William Eubank

William Eubank (born November 15, 1982) is an American film director, screenwriter, and cinematographer. On his first feature film, Love, released in 2011, in addition to directorial and director of photography duties, Eubank also served as production designer. His second feature film, The Signal, premiered at the 2014 Sundance Film Festival and was released in theaters by Focus Features on June 13, 2014. His third feature film, the science-fiction horror film Underwater, was released in January 2020 by 20th Century Fox. Early life Eubank was born on November 15, 1982 in Holyoke, Massachusetts. His father, Carlyle Eubank II, is a fine art consultant, former Christie's representative, and adviser to the Office of Fine Arts at the State Department. His mother, Patricia Reeder Eubank, is a children's book author and illustrator. The second of four siblings, Eubank has one older sister and two younger brothers, and grew up in the Santa Ynez Valley, a noted wine-producing region north of Los Angeles. Growing up he was inspired by his grandfather, a former 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 attend the United States Naval Academy or become a cinematographer, eventually settling on the latter. Eubank grew up involved in Scouting and, like filmmakers Steven Spielberg and David Lynch, 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.