Marc Forster life and biography

Marc Forster is a German-Swiss filmmaker and screenwriter. He is best known for directing the films Monster's Ball, Finding Neverland, Stranger than Fiction, The Kite Runner, and Quantum of Solace.

Forster was born in Au (today Illertissen), in the Neu-Ulm district of Bavaria. The son of a German doctor and a Swiss architect, Forster grew up in Davos, a winter resort in eastern Switzerland.

In 1990, when he was 20 years old, Forster moved to New York, in the United States. For the next three years, he attended New York University's film school, making several documentary films. In 1995, he moved to Hollywood and shot an experimental low budget film ($10,000) called Loungers, which won the Slamdance Audience Award. Forster's first feature-length motion picture was the psychological drama Everything Put Together (2000), which was nominated for the Grand Jury Prize at the Sundance Film Festival.

Forster's success with Everything Put Together proved his ability to capture such a suffocating atmosphere on digital video, and he was next approached as a prospect to direct Monster's Ball. Though the script had been floating around Hollywood for nearly five years by the time it crossed Forster's desk, the high-priced demands of the A-list stars and directors who had shown interest -- combined with the studio's insistence that the film be made for less that five million dollars -- found the tide slowly turning in the ambitious young director's favor. When Monster's Ball was released in 2001, there was little doubt that Forster had been the right choice to direct the downbeat drama. In addition to earning star Halle Berry an Oscar for her emotionally devastating performance as a widow whose passionate affair with a prison guard proves a last-ditch effort to jump-start her numbed emotions, the film also found Forster's Inbox flooding with tempting offers. When the smoke cleared and the director had found adequate time to carefully consider his future prospects, he eventually announced that he would be directing screen heavies Johnny Depp and Kate Winslet in the fact-based drama Finding Neverland (2004), a film which served to detail author J.M. Barrie's motivation behind the penning of his children's classic Peter Pan. Even before that film hit theaters stateside, Forster was in post-production on Stay, a labyrinthine thriller starring Ewan McGregor that told the dark tale of an Ivy League professor who attempts to alter the tragic fate of one of his students.

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