Tony Gilroy

After spending much of his early career writing scripts for films that were never produced, writer-director Tony Gilroy emerged as the go-to screenwriter for intelligent and richly drawn thrillers that often featured isolated heroes nearing the end of their limitations. Though he broke through with the ice-skating romantic comedy, "The Cutting Edge" (1992), Gilroy penned well-known thrillers like "Dolores Claiborne" (1995), "Extreme Measures" (1996) and "The Devil's Advocate" (1997), which helped pave the way for a lucrative side career as a noted script doctor. But it was his adaptation of Robert Ludlum's dense spy thriller, "The Bourne Identity" (2002) that propelled him into the upper echelon of Hollywood scribes. The massive critical and financial success of that film, as well as the sequels "The Bourne Supremacy" (2004) and "The Bourne Ultimatum" (2007), redefined the spy thriller genre while making Gilroy a highly-sought writer. He parlayed the success of that franchise into a new career as a director, starting with the excellent legal thriller "Michael Clayton" (2007), which earned a large helping of critical adulation while drawing upon the stark, character driven films of the 1970s. He moved on to direct the engaging romantic thriller "Duplicity" (2009) while penning "State of Play" (2009) and the remake of "Red Dawn" (2010), which only further added to Gilroy's already considerable stature within Hollywood.