Robert Zemeckis

Robert Lee Zemeckis (born May 14, 1952), 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 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 (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 competitive 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 can be 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.

Robert Lee Zemeckis was born in Chicago on May 14, 1952, the son of Italian-American mother Rosa (née Nespeca) 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 (NIU) 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 (USC) 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 [and] 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.

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.