Chris Weitz

• 1. Introduction

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  Chris Weitz delivered an unsolicited 40-page treatment to New Line Cinema in 2003. Nobody at the studio had asked for it. He wanted to direct The Golden Compass, the first book in Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials series. He decided to make that case in writing. He got the job. What followed would be one of the stranger creative journeys in modern Hollywood. He would depart the project, return to it, and ultimately lose control of the final cut. The film divided critics and audiences when it arrived. The Weitz name had been a part of Hollywood for generations before Chris Weitz made a single film.

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• 2. A Lineage Built for Hollywood

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  Lupita Tovar, Chris Weitz's maternal grandmother, starred in Santa in 1932, the first sound film ever made in Mexico. She came from Oaxaca, and she also appeared in a Spanish-language version of Dracula produced around the same time. Her husband was Paul Kohner, a Czech-born agent and producer who built a prominent career in the American film industry. Their daughter, the actress Susan Kohner, became Weitz's mother.

  John Weitz was born in Berlin, the son of a successful textile manufacturer whose social world included the writer Christopher Isherwood and the actress Marlene Dietrich. The family left Germany when the Nazi regime took power. John Weitz eventually became a novelist and menswear designer in the United States, where he met and married Susan Kohner.

  Weitz was born in New York City on the 30th of November, 1969. His father and maternal grandfather were Jewish; his maternal grandmother had been Catholic. He was raised without religion and later described himself as a "lapsed Catholic crypto-Buddhist." He attended Allen-Stevenson School with his brother Paul and was a member of the Knickerbocker Greys, a New York City youth marching corps in continuous operation since 1881. At 14, he enrolled at St Paul's School in London, the boarding school his father had attended before him. He graduated from Trinity College, Cambridge, with a degree in English.

  He later married Mercedes Martinez, who is Cuban and Mexican. He has said the two met at the Burning Man festival.

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• 3. The Brothers Weitz

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  Antz, the 1998 animated film, was Weitz's first feature writing credit. He co-wrote the screenplay with his brother Paul and with Todd Alcott. That same year, the brothers contributed scripts to a revival of Fantasy Island, the TV series that had originally aired in the late 1970s. Their full debut as directors came in 1999. American Pie, written by Adam Herz, became a major box office success under their direction. Weitz later served as executive producer on the film's two theatrical sequels.

  The brothers co-directed again in 2001 with Down to Earth, a comedy featuring Chris Rock. Their most formally ambitious collaboration came the following year.

  About a Boy, based on Nick Hornby's novel and starring Hugh Grant, had been set up at New Line Cinema with Robert De Niro producing. At that stage, the main character was scripted as an American. The Weitz brothers felt strongly that the character had to be British and pushed for that change. Inspiration for the adaptation came partly from the 1960 film The Apartment. The result earned them a nomination for the Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay.

  Even after the Oscar nomination, the brothers kept working together. Weitz produced two further films directed by Paul, In Good Company and American Dreamz. He was also beginning to pursue larger projects on his own.

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• 4. A Film Taken Away

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  Before the full production of The Golden Compass began, Weitz was invited by director Peter Jackson to visit the set of King Kong. The gesture was practical. Jackson wanted to give him a feel for directing at that scale and offer advice on navigating New Line's internal politics.

  By 2005, Weitz had stepped away from the project. He cited the enormous technical challenges involved and a fear of being attacked by the novel's devoted fans and its religious detractors at the same time. The British director Anand Tucker took over. Tucker then left in 2006 after creative differences with New Line. The project returned to Weitz after Philip Pullman sent him a personal letter asking him to reconsider.

  In post-production, New Line moved decisively against Weitz. The studio replaced his editor. Every reference to religion or religious ideas was cut from the film. The dark ending Pullman had written was replaced with something lighter. The voice of a central character was redone entirely, against Weitz's wishes. He described the experience as terrible: he had been able to shoot what he wanted, but the finished cut was then taken from him. The studio's caution proved fruitless: the groups it had feared would protest the film did so regardless.

  The Golden Compass was released in 2007. American grosses fell short of what the $180 million budget implied. Internationally, the film drew large audiences, with the worldwide box office described as stunning and projected to approach $250 million. The final worldwide gross settled at $372,234,864. When asked about a sequel, New Line co-head Michael Lynne said the jury was still very much out on the film. The planned sequels never went before a camera: the economic recession and sustained protests from the Catholic Church ended the franchise's prospects. The His Dark Materials story would not return to screens until a television adaptation launched in 2019.

