Raised in Montreal and Toronto, LAWRENCE GUTERMAN (Director) first became involved in visual storytelling and making films as a child and made his first short film in the 8th grade. While earning his physics degree from Harvard University. he served as editor and illustrator for the famed humor magazine The Harvard Lampoon and spent summers studying animation at the highly regarded Sheridan College of Art in Toronto. Upon making a 15-minute film for a documentary course in his senior year he became hooked on directing.
Relocating to Los Angeles, Guterman worked in computer graphics while beginning his film industry career as a script reader for producer Joel Silver and in production development for Melinda Jason at Columbia Pictures. In 1995 he graduated from the USC School of Cinema where he paid his tuition by teaching undergraduate physics.
While at USC, Guterman sold two scripts to major studios and caught the attention of Robert Zemeckis and HBO by co-writing a script for a "Tales From the Crypt" episode. His 1995 Master's thesis, "Headless!," a 35-minute black comedy, quickly made the "agent circuit" after winning rave reviews at USC's First Look Festival and winning 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 his involvement with the production of "Antz," for which he directed several memorable sequences including: "The March to Battle with the Termites" and "Patton Speech." Guterman was next attached to direct "Curious George" for Imagine and spent a year developing the project with Ron Howard but the film ultimately did not go into production.
He worked with the writers for a year on developing "Cats & Dogs," interested in interplay of live action with stunning visual effects and the concept of reinventing the spy thriller genre from the canine and feline point of view. It was the early and successful test scene for the film, directed by Guterman, that encouraged Warner Bros. Pictures to greenlight the project.
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