Profile: Robert Zemeckis

Our friend Trevor Hogg at FlickeringMyth.com has Part 1 of a 3-part profile of screenwriter-director Robert Zemeckis:

“In my family there was no art,” revealed Chicago-born filmmaker Robert Zemeckis. “There was no music, there were no books, there was no theatre. I grew up in a very working class, lower middle class, blue collar life. The only thing I had that was inspirational was television – and it actually was.” Another thing the young Zemeckis found himself drawn towards was the 8 m.m. home movie camera systems owned by his father and his uncles; he became fascinated with the ability of cinema to manipulate his emotions. “Any time there was a family gathering, I’d pull out the screen and the projector. Then it got more and more elaborate, trying to synch up sounds, which was my biggest thing. I was really trying to figure out how to do that, and then, ultimately, making these 8 m.m. productions. I started to do a lot of stop motion animation, puppet animation-type things, and blowing things up with fire crackers and elaborate special effects. So they were very entertained by that.”

“I would say it was my junior year in high school,” reflected the director on when he made his fateful career decision. “I had a passionate interest in the technique of filmmaking. I think, because of how I was raised, I always assumed that I would be some sort of technician. I just loved the process and I thought, ‘Maybe there’s a way I can be a cameraman or something.’”

"Maybe there's a way I can be a cameraman or something." Yeah, Bob, you kind of hit a grand slam on the 'something' front: Romancing the Stone (1984), Back to the Future (1985), Who Framed Roger Rabbit (1988), Forrest Gump (1994), Cast Away (2000), The Polar Express (2004), Beowulf (2007), A Christmas Carol (2009) among his directing credits (he also co-wrote Back to the Future). Interesting that in the above quote, we catch a sense of Zemeckis' technician side which perhaps led him to the capture-motion approach to movies he's taken with Polar Express, Beowulf, and A Christmas Carol.

So enjoy Part 1 of Trevor's profile of Zemeckis. And here's something rather crazy. I've been going through this massive transition at home, transferring all my videotapes to digital format. In the last bin of videocassettes, I found a tape my mother-in-law sent to me. For some inexplicable reason, she attended a session at UCSB in 1996 featuring a Q&A with Robert Zemeckis. 50 minutes I've yet to screen. The first question from the students: "What does the feather mean in Forrest Gump?"

Anybody interested to see some excerpts from that session? If so, I might be persuaded to cull through the tape and see what's on it.