LORENZO di Bonaventura is enjoying his time as an independent producer. And why not?The former Warner Bros president of worldwide production shepherded several films into cinemas after he left the studio, from the interesting (Derailed and 1408) and the middling (Four Brothers and Shooter) to the huge successes (the first two films in what is now the Transformers franchise).
After pushing The Matrix and Harry Potter into production at Warner Bros, di Bonaventura can consider himself one of the most successful producers of modern cinema.
He is certainly a brand name in the same fashion as J.J. Abrams (Lost and Star Trek) and Jerry Bruckheimer (Con Air, CSI and Pirates of the Caribbean).
It's fun," he says of life as an independent producer. "I enjoyed my time -- I didn't enjoy everything about being an executive -- but there were things I enjoyed." He misses pushing risky films with "potentially polarising ideas" into production.
Of course the continued success of Harry Potter gives him enormous satisfaction, but he's prouder of films such as The Matrix, Training Day, Falling Down and Three Kings.
As a producer you cannot get those films made, you have to have a studio executive who's willing to put their career on the line for you," he says. The big American studios tend not to make such commercially contentious films. Known properties and predictable genres take the big budgets while comedies take the smaller ones.
Di Bonaventura says studios, and consequently the executives making the decisions (or in most cases, not making decisions), are so risk averse that "a producer can't get (challenging films) done and even a movie star can't get them made".
Maybe one movie star, maybe Will Smith, but short of that, I miss that ability to get that done," he says.
It is a common criticism of modern Hollywood filmmaking that studio executives are reluctant to gamble their jobs and reputations for riskier films. Di Bonaventura believes that is a fair criticism, but he also thinks the audience is partly to blame.
I think it's presumptuous to think that Hollywood leads the audience," he says. "The audience leads Hollywood. We led them on The Matrix, I'll say that -- we blew people's minds because they were not expecting that to come -- but in my 20 years I've seen, I don't know, two or three films that led the audience. The rest followed the audience."
He tried to lead the audience to a film such as Three Kings, which starred George Clooney and Mark Wahlberg as conflicted US soldiers who steal a gold stash during the Gulf War. It was a "great disappointment", he says, that "a very candid assessment of US foreign policy" did not work commercially, particularly with audiences outside the US.
It's actually more painful -- and I think that's where Hollywood executives have internalised this -- it's more painful when you make a daring movie and it fails, not as a movie but as a box-office experience," he says.
Di Bonaventura recalls the dispiriting feeling as a studio executive who responds to demands to make a smart or daring movie, yet the audience doesn't respond when it is made.
But for me, I'm personally motivated to make those kinds of movies," he adds, citing the thriller set in a hotel room, 1408, as another of his "daring exercises" or Derailed, a thriller written by Australian Stuart Beattie.
There's another example," he says. "Jennifer Aniston (in Derailed) made a ballsy choice (playing an adulterous wife) and critics killed her. I think they were wrong, but forgetting whether they were wrong or right, applaud her for taking the risk. Say you didn't like it, but nobody applauded her for taking the risk. So if you're Jennifer Aniston, will you go out there and do that again to get your head walloped around? It just doesn't encourage the very thing we should all be encouraging if we all love film."
That said, lovers of film may not have diBonaventura on the top of their list as a producer making the world a better place. His first adaptation of the Hasbro toy series Transformers was a pleasant surprise in the blockbuster realm. It earned more than $US700 million ($830m) worldwide; the far inferior sequel, Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen, has amassed more than $US800m.
Now, with two blockbusters of dubious merit, di Bonaventura has lifted the fortunes of a studio, Paramount, that was floundering in a management malaise. He also has produced the latest release for the studio, G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra, another Hasbro collaboration adapting a storied toy.
G.I. Joe, starring Sienna Miller, Channing Tatum, Dennis Quaid, Christopher Eccleston and Jonathan Pryce, is a big-budget spectacular that thumbs its nose at the laws of physics and probability. The elite military unit called G.I. Joe that fights an evil arms dealer in this movie is aeons removed from the action figure of the same name with which some of us grew up in the 1970s. Di Bonaventura had been trying to bring the G.I. Joe character to the screen for years, far longer than the Transformers franchise. And he is ready for the slings, arrows and inexplicable laser guns that will be coming his way for producing a big, often stupid, action movie.
People think it's a cynical exercise. I don't think of it in that way," he says, recalling the plot of Michael Chabon's novel The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, whose central thesis is that in dark times people want superheroes. "That's what's happening now, people want to go out and have some fun. People want to be entertained and get away from all the shit that's bugging you. I feel thatway."
He had a tough time convincing studios that might be the case; not that he felt the same frustration when being rebuffed that others might, he says with a laugh.
I guess having been a studio executive for so long, and having said no so many times, I accept the notion of no," he says.
And as somebody who's spent a bit of time in the business now, I like to move where everybody isn't. G.I. Joe and Transformers? Nobody was there but suddenly everybody's buying those kind of properties and I'm moving away now."
Moving away in the best sense. The third Transformers film is in the works and already people anticipate G.I. Joe to move into second and possibly third instalments.
That already seems like a cynical exercise in creating content and breathing new sales life into toy lines. Di Bonaventura contends he doesn't think about the franchise, only the first movie's probability of success.
People say: 'This is three movies', but come on! It's hard enough to make the first one successful, but when you start trying to plan it out that way you're kidding yourself." Even so, he relishes the "incredibly rich mythology and characters" within the confused four decades of the G.I. Joe characters. It has the potential to not only spawn sequels but character spin-offs.
The "incredibly intertwined, insane back stories" also offer enticing narrative possibilities not really explored in the sturm und drang of this first film.
It's very different (from) Transformers, where you start with Sam meets Bumblebee, or (The Matrix's) Neo meets Trinity, or (Harry Potter's) Harry meets Ron and Hermione," di Bonaventura says.
In this one everyone, or a lot of them, comes to the table with a very deep back story and that makes it very different as both a development process and from a moviemaking point of view
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