The Big Picture

Collider’s Steve Weintraub hosts our first-ever “Producers on Producing” panel with Lorenzo di Bonaventura, Akiva Goldsman, and Roy Lee.
Being a Hollywood producer is filled with challenges and surprises, especially as the industry continues to evolve. This trio gives us some insight into what being a producer in Hollywood really means.
Lorenzo, Goldsman, and Lee discuss upcoming projects like
Transformers One
,
Constantine 2
, and the Minecraft movie, dream projects, beloved projects that fell apart, and tons more.

At this year’s San Diego Comic-Con, Collider’s Steve Weintraub invited a trio of Hollywood producers for our first-ever “Producers on Producing” panel. To kick off what will hopefully be a new annual SDCC panel, we spoke with Lorenzo di Bonaventura (Transformers, Deepwater Horizon and The New Look), Akiva Goldsman (Star Trek: Strange New Worlds, I Am Legend, and Constantine), and Roy Lee (Barbarian, The Lego Movie, and the upcoming Minecraft movie) about the ins and outs of what a producer really does throughout the production of a movie.

In addition to sharing the highs and lows of producing in this ever-evolving industry—battling streaming and getting projects off the ground—Bonaventura, Goldsman, and Lee reveal the dream movies and shows that ended up in the can, how different classic movies could have been, directors’ cuts that exist in limbo, and scenes from movies they’d reshoot if they could. They talk about sequels, like Constatine 2 and I Am Legend 2, upcoming blockbusters like Transformers One, the Minecraft movie, and Stephen King’s The Long Walk, and tons more.

Check out the full panel in the video above or in the transcript below for questions from others in the industry, like Kelly McCormick (The Fall Guy), Alex Kurtzman (Star Trek: Strange New Worlds), Simon Kinberg (The Martian), Jeremy Latcham (The Avengers), and more.

COLLIDER: What do you guys think would be surprising for the audience to learn about being a producer in Hollywood?

Image via Paramount Pictures

LORENZO DI BONAVENTURA: How undignified it is. There is this weird perception out there that somehow we pull all the strings. We pull a few of them, but it actually is a very tough profession because there are a lot of people, the stars, who gain more ground—the studios and the buyers care more about them. Now there is this thing called credit proliferation that’s happened in Hollywood where there are so many producers on the project that when we’re on it, we don’t know who’s in control. It leads to this lack of respect. I think people think, “Oh, no, the fat cat producers got it all goin’.” It’s a fight.

AKIVA GOLDSMAN: Agreed. When I graduated from college, there was a guy named Paul Schiff. Paul produced My Cousin Vinny, and he had gone to college where I went to college. It was a few years later, and I went out, and I wanted to be in Hollywood. He took me out to lunch, and I said, “Tell me how to be a producer. How do you produce a movie?” He said, “Well, there’s no one way.” I thought, “Fuck you. Obviously, there’s a way, and you won’t tell me.” Three decades on, I realized he was right. Each one is unique, therefore, each producing job is unique. It is oddly without a job description. I don’t know how to do what these two folks do because I’m a writer-producer, so I get to go in and actually typically establish the bona fide on the page first. To be a producer-producer, without bringing with you a secondary or primary set of skills, is, I think, the hardest job in Hollywood. I recommend it to none of you.

ROY LEE: I was going to say that you don’t actually have to go to film school or have any type of film education to become a producer. It’s just sort of having good taste and knowing how to interact with people. That’s about all you need.

‘The Thing’ That Never Was and the Loss of Hopes and Dreams

ERICA LEE: What’s the project that got away? What’s the one thing you passed on that you wish you hadn’t?

BONAVENTURA: I’ve never passed on anything that’s good. [Laughs] This gentleman wrote an extraordinary movie based on a book, and most people couldn’t figure out what the movie was. Then it won a little thing called an Academy Award. So I would say that’s the one where you go, “How is it I couldn’t see it?” I just couldn’t see it.

GOLDSMAN: We just failed at The Dark Tower. It’s not that it got away. We just failed at it. We tried to put the pieces together, we couldn’t hang on, it kept shifting, everybody had a different point of view. So many of us who started it lost any chance to hold onto it, and by the end, it was a lot of significant hopes and dreams that led to not very much. That’s not exactly passing on a thing, but it’s a loss of it.

ROY LEE: The same type of thing, a loss on a project, that I feel was with Frank Darabont after he’d done The Walking Dead. We were working on a sequel series for The Thing, which was picking up in the present day after the events of The Thing actually happened. It was done as a series, and he wanted to do it like The Walking Dead and turn it into a Thing set in the US, but we never got it off the ground. We got a script written, but the studio hated it.

