Robert L. Zemeckis is a Lithuanian-American film director, producer and screenwriter.
Zemeckis first came to public attention in the 1980s as the director and creator of the
comedic time-travel Back to the Future film series, as well as the Academy Award-winning
live-action/animation epic Who Framed Roger Rabbit, though in the 1990s he diversified
into more dramatic fare, including 1994's Forrest Gump, for which he won an Academy
Award for Best Director.
His films are characterized by an interest in state-of-the-art special effects, including
the early use of match moving in Back to the Future Part II and the pioneering performance
capture techniques seen in The Polar Express, Beowulf and A Christmas Carol.
Though Zemeckis has often been pigeonholed as a director interested only in effects,
his work has been defended by several critics, including David Thomson, who wrote that "No
other contemporary director has used special effects to more dramatic and narrative purpose."
As of April 2014, Zemeckis was working on his next movie, entitled The Walk, a biographical
film based on the life of French high-wire professional Philippe Petit, the man who tight
rope walked between the World Trade Center towers in 1974.
In May of 2014, the project was set for an October 2, 2015 release date.
Early life 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, Zemeckis gradually
began producing narrative films with his friends that incorporated stop-motion work and other
special effects.
Along with enjoying movies, Zemeckis remained an avid TV watcher.
"You hear so much about the problems with television," he said, "but I think that it
saved my life."
Television gave Zemeckis his first glimpse of a world outside of his blue-collar upbringing;
specifically, he learned of the existence of film schools on an episode of The Tonight
Show Starring Johnny Carson.
After seeing Bonnie and Clyde with his father and being heavily influenced by it, Zemeckis
decided that he wanted to go to film school.
His parents disapproved of the idea, Zemeckis later said, "But only in the sense that they
were concerned....for my family and my friends and the world that I grew up in, this was
the kind of dream that really was impossible.
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."
USC education and early films Zemeckis applied only to University of Southern
California's School of Cinematic Arts, and went into the Film School on the strength
of an essay and a music video based on a Beatles song.
Not having heard from the university itself, Zemeckis called and was told he had been rejected
because of his average grades.
The director gave an "impassioned plea" to the official on the other line, 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 was, in his words, made up
of "a bunch of hippies [and] considered an embarrassment by the university."
The classes were difficult, with professors constantly stressing how hard the movie business
was.
Zemeckis remembered not being much fazed by this, citing the "healthy cynicism" that had
been bred into him from his Chicago upbringing.
While at USC, Zemeckis developed a close friendship with the writer Bob Gale, who was also a student
there.
Gale 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.
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
Zemeckis co-wrote with Gale.
He later executive produced other Zemeckis films, including the Back to the Future trilogy
and Who Framed Roger Rabbit. 1978's I Wanna Hold Your Hand and 1980's Used
Cars were well-received critically, with Pauline Kael being very positive over the latter film,
but both were commercial failures.
I Wanna Hold Your Hand was the first of several Zemeckis films to incorporate historical figures
and celebrities into his movies.
In the film, 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 in 1979, the
pair gained a reputation for writing "scripts that everyone thought were great [but] somehow
didn't translate into movies people wanted to see."
Breakthrough films and Forrest Gump 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, about a teenager who accidentally 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 film Romancing the Stone.
A romantic adventure starring Douglas and Kathleen Turner, Romancing 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 of his subsequent pictures.
After Romancing, the director suddenly had the clout to direct his time-traveling screenplay,
which was titled Back to the Future.
Starring Michael J. Fox, Lea Thompson, 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 painstakingly
combined traditional animation and live action; its US$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 four 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, 1994's Forrest Gump.
Starring Tom Hanks in the title role, and borrowing to some extent from Woody Allen's
earlier Zelig, 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 U.S. film of 1994;
it won six Academy Awards, including Best Picture, Hanks as Best Actor, and Zemeckis
as Best Director.
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, a scientist played by Jodie Foster, who believes she has
made contact with extraterrestrial beings.
Work in the 2000s and interest in digital filmmaking
In 1999, Zemeckis donated $5 million towards the Robert Zemeckis Center for Digital Arts
at USC, a 35,000-square-foot center that houses production stages, an immense 60-system digital
editing lab, and a 50-seat screening room.
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.
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, which was inspired by Robinson Crusoe, is about a man who becomes stranded
on a desert 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 Cast Away 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 was released that December and grossed $233 million domestically; Hanks received
an Oscar nomination for Best Actor for his portrayal of Chuck Noland.
In 2004, Zemeckis reteamed with Hanks and directed The Polar Express, based on the children's
book of the same name by Chris Van Allsburg.
