STEALTH

ROB COHEN (Director) Combining nearly three decades of motion picture experience, first as an executive, then as a highly prolific producer and finally as one of American film's most versatile and successful directors, Rob Cohen maintains a unique place in the entertainment industry.

His two recent back-to-back blockbusters, The Fast and the Furious and XXX, prove that Cohen is often on the cutting edge of cultural (pop and otherwise) and technological developments. Cohen's films as both producer and director have swept across a wide range of topics and backdrops, revealing a filmmaker constantly in search of broadening his cinematic horizons. The two films have generated over $1 billion.

Cohen's most recent hit was Columbia Pictures/Revolution Studios' action thriller XXX, starring Vin Diesel, Samuel L. Jackson and Asia Argento, which grossed more than $275 million worldwide and broke records on its DVD and video sales and rentals. Filmed in Prague, the Austrian Alps, Bora Bora and Los Angeles, the summer 2002 release vigorously revived the secret agent genre for a new generation with its high-adrenaline stunts and wicked sense of humor.

Cohen's blockbuster The Fast and the Furious, set against the explosively charged backdrop of underground street racing in Los Angeles, was released in the summer of 2001. The trend-setting film, which starred a young ensemble of cutting-edge talent headed by Vin Diesel and Paul Walker, grossed in excess of $145-million at the domestic box office, and won extensive praise for its highly visceral and imaginative reinvention of the dormant auto racing genre. The film was also a blockbuster in its DVD and video sales and rentals.

In 2000, Cohen's provocative thriller The Skulls, revealed the machinations of Ivy League university secret societies. The film starred Joshua Jackson, Paul Walker and Leslie Bibb. Cohen's critically acclaimed "The Rat Pack,” an HBO film starring Ray Liotta as Frank Sinatra, Joe Mantegna as Dean Martin and Don Cheadle as Sammy Davis, Jr., chronicled an entire era as it told the story of Hollywood and Las Vegas' most famous swingers in their heyday. "The Rat Pack” garnered 11 Emmy Award nominations (winning three), won Cheadle a Golden Globe Award and earned Cohen a nomination from the Directors Guild of America for Outstanding Direction of a Television Film.

Cohen's previous directorial efforts reveal his expansive storytelling interests. His debut film, A Small Circle of Friends, starred the late Brad Davis and Karen Allen in a romance set against the political turmoil of late 1960s Harvard University (Cohen's alma mater). Heralded both by critics and audiences, Dragon: The Bruce Lee Story — which was both written and directed by Cohen — humanized the legendary Hong Kong-born action hero for new generations, and made stars of both Jason Scott Lee and Lauren Holly. Daylight, starring Sylvester Stallone, was a big-scale action thriller with high-tech special effects set primarily in a massive tunnel beneath New York's Hudson River, which was re-created in Rome's Cinecitta Studios. Daylight was nominated for an Academy Award® for Best Sound Effects Editing.

Visual effects made a quantum leap in Dragonheart, Cohen's epic fable of an unlikely alliance in mythical times between a knight (Dennis Quaid) and a fierce but noble dragon endowed with the powers of speech (voiced by Sean Connery). Cohen was intricately involved with both the design of the massive creature and implementation of the state-of-the-art effects from ILM, the first time that a major motion picture character was fully rendered digitally. The film won the Saturn Award as Best Fantasy Film of 1996, and was nominated for an Academy Award® for Best Visual Effects.

Cohen was born in Cornwall-on-Hudson in New York. He attended Harvard Univers

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