Dreamers
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1.
Steven Spielberg
Producer, Saving Private Ryan
Undoubtedly one of the most influential film personalities in the history of film, Steven Spielberg is perhaps Hollywood's best known director and one of the wealthiest filmmakers in the world. Spielberg has countless big-grossing, critically acclaimed credits to his name, as producer, director and writer...
2.
Robert Zemeckis
Writer, Back to the Future Part II
A "whizkid" with special effects, Robert is from the Spielberg camp of film-making (Steven Spielberg produced many of his films). Usually working with writing partner Bob Gale, Robert's earlier films show he has a talent for zany comedy (Romancing the Stone, 1941) and special effect vehicles (Who Framed Roger Rabbit and Back to the Future)...
3.
George Lucas
George Walton Lucas, Jr. was raised on a walnut ranch in Modesto, California. His father was a stationery store owner and he had three siblings. During his late teens, he went to Downey High School and was very much interested in drag car racing. He planned to become a professional racecar driver. However...
4.
Peter Jackson
Peter Jackson was born as an only child in a small coast-side town in New Zealand in 1961. When a friend of his parents bought him a super 8mm movie camera (because she saw how much he enjoyed taking photos), the then eight-year-old Peter instantly grabbed the thing to start recording his own movies...
5.
Guillermo del Toro
Producer, Pan's Labyrinth
Guillermo del Toro was born October 9, 1964 in Guadalajara Jalisco, Mexico. Raised by his Catholic grandmother, del Toro developed an interest in filmmaking in his early teens. Later, he learned about makeup and effects from the legendary Dick Smith (The Exorcist) and worked on making his own short films...
6.
Hayao Miyazaki
Director, Spirited Away
Hayao Miyazaki is one of Japan's greatest animation directors. The entertaining plots, compelling characters, and breathtaking animation in his films have earned him international renown from critics as well as public recognition within Japan. The Walt Disney Company's commitment to introduce the films...
7.
Shigeru Miyamoto
Producer, The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time
Shigeru Miyamato has been helping create games for Nintendo since 1981. In the late 1970s Nintendo was going bankrupt. Myamato then made two characters, Donkey Kong and Mario (then called Jumpman), for the game Donkey Kong. He has been the supervisor of many games, like the Mario and Zelda games.
8.
Jan Svankmajer
Director, Greedy Guts
After studying at the Institute of Industrial Arts and the Marionette Faculty of the Prague Academy of Fine Arts in the 1950s, Jan Svankmajer started working as a theatre director, chiefly in association with the Theatre of Masks and the Black Theatre. He first experimented with film-making after becoming involved with the mixed-media productions of Prague's Lanterna Magika Theatre...
9.
Timothy Quay
Director, Street of Crocodiles
The identical twin Brothers Quay (the other being Stephen) were born near Philadelphia in a town with a large European immigrant population, which fuelled their interest in European (especially Eastern European) culture. They moved to London in the late 1960s to study at the Royal College of Art where they made their first short films (now lost)...
10.
Stephen Quay
Director, Street of Crocodiles
The identical twin Brothers Quay (the other being Timothy) were born near Philadelphia in a town with a large European immigrant population, which fuelled their interest in European (especially Eastern European) culture. They moved to London in the late 1960s to study at the Royal College of Art where they made their first short films (now lost)...
11.
Walt Disney
Producer, Cinderella
At age 16, during World War I, he lied about his age to join the American Red Cross. He soon returned home, where he won a scholarship to the Kansas City Art Institute. There, he met a fellow animator, Ub Iwerks. The two soon set up their own company. In the early 20s, they made a series of animated shorts for the Newman theater chain...
12.
Joss Whedon
Writer, The Avengers
Joss Whedon is the middle of five brothers - his younger brothers are Jed Whedon and Zack Whedon. Both his father, Tom Whedon and his grandfather, John Whedon were successful television writers. Joss' mother, Lee Stearns, was a history teacher and she also wrote novels as Lee Whedon...
16.
Andrew Stanton
Writer, Finding Nemo
Oscar-winning filmmaker Andrew Stanton was raised in Rockport, Massachusetts. He was educated at The California Institute of the Arts (or "CalArts") in Los Angeles, where he studied character animation. After graduation, Stanton began working as a writer on the TV series Mighty Mouse, the New Adventures. In 1990, he became only the second animator and ninth employee to join Pixar Animation Studios...
17.
Don Bluth
Director, The Secret of NIMH
Don Bluth was one of the chief animators at Disney to come to the mantle after the great one's death. He eventually became the animation director for such films as The Rescuers and Pete's Dragon. Unfortunately, the quality of animation that Disney was producing at this point was not up to par with the great works of Disney...
18.