  Weitz had already completed the screenplays for the second and third installments. Neither was ever filmed.

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• 5. New Moon Sets Records

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  In December 2008, Weitz was named the director of The Twilight Saga: New Moon, the sequel to the first Twilight film. He said he felt a tremendous sense of responsibility toward the franchise's passionate fan base. The film opened in November 2009, one year after the original. Its midnight screenings generated an estimated $26.3 million across 3,514 theaters. That broke the midnight opening record previously held by Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince. On its opening day, New Moon earned $72.7 million domestically. At the time, that was the single largest opening day in American box office history. It surpassed the $67.2 million that The Dark Knight had posted.

  The opening day was part of something historic. For the first time on record, the combined gross of the top ten domestic films exceeded $100 million on a single day. New Moon's opening weekend totaled $142,839,137, placing it third all-time among domestic opening weekends. The worldwide opening weekend reached $274.9 million, the sixth-highest ever recorded at the time.

  New Moon had been made for just under $50 million. That made it the least expensive film ever to open to more than $200 million worldwide. Over Thanksgiving weekend, the domestic box office added $42.5 million. Including ticket sales from the Wednesday and Thursday before the holiday, that total reached $66 million domestically. Internationally, the Thanksgiving period brought in roughly $85 million more. After ten days in release, New Moon had earned $230.7 million at the domestic box office. That total exceeded the entire domestic run of the first Twilight film by $38 million. The worldwide total in those first ten days reached $473.7 million.

  Despite the figures, Weitz chose not to direct the next film in the franchise.

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• 6. Social Cinema, Personal History

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  A Better Life was written by Eric Eason and released by Summit Entertainment in June 2011. It followed a Hispanic gardener and his son in Los Angeles as they searched for their stolen truck. The film was notable for its casting: the ensemble was drawn almost entirely from the Hispanic community, unusual for a Hollywood production. Weitz said making the film allowed him to explore his own Hispanic heritage and prompted him to learn Spanish. It earned an Academy Award nomination.

  The following year, Weitz collaborated with journalist Jose Antonio Vargas on four documentary short films. They were released in 2012 under the title Is This Alabama? The films examined the effects of Alabama HB 56, the state's anti-immigration legislation of 2011. Vargas conducted the interviews. The project also involved the Center for American Progress, America's Voice Education Fund, and Vargas' Define American campaign.

  Operation Finale, the 2018 MGM thriller written by Matthew Orton, dramatized the capture of Adolf Eichmann by Mossad and Shin Bet agents. The cast included Oscar Isaac, Ben Kingsley, Lior Raz, Melanie Laurent, Nick Kroll, and Joe Alwyn. For Weitz, whose paternal family had escaped Nazi Germany, the story carried weight beyond its genre.

  Afraid, a Blumhouse horror thriller, followed in 2024, released on the 30th of August of that year.

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• 7. Writing Across Worlds

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  Disney's 2015 live-action Cinderella, which arrived in theaters on the 13th of March, 2015, was written by Weitz. He went back to the major versions of the story: the Brothers Grimm telling, Charles Perrault's adaptation, and the 1950 animated Disney film. He brought his own vision to the material alongside those sources.

  Rogue One, released in 2016, was directed by Gareth Edwards and scripted by Weitz alongside Tony Gilroy. Weitz had taken over the screenplay from Gary Whitta, who wrote an earlier draft. On the 11th of November, 2016, Weitz posted on Twitter following Donald Trump's presidential election victory. He wrote: "Please note that the Empire is a white supremacist (human) organization." He apologized and deleted the post, but some Trump supporters launched the hashtag #DumpStarWars and claimed the film carried an anti-Trump message.

  Weitz published his first novel in 2014. The Young World launched a post-apocalyptic trilogy that continued with The New Order in 2015 and The Revival in 2016. The books follow teenagers trying to survive after a disease has killed every adult over the age of 18. He built the stories around the "Society of Mind" theory developed by the cognitive scientist Marvin Minsky. He described the trilogy as loosely autobiographical, grounded in his own memories of growing up in New York City.

  Among his projects in development is a screenplay for 21 Years to Midnight. The film centers on the legal case Obergefell v. Hodges, which established marriage equality in the United States.

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