Michael Tucker was born in Honolulu, Hawaii, and spent his youth on far-flung Army posts until he settled in the Northwest where he worked (among other things) as a commercial fisherman until an accident on a Bering Sea trawler forced him to pick up his first camera. Tucker began working with Petra Epperlein in New York in 1994; they soon moved to Berlin where they were early pioneers in digital cinema. In 1997, with the support of Sony Europe and other technology companies, they produced The Last Cowboy, one of the first films to be shot on DV and edited on the desktop. Liberated by the new technology, they spent their early years honing their craft on remote locations including Bosnia, Vietnam, Cuba, the Australian Outback and Namibia.

In early 2003, they abruptly transitioned from filming wildlife in Africa to the war in Iraq, when Tucker was invited to drive into Baghdad from Jordan with an opportunity-seeking German armored car salesman. That road trip became the first act of Bulletproof Salesman as well as the first chapter of what would become an epic six year chronicle of the war.

While in Baghdad, Tucker fell in with a U.S. Army unit housed in one of Uday Husseinʼs palaces and began filming their surreal indoctrination to war. When the resulting film, Gunner Palace, premiered at the 2004 Telluride Film Festival, AO Scott at the New York Times said it was a "... raw, intimate and improbably funny portrait." Soon after, the MPAA slapped the film with an R rating, but after an emotional appeal by Tucker to the MPAA board, the film was granted an unprecedented PG-13 and now carries the conspicuous distinction of being the most profane PG-13 movie in MPAA history with 42 utterances of the F-word.

In 2006, the pair went on to tell the Kafkaesque tale of a falsely imprisoned Iraqi journalist in The Prisoner or: How I Panned to Kill Tony Blair . Tucker wrote a feature story about The Prisoner for Vanity Fair in 2007 and the film was nominated for an Independent Spirit Award in 2008.

With the war in Afghanistan heating up in 2007, they revisited the salesman that led them to Iraq and produced Bulletproof Salesman, a film that explores the symbiotic relationship of terror and business through the jaded eyes of a businessman who trafficks in the concept of security.

In 2008, one of the soldiers from Gunner Palace returned home and decided to run for U.S. Congress in a Rust Belt district while his fellow soldiers faced their own challenges as their country fell into economic crisis. Their stories, told in How to Hold a Flag, premiered in Toronto in 2009, effectively closing the curtain on more than six years of war. At the same time, one of the veterans featured in Flag -- a cage fighter -- led them to Fightville, their latest film, which captures the rise of small town mixed martial arts fighter as he fights his way to top.

Epperlein is currently working on a graphic novel about life in East Germany and Tucker is working on his first narrative screenplay. They live and work together with their daughter in a farmhouse in Upstate New York.

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