Lawrence Bender is a film producer who has a career that spans three decades of producing highly successful films with worldwide box office cumulative of over a billion dollars. His films to date, including such hits as Inglorious Bastards, Pulp Fiction and Good Will Hunting, have been honored with 36 Academy Award nominations, including three for Best Picture, and have won nine. His film An Inconvenient Truth, which raised unprecedented awareness about climate change, won the Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature.
Bender just wrapped his next movie, Roll, which filmed in Tunisia. In 2021 Bender produced The Harder They Fall starring Idris Elba, Regina King, Jonathan Majors, LaKeith Stanfield, Zazie Beetz and Delroy Lindo. Also in 2020, Bender produced two short films; the Peabody winning animated short film, Cops and Robbers and the Academy Award winning short film Two Distant Strangers. Other films include, Neil Jordan’s Greta (2019), Mel Gibson’s Hacksaw Ridge (2016), Martin Scorsese’s Silence (2016), Innocent Voices (2004), The Mexican (2001), Anna and the King (1999), From Dusk Till Dawn (1996), and Quentin Tarantino’s Reservoir Dogs (1992), Jackie Brown (1997), Kill Bill: Vol. 1 and Vol. 2 (2004). Lawrence has also produced, Safe; Havana Nights: Dirty Dancing 2; Knockaround Guys; A Price Above Rubies; White Man’s Burden; Killing Zoe; and Fresh.
His documentary, Countdown To Zero, featuring Tony Blair, Presidents, Musharef, Gorbachev, De Klerk and Carter among others, details the urgent risk posed by proliferation, terrorism, and accidental use of nuclear weapons. Countdown To Zero was an official selection out of competition at the Cannes film festival. It screened at the United Nation hosted by Secretary General Ban Ki-moon and Michael Douglass. It also screened at CIA headquarters to over 500 operatives and the key directors. Bender traveled with the movie around the world to screen it in places like Kazakhstan and India as well as many high-level screenings in Washington DC.
Bender has a long list of Television credits including four seasons of the series Roswell New Mexico. He also produced the Netflix limited series Seven Seconds (2019) starring Regina King who won the Emmy for best actress, and the Starz limited series Flesh and Bone (2015).