Ahoy, squirts! Quint here with a chat I had with Lorenzo di Bonaventura, producer of this summer’s TRANSFORMERS, 1408 and STARDUST. This is an interview five years ago I would have put money on never appearing on this website. When di Bonaventura was an exec at Warner Bros he was kind of Harry’s arch-enemy. Harry demanded his resignation on almost a weekly basis, it seemed. But he dropped out of the suit world and dropped into the producer world and the water is long under the bridge. di Bonaventura has been attaching himself to some good and interesting projects. We talk mostly about TRANSFORMERS and STARDUST, but we also get into his plans for a couple upcoming projects: GI Joe and THE STARS MY DESTINATION. Enjoy the chat!
Quint: Hey, how’s it going man?
di Bonaventura: Great, good to talk to you.
Quint: I just found out we were doing this like late last night, so hopefully this turns out somewhat coherent. [Laughs]
di Bonaventura: I’m sure it will. You probably know some of this stuff better than I do.
Quint: Well I guess the best place to start is… Let’s talk a little TRANSFORMERS and I’m sure we will talk a little bit about STARDUST as well before we’re cut off… Was TRANSFORMERS brought to you or did you seek it out?
di Bonaventura: No, it was something… I was involved with G.I. JOE with Hasbro and I discovered that they owned TRANSFORMERS as well and I was intrigued, because it wasn’t something I had grown up with, but my younger siblings had and a lot of people I knew were very passionate fans of it . So I asked to read about the mythology and I got to learn about the mythology and what surprised me, as somebody who hadn’t grown up with it, was the depth of the ideas and the thinking and the stories behind what they are… who they are… or why they are what they are. That’s what made me say, “You know what, I’d really like to tackle this as a movie…”
Quint: That’s cool. Is that the typical process you go through when you’re interested in an established property?
di Bonaventura: For me it’s like: “what can I emotionally connect to and what do I find intellectually fascinating?” And if I can find both of those things... but sometimes one is enough, but I try to find both things and then you sort of analyze it from a business point of view, particularly with a phenomenally successful and deep fan base the Transformers have, then you say to yourself, “OK, there’s a big fan base...” The upside to that is… a lot a people are passionate about it – the complication of that is that they have strongly held points of views about it and therefore you have to include them and pick their brains and then evolve it a bit forward, so that it’s fresh to them and you need to get people who are not TRANSFORMERS fans.
Quint: I think that a lot of people don’t really know what a producer does and actually I think a lot of people who are in the industry don’t exactly know what it is, because the job seems to change from project to project depending on how hands on you need to be. What were your duties? What did you do on the movie? Did you bring in Michael Bay and do all that stuff?
di Bonaventura: No, I think the truth is… Dreamworks really should be given credit for coming up with the idea of Bay. They had just done THE ISLAND and they felt… Steven [Spielberg] felt personally, that Michael would be perfectly suited with the idea and for the real big challenges, so I take no credit for that idea,. You know, it’s funny, there’s no good answer to the question you asked, but I’ll say this – I think the best producers are ones that often are responsible for generating the initial creative drive for a project. Often they are the ones that were first sparked by some crazy book or some belief within them that they want to make a movie about something and then a producer, a good producer, has to be very nimble and provide the services that nobody else on the project does. So you know, you find yourself working on the script, you find yourself working on marketing, you find yourself working with promotions. In the case of Michael I don’t think there is any producer who could really add a lot to how he’d like to shoot something. He’s a master at that, so with each director and with each thing I think as a producer you have to adapt to the strengths and where you find weaknesses or where you can be the biggest pillar of support. I’ve only been one for five years, so I don’t want to claim to have all the answers as a producer. Relatively speaking I’m young in the producing reigns.
Quint: Yeah... Your point of view is fascinating though, because you worked as a studio exec . Part of a producer’s job is to protect the project and the vision of the filmmaker from the suits and you were a suit first.
di Bonaventura: I know! It’s funny, it has been my experiences having been an executive I found myself sometimes protecting the movie from my bosses, sometimes protecting it from the filmmakers themselves, and I think the movies I’m most proud of, as an executive, are the ones that were the boldest decisions and the ones that I, as an executive, had to fight the most, alongside the filmmaker to hold the vision. Whether it’s THE MATRIX or PERFECT STORM… make a 132 million dollar movie and have everybody die at the end…
Quint: Yeah.
di Bonaventura: Or THREE KINGS. As a producer… because I understand the stresses and the experience of what it is to like to be an executive, I feel like what I can often bring to the table is understanding where the fears are as an executive and how to address those in a way that brings the best out in the filmmakers and brings the best out in the executives. And also working at Warner I got to work on so many movies that I got to see a pattern if you would, you know? As soon as you can begin to see a pattern, of course, it shifts on you, but you also can have some perspective and my perspective is that it’s constantly changing how to protect the piece of material and what you have to do as a producer. Certainly you have to remind everybody all the time of why we are doing what we are doing and where we are going to go. Hopefully you succeed by doing it that way.
