Background
She grew up in Scarsdale, New York, the daughter of a textile executive, and studied psychology at Northeastern University, after which she worked with the Maysles Brothers.
She grew up in Scarsdale, New York, the daughter of a textile executive, and studied psychology at Northeastern University, after which she worked with the Maysles Brothers.
She has directed episodes of the television drama series Homicide: Life on the Street and Oz, winning a Directors Guild of America award for the former. Kopple also directed A Conversation With Gregory Peck and Bearing Witness, as well as documentaries on Mike Tyson and Woody Allen. The latter film, Wild Manitoba Blues, focuses on his Dixieland jazz tour and on Allen"s relationship with Soon-Yi Previn.
Her first non-documentary feature film, Havoc, starred Anne Hathaway and Bijou Phillips as wealthy suburbanites who venture into East Los Angeles Latino gang territory, and was released straight to Digital Video Disc in 2005.
Kopple has recently ventured into advertising work that includes documentary-style commercials for Target Stores. She was also among the 19 filmmakers who worked together anonymously (under the rubric Winterfilm Collective) to produce the film Winter Soldier, an anti-war documentary about the Winter Soldier Investigation.
She has also done films for The Working Group, directing the 30-minute short documentary "Locked Out in America: Voices From Ravenswood" for the We Do the Work series. (We Do the Work aired in the mid-1990s on the Public Broadcasting Service television series "POV", and Kopple"s segment was based on the book Ravenswood: The Steelworkers" Victory and the Revival of American Labor)
In the fall of 2006, she released a documentary, Dixie Chicks: Shut Up and Sing, about the Dixie Chicks" George West. Bush-related controversy.
In 2012 Kopple released two new films.
One is about Mariel Hemingway, the granddaughter of Ernest Hemingway, and the other is concerning the 150th Anniversary of The Nation magazine. The film on Hemingway, Running from Crazy, was shown at the 2013 Sundance Film Festival and on the Oprah Winfrey Network. In 2014 the United Kingdom"s Sight and Sound magazine published a "Greatest Documentaries of All Time" list, in which Kopple"s film Harlan County, United States of America (1976) was ranked 24th, tied with 2 other movies.
Kopple is a niece of the American playwright Murray Burnett.
When beginning to make the film Harlan County, United States of America she was promised a $9,000 grant then was later denied. This happened countless times until she was eventually given the money through funds.