Robert Zemeckis
Robert Lee Zemeckis, sometimes referred to as Bob Zemeckis, is an American filmmaker. Known for directing and producing a range of successful and influential films that often blend cutting-edge visual effects with storytelling, he has received accolades such as two Academy Awards and a Golden Globe Award, as well as nominations for five British Academy Film Awards and a Daytime Emmy Award.
Zemeckis gained some recognition for his short film A Field of Honor, which awarded him a Student Academy Award for Special Jury Prize at USC. He started his career directing the comedy films I Wanna Hold Your Hand, Used Cars, and Romancing the Stone. He gained prominence directing the sci-fi comedy Back to the Future trilogy, the fantasy comedy Who Framed Roger Rabbit, and the comedy-drama Forrest Gump, the latter of which earned him the Academy Award for Best Director. He is one of only a few people to win Academy Awards for both student and competitive work.
Zemeckis has also directed the satirical black comedy Death Becomes Her, the science fiction film Contact, and the drama films Cast Away, Flight, The Walk, and Allied. His exploration of motion capture techniques is seen in the animated films The Polar Express and A Christmas Carol, as well as the action fantasy drama Beowulf and the drama Welcome to Marwen. He has collaborated with film composer Alan Silvestri since 1984, and directed Tom Hanks in five films.
Early life
Robert Lee Zemeckis was born in Chicago on May 14, 1952, the son of Italian-American mother Rosa and Lithuanian-American father Alphonse Zemeckis. He grew up in a working-class family on Chicago's South Side, where he attended a Catholic grade school and Fenger Academy High School. He said of his childhood, "The truth was that in my family there was no art. I mean, there was no music, there were no books, there was no theater... the only thing I had that was inspirational was television."As a child, Zemeckis loved television and was fascinated by his parents' 8 mm film home movie camera. Starting off by filming family events like birthdays and holidays, he gradually began producing narrative films with his friends that incorporated stop-motion work and other visual effects. He remained an avid television viewer, about which he later said, "You hear so much about the problems with television but I think that it saved my life." Television gave him his first glimpse of a world outside of his upbringing, specifically after he learned that film schools existed from an episode of The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson. After seeing Bonnie and Clyde with his father, he decided that he wanted to go to film school. His parents disapproved of the idea. He later clarified that they disapproved "only in the sense that they were concerned" because "this was the kind of dream that really was impossible" for family and my friends in the world he grew up in. He said, "My parents would sit there and say, 'Don't you see where you come from? You can't be a movie director.' I guess maybe some of it I felt I had to do in spite of them, too."
Zemeckis first attended Northern Illinois University in DeKalb, Illinois, and gained early experience in film as a film cutter for NBC News in Chicago during a summer break. He also edited commercials in his home state. He applied to transfer from NIU to the University of Southern California's School of Cinematic Arts in Los Angeles, where he went into the Film School on the strength of an essay and a music video based on a Beatles song. After waiting to hear back from the university, he called them directly and was told he had been rejected because of his average grades. He gave an "impassioned plea" to the university official during the phone call, promising to go to summer school and improve his studies, and eventually convinced the school to accept him.
Arriving at USC that fall, Zemeckis encountered a program that he later described as being "made up of a bunch of hippies considered an embarrassment by the university". The classes were difficult, with professors constantly stressing how hard the film industry was. Zemeckis remembered not being much fazed by this, citing the "healthy cynicism" that had been bred into him from his Chicago upbringing. He met a fellow student, writer Bob Gale, who later recalled, "The graduate students at USC had this veneer of intellectualism... so Bob and I gravitated toward one another because we wanted to make Hollywood movies. We weren't interested in the French New Wave. We were interested in Clint Eastwood and James Bond and Walt Disney, because that's how we grew up." Zemeckis graduated from USC in 1973, and he and Gale co-wrote the unproduced screenplays Tank and Bordello of Blood, which they pitched to John Milius, the latter of which was later developed into a film that was released in 1996.
Career
1978–1984: Early comedy films
As a result of winning a Student Academy Award at USC for his film A Field of Honor, Zemeckis came to the attention of Steven Spielberg. Spielberg said, "He barged right past my secretary and sat me down and showed me this student film ... and I thought it was spectacular, with police cars and a riot, all dubbed to Elmer Bernstein's score for The Great Escape." Spielberg became Zemeckis's mentor and executive produced his first two films, both of which Gale and Zemeckis co-wrote.Spielberg produced I Wanna Hold Your Hand and Used Cars ; both were critical, but not commercial, successes. I Wanna Hold Your Hand was the first of several Zemeckis films to incorporate historic figures and celebrities into his movies; he used archival footage and doubles to simulate the presence of the Beatles. After the failure of his first two films, and the Spielberg-directed 1941 , the pair gained a reputation for writing "scripts that everyone thought were great somehow didn't translate into movies people wanted to see."