Quint: On TRANSFORMERS, what did you find was your biggest task? What was the one that you really had to concentrate the most on as a producer?
di Bonaventura: Let me think about that… well, like I said [laughing] we’re sort of all jack-of-all-trades, so I’m not sure there is a dominant area where I can just go. I worked on the script. I worked on the marketing. I worked on the promotions….
Quint: Let me rephrase it then, how about when the movie was in production and shooting, what was your day to day like?
di Bonaventura: I think when you’re day to day with a guy like Michael, the truth is in the shooting. Michael has a solid hand so that’s really not where it is. I think it was probably a benefit. It’s not often you have a filmmaker like that, who can handle so much of what’s going on on set, so from my side, I was able to work on things like, “Alright, how do we put together a soundtrack? Where do we go? How do we get some cool bands?” things you don’t get to do until much later in the project and when you turn later in the process, it usually suffers. You know what I mean?
Quint: Yeah.
di Bonaventura: I got to do things like that, where I went “alright, let’s go create, in the middle of (shooting), the soundtrack… or how do we create a soundtrack that can be successful as a soundtrack and to support the movie as it’s going along?” and we worked with the marketing guys, sort of began to find (the marketing). You know, you’ve seen a lot of campaigns, but usually it’s a process of distillation and you see right away …. Sometimes you’re lucky and you stumble on to it, but I was able to move certain processes forward that normally don’t get moved forward so quickly. In particular, we got Linkin Park and… have you seen the movie yet, Quint?
Quint: No, no I haven’t.
di Bonaventura: When you see the movie, the Linkin Park song is, I think, one of the best fusions of song and scene that I have seen and it was perfect for the movie.
Quint: Which scene does it go over… if it’s not a spoiler?
di Bonaventura: Should I spoil that?
Quint: I don’t know. Can you?
di Bonaventura: Well… it cuts over the last scene of the movie…
Quint: Oh, okay, cool.
di Bonaventura: I think it’s really uplifting as a song and when we first saw it against the picture, we all looked at each other and there was literally no controversy. Everybody was immediately… you know, usually you try different songs and you have different thoughts, but this is one where we put the song on and looked at it and went “this is it” and we kept moving. It was really incredible.
Quint: Sweet. Let’s talk a little bit about STARDUST. I met you for the first time on that set in London and I have to admit, I was nervous going up there, just because we had never had any interaction and I knew Harry shot some nasty barbs at you when you were at Warners.
di Bonaventura: Well, the funny thing is that Harry said to me once, “You know we have a lot of mutual friends and they tell me we would like each other,” and I said, “Well yeah, why shouldn’t we?” You know what? I love passionate people. I’m a passionate person… sometimes I piss people off and it’s not because I want to be disrespectful to anybody or uncaring, it’s just because I get into it, you know?
Quint: Yeah.
di Bonaventura: Neil, Neil Gaiman, is somebody I’ve been into for years and (tried to get) BEOWULF to the screen for many years and it was frustrating, you know? Harry, along the way, threw some barbs at me that were probably right and some that were probably wrong, but you know…Neil… talking about STARDUST… Neil is… I’ve tried BOOKS OF MAGIC… I’ve tried SANDMAN… I’ve tried DEATH: THE HIGH COST OF LIVING and I wish I could’ve just put Neil on as a director and writer, but unfortunately I never got it over that starting line. It was really a great treat for me to actually get to work on a movie with Neil that was shooting, as opposed to developing.
