- Born
- Zak Penn's career began as a screenwriter when he sold his first script, Last Action Hero, at the age of twenty-three. Since then, Penn has become known for his work on numerous films based on Marvel comics, including X-Men 2 and X-Men: The Last Stand, The Incredible Hulk, and The Avengers. He has also dabbled in other genres, writing scripts for disparate films such as P.C.U., Behind Enemy Lines and Suspect Zero.
Penn's shift into independent cinema began when he collaborated with his idol, Werner Herzog, on the script for Rescue Dawn. Penn directed and co-starred with Herzog in Incident at Loch Ness, his award-winning "hoax" documentary about the legendary director's attempts to make a film about the equally legendary monster. The Grand, Penn's second completely improvised film, was his third film with Herzog, and featured an eclectic cast including Woody Harrelson, David Cross, Ray Romano, Cheryl Hines, Dennis Farina and Gabe Kaplan.
In addition, Penn co-wrote the original story for Antz and produced the animated film Osmosis Jones. His first foray into television was the critically acclaimed SyFy Channel original series "Alphas" starring David Strathairn. His most recent endeavor was video game documentary Atari: Game Over, which recently premiered on Xbox Live.
- IMDb mini biography by: Hannah Rosner
- SpouseMichele Weiss(August 29, 1998 - present) (2 children)
- Graduated from Wesleyan University in 1990.
- Close friends with documentary film makers Louis Theroux and Werner Herzog.
- Disowned Suspect Zero (2004) and refuses to watch it. The script, which took nearly a decade to go from page to screen, was rewritten so many times during production that he barely recognized the final draft.
- He wrote an uncredited early draft of the 2005 Fantastic Four film directed by Tim Story. He also wrote the tie-in video game based on his draft.
- ...if you get a bunch of cynical people making a big-budget Hollywood movie, the irony is it doesn't work. [referring to his experience with 'The Last Action Hero']
- If you want to do only what you want, be prepared to make no money. If you want to get paid, you're going to have to do something that people want to see. And I've tried pretty hard to balance those two things without getting angry. It's not like, I'm an important artist so I deserve to be rich and do whatever I want to do.
- [his experience co-writing the original draft of Last Action Hero (1993)] The weird thing is that The Simpsons (1989) inspired it in the first place....We thought, 'If this show can destroy genres even as it embraces them, why can't we do it in live action?' But somewhere along the way, the movie got lost. And nobody came out smelling like a rose. (...) We dubbed it 'Reverse Purple Rose' after we realised it was the opposite of Woody Allen's The Purple Rose of Cairo (1985), where a character comes out of the screen into the real world. (...) We rented every action movie we could think of and made a checklist. Does the second-most evil bad guy die before or after the most evil bad guy? Does the hero have a Vietnam buddy? It was fun, although watching Steven Seagal movies one after another can be soul-crushing. (...) [The premiere] was not a pleasant experience. People kept saying, 'Did you do all those fart jokes?' 'No, no, that wasn't me.' 'Why did you have a kid thrown off a roof in the opening sequence? It made my kid cry.' 'I didn't write that!' [Empire 2012]
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