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Robert Zemeckis is an Academy Award and Golden Globe-winning American movie director, producer and writer. Zemeckis first came to public attention in the eighties as the director of "intricate cinematic jungle gyms" like Back to the Future and Who Framed Roger Rabbit, though he has since diversified into more dramatic fare, including Forrest Gump, for which he won an Oscar.
His films are characterized by an interest in state-of-the-art technology, 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.
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' mentor and executive produced his first two films, both of which Zemeckis co-wrote with Bob Gale.
1978's I Wanna Hold Your Hand and 1980's Used Cars were well-received critically but both were commercially inert. After a third failure, the Spielberg-directed 1941 (for which Zemeckis and Gale had written the screenplay), the pair gained a reputation for writing "scripts that everyone thought were great but somehow didn't translate into movies people wanted to see”.
As a result of this, Zemeckis had trouble finding work in the early eighties, though he and Gale kept busy. Another Zemeckis-Gale project, about a teenager who accidentally travels back in time to the fifties, 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.
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, the 1985 movie was wildly successful upon its release, and was followed by two sequels. The Back to the Future sequels sandwiched another Zemeckis project, the madcap 1940s toon-mystery Who Framed Roger Rabbit. After the last Back to the Future sequel, Zemeckis did decide to direct more serious fare, starting with what has been his biggest commercial and critical success to date, 1994's Forrest Gump. The film won Zemeckis an Academy Award for Best Director. In 2000, Zemeckis directed "Cast Away", starring Tom Hanks. This move was called, according to the New York Post, "Gives one of the most towering screen performances of all time.”