A protege of Steven Soderbergh and Nancy Tenenbaum, Greg Mottola made his directorial debut with "The Daytrippers" at the Slamdance Film Festival in 1996, which then went on to win mild critical applause and earn him a place in the latest new wave of independent filmmakers. Raised on Long Island, New York, Mottola studied art at Carnegie-Mellon University in Pittsburgh, where he also made some student films and worked for one week as a production assistant on "Day of the Dead" (1985), a George Romero horror flick. He attended Columbia University for graduate school in film. While there, he
