William Eubank — Director | Biography, Movies & Career

Biography

William Campbell Eubank (born November 15, 1982) is an American director, screenwriter, and cinematographer. He made his feature directorial debut with the sci-fi drama "Love" (2011), and went on to direct the sci-fi mystery "The Signal" (2014), the disaster thriller "Underwater" (2020), the supernatural horror "Paranormal Activity: Next of Kin" (2021), and the military action adventure "Land of Bad" (2024).

Like filmmakers Steven Spielberg and David Lynch, Eubank is an Eagle Scout. When Eubank was young, he had an interesting experience with the verisimilitude of cinema. At the time that he first watched the 1974 film "Chinatown," set in the year 1937, Eubank was unaware that it was a period piece, assuming it to have been made contemporaneously in 1937. When he found out it had been made almost four decades after the era it depicted, Eubank came to a realization about film's power.

Eubank drew significant inspiration from his grandfather, a US Navy cinematographer. From the stories he would tell – one involved operating a camera while flying underneath the Golden Gate Bridge – Eubank decided he wanted to either serve in the US Navy or pursue a career in film. Admitted to Annapolis, at the last minute before reporting to campus Eubank decided to instead take his shot at the arts. He began working at Panavision Woodland Hills as a camera repair technician and digital imaging technician and describes his eight years at Panavision as serving as his film school. Eubank credits the company's kindness to him as being essential to his development as an artist saying "I owe my entire career to those guys".