Jay Roach Biography

Jay Roach (born 1957 in Albuquerque, New Mexico) is a film director and producer whose credits include the Austin Powers movies, and the hit comedies Meet the Parents and Meet the Fockers starring Robert DeNiro and Ben Stiller.

Jay Roach made his feature directorial debut with the "Austin Powers: International Man of Mystery" (1997), which united the suave glamour of a James Bond film with the sharp silliness of a Peter Sellers vehicle. A fun summer movie, it received decent reviews and box office returns, but proved a greater success on home video, where it became a big seller and repeatedly viewed cult classic.
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Written by and starring comedic actor Mike Myers, the film opened with a truly inspired musical romp on a swinging 60s Carnaby Street, introducing popular ladies man Austin Powers (Myers), a fashion photographer with a sideline as a secret agent. After a thirty year deep freeze Powers finds himself thawed out in the 1990s, a time with a cautious climate entirely different from the groovy free love haven he is accustomed to. It is a world which nevertheless needs this bumbling spy's aid against perennial archvillain Dr. Evil (also played by Myers), a comparably out-of-touch cryogenics experiment. Roach employed much of the jumpy stylistic editing so popular in 60s cinema and also used appropriately garish Technicolor hues in scenery and costumes. The quick and sometimes unsteady pace of the cartoonish "Austin Powers" at once parodied and celebrated movie effects of yore, particularly those so routinely practiced in the self-consciously hip swinging spy films of that era.

The New Mexico native who trained at USC was tapped to helm the 1999 time travel follow-up, "Austin Powers II: The Spy Who Shagged Me", where secret agent Powers returns to the 1960s only to find that the square sensibilities of his adopted 1990s world have affected his attitude and diminished his appeal. Similar in theme and style to its predecessor, this film was an even more over-the-top affair, super stylized, unabashedly mad and just behind "Star Wars: Episode I - The Phantom Menace" as an eagerly awaited summer film. Released that same year to much less hype was "Mystery, Alaska", also directed by Roach. This compelling story of a quietly scandalous small town and its local hockey team's face off with the New York Rangers was both penned and produced by David E Kelley. Starring Russell Crowe and Mary McCormack, the film was poignantly funny, atmospheric and understated, a far cry from Roach's outrageous "Austin Powers" work, proving the director's versatility.

Roach proved faithful to his franchises, returning for a third go-round with Mike Myers with the sequel "Austin Powers in Goldmember" (2002), which remained pleasingly fresh with the addition of Powers' father Nigel (Michael Caine), '70s superspy Foxy Cleopatra (Beyonce Knowles) and a further exploration of the Dr. Evil-Mini-Me dynamic. The director also successfully revisited his other big-screen enterprise with the sequel "Meet the Fockers" (2004), reuniting with Ben Stiller and Robert De Niro and introducing the proud Focker family in the form of Dustin Hoffman and Barbra Streisand. The crowd-pleasing comedy, familiar but with a few fresh elements, demonstrated that Roach was willing to pump creative energy into the usually stale sequel-land, with major payoffs.

JAY ROACH PICTURES

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JAY ROACH BIOGRAPHY