Romanek was born in Chicago, Illinois, the son of Shirlee and Marvin Romanek. He is Jewish. He credits seeing Stanley Kubrick\'s 2001: A Space Odyssey at the age of nine with inspiring him to become a film director. He experimented with Super 8 and 16mm film as a teenager while attending New Trier High School. There, he studied first with Kevin Dole, a local filmmaker who was already creating a form of music video on his own in the mid-1970s, and then with Peter Kingsbury, a filmmaker who had studied with experimentalists Owen Land, John Luther Schofill, and Stan Brakhage at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Both teachers exposed students to works by significant figures of the American avant-garde cinema, such as Maya Deren, Kenneth Anger, and Paul Sharits.\n', '

Romanek subsequently attended Ithaca College in Ithaca, New York, and graduated from its Roy H. Park School of Communications with a degree in cinema and photography. He served as second assistant director for Brian De Palma on Home Movies, an autobiographical film De Palma conceived as an exercise for his students at Sarah Lawrence College (having returned to his alma mater as an instructor of film production). On set, Romanek met Keith Gordon, playing De Palma\'s alter ego. Gordon remembers Romanek\'s entrance into film production:\n', '

Romanek released his first film, Static, in 1986. It was co-written with Gordon and starred Gordon as a man who claimed he had invented a television set capable of showing a live picture of Heaven. The film achieved something of a cult following in London and led to Romanek\'s first job at the helm of a music video for the British new wave group The The, who featured on the soundtrack for Static, in 1986.\n', '

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