That makes absolutely no sense. How has the role of the producer changed from when you started to where you are now?

LEE: When I started, it wasn’t as IP-driven as it is now. You could actually develop things. Now, it’s sort of hard to get the studios to do long-term development of taking an original idea, cultivating it, and making it into a movie, whereas before, we could do it.

GOLDSMAN: I didn’t start as a producer. I really was a writer. I became a producer just so if somebody had to fire me, it would be me. But I will take this opportunity to tell you why I’m here, and the reason I’m at this panel is because of Lorenzo. What I mean is the reason I’m on this panel is because of Lorenzo. I had no career. I was a brand-new screenwriter, and this gentleman to my right took a flier on me, and then another and another and another. It’s an extraordinary joy to be old and still be sitting next to him.

BONAVENTURA: We had some fun together. I would say the biggest difference is that the relationship between the buyer and the producer has shifted quite a bit. The studio, when I say studio, I mean the buyer, so the streamers, but back at that time, there were no streamers, so there was a symbiotic relationship between the studio and the producer. The producer’s job was to protect the studio. With the corporatization of the studios, they’ve become less and less trusting of partners and more and more judgmental of what we do.

One of the interesting things is our job is to make the star feel good, the director feel good, the studio feel good. As a process, it was a much smoother-running process because there was a sense of commonality in the goal. Now, for whatever reason—and I do think it’s largely the corporization and how they look at it—there’s a breakdown in that sense of utter trust in your producer. That doesn’t mean a studio didn’t see the weakness that the producer may have or the inclination, and adjust to it, but now that fundamental relationship has really changed. It’s one of the reasons why I would say we’ve had some quality issues over the last decade because the producer usually is the first person in and the last person out. So, in a way, they’re the guardian of the DNA of whatever this is. That doesn’t mean they’re right all the time, but you have a much better chance of doing something high-quality if you can protect the DNA.

‘Deep Blue Sea’ Originally “Kept the Wrong Person Alive”

JEREMY LATCHAM: If you could reshoot one scene from any film that you’ve made, what would it be, and what would be the reason for reshooting it? Is it to make the film funnier, more exciting, more emotional? What one moment from any of the films you guys have made would you reshoot if you could?

LEE: For me, it’s a recent movie called Barbarian, which turned out really well. I love how it turned out, but the last shot of the movie was a scene where we threw the main character off a big building, and the monster jumped after her. We just actually ran out of time to shoot everything in one day, which for that one, we needed more time. I just wish we had a little bit more time to reshoot that scene.

GOLDSMAN: I have only once in my career found that one single scene mattered. The movie is either fundamentally working or not working in the DNA. The one time was, of course, Deep Blue Sea, where we made a movie, and then the audience came back and told us we had kept the wrong person alive. So, without actually having the actress return, long before the days of AI, we killed her, rescued LL Cool J, and the scores went up 20 points.

BONAVENTURA: It’s even better. We did the audience preview, and we couldn’t figure out why we were scoring so badly. There was one card that was written by, I think, a stone-cold moron with a crayon in his hand. But he solved it for us because he said, “Save the parrot, kill the bitch.” So, we couldn’t save the parrot, but we killed the bitch.

I can’t believe I didn’t know the story.

BONAVENTURA: I keep looking for that guy. I want him to see all my movies.

How Streaming Has Changed the Feedback on Film
Image by Collider Staff

You guys have all worked with the big studios and the streamers. What is the big difference, if any, between making something for a studio and a streamer?

GOLDSMAN: I think there’s something very strange that’s happened, and I think we’re seeing this clearly: the collapse of the streaming model, at least in terms of the scope and scale that we have become accustomed to in the last few years. They’ve unhooked the metric of viewership to success, which is kind of horrific and counterintuitive because, obviously, what we do is we make things so people will see them. When that correlation vanished, became this more abstract notion of subscribers and generating subscribers and generating an increase of subscribers proportional to the base number they have—very different if you’re Apple or Netflix—then what started to happen was the idiosyncrasy of keeping people’s jobs became more important than the success of the movie.

In the old days, if ya made a hit, ya made a hit. We could have fought, and we could have struggled, and hopefully, we stayed within the bounds of ideal civil struggles—most of the time—and then we all looked at each other, and we went, “Okay, we fought a war together and we won,” or we lost. I remember you called me once, and you said, “I’m calling you today because the movie tanked, and people won’t typically call you when it tanks.” [Laughs] The truth is we become friends; we become teams. It all still kept you connected because you built a thing together, and that thing was then exposed to the world, and the world reacted. Now, because there’s no metric to determine whether something is successful, it is just the people in place who can either take credit or lay blame. That creates the profile of the movie and whether it was successful or not, including the media, and that’s true of television too. That’s really complicated because the proving ground is supposed to be the audience, and it’s not been.

