Here - Robert Zemeckis
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From my review of Beowulf back in 2007:
It's been interesting watching him continually try to push these envelopes throughout his career.
Robert Zemeckis has never been one to shy away from a challenge. For over twenty years, he's blazed one trail after another. He was the first director to merge live action and animation in a truly seamless fashion with 1988's Who Framed Roger Rabbit?. He filmed Back to the Future II and Back to the Future III back-to-back in 1989, before such gambles were in vogue. And now, he's championing the motion-capture technology introduced in The Polar Express and substantially improved in Beowulf.
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And before (in case?) anyone nitpicks, I did hedge/qualify the animation blend comment a bit. You could make an argument for Mary Poppins, though that utilized something called the Sodium Vapor Process to essentially fake a green screen before they existed. It's an interesting bit of tech that's still arguably superior to a lot of the techniques today, though I think of it as fundamentally different from the kind of insane blocking that Zemeckis did for Roger Rabbit.
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Definitely.
I particularly like his approach to effects, contrasted with someone like James Cameron, where the effects are very visible, very in-your-face. That stuff can be useful and I suppose I'm glad the tech is being advanced and all, but there's something a lot warmer and more interesting about Zemeckis, who uses it to, say, have Forrest Gump blended into historical footage. It's a perfect example of using effects to tell the story you want to tell, as opposed to the other way around. It's a practical effects sensibility applied to CGI, in a way.
I particularly like his approach to effects, contrasted with someone like James Cameron, where the effects are very visible, very in-your-face. That stuff can be useful and I suppose I'm glad the tech is being advanced and all, but there's something a lot warmer and more interesting about Zemeckis, who uses it to, say, have Forrest Gump blended into historical footage. It's a perfect example of using effects to tell the story you want to tell, as opposed to the other way around. It's a practical effects sensibility applied to CGI, in a way.
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Tom Hanks was on the Colbert show last night to talk about the new movie; he really does the funniest impression of Bob Zemeckis that I've ever seen anywhere.
HERE
If you're a big Robert Zemeckis fan, you will probably enjoy HERE much more than the average moviegoer.
Zemeckis has been experimenting with narrative in so many interesting ways in recent years that it's easy to take him for granted; in some ways, I think he's at his best when he gets to work with Tom Hanks.
His latest movie is a multi-generational saga spanning, well, strictly speaking, millions of years, although for the most part it concentrates on events from the 20th century.
This isn't the kind of movie that I think the average moviegoer will have the patience to really appreciate - the still-camera trick hasn't been used much lately, and it may put off some viewers.
That means essentially that the camera doesn't move at all for 99.9% of the movie - everything revolves around shifting the temporal perspective, sometimes going forwards, and sometimes going back.
Hanks is also reunited with Robin Wright, and they get to play characters from their teenage years to old age, thanks to the movie magic that Zemeckis is so good at playing with. Paul Bettany and Kelly Reilly are also wonderful, playing the parents of the Hanks character.
There's a lot of creativity here, because it isn't easy to tell a story where the camera basically never moves - but Zemeckis and his awesome cast have come through with flying colors.
Tom Hanks really does the funniest impression of Bob Zemeckis that I've ever seen anywhere.
Which begs the question: How many Zemeckis impressions have you seen?
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