Robert Zemeckis

2 titles

Date of Birth: 1951-05-14 (age 75)

Mini Bio

Robert Lee Zemeckis (born May 14, 1951), 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 (1973), which earned him a Student Academy Award for Special Jury Prize at USC. He started his career directing the comedy films I Wanna Hold Your Hand (1978), Used Cars (1980), and Romancing the Stone (1984). He gained prominence directing the sci-fi comedy Back to the Future trilogy (1985–1990), the fantasy comedy Who Framed Roger Rabbit (1988), and the comedy–drama Forrest Gump (1994), 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 professional work. Zemeckis has also directed the satirical black comedy Death Becomes Her (1992), the science fiction film Contact (1997), and the drama films Cast Away (2000), Flight (2012), The Walk (2015), and Allied (2016). His exploration of motion capture techniques is seen in the animated films The Polar Express (2004) and A Christmas Carol (2009), as well as the action fantasy drama Beowulf (2007) and the drama Welcome to Marwen (2018). He has collaborated with film composer Alan Silvestri since 1984, and directed Tom Hanks in five films.

Backstage

Along with Steven Spielberg, Alfred Hitchcock, Francis Ford Coppola, David Cronenberg, John Hughes and a few others he is one of only a handful of directors to have two directed films released in the same year, 2000. What Lies Beneath opened in July that year while Cast Away opened that December.
Father, with Mary Ellen Trainor, of Alexander Zemeckis.
Interviewed in "Directors Close Up: Interviews with Directors Nominated for Best Film by the Directors Guild of America," ed. by Jeremy Kagan, Scarecrow Press (2006).
Announced through his company ImageMovers that he will direct a film adaptation of the popular horror/fantasy comic book "Route 666". The comic, published by CrossGen Comics, centers on a young woman who is besieged by demons and other strange creatures during the Cold War. (August 2002)
"I was raised a Catholic on the South Side of Chicago, and I felt I had to undo a lot of serious damage. But as I was getting older, I began coming off my absolutely young, arrogant, agnostic beliefs. I was thinking more about coming to terms with human spirituality."
"No matter how many obstacles that are thrown in our path, there are ways to accept them and to live through them. Understand life's mysteries, - as mysteries to be lived."
"It's the most unrealistic thing you can do to shoot a close-up, and it's the most unrealistic place you can be as a performer. And yet, actors grouse about having to do visual effect shots. But they love close-ups."
"From where I sit, I see the digital cinema creating sloppiness on the part of filmmakers because they know if they really get in trouble they can fix it later. So they don't pay that much attention, and of course it costs a lot of money."
"I guess you can say, I have been remaking my student films forever."
"I'm addicted to documentaries. That's all I watch on television."
"Most actors that I work with are wonderful. Jodie Foster or Tom Hanks will make anything work."
"I can't see any reason why a dramatic story can't be in 3-D. I think Lawrence of Arabia (1962) would have been fabulous in 3-D."
"I Wanna Hold Your Hand (1978) and Used Cars (1980) were absolute failures at the box office. Complete disasters. I learned some sad news: it's not an automatic thing that, if you make a good movie, everyone wants to see it."
"I feel that one of the reasons I enjoy having films that are historical or revisionist history or a period film is because I think it's one of the things that cinema can do best. It can do it \[well\] in two areas. One is that you can recreate the past in a movie and present it in a fictional way, because we know what it looked like. And the second reason is, by having time pass, you can examine the truth about something that happened in the past, because you've been able to look at it through the prism of time."

Movies

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