LEE: Although this week is the first week on a project I have with Netflix that they’re negotiating to pick up. The compensation has changed now that they’re changing it to be like a metric of box office bonuses, similar to box office bonuses, where it’s a chart of, “If you hit this amount of viewers, you get this amount of compensation in terms of an increased backend.” So it’s gonna be different now because it motivates the producers to actually do a movie that gets a bigger audience, and actually push and promote and try to make the best movie possible.

You’ve done a lot. Is this brand-new contract stuff?

LEE: Actually, just yesterday they submitted the proposal to me. I actually haven’t even looked at the details yet.

I’ve been hearing that this was coming from Netflix, and even Apple. Everyone is looking at the numbers in a different way. I’m curious if it means, like, if you normally got paid $5, is it now going to be you getting paid $2.50 with a stronger backend?

LEE: Yes. You’re no longer getting the buyout right up front. Before, you’d just get a buyout as if it was sort of a hit, and you’d make that much money. Now, if it gets a lot of viewers, you could get a lot of money.

Got it.

BONAVENTURA: Since we’re on the topic of streamers, I think what both of these guys are saying is what’s happening. The experience of it, I find that it would be great when they tell us it’s better numbers, but it’s still an abstraction because we don’t know what the hell they’re saying to us. Those guys are very smart, and they do not share a lot of the information, which is alien to those of us who worked within the studio system where they share a great deal. Plus, you had, “You did $10 million Friday night,” or, “You did $100,000 Friday night.” You had such a quick sense of accomplishment or failure that I think it was a better proving ground in a way because you really did feel the failure. It’s public, and that’s a different thing. You really don’t want to experience the failure again. I know it sharpened my instincts because every time you failed, you’d go back, like, “How’d that happen? I don’t want that to happen again.” How many subscribers there are, what is the number of people who tuned in—they have a lot of different metrics—how many people actually watched it to the end, and all these things—I don’t find the tangibility of that. I hope that with this new thing, we’re gonna start finding that.

LEE: Yeah. They have to be a little bit more transparent now that advertising is coming on every surface. They have to be transparent with them.

Adapting Popular IP for a “Rabid Fan Base”

SIMON KINBERG: You’ve all worked on big IP-based franchise fanboy/girl movies. I want to know how that is any different—better or worse—than working on original movies that have a sort of civilian, non-fundamentalist fervor to the audience.

BONAVENTURA: It’s interesting, I produced the Transformers, and we have a rabid fan base, thank God. One of the interesting parts about it is there are so many people with so many different opinions that it starts getting really confusing to listen to. I think one of the big differences is you have a fan base that you have to respect when you have a franchise like that. At the same time, I remember when we did the very first movie, I remember the very first reactions when people saw the advertising, was, “Michael Bay ruined my childhood.” They hadn’t even seen the movie. But it tells you how dear they hold their sense memory of it. I find the most turbulent part of it is if you really gave the fans exactly what they asked for, they actually would not be happy because it’s from what they’ve already seen. Our job is to try to hold on to their sense memory but move it forward. The robots are great examples. A lot of people said to us, “Don’t change the robots from the animated TV show.” Well, that would look awful on the big screen. It would have looked awful. So, moving that design forward created a lot of flak, and pleased a lot of people. I think that’s where franchises in particular, big IP, come with this, like, “Alright, how do we balance those two things?”

GOLDSMAN: I agree. I’m sort of a serial adapter, and I’ve adapted things that lots of people have feelings about before they see the movie. I think the rudder remains the same; the rudder is affection. I think that you shouldn’t have a creative point of view about something in any deep way unless you have a deep affection for it. That becomes your guide. You can’t possibly anticipate what everybody wants from a Star Trek episode because so many people want so many different things from a Star Trek episode. But if you are a fan, you know what you would like. If you can bring that point of view, and listen to what other people say they would like, then that’s where you have the opportunity to have some fidelity to the source material and to expanding it. Obviously, in the case of the adaptation of a novel nobody’s read, there’s less reactivity, but still, it has to work, and it has to work on its own terms. That really has to do with whether or not you’ve invested the affection and attention.

LEE: For me, whenever I develop something that’s a huge IP, I always try to find people who have no connection to it, who know nothing about it, to read over our scripts to see if it resonates with them. I want to make sure that anything that we develop will please the fans, which usually is most of the people who are working on the movie, as well as people who have no idea what it is. If you can please both, that’s what easily turns out the best movies, similar to The Lego Movie or with It.

