The true mark of a Hollywood legend is the ability to adapt. With technology moving so fast, any director who can't keep up with the latest advances is doomed to stagnate in a backwater of nostalgia. The ones who can keep a career vital for decades are the ones who continue to push the creative and technical envelopes with each film. Robert Zemeckis is one such legend.
Born and raised in a working-class Chicago family, Zemeckis was captivated by television. Starting with using his parent's 8mm camera to record family gatherings and events, he soon turned his lens to fiction. After a screening of Bonnie and Clyde turned his world upside down, young Robert decided to go to film school, attending USC's School of Cinematic Arts. While there, his film A Field Of Honor came to the attention of Steven Spielberg, who took the gung-ho young director under his wing, producing his first two features.
Zemeckis's breakthrough film was 1984's comedy-adventure Romancing the Stone. The movie was expected to be a flop but instead performed remarkably well, turning out to be Fox's only hit that year. With that under his belt, Zemeckis started shopping around a screenplay he had been working on for the last five years, a little thing about a teenager who travels back to the 1950s. Maybe you've heard of it - Back to the Future? Obviously, it was a smash hit, spawning two sequels and becoming a permanent part of 80s pop culture history. With the mega-successful franchise under his belt, Robert Zemeckis was firmly established as a Hollywood force to be reckoned with.
His next film, Who Framed Roger Rabbit, showed the director pushing the envelope of possibility once more. A dizzying fantasia of a film, mixing perfectly-executed cartoon slapstick with dingy reality, Roger Rabbit cost a then-unbelievable $70 million to produce but went on to snag four Academy Awards and introduce the world to Jessica Rabbit, probably the hottest piece of animated ass of all time.
And the hits kept on coming, first with the awesome black comedy Death Becomes Her, starring Meryl Streep as an immortal harridan who experiences untold gory torments for riotous laughs, and Forrest Gump, a bizarre Zelig-esque tale of a partially retarded man and his escapades through history. More films followed - What Lies Beneath, Cast Away, all huge box-office hits. His next project, The Polar Express, was produced using an innovative process called "performance capture," where the motions of real actors are transferred to digital facsimilies. But the film that really brought him back into our hearts is, of course, Beowulf.
This "cheerfully violent and strange" take on the Old English legend (as described by screenwriter Neil Gaiman) was an amazing visual accomplishment, lending a larger-than-life mythic heft to the simple tale of heroism and betrayal. His next project is a re-imagining of A Christmas Carol starring Jim Carrey in many roles using the same technology. Zemeckis's relentless explorations into new ways of making movies are helping both push the industry forward and entertain the hell out of us, and we can think of no greater achievement.