As a result of his reputation within the industry, Zemeckis had trouble finding work in the early 1980s, though he and Gale kept busy. They wrote scripts for other directors, including Car Pool for Brian De Palma and Growing Up for Spielberg; neither ended up getting made. Another Zemeckis-Gale project, Back to the Future, about a teenager who travels back in time to the 1950s, was turned down by every major studio. The director was jobless until Michael Douglas hired him in 1984 to direct Romancing the Stone. A romantic adventure starring Douglas and Kathleen Turner, Stone was expected to flop, but the film became a sleeper hit. While working on Romancing the Stone, Zemeckis met composer Alan Silvestri, who has scored all his subsequent pictures.
1985–1999: Breakthrough and acclaim
After Romancing the Stone, Zemeckis had the clout to direct his time-traveling screenplay. Starring Michael J. Fox, Lea Thompson, Crispin Glover, and Christopher Lloyd, the 1985 film was wildly successful upon its release and was followed by two sequels, released as Back to the Future Part II in 1989 and Back to the Future Part III in 1990. Before the Back to the Future sequels were released, Zemeckis collaborated with Disney and directed another film, the madcap 1940s-set mystery Who Framed Roger Rabbit, which combined live-action and traditional animation; its $70 million budget made it one of the most expensive films made up to that point. The film was both a financial and critical success and won three Academy Awards. In 1990, Zemeckis commented, when asked if he would want to make non-comedies, "I would like to be able to do everything. Just now, though, I'm too restless to do anything that's not really zany."In 1992, Zemeckis directed the black comedy Death Becomes Her, starring Meryl Streep, Goldie Hawn, and Bruce Willis. Although his next film would have some comedic elements, it was Zemeckis's first with dramatic elements and was also his biggest commercial success to date, Forrest Gump. Starring Tom Hanks in the title role, Forrest Gump tells the story of a man with a low I.Q., who unwittingly participates in some of the major events of the twentieth century, falls in love, and interacts with several major historical figures in the process. The film grossed $677 million worldwide and became the top-grossing American film of 1994; it won six Academy Awards, including Best Picture, Best Actor for Hanks, and Best Director for Zemeckis. From this point, Hanks and Zemeckis became frequent collaborators. In 1997, Zemeckis directed Contact, a long-gestating project based on Carl Sagan's 1985 novel of the same name. The film centers on Eleanor Arroway, who believes she has made contact with extraterrestrials. In the early 1990s, he founded South Side Amusement Company, which later became ImageMovers.
During this same time period, Zemeckis was an executive producer of HBO's Tales from the Crypt and directed three episodes. In 1999, Zemeckis donated $5 million towards the Robert Zemeckis Center for Digital Arts at USC, a center. When the Center opened in March 2001, Zemeckis spoke in a panel about the future of film, alongside friends Steven Spielberg and George Lucas. Of those who clung to celluloid and disparaged the idea of shooting digitally, Zemeckis said, "These guys are the same ones who have been saying that LPs sound better than CDs. You can argue that until you're blue in the face, but I don't know anyone who's still buying vinyl. The film, as we have traditionally thought of it, is going to be different. But the continuum is man's desire to tell stories around the campfire. The only thing that keeps changing is the campfire." The Robert Zemeckis Center currently hosts many film school classes, much of the Interactive Media Division, and Trojan Vision, USC's student television station, which has been voted the number one college television station in the country.
In 1996, Zemeckis had begun developing a project titled The Castaway with Tom Hanks and writer William Broyles Jr. The story, inspired by Robinson Crusoe, is about a man who becomes stranded on a tropical island and undergoes a profound physical and spiritual change. While working on The Castaway, Zemeckis also became attached to a Hitchcockian thriller titled What Lies Beneath, the story of a married couple experiencing an extreme case of empty nest syndrome that was based on an idea by Steven Spielberg. Because Hanks's character needed to undergo a dramatic weight loss over the course of The Castaway, Zemeckis decided that the only way to retain the same crew while Hanks lost the weight was to shoot What Lies Beneath in between. He shot the first part of Cast Away in early 1999, and shot What Lies Beneath in fall 1999, completing work on the former in early 2000. Zemeckis later quipped, when asked about shooting two films back-to-back, "I wouldn't recommend it to anyone." What Lies Beneath, starring Harrison Ford and Michelle Pfeiffer, was released in July 2000 to mixed reviews, but did well at the box office, grossing over $155 million domestically. Cast Away, starring Hanks and Twister actress Helen Hunt, was released that December and grossed $233 million domestically; Hanks received a nomination for the Academy Award for Best Actor for his portrayal of Chuck Noland.