Why the Original ‘I Am Legend’ Ending Changed
Image via Warner Bros. 

All three of you have been involved in so many different projects. What’s the one that changed the most in the editing room in ways you didn’t expect going in?

GOLDSMAN: Gosh, what didn’t?

LEE: There’s one movie called The Strangers where the original version of the movie when we tested it, it tested the lowest test score in Universal history. It was so bad that the studio just wanted to dump the movie. We brought in an editor who just rearranged everything and made a totally different movie that we didn’t even test. Then, when it was released, it turned out to be a hit movie.

GOLDSMAN: I guess now infamously, for me, it’s I Am Legend. Because we made a movie that, although wildly iterative from the [Richard] Matheson novel, very much had fidelity to the source material’s message, which is that we are the monsters. We made that movie, and everybody in the test audience went, first, “Don’t kill the dog.” Never more walkouts, by the way. You can kill the entire population of Earth, but one dog… But we shot this ending, which is now available out there, which is sort of fun, which is what’s now called the “alternative cut,” which was the original cut where Will lives, but mankind is doomed. Everybody in the testing audience said, “No, no, no.” So we went and reshot an ending where, weirdly, Will dies, but mankind is saved. That was considered a happier ending. It’s a very different message than the movie we set out to make, but we did it willingly with crass commercialism in mind. So it goes.

BONAVENTURA: I think it was Under Siege, actually, because the original script was very, very well-written, a very good script, but the tone of it was very different than the tone of what the movie became. We had Gary Busey running around in drag and Playboy Bunnies jumping out of cakes. We had all this kind of crazy stuff that really, at first, we were very timid about including it in the movie. It kind of worked. It was good. Then you started letting all that color go in, and it completely changed the experience of it. So, I think the original cut probably would have been successful, but it would not have been what it was.

It was all about tone, which I think we often find that the balance of the tone, particularly in these really big movies, whether it’s talking apes or talking robots, you think about it on a certain level, and they’re absurd. Your job is to make them feel real. So that’s the tone question. Under Siege is supposed to be like, “Okay, we gotta stop the madman from blowing up Hawaii, but let’s have some fun with the guy running around with the fake boobs and dress.” Gary Busey looked truly absurd. I remember showing it to the studio the first time with all that in there because they didn’t really know that we shot that as we were going along, and there was a lot of shock. Eventually, it became a really big hit, in part because of that.

Francis Ford Coppola Put a Stop to This ‘Apocalypse Now’ Character’s Origins
Image via United Artists

Is there a project for all three of you that you have been trying to push up the hill for a very long time, and for some reason, no one will finance it? Ifyou could get the financing tomorrow, which one would you make?

BONAVENTURA: I have one called Arcadia. It’s a throwback movie to what I think people originally fell in love with with sci-fi, where it’s really thoughtful subject matter and really spare world. You go back to the early Mad Max kind of feel where it’s just the real simplistic elements, and then what is the moral of the story? It’s not uncommercial, but it doesn’t fit in the box. That’s what I would love to do. We’ve been trying for about 10 years now, so it’ll probably take another 10.

GOLDSMAN: Oh, too many to count.

LEE: There’s the one that I would love to make, but it’s just difficult, and you’ll understand why after I explain it. It’s a project called Kurtz. I thought that Heart Of Darkness was in the public domain, which it is, and so we had a script written that was Colonel Kurtz in Vietnam. It’s sort of the origins of Apocalypse Now with Colonel Kurtz. It was like an English language Apocalypto. It turns out that because Francis Coppola had created the version of Kurtz that was in Vietnam, we would have to get his rights in order to do it, and he wanted a lot of money just to do it. It was just impossible to get the clearance to do it.

KELLY MCCORMICK: You guys have connected to some of the most amazing IP. You’ve made incredible films that last for generations. How have you done it? How have you appeased the fans? How have you allowed for filmmaker originality? Also, what is your craziest courtship negotiation to attach someone to that IP?

BONAVENTURA: I was at Warner Bros., and we had never done a movie with Arnold Schwarzenegger. I had a lot of friends within the larger Kennedy-Schwarzerenegger-Shriver world. I was headed to Sun Valley to go skiing, and I knew I would run into Arnold. I’d known him over the years at different family functions, but we’d never gotten him. So, I decided that the way to get Arnold was I would just wait, and I knew there would be this one moment when we’d show up at the ski lift at the same time, and Arnold would say, “Come on, Lorenzo! Come on with me.” And it happened, and on the ski lift, the two of us were talking, and Arnold pointed out that he’d never done a movie for Warner Bros. and why doesn’t Warner Bros. like him? Don’t we have anything for him? At that point, I unzipped my ski suit, I reached in, pulled out the script, and said, “Here, Arnold. This is the one we want to do.” He has a great sense of humor, so of course, he laughed, and then he ended up doing the movie. It was called Eraser.

