Writer: Bruce Joel Rubin

Bruce Joel Rubin won the Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay for Ghost, which combined a romance, a thriller and a comedy in proportions that should not have worked commercially and did enormously.

Jacob’s Ladder is the more ambitious script, a hallucinatory film about a Vietnam veteran whose structure only resolves in its final moments, and it has influenced a great deal of subsequent psychological horror.

He studied Buddhism extensively and has said the metaphysics in his work is sincere and not a device, which distinguishes it from most Hollywood treatments of the afterlife.