Robert Zemeckis

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Robert Zemeckis (2015)

Robert Lee Zemeckis [ ziːˈmekɪs ] (born May 14, 1952 in Chicago , Illinois ) is an American director and film producer . His directorial work on Forrest Gump won an Oscar in 1995 , but he has also received numerous awards for his film trilogy Back to the Future .

Life

Zemeckis was born in Chicago to a Lithuanian -American father and an Italian-American mother and grew up in a Catholic working-class family.

Zemeckis loved film and television even as a child and was enthusiastic about his father's 8mm film camera . After he had already filmed family celebrations and holiday experiences with it, he began making small documentaries with friends, in which he also tried to incorporate special effects. The film Bonnie and Clyde fascinated him so much that he decided to go to film school.

According to his own statements, Zemeckis sacrificed a lot of life just to make a career in the film business. “I won an Academy Award when I was 44, but I paid for it with my 20s lifetime. This decade of my life from film school to 30 was nothing but work, nothing but absolute, driven work. I had no money and no life. "

In 1980 Zemeckis married the actress Mary Ellen Trainor , with whom he has a son named Alexander. This relationship was always in tension with his cinematic work and ended in 2000 with a divorce. In 2001 he married the actress Leslie Harter .

Politically, Zemeckis was repeatedly active as an election campaign sponsor for the Democratic Party .

Career

His adventure comedy On the Hunt for the Green Diamond was Zemeckis' first major success, which enabled him to realize the 1985, also very successful film classic Back to the Future , for which he also wrote the script with Bob Gale and which he wrote in 1989/90 two sequels to the trilogy followed. In 1995, Zemeckis won an Oscar for Best Director in Forrest Gump, starring Tom Hanks . He also directed Wrong Play with Roger Rabbit , Contact, and Cast Away (again with Hanks).

Robert Zemeckis has made eight films to date, with grossing over $ 100 million in the United States. He is one of Steven Spielberg's most loyal companions . Spielberg produced almost all of his films, and Robert Zemeckis also wrote the screenplay for the 1941 Steven Spielberg film - Where Please Go to Hollywood .

Robert Zemeckis founded the production company ImageMovers in 1998 with Steve Starkey and Jack Rapke , which however closed in 2007 and reopened after some time as ImageMovers Digital by the Walt Disney Company . He also founded the horror film production company Dark Castle Entertainment with Joel Silver and Gilbert Adler .

Zemeckis 'film Der Polarexpress was made completely computer-animated by motion capture and represents the third collaboration with Tom Hanks. After The Legend of Beowulf, Charles Dickens ' Disney's A Christmas Story also comes from pure computer work with the same technology. In this Jim Carrey acted as a human role model for the artificially generated computer figure.

Since On the hunt for the green diamond , Robert Zemeckis' directorial work has been shaped by the film music by composer Alan Silvestri (exception: Three Paths to Death ). In 2012 he shot the documentaries Bound by Flesh with his wife Leslie Zemeckis about the Siamese twins Daisy and Violet Hilton .

Filmography

Director

producer

Screenwriter

Series

  • 1976: Kolchak: The Night Stalker
  • 1986: Amazing Stories (Amazing Stories: Go to the Head of the Class)
  • 1989-1995: Tales from the Crypt (Tales from the Crypt)
  • 2019–2020: Project Blue Book

Awards

Films in the top 250 of the IMDb
space Movie
12 Forrest Gump
38 Back to the Future

Academy Award

nomination

Golden Globe Awards

nomination

Individual evidence

  1. For example, prisma-online , whoswho.de , nndb.com and bttf.com name the year of birth 1952 . However, numerous sources give 1951 as the year of birth, including Kay Less : Das Großes Personenlexikon des Films , spielfilm.de , hollywood.com ( Memento from May 18, 2009 in the Internet Archive ) and IMDb.
  2. Oscar victory for Forrest Gump ( Memento of the original from April 1, 2014 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. . @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.achievement.org
  3. Deborah J. Kunk: THE MAN WHO FRAMED ROGER RABBIT , St. Paul Pioneer Press. June 26, 1988. Retrieved December 10, 2007. 
  4. a b Robert Zemecki's interview. (No longer available online.) Academy of Achievement: A Museum of Living History, June 29, 1996, archived from the original on February 8, 2007 ; Retrieved January 22, 2007 . Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.achievement.org
  5. ^ Robert Zemeckis ( Memento from April 3, 2013 in the Internet Archive ). Newsmeat.
  6. Exclusive: Carrey Making Christmas Carol . In: empireonline.com . July 4, 2007. ( archive.org )
  7. ^ Leslie and Robert Zemeckis Shooting Documentary on Freaks Stars Daisy and Violet Hilton - Bound by Flesh . In: dreadcentral.com . April 15, 2012.
  8. The Top 250 of the IMDb (as of April 26, 2020)

Web links

Commons : Robert Zemeckis  - collection of images, videos and audio files