Related This Arnold Schwarzenegger Classic Marked the Death of ’80s Action Movies “You’re luggage!”

How long were you standing there waiting for him?

BONAVENTURA: Well, it was probably the third day of skiing, so that script was getting beat up. I didn’t have the foresight to remember to bring a new one each day.

Lesson learned.

BONAVENTURA: But we will go to any length, particularly the bigger the movie star. We’ll go to whatever it takes. I’m a huge fan of movie star movies. Not every movie, obviously, but I like to give over my faith or the morality of the story, or whatever it is, to that guy or girl, so I’ll go to just about any length.

GOLDSMAN: I was being asked to work on The Client, which was a movie that Joel Schumacher was directing. I had never done much of anything, and suddenly Joel Schumacher was off to Cannes with a movie called Falling Down, and I was to go meet with Susan [Sarandon], who decided that she hated the script that had been written, and my job was to have a conversation with her and keep her in the movie. So, it was not a writing function, it was a quasi-producing function. So, off I went.

I was besotted with Susan Sarandon. I couldn’t imagine that I was suddenly flying to New York to go to her apartment. I thought of all the things I was going to say to her to try to convince her that the next version of the script would be great, that Joel had a point of view that was going to be incredibly successful, that there were themes here in The Client about age and race. That was the first time I’d ever flown first class, so there I was in first class, and Walter Koenig, who played Chekhov, was in first class, too, and I spent the whole time not asking to get an autograph. I got to Susan Sarandon’s apartment, and there she was. It was a loft, and Tim Robbins was her husband, who’s very tall, and I just said, “Oh my god, I loved you in The Rocky Horror Picture Show! “Touch-A Touch-A Touch-A Touch Me” is my favorite.” Anyway, it worked.

Image via 20th Century Fox

LEE: For me, it’s not an actor, but Stephen King is one of my favorite authors, and I had been chasing the project, The Long Walk, for years. For over 20 years, I was asking. At first, he had no idea who I was. I would just send him letters and talk to his assistant to see if there was any way to get The Long Walk. I always got a no, for 20 years. Even after It, he finally said anything that he had that was available I could do, and unfortunately, The Long Walk was with Frank Darabont, and then it was with various other directors and producers. It was only about a year ago that the rights became available and that I got a call saying, “You want to try to do The Long Walk?” I actually just flew, yesterday, back from the set. We just started the first week of production for The Long Walk.

For people who don’t know, who do you have in the film and who is directing?

LEE: Frances Lawrence, who’s friends with all of us here at the table, is directing the movie. We just announced today that Mark Hamill is one of the stars of the movie.

ALEX KURTZMAN: Obviously, streaming has changed the way movies and television are made. I’m curious to know how it’s changed since you started as a producer and what new opportunities exist for you as producers.

BONAVENTURA: As a producer, there’s less support now because the education system for the executives growing up, and junior producers, has diminished. You would always turn to a studio and go, “Alright, they’re gonna know the answer here,” and we’re constantly now being put in a position of being the ones who are trying to provide the answer. The difficulty of that is twofold. One is we don’t know at all, and we’re counting on some other people to help us and have that perspective, but also, if their training is such that they don’t understand the situation—try moving that battleship when they understand where they’re going—when they don’t understand where they’re going, it’s nearly impossible.

GOLDSMAN: Yeah, this is really significant. We used to survive by inheriting institutional memory. There would be systems in place and they were tried and true. They were studio systems, and they were calcified and intransigent, and also predictable and reliable. They afforded you guard rails that sometimes were terrible because they were guard rails, but often safe. When I say safe, I mean, so you didn’t kill yourself and the other people on the road. So fundamentally, those systems have collapsed. The institutional memory is gone. And at the same time—and this is the very strange part which some of you will really understand—we’ve gotten old. When you get old, you are suddenly one of the people who’s supposed to have the answers. It’s great, but the folks who were older than us who had the answers and the institutions that held on to that knowledge have, in large part, fallen away. So, we’re sage old people who are at least two-thirds of the time faking it, which is great when it works, but terrible when there’s actually no one to look to to say, “What do we do now?”

What Ever Happened to the Joel Schumacher Cut of ‘Batman Forever’?
Image via Warner Bros. 

I have some individual questions for you guys. Akiva, there’s been a lot of talk about a [Joel] Schumacher cut of Batman Forever.