Tim Burton
Producer, Edward Scissorhands
His early film career was fueled by almost unbelievable good luck, but it's his talent and originality that have kept him at the top of the Hollywood tree. Tim Burton began drawing at an early age, going on to attend the California Institute of the Arts, studying animation after being awarded a fellowship from Disney...
20.
Bob Peterson
Actor, Up
Bob Peterson was born in Wooster, Ohio, USA, in 1961. He studied mechanical engineering at Ohio Northern University, where he took computer graphics courses and graduated in 1983. He continued his studies in mechanical engineering at Purdue University where he earned a master's degree in 1986. While a student...
29.
Osamu Tezuka
Writer, Astroboy
Tezuka wrote/animated the Japanese TV Series "Jangaru Taitei" that was turned into a USA syndicated series in the 60s called "Kimba The White Lion". This story was then plagiarized by The Disney Company in 1994 and became "The Lion King", the most profitable film of all time, and Tezuka has never received due credit from Disney for his creation, much less any money.
31.
M. Night Shyamalan
Writer, The Sixth Sense
Born in India but raised in the posh suburban Penn Valley area of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, M. Night Shyamalan is the son of two doctors. His passion for filmmaking began when he was given a Super-8 camera at age eight, and even at that young age began to model his career on that of his idol, Steven Spielberg...
37.
John August
Writer, Big Fish
John August's screenwriting credits include Go, Big Fish, Titan A.E., Charlie's Angels, and Charlie's Angels: Full Throttle. He also maintains a screenwriting-oriented website at johnaugust.com. Born and raised in Boulder, Colorado, John earned a degree in journalism from Drake University in Iowa and an MFA in film from the Peter Stark program at the University of Southern California...
41.
Satoshi Kon
Writer, Tokyo Godfathers
Satoshi Kon was born in 1963. He studied at the Musashino College of the Arts. He began his career as a Manga artist. He then moved to animation and worked as a background artist on many films (including Roujin Z by 'Katsuhiro Otomo'). Then, in 1995, he directed an episode of the anthology film Memories (this Episode was "Magnetic Rose")...
45.
Spike Jonze
Director, Where the Wild Things Are
Spike Jonze made up one-third (along with Andy Jenkins and Mark Lewman) of the triumvirate of genius minds behind Dirt Magazine, the brother publication of the much lamented ground-breaking Sassy Magazine. These three uncommon characters were all editors for Grand Royal Magazine as well, under...
46.
Jean-Pierre Jeunet
Director, Amélie
Jean-Pierre Jeunet is a self-taught director who was very quickly interested by cinema, with a predilection for a fantastic cinema where form is as important as the subject. Thus he started directing TV commercials and video clips (such as Julien Clerc in 1984). At the same time he met designer/drawer Marc Caro with whom he made two short animation movies: L'évasion and Le manège...
47.
Sam Raimi
Writer, Spider-Man 3
Highly inventive U.S. film director/producer/writer/actor Sam Raimi first came to the attention of film fans with the savage, yet darkly humorous, low-budget horror film, The Evil Dead. From his childhood, Raimi was a fan of the cinema and, before he was ten-years-old, he was out making movies with an 8mm camera...
48.
Federico Fellini
Writer, 8½
The women who both attracted and frightened him and an Italy dominated in his youth by Mussolini and Pope Pius XII - inspired the dreams that Fellini started recording in notebooks in the 1960s. Life and dreams were raw material for his films. His native Rimini and characters like Saraghina (the devil herself said the priests who ran his school)...
49.
Alejandro Jodorowsky
Actor, The Holy Mountain
Alejandro Jodorowsky was born in Iquique, Chile on February 7, 1929. In 1942 he moved to Santiago where he attended university, was a circus clown and a puppeteer. In 1955 he went to Paris and studied mime with Marcel Marceau. He worked with Maurice Chevalier there and made a short film, La cravate...
50.
Georges Méliès
Director, An Impossible Voyage
Georges Melies, a professional magician by training, first saw the new "moving pictures" in 1895. Little over a year later, Melies was filming and projecting his own creations. By accident, he discovered that he could use stop-motion photography to render trick visual effects. Melies was also the first to use techniques such as the fade-in...
51.
Genndy Tartakovsky
Director, Hotel Transylvania
Genndy Tartakovsky was born and raised in Moscow, USSR. He and his family moved to Chicago, IL when he was 7 years old, after his father defected to the US. His interest in comic books and animation led him to study animation at Cal Arts in Los Angeles. While he was there he produced two student films...
52.
Chuck Jones
Director, How the Grinch Stole Christmas!
Starting as a cel washer, Chuck Jones worked his way up to animator and then director at the animation division of Warner Bros. He is famous for creating such beloved cartoon characters as Wile E. Coyote, Henery Hawk, Pepé Le Pew, Marvin the Martian, Ralph Wolf, Road Runner, Sam Sheepdog, Sniffles, and many others...
