Karey Kirkpatrick

A former actor with a musical theatre background, Karey Kirkpatrick ventured into screenwriting and directing after an unsuccessful bid of selling a script to Disney Studios. The script (for an animated musical) was ultimately passed over, but the studio, impressed with Kirkpatrick's talent, hired him as a full-time staff writer. While his stint at Disney yielded just one film, 1990's "The Rescuers Down Under," the experience proved to be a valuable launching point for his writing career in animation, with the list of Kirkpatrick-penned screenplays growing to include such films as "James and the Giant Peach" (1996) and the Golden Globe-nominated "Chicken Run" (2000). While his work rarely ventured outside of animated features, beginning in the late 2000s, Kirkpatrick began writing scripts for live-action films, including a 2005 film adaptation of the Douglas Adams sci-fi novel "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy" and the offbeat 2007 indie comedy "Flakes"; he made his directorial debut on the family comedy "Imagine That" (2009), starring Eddie Murphy.