GOLDSMAN: Yes, there has.

Does it exist? Have you seen it?

GOLDSMAN: Yes, it does. Yes, I have. There is a preview called Preview 1, which Joel previewed, ergo the name. It was most of the material that is available put back together. There’s not a lot out there that folks haven’t seen that you couldn’t cobble. I did talk to Warners—this is one administration ago—and they found the cut. My fantasy was to try to resurrect it as a sort of celebration of Joel after he died and to dedicate a cut to him. It was darker. It was very much, you know, Bruce was haunted by his past, he felt guilty. It’s all the stuff you’ve read, none of it’s mysterious, but it was a more modern interpretation of the narrative, ones that we’ve sort of caught up with now. I’ve seen it. It was put back together. There are some visual effects that need to be finished. There would be some music that would have to be, if not rescored, rewritten and cloned. The whole thing, soup to nuts, was about a million bucks. They were on the verge of doing it, and then Warners got sold again. So, it sort of went the way of all flesh. Now there’s a whole other DC; it’s new again. I will, once the new DC world is moving forward, bat my eyes at everybody again and see if, once more, we can resurrect it.

I really hope it happens. I just want to see it.

Akiva Goldsman Is Writing ‘Practical Magic 2’
Image by Jefferson Chacon

Of all the things you worked on, how shocked are you that Practical Magic is getting a sequel?

GOLDSMAN: I mean, please! It’s the only thing that I’ve worked on that my children have seen any of. They just fast-forwarded through the parts that weren’t for them. So it’s great because my daughters will now actually be involved in talking to me about something I’ve done. Maybe.

Are you involved at all in the sequel?

GOLDSMAN: Yeah, I’m writing. Which it’s Hollywood, so marginal involvement.

Are you writing it right now?

GOLDSMAN: No, I’m writing Constantine right now, and if I don’t leave now and finish it, Lorenzo will hit me.

What to Expect from the “Minecraft’ Movie

Roy, I’m gonna jump in with you. You are producing the Minecraft movie, so what can you tell people about it?

LEE: Nothing. It comes out next year. That’s about all I can tell you. It stars Jason Momoa and Jack Black.

Will the movie retain the game’s monster designs?

LEE: Yes, it will, but in live-action.

Is it more like The Lego Movie, Barbie, or more like The Super Mario Bros. Movie? What would you compare it to?

LEE: It’s more like The Lego Movie, live-action. It has a comedic tone. Jared Hess, who had done Napoleon Dynamite, is directing it.

You have been developing Dragon’s Lair at Netflix for forever. What’s the status?

LEE: The status has changed a lot. Originally, it was gonna be one of the movies that was gonna be like a choose your own adventure. They had that Black Mirror episode where you could decide the fate of the characters, and that’s the way we had originally developed it. We had a 400-page script because you could go different directions and go different ways, and Ryan Reynolds was gonna play Dirk the Daring, but they pulled the plug on that format. Now, we’re reconfiguring it as a straight, linear movie.

Oh, so do you have someone writing the script now?

LEE: Yep. It’s the same writers. They just had to take the 400-page script and pare it down.

The ‘Bioshock’ Movie Has Been “Reconfigured”
Image via 2K Games

You have been working on Bioshock for a long time. Can you tell anybody any updates?

LEE: Same thing. Reconfigured. It was originally done with the previous regime, and the new regime has lowered the budgets on some things, so we’re doing a much smaller version of the movie. But it’s eventually going to get made with Frances Lawrence directing.

You could go harder with it if you’re not making a $200 million movie. You could maybe do more boundary-pushing.

LEE: It’s gonna be on a more personal point of view as opposed to a grander, big, epic movie.

Lorenzo, a lot of people don’t realize that when you were at Warner Bros., you were the one who bought Harry Potter. Talk a little bit about what it was that said, “Oh, we need to buy this.”

BONAVENTURA: It was a great book. We got it in galleys, which is before it’s been published. It’d been submitted by David Hayman, who was the provincial producer, and at first, I didn’t rush to read it because it’s a kid’s book. That’s how it was described to me. Then eventually, when I did take a look at it, I was like, “This is not a kid’s book. This is an everybody’s book.” So we bought it, and then I promptly got a call from one of my bosses going, “What are you doing? You spent so much money on a kid’s book.” It was a good chunk of change, and it was more than we would normally spend on, quote, an adult book, too. I was like, “Well, it’s not really that. It’s for everybody,” and they’re like, “No, it’s either animated or they’re small.” I said, “Well, this is not animated and it’s big.”

