Scott Z. Burns

Scott Z. Burns (born July 17, 1962) is an American filmmaker and playwright.

Early life and education
On July 17, 1962, Burns was born in Golden Valley, Minnesota.

In 1985, Burns graduated summa cum laude with a degree in English from the University of Minnesota.

Career
After graduating from the University of Minnesota, Burns began his career in advertising, later becoming a television commercials director. He was part of the team at Goodby, Silverstein & Partners that created the original Got Milk? campaign.

Burns has written screenplays for The Bourne Ultimatum (2007), The Informant! (2009), and Contagion (2011), all of which feature Matt Damon. His films The Informant! (2009), Contagion (2011), and Side Effects (2013) were directed by Steven Soderbergh. Burns also produced the Academy Award-winning An Inconvenient Truth (2006). He wrote and directed the film The Report (2019), a drama about the secret torture program inside the CIA.

Public interest in Burns's film Contagion (2011) renewed during the COVID-19 pandemic, making it the seventh-most downloaded film on iTunes by March 6, 2020.

In a March 2020 interview, Burns commented on the film's resurgence and similarities to the active pandemic, especially in the wake of a round of CDC budget cuts:

"'I was terrified. Every scientist who I spoke to when I worked on the movie said that exact same thing to me: It's not a matter of 'if,' it's a matter of 'when.' You can decide that most of the time, firemen are just sitting around. But it's very hard to start a fire department once your house is on fire. And so the notion that we're going to cut these things and we'll just try to rebuild them when we need them is foolish and dangerous. I was very aware that our Department of Homeland Security had a pandemic team standing by because this is a real threat. The fact that this administration decided to do away with that puts all of us at risk.'"