Martin Spottl

Martin Spottl is an American film director, producer, and screenwriter.

Early life Spottl was born in the Bronx, New York, and graduated from Dartmouth College with the class of 1987.

Career Spottl's feature directing debut was reported by Variety in 1998, which noted that actor Martin Sheen had signed on for a supporting role in Across the Line, written by Sigal Erez and Spottl (produced by Brian Duncan and Randall Emmett) and described as a suspense thriller set on the Texas border in which a small-town sheriff uncovers a major drug-smuggling scandal involving the U.S. Border Patrol. Dartmouth Alumni Magazine reported around the same time that Spottl and classmate Brian Duncan '88 had formed the production company High Water Films to make the picture, with actors Tom Berenger and Martin Sheen then attached, though neither appeared in the finished film.

Spottl wrote, directed, and co-produced the finished feature, Across the Line (2000), starring Brad Johnson, Sigal Erez, Brian Bloom, and Adrienne Barbeau.

Ahead of that premiere, La Opinión ran a front-page Entertainment-section interview with Spottl and co-writer/star Sigal Erez about the film's approach to its subject, undocumented immigration. Spottl described the film as ("not a film with only two dimensions, black and white"), saying its story carried many dramatic and emotional nuances and that he and Erez had deliberately avoided treating the subject of immigration too simplistically. Erez, in the same interview, said their aim was to put a human face on the statistics surrounding immigration rather than treat migrants as an anonymous list of numbers.

Filmography Year Title Director Writer Producer Notes 1990s Stones in My Passway: The Robert Johnson Story 2000 Across the Line Feature directorial debut