I then hired Steve Kloves to write it, who was known for dark, violent, sophisticated characters, and a very expensive writer—and by the way, stayed with the franchise for every single movie. Then I got that call, like, “Okay, what are you doing? I don’t get it.” It was basically $2 million bucks at that time, and I said, “Well, Steve’s great. He’s gonna do a really great job!” Then the book gets published, and I wanna say two or three months after that call about, “What the hell are you doing,” Harry Potter appeared on the cover of Time magazine. I never got the call, “You knew what you were doing!” [Laughs]

A G.I. Joe and Transformers Crossover Is in the Works

Image by Tania Hussain

We’ve talked for many years about G.I. Joe, Transformers, and if they’ll ever meet up. There’s talk that Chris Hemsworth and you guys are working on a Transformers/G.I. Joe movie. Is this the case? What’s going on?

BONAVENTURA: We are definitely in the process of figuring out how to integrate G.I. Joe and Transformers. We’re in the creative process. We really have not discovered the key to that yet because one of the difficulties with it is there are so many characters that you feel you have to service, and when you do that, you never really deliver any good characters. So the trick here is to figure out how do you combine these two worlds with the least number of people or robots? That’s where it’s a big trick that we’re trying to figure out. So, we’re working with that.

We do intend to bring back G.I. Joe, a standalone. We’ve created a complication for ourselves because we just did the animated movie, and to our wonder and to our real happiness, because there are no human characters in the animated movie, the characters of the robots are so much more sophisticated and rounded. They cost too much in live-action, so we’re always trying to figure out how few words we can get from that, whereas, the animation is all the same. So, we’ve set a third problem for ourselves here, which is now the audience would be disappointed if we return to the same level of characterization we’ve had up to now.

‘Transformers One’ Creates a Problem for the Future of the Franchise

It’s funny you say that because I’ve seen Transformers One. It’s fantastic, and fans are gonna love it. What can you actually tease people about Transformers One?

BONAVENTURA: We’ve talked about wanting to do this story for almost 20 years. The thing about it is, it is literally a great origin story. You don’t have to make up anything. You do always make up something, but in it’s form, it is a story of two best friends who become mortal enemies. It’s biblical. There are a lot of great things. We always strive to make character-based action-adventure movies, but we often don’t quite get there on the characters, and this movie is only about the characters. It’s really very little about anything else. So, it proved to be a really great decision to go take that story and do it. It’s gonna cause problems because now people are gonna want the robots like that, so we’re gonna have to figure that out.

I saw the version in 2D and I’m absolutely seeing it in 3D when it comes out. Can you touch on the what ILM did with the animation? It looks fantastic.

BONAVENTURA: It’s two things. ILM did a phenomenal job, but our production designer and our director really had a great imagination, and both are hardcore Transformers fans. Our goal when we hired them was to create something we’ve never seen in the series—the color of it, in particular. Every time we’ve seen Cybertron, Cybertron looks metal and dark and kind of inhospitable. We were like, “Why?” So we turn to the purples and yellows and give it a life. The design of it, through the execution of it, really is beautiful, and lived up to the highest bar that we were trying to get to.

How ‘Constantine’ Was Brought Back from Hollywood Hell

You guys touched on Constantine a little earlier, and I want to go back to that. What’s the status? What’s going on? How is it going?

GOLDSMAN: It’s going fine. I’m writing a script about Constantine 2. It’s good. I hope to have a script for my partners soon.

How long have you been working on the script?

GOLDSMAN: Yes. [Laughs]

Are you surprised that it’s finally gaining momentum? I remember we talked a number of years ago. We talked virtually with Keanu [Reeves], you, Frances Lawrence, and I. We talked about the possibility. Did that help?

GOLDSMAN: Yes. You get to be one of the patron saints of this redux. Fundamentally what happened was we went through a bunch of different lives at Warner Bros. We have always been trying very hard to reconvene the group from the first movie. Frances and Keanu, in particular, had very much wanted to revisit the character. As I’m sure those of you who follow this know—and those of you who don’t shouldn’t—the movie we made, we thought was PG-13, and then it was R because of demons. So, everybody sort of felt like, “Gee, if it was going to be R, we might have dug a little more deeply into some of the stuff we were working with.”

There was always this desire, if not lurching, to try to redo it. We tried it for TV, and we could never quite get the rights back; the rights were sort of going around. There was a sort of ground swell—there was a TV series somewhere in there. Then Keanu went on Colbert—not two nights ago when he did it again, but a few years ago, and said, “It’s the one character I’d like to revisit,” and you’d be stunned what would do when it comes to a studio’s enthusiasm. Shocking. So, life returned.

BONAVENTURA: Particularly, right after John Wick.