53.
Tex Avery
Director, A Wild Hare
Tex Avery was a descendant of Judge Roy Bean and Daniel Boone, but all his grandma ever told him about it was "Don't ever mention you are kin to Roy Bean. He's a no good skunk!!" After graduating from North Dallas High School in 1927, Avery moved to Southern California in 1929 and got a job in the harbor...
54.
Joe Dante
Director, Gremlins
Joe Dante is a graduate of the Philadelphia College of Art. After a stint as a film reviewer, he began his filmmaking apprenticeship in 1974 as trailer editor for Roger Corman's New World Pictures. He made his directorial debut in 1976 with Hollywood Boulevard (co-directed with Allan Arkush), a thinly disguised spoof of New World exploitation pictures, shot in ten days for $60,000...
55.
Tarsem Singh
Director, Immortals
Indian director Tarsem Singh is the son of an aircraft engineer. He was educated at Bishop Cotton Boy's School in Shimla and relocated to the USA to study business at Harvard and, significantly, film studies at the Art Center College of Design in California. Upon graduating he embarked on a career as a director of music videos...
56.
Gore Verbinski
Gore Verbinski, one of American cinema's most inventive directors who was a punk-rock guitarist as a teenager and had to sell his guitar to buy his first camera, is now the director of Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest which made the industry record for highest opening weekend of all time ($135,600,000) and grossed over $1 billion dollars worldwide...
58.
Hark Tsui
Producer, Once Upon a Time in China
Tsui Hark recently became the fourth Chinese film director to join the board of judges for the 57th Cannes Film Festival in the feature films category this year. An internationally acclaimed visionary director, Hark started making experimental movies with 8mm film when he was only 13. After graduating from the University of Texas in Austin...
61.
Wes Anderson
Director, Moonrise Kingdom
Wes Anderson is the son of Melver, an advertising and PR executive, and Texas Anne Anderson, an archaeologist turned real estate agent. He has two brothers, Eric and Mel. Anderson's parents divorced when he was a young child, an event he described as "the most crucial event of my brothers and my growing up." During childhood...
62.
Alfonso Cuarón
Director, Children of Men
Alfonso Cuarón Orozco was born in 28 November in Mexico City, Mexico. He has always wanted to be a director, and also an astronaut. He didn't want to enter to the army so he forgot that possibility. When he was little instead of playing he wanted to make a film, but unfortunately he didn't have a camera...
66.
Rod Serling
Writer, Twilight Zone
A former boxer, paratrooper and general all-around angry young man, Rod Serling was one of the radical new voices that made the "Golden Age" of television. Long before Twilight Zone, he was known for writing such high-quality scripts as "Patterns" and "Requiem for a Heavyweight," both later turned into films (Patterns and Requiem for a Heavyweight)...
67.
Dean DeBlois
Writer, How to Train Your Dragon
Dean DeBlois is a Canadian writer, director, and producer known best for having co-written and co-directed Disney's "Lilo & Stitch" and Dreamworks' "How To Train Your Dragon, both Oscar nominees. While working as an assistant animator and layout artist for Hinton Animation Studios in Ottawa, Ontario...
69.
Carlos Saldanha
Director, Ice Age
Carlos Saldanha (born July 20, 1968) is a Brazilian director of animated films. He was the director of Ice Age: The Meltdown (2006), Ice Age: Dawn of the Dinosaurs (2009) and Rio (2011), and the co-director of Ice Age (2002) and Robots (2005). Saldanha was born in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. He left his hometown in 1991 to follow his artistic instinct and passion for animation...
72.
Gary Trousdale
Writer, The Lion King
Gary Trousdale was born in La Crescenta, California. His fascination with animation was fostered as a child, where he drew cartoons from an elementary school age. He planned to become an architect, but decided instead to study animation at CalArts, where he studied for three years. He was hired in 1982 to design storyboards and do other animation...
80.
Ralph Bakshi
Director, The Lord of the Rings
Ralph Bakshi worked his way up from Brooklyn and became an animation legend. Born on October 29, 1938, in Haifa, Bakshi grew up in Brownsville after his family came to New York to escape World War II. Bakshi attended the Thomas Jefferson High School and was later transferred to the High School of Industrial Arts and graduated with an award in cartooning in 1957...
82.
Chris Columbus
Producer, Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone
Born in Pennsylvania and raised in Ohio, Chris Columbus was first inspired to make movies after seeing "The Godfather" at age 15. After enrolling at NYU film school, he sold his first screenplay (never produced) while a sophomore there. After graduation Columbus tried to sell his fourth script, "Gremlins"...
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