Quint: Obviously you’ve seen the movie by now, it’s screened a couple of times now. What do you think about the final project? Was it everything that you were hoping it would be?
di Bonaventura: You know what? I love it. And, most importantly, Neil loves it. I would have been heartbroken if Neil had been disappointed, you know? So, for me, we accomplished the most important thing, which was Neil felt that his vision had been realized and after that we’ll turn to ourselves and be a little more selfish for a second. What I love about Neil’s work is that sense of whimsy that is both his sharp tongue, yet very sweet at the same time. Usually I find one or the other, not both coexisting so nicely and I think maybe in a way the proudest thing I can say about the movie is that we were able to retain that unbelievable sweetness and that unbelievable sharp-tongued way and let them coexist in a movie and not have it be pushed out because it doesn’t make sense that both tones are in the same movie and all those things that you’re sort of told along the way in the developing process. I think Matthew [Vaughn] and Jane [Goldman] did a phenomenal job in encapsulating that into the script and then Matthew, as the director, was able to execute it, but that’s a hard thing, in today’s Hollywood – to retain such individuality. I’m really proud of the movie. It has such great individuality and such a unique attitude.
Quint: I guess we should probably bring up a couple of movies that you’re working on that the fans, especially at AICN, would really dig on and those are G.I. JOE and THE STARS MY DESTINATION. Do you know what’s going on with those two?
di Bonaventura: I know it intimately. [Laughs] I have a feeling the fans are hoping that I don’t screw this one up. Let’s start with STARS, it’s the quickest thing in a way… it’s in development; the writer’s working on it right now. Its greatest challenge, I’ll say, is its ending; as phenomenal as it is in the book, it is completely un-cinematic and so that’s the thing that we’re going to struggle with for a long time, figuring out how to execute the emotional construct of that ending. The ideas behind it… the expansiveness… there’s bold thinking that is impossible to figure out, I’ll say, on a construction level how to do it, how you do it emotionally, so we’re underway and… fingers crossed. I knew, when I got involved with that book, that the third act was always going to be, from a movie point of view, the most complicated and difficult thing, because the book doesn’t help you get there.
Quint: Yeah. I saw John Carpenter speak once and somebody asked him if he was cut a check for any amount of money, what movie would he make. He said THE STARS MY DESTINATION, but said “It can never be made.” He didn’t see how it could ever be translated.
di Bonaventura: Well, I think that’s the real trick and I hope that we are smart enough to figure it out. We’ll see and we’ll see how people feel about it and frankly we’ll see it from our own point of view. G.I. JOE is a really interesting and complicated process, because it has two fan bases I’ll say: it has one that exists before the 80’s, and the one that move forward from the 80’s and they are two different fan bases. I’d say on the internet the most vocal fan base would be the post 80’s fan base, but, as a filmmaker, I don’t want to abandon the pre-80’s fans and we’re working very hard to come up with what is similar between the two things I think attitude and values-wise. Particularly values. You know… loyalty, courageousness… That if you had never seen the TV show or read the comics, what would you say? Those ideas do exist in the TV and the comic books. They were definitely drawn on when they were made, so that’s the unity of the two ideas. The characters are fantastic… Snake-Eyes… they present their own challenges because the character doesn’t talk and is a difficult character to figure out how to register on screen and it’s a fun challenge, but it’s a challenge and like every strong fan base, people are very passionate about one thing or another and what I always try to encourage people to think of the process of germination first and it’s a process of evolution and actually you get to the ideas that really land and we’re somewhere in that germination-evolution transfer right now, so we’re pretty early in the process.
Quint: I think, without dragging this out too much longer, probably what fans are going to immediately jump on is the period. Like you said, there are so many different iterations, you know?
di Bonaventura: Yeah and it’s difficult, so for me, I’m trying to go back to the original comic books and go back to the thing that existed before the comic book and then take, as best we can, the things that come together then. They don’t all line up I don’t think, but take as many things that line up as possible, put them together and come up with a story that is exciting. A lot of people say “Well, I want this character in” or “I want this character…” and like every property like this, you can’t handle every character or else you have a story that makes no sense, so we’re going to have to make those choices. There are so many characters that so many people love and it’s immediately such a controversy when you talk about having one or killing one or doing something slightly different than what was done before, but like all of these properties if you’re not true to what it is, then you’re going to fail and I’m acutely aware of that.
There it is. I’m finally seeing TRANSFORMERS later tonight. I’m excited. My expectations are up. All the other summer tentpole type movies haven’t really put any wind in my sails. I liked PIRATES 3 more than most seemed to, but I will say that I never did feel the urge to see it a second time. So, I hope TRANSFORMERS scratches that summer film itch for me. I have a few more interviews that should hit in the very near future. Still putting the finishing touches on that Daniel Radcliffe chat, but that’s really close. Thanks to Muldoon for the transcription work. -Quint quint@aintitcool.com
