Robert Zemeckis

Zemeckis grew up in a working-class Chicago suburb and has said an 8mm camera his uncle gave him as a teenager changed the course of his life; he studied filmmaking at USC and worked briefly in local television news before breaking into features. Steven Spielberg, then just beginning to establish Amblin Entertainment, championed Zemeckis's early scripts when few other studios would.

Spielberg's protégé and one of Hollywood's great technical storytellers, Zemeckis writes machines for generating joy — none more perfectly engineered than a time-travelling DeLorean. He and writing partner Bob Gale spent years shopping the Back to the Future script around Hollywood, collecting dozens of rejections from studios who thought it either too tame or too strange, before Spielberg's backing finally got it made at Universal.

Zemeckis went on to become one of cinema's boldest technical experimenters, blending live action seamlessly with animation in Who Framed Roger Rabbit, digitally inserting his lead actor into archival newsreel footage in Forrest Gump, and pioneering performance-capture filmmaking with a string of animated features in the 2000s. Few directors have been as consistently willing to gamble an entire production on unproven visual-effects technology.