Lawrence Guterman

Born: Montreal, Canada

The former illustrator made his big screen directorial debut with the children's animal caper Cats & Dogs.

Guterman first became involved in visual storytelling and making films as a child with his first short film completed at the age of fourteen.

While studying physics at Harvard University, he served as editor/illustrator for the magazine The Harvard Lampoon and spent summers studying animation at the Sheridan College of Art in Toronto.

While making a 15-minute film for a documentary course, he became hooked on directing.

Moving to Los Angeles, Guterman worked in computer graphics while beginning his film industry career as a script reader for producer Joel Silver.

In 1995, he graduated from the USC School of Cinema where he paid his tuition by teaching undergraduate physics.

While there he sold two scripts to major studios and caught the attention of Robert Zemeckis by co-writing a script for a Tales From the Crypt episode.

His 1995 Master's thesis - Headless! - a 35-minute black comedy, won rave reviews at USC's First Look Festival and won the grand jury prize at the Worldfest-Houston International Film Festival.

On the strength of that success, Guterman was invited by Steven Spielberg and Jeffrey Katzenberg to direct the DreamWorks//Microsoft Corporation's first live-action CD-ROM, a game based on the Goosebumps series.

This in turn led to work on the movie Antz, for which he directed several memorable sequences.

In 2001, he directed Cats & Dogs, which featured the voice talents of Jeff Goldblum and Elisabeth Perkins.

His next big screen outing was Son of the Mask, the sequel to the Jim Carrey vehicle The Mask.