Director, Producer, Cinematographer

(b. October 7, 1929 Toronto, Ontario)

Graeme Ferguson, co-founder of IMAX Corporation and its president from 1970 to 1990, found his calling doing a summer job at the National Film Board in 1950 while studying political science and economics at the University of Toronto. After graduating, he worked in India with Swedish director Arne Sucksdorff. In the late fifties he moved to New York City, where he worked as a freelance director, cinematographer and editor on a number of films, most notably the Silents Please series (1960), A Bowl of Cherries (1960), The Legend of Rudolph Valentino (1963), Madigan (1968), The Seducers (1962), The Days of Dylan Thomas (1965) and the Academy Award®-nominated Rooftops of New York (1960).

Ferguson was then commissioned to design and direct Polar Life, a multi-screen installation that was one of the biggest hits at Expo '67. The success of that film led to Ferguson’s creation in 1968 of the IMAX (a play on the words “maximum image”) system of projection with his brother-in-law Roman Kroitor and his high-school friends Robert Kerr and William Shaw. He returned to Canada in 1970 to head Multi-screen Corporation with Kroitor and Kerr, and in 1971 directed North of Superior, which, with its breathtaking scenes of nature captured in a dynamic, epic manner, came to define the IMAX style.

IMAX Corporation currently operates more than 280 theatres in thirty-six countries. Ferguson received the Air Canada Genie Award in 1986 for outstanding contributions to the Canadian film industry. He was awarded the Royal Canadian Academy of Arts Medal in 1990, named a Member of the Order of Canada in 1993, received an honourary doctorate form the University of Bradford in 1994, and received the Kodak Vision Award from the Large Format Cinema Association in 2005. He remains active as a producer of IMAX films.

Film and video work includes

Rooftops of New York, 1960 (cinematographer)
Sail a Crooked Ship, 1961 (actor)
The Seducers, 1962 (director)
The Legend of Rudolph Valentino, 1963 (director; writer; producer)
The Double-Barrelled Detective Story, 1965 (director)
The Love Goddesses, 1965 (co-writer & co-producer with Saul J. Turell)
Polar Life, 1967 (director; cinematographer, producer)
The Virgin President, 1968 (director; co-writer with Severn Darden; cinematographer)
Madigan, 1968 (title designer: background)
The Question of Television Violence, 1972 (director)
Exercise Running Jump II, 1972 (co-cinematographer with François Brault, Daniel Fournier, Richard Leiterman)
Circus World, 1974 (co-cinematographer with John Spotton)
Man Belongs to Earth, 1974 (director; producer with Roman Kroitor)
Snow Job, 1974 (director; producer)
Nishnawbe-Aski: The People and the Land, 1977 (producer with John N. Smith; cinematographer)
Ocean, 1977 (director; producer)
Hail Columbia!, 1982 (director; producer with Roman Kroitor; co-cinematographer with
David Douglas & Richard Leiterman)
The Dream Is Alive, 1985 (director; producer)
Blue Planet, 1990 (producer)
Journey to the Planets, 1993 (producer)
Destiny in Space, 1994 (producer)
Into the Deep, 1994 (producer)
L5: First City in Space, 1996 (co-producer)
Mission to Mir, 1997 (producer)
Im Spiegel der Maya Deren, 2002 (appears as himself)
Space Station 3D, 2002 (consulting producer)
Deep Sea 3D, 2006 (executive producer)