George Nolfi

George Nolfi isn’t your average Hollywood guy—he’s basically a brainiac who bailed on academia to make action blockbusters. He’s the mind behind some heavy-hitters: The Bourne Ultimatum, Ocean’s Twelve, and The Adjustment Bureau. Seriously, that’s a wild lineup. His latest flick, The Banker, dropped with Sam Jackson and Anthony Mackie running the show—no big deal, just picked up the 2021 NAACP Image Award for Best Independent Motion Picture. Not a bad resume, right? But get this, Nolfi didn’t even start out in film. Born in Massachusetts, he did the Ivy League thing at Princeton, then jetted off to Oxford on a Marshall Scholarship—he was primed for government or academic work, not Hollywood chaos. Dude was literally working on a PhD dissertation at UCLA in political science when he tossed out a spec script called Pathfinder. Studios went nuts for it (bidding war status), so he ditched academia for the glitz of screenwriting. His first big break was adapting Michael Crichton’s sci-fi beast, Timeline. Then he flipped his own script, Honor Among Thieves, into Ocean’s Twelve in 2004. That same year? He rewrote the ending of Bourne Supremacy just weeks before release. Talk about clutch. By 2007, he’s co-writing The Bourne Ultimatum, and his work with Matt Damon leads right to his director debut with The Adjustment Bureau, starring Damon and Emily Blunt. From nearly being a political scientist to directing A-listers—George Nolfi’s career path is anything but boring.