The Polar Express utilized the computer animation technique known as performance capture, whereby
the movements of the actors are captured digitally and used as the basis for the animated characters.
As the first major film to use performance capture, The Polar Express caused The New
York Times to write that, "Whatever critics and audiences make of this movie, from a technical
perspective it could mark a turning point in the gradual transition from an analog to
a digital cinema."
In February 2007, Zemeckis and Walt Disney Studios chairman Dick Cook announced plans
for a new performance capture film company devoted to CG-created, 3-D movies.
The company, ImageMovers Digital, created films using the performance capture technology,
with Zemeckis directing most of the projects and Disney distributed and marketed the motion
pictures worldwide.
Zemeckis used the performance capture technology again in his film, Beowulf, which retells
the Anglo-Saxon epic poem of the same name and stars Ray Winstone, Angelina Jolie, and
Anthony Hopkins.
Hugo Award-winning science fiction writer Neil Gaiman, who co-wrote the adaptation with
Roger Avary, described the film as a "cheerfully violent and strange take on the Beowulf legend."
The film was released on November 16, 2007, to mixed reviews.
In July 2007, Variety announced that Zemeckis had written a screenplay for A Christmas Carol,
based on Charles Dickens' 1843 short story of the same name, with plans to use performance
capture and release it under the aegis of ImageMovers Digital.
Zemeckis wrote the script with Jim Carrey in mind, and Carrey agreed to play a multitude
of roles in the film, including Ebenezer Scrooge as a young, middle-aged, and old man, and
the three ghosts who haunt Scrooge.
The film began production in February 2008, and was released on November 6, 2009, again
to mixed reviews.
Actor Gary Oldman also appeared in the film.
In August 2008, Movies IGN revealed in an interview with Philippe Petit that Zemeckis
is working with Petit to turn Petit's memoir To Reach the Clouds into a feature film.
Robert Zemeckis was either seriously considered to, or attached to direct the 2005 version
of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.
Zemeckis is an avid supporter of 3-D Digital Cinema, and has stated that, starting with
the 3-D presentations of Beowulf, all of his future films will be done in 3-D using digital
motion capture.
He has reportedly backed away from that statement and has said that the decision to use 3-D
will be on a film-by-film basis.
On August 19, 2009, it was reported that Zemeckis and his company were in talks with Apple Corps
Ltd to remake the animated film Yellow Submarine in 3-D once again utilizing performance capture.
However, on March 12, 2010, with Zemeckis' biggest Disney ally gone, former chairman
Dick Cook, and amid drastic cost-cutting by the new management team, Disney announced
that it was ending its relationship with ImageMovers Digital.
The studio's final film, 2011's Zemeckis-produced Mars Needs Moms, was a box office failure.
Zemeckis made his return to live-action filmmaking with Flight, a 2012 drama for Paramount, starring
Denzel Washington.
On 31 January 2014, it was announced that a stage musical adaptation of Zemeckis's first
Back to the Future film was in production.
The show, which will be co-written by original writers Robert Zemeckis and Bob Gale, is expected
to be performed in 2015, on the 30th anniversary year of the film.
According to Gale, the musical will be "true to the spirit of the film without being a
slavish remake".
Personal life
Zemeckis has said that, for a long time, he sacrificed his personal life in favor of a
career.
"I won an Academy Award when I was 44 years old," he explained, "but I paid for it with
my 20s.
That decade of my life from film school till 30 was nothing but work, nothing but absolute,
driving work.
I had no money.
I had no life."
In the early 1980s, Zemeckis married actress Mary Ellen Trainor, with whom he had a son,
Alexander Francis.
He described the marriage as difficult to balance with filmmaking, and his relationship
with Trainor eventually ended in divorce.
On December 4, 2001, he married actress Leslie Harter, with whom he has children Zane and
Rhys.
Zemeckis is also a private pilot who has logged approximately 1,600 hours of flight time as
of October 2012.
He flies a Cirrus SR20, known for having a parachute that safely lowers the plane to
the ground in case of an emergency.
According to campaign donation records, Zemeckis has frequently contributed to political candidates
affiliated with the Democratic Party, as well as PACs that support the interests of aircraft
owners and pilots, family planning interests, and a group that advocates for Hollywood women.
Filmography Film
Television References
External links Robert Zemeckis at the Internet Movie Database
Robert Zemeckis at AllMovie Works by or about Robert Zemeckis in libraries
Robert Zemeckis collected news and commentary at The New York Times
Robert Zemeckis at the Notable Names Database The Art of Robert Zemeckis – French PDF
The best movies of Robert Zemeckis