GOLDSMAN: Yes, that did help.

At least you can say you’re writing an R-rated script.

GOLDSMAN: Oh, I can’t say that. I’m definitely writing a script about Constantine 2.

BONAVENTURA: What’s funny about Constantine is I was trying to get a green light, then I ended up becoming one of the producers as I left the studio. Our boss was an ardent anti-smoker, and he was absolutely against this movie because he’s a character. So, there are funny things that get movies made. This is what happened, I went to him and said, “This is an anti-smoking movie.” And he said, “What do you mean?” I said, “He gets cancer.” It got greenlit.

That’s fantastic.

‘I Am Legend 2’ Will Be a Sequel to the Alternate Cut
“It’s not your father’s I Am Legend.”
Custom Image by Zanda Rice

Let’s talk about the other one, which is I Am Legend 2.

GOLDSMAN: Here’s what’s going on with I Am Legend 2.

BONAVENTURA: Are you writing this one, too?

GOLDSMAN: I am.

BONAVENTURA: Shit.

GOLDSMAN: I wrote a draft. The idea is both Michael B. Jordan and Will Smith. I wrote a draft, and that draft put me and Will and Mike, and our producing partners in a room where we spent a week doing really fun stuff of talking story. I wrote another draft based on that week, and I imagine there will be some very good news shortly.

Oh, so we’re close? That’s interesting. And the thing is, I believe you’re posing to the audience that, obviously, Will did not die at the end of the film.

GOLDSMAN: We’re sequelizing the alternate cut. The one that we were talking about earlier, where Will lives and things didn’t go so well for humanity.

What’s interesting about both of these projects is that both are going to play, I would imagine, with the real use of time for these characters. So, what’s happened with Constantine over the 20 years, and what’s happened in the world of I Am Legend over those decades?

GOLDSMAN: I will tell you something about Legend: it’s counterintuitive what happens to New York after 30 years. You imagine a post-apocalyptic scenario, but if you actually do research about what happens to cities, it’s pretty much the opposite. The world returns, and it returns in a way that is kind of spectacular. So, that’s a really exciting playground for all of us because it’s not what you imagine. It’s not your father’s I Am Legend.

‘Red,’ ‘A Beautiful Mind,’ and ‘The Departed’ Were Almost Very Different Movies

BRAD FURMAN: The recently late but amazingly inspiring Al Ruddy once told me that the actor you get to star in your movie is actually the one you were meant to have. I have not only argued with him but wrestled with that question many times. You guys have made so many classic, super cool films. I’m wondering if you feel that’s actually true or if many times you settle for less having to get an actor that ultimately you felt triggered the financing to get the movie made, whatever the case may be, and if you agree or not with Mr. Ruddy.

GOLDSMAN: When the movie works.

BONAVENTURA: That was perfectly said. You know what? I have a funny story. When we made the movie Red, we got literally the first choice for every one of those roles except one because [John] Malkovich was unavailable. So the studio came to us and said, “John C. Reilly is the guy who will get this movie made.” I brought John C. onto Perfect Storm, so I said, “I’ve known him a long time. He commits. The movie’s a green-lit movie.” Three weeks before we’re starting, John C. Reilly said, “No, I’m out.” Studio goes, “Uh oh, now what are we gonna do?” He’d just done Step Brothers, so he was the guy who was gonna get the young males because of the comedy. So, we had this horrible experience where the movie started to fall apart. Finally, they said, “Well, who would you want?” They’re like, “We always wanted John Malkovich.” John Malkovich had a movie fall apart, and so he came back into it. So I both hate John C. Reilly for putting us through that and love him for getting us Malkovich.

GOLDSMAN: I used to have a headline, it was a Hollywood Reporter article announcing the Tom Cruise/Robert Redford pairing of director and star of A Beautiful Mind, with no writer, by the way. So somebody had written “writer to be named later,” and stuck it in, even though it was based on my screenplay. I was like, “Everything has happened perfectly,” and then, of course, none of that happened. Then I thought, “My life is ruined. The thing that I love the most will never get made.” And with all due respect to Robert Redford and to Tom Cruise, Ron Howard and Russell Crowe were the people who were supposed to make that movie. So, sometimes it does find its way.

LEE: For me, it was Robert De Niro who was supposed to be in The Departed. At the time, he was gonna play the role that ended up being Martin Sheen. Martin Sheen did a great job, but it was unfortunate because Robert De Niro was gonna direct a movie, The Good Shepherd, at the time when we were shooting, so he had to drop out. I don’t know if we were green-lit because of De Niro at the time, but it was moving forward with him. I wish it was him, but it was still good with Sheen.

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