and Tribeca film festivals.

He directed Nanking (THINKFilm, 2007), a theatrical documentary which premiered at Sundance and featured Woody Harrelson and Rosiland Chao, and was shortlisted for an Oscar. He also directed Soundtrack for a Revolution (Wild Bunch, 2009), which had its international premiere at Cannes and was also shortlisted for an Oscar.

He directed and co-wrote Rule Breakers, a dramatic feature based on the true story of the Afghan Girls Robotics Team. The film stars Nikohl Boosheri, Ali Fazal, and Phoebe Waller-Bridge. The movie was released in March 2025 in over 2000 US theaters, and also had widespread international distribution. The film had special screenings in the UK Parliament and the United Nations.

Bill Guttentag won an Academy Award for the documentary Twin Towers (Universal, 2003). He has also received a second Oscar, three additional Oscar nominations, a Peabody Award, three Emmy Awards, three additional Emmy nominations, two Writers Guild Award nominations, a Producers Guild Award nomination, and a Robert Kennedy Journalism Award.

His films have been selected for Sundance three times, Telluride twice, Tribeca five times, and have won awards at numerous American and international film festivals. They have received a number of special screenings including at the Museum of Modern Art, Council on Foreign Relations, Stanford, the Harvard Kennedy School, Yale, and the White House.

He wrote and directed the dramatic feature LIVE! (Atlas Entertainment, 2008) starring Eva Mendes and Andre Braugher, and produced by Chuck Roven. He wrote and directed Knife Fight (IFC, 2013) starring Rob Lowe, Julie Bowen, David Harbor, Jamie Chung, and Carrie-Ann Moss. Both films premiered at Tribeca.

Bill Guttentag partnered with Richard Linklater on That Animal Rescue Show, on which they were executive producers and directors. The 10-part series aired on Paramount+ (2020). An episode from the series was part of the selection of the 2020 Telluride Film Festival.

His film Only the Dead See the End of War (HBO), premiered theatrically at the 2015 Telluride Film Festival. He won an AACTA Award (Australian Academy Award) for best directing for a documentary, and a Walkley Award (Australian Pulitzer) for the film. The film was nominated for an Emmy.

Bill Guttentag created, executive produced, and directed the NBC series Crime & Punishment, which ran for three seasons (2002-2004). The series was part of the Law & Order family of shows, and was created with Dick Wolf, who was also an executive producer. Over the series’ run, nearly every show was in the Nielsen top 20.

He has directed commercials and other projects for a number of Silicon Valley companies including Google, Yahoo, and MasterClass. He is also an advisor to Silicon Valley companies including Mattermost and MasterClass, where he directed the first and third classes (James Patterson and Serena Williams).

His film, Nanking, was filmed largely in China, and won awards at a number of U.S. and international film festivals (including Sundance), and after its theatrical release, played on Cinemax. Guttentag won a Peabody Award and Emmy Award and was nominated for a WGA award for the film. Nanking’s international release included China, where it became the highest-grossing theatrical documentary in Chinese history.

He has directed eight films for HBO, as well as films for ABC, CBS, National Geographic, and others. He produced Groomed (Blumhouse, 2021), which premiered on Discovery+, and directed and produced Sublime (Interscope) which premiered at Tribeca in 2019. Additional films include, You Don’t Have to Die (HBO), for which he won an Oscar.

He has served on a number of film festival juries, including the Shanghai International Film Festival the Odesa Film Festival, and the Morelia Film Festival.

His novel, Boulevard was published by Pegasus Books/W.W. Norton in 2011. The French edition was published by Éditions Gallimard, where it was finalist for the French literary award Grand Prix de Littérature Policière. He co-wrote Masters of Disaster – The Ten Commandments of Damage Control (Palgrave/Macmillan, 2012). He has also written nonfiction pieces, including for The Wall Street Journal and The Los Angeles Times.

He has shown his films and given lectures at many US and international universities including: Yale; Harvard; the University of Pennsylvania; University of California, Berkeley; Vanderbilt; USC; Peking University; Tsinghua University; Fudan University; Kyoto University; the Hong Kong Academy of Performing Arts; and Freie Universität Berlin. Other screenings include the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences; the Paley Center for Media; and the Brooklyn Academy of Music.

He has taught at the Hasso Plattner Institute of Design (Stanford d.school).

Since 2001, Bill Guttentag has been a lecturer at the Stanford University Graduate School of Business.