Derick Martini

Film and television

Martini's feature film writing credits include the coming of age story Lymelife, which he wrote with his brother Steven Martini. Lymelife marked Martini's directorial debut and premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival in September 2008, where it won the International Federation of Film Critics (FIPRESCI) Award for best film. Martini also received a "Breakthrough Director" nomination from the 2009 Gotham Awards for the film. The film also landed on several major film critic's "Top Ten Films of 2009" lists. Lymelife was filmed in 22 days and on a budget of 1.5 million dollars. Martin Scorsese, a producer of Lymelife, is a champion of Martini's work.

Martini was the youngest filmmaker to ever win the prestigious International Federation of Film Critics (FIPRESCI) award.

Before turning to directing Martini script doctored numerous studio feature films for which he is uncredited.

Martini's other feature film credits include Smiling Fish and Goat on Fire, written and produced and starring both he and his brother Steven Martini in 2000, which also made its premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival where it was awarded the festival's Discovery Award; Bolden, a full-length feature film he co-wrote with the director Daniel Pritzker depicting the life of obscure jazz legend Buddy Bolden; and Louis, a black and white silent film chronicling the early days of Louis Armstrong and his quest to acquire his first trumpet. His television credits include the Jennifer Lopez-produced television series South Beach, and a remake of Alex Raymond's Flash Gordon.

Hick, his second feature film as a director, is based on the autobiographical novel of the same name. Its author, Andrea Portes, adapted her own work for the screen with Martini. Production on "Hick" was plagued with problems. Hick premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival on September 10, 2011 to extremely divisive critical and audience responses. Critics on Rotten Tomatoes rated the film 5%, and Metacritic scored it 28/100. In a negative review, Roger Ebert praised Martini as a "gifted filmmaker", but questioned the point of the film. The film was released theatrically in 2012 by Phase 4 Films.

Martini dropped out of film school and was invited to develop his film Lymelife at The Sundance Institute Filmmaker's Lab where he met Kieran Culkin who was cast as the lead character of Scott for the experimental scenes. When the film was ready to go into production, Martini and Culkin felt he was too old to play the lead character. Martini, an avid fan of Kieran's younger brother Rory Culkin was cast as Scott and Martini offered the role of Scott's older brother, Jimmy, to Kieran. Martini became so attached to the idea of real brothers playing brothers in the film, he has said that he could never have made the film as well as he did without the real sibling dynamic Kieran and Rory brought to the project.

After "Lymelife" premiered to raves and an award and was picked up for theatrical distribution in 2008 at the Toronto International Film Festival, Martini insisted the film go unreleased until the programmers at the Sundance Film Festival, to whom Martini was very grateful, got a chance to see the film and decide if they wanted to put it in their line up despite it not being considered a "premiere". The programmers chose to invite the film to show at the 2009 Sundance Film Festival where it again garnered more raves but caused its theatrical release to be delayed until April 29, 2009.