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Stephen Sommers
Young American filmmaker came straight out of film school to direct his first feature, the low-budgeted actioner, "Catch Me if You Can" (1989). On the basis of that film and his script for "The Adventures of Huck Finn," Disney offered Sommers a "director's test," a two-scene $20,000 short with one day's filming. Impressed with the results, Disney allowed Sommers to direct his script for "Huck Finn" (1993) and offered him a two year production deal. He scripted the less successful western yarn "Gunmen" (1994), then attained solid critical and commercial success with his direction and co-scripting for the remake of "Rudyard Kipling's The Jungle Book" (1994) loosely based on the classic tale of a young boy raised in the wild.