CHRIS NEUMER: In our first interview we couldn’t touch on everything that we wanted to–you went off on these wonderfully long tangents at times–and we never ended up going back. I say that in a positive way too, it really, really, really beats having to poke you with a sharp stick to get stuff out of you. So that’s what we’re doing today. We’re clarifying and getting extra sentences. You had said, "The script is everything. You can compromise almost anywhere else, but not on the script." Where are the decisions in the process that you can compromise most easily?
PETER GUBER: Cost. You can make almost any picture for almost any price. I’m not saying you can make Star Wars for $750,000, but we’re talking about variations. You can make almost any picture for any price. I made films like Rain Man and it cost me $23 million. Could have be made for $2 million and ended up as a television movie. It could have easily been made that way. You could have made almost any film for a television movie budget. Even less if you want to. History has proved that nobody goes to the movie theater and says, "Let’s go see this movie because it cost $74 million." They don’t do that. That’s number one as a compromise. The second is probably elements–locations. Most anywhere. You can’t do an underwater picture in the desert, but the idea here is that for most films, locations are an enhancement, not the element that drives it all. There are a lot of ways to make the picture work.
CHRIS NEUMER: You say that though and I’m thinking if Jim Cameron heard about that underwater project in the desert, he might be up for it.
PETER GUBER: He might be able to make it work too. On the economic side, we all know that adversity is a good force for creativity. It makes people less flaccid. You can see in films like Good Night and Good Luck or Crash, a whole host of films. The people had to struggle to get the economics in line with their passion.
CHRIS NEUMER: So you’re saying that if you limited resources that it forces you to be more creative with the resources that you do have?
PETER GUBER: And with the time and the energy and the commitment that people have. If you offer someone an enormous amount of money to do a picture and they have financial constraints in their life that otherwise bother them and this would solve the problem, they would be more inclined to do a picture that they wouldn’t otherwise do. You do see those kinds of things happen. People being bought into movies. Money is a funny thing. So the short answer to your question is money, location, and after that even cast can be compromised.
CHRIS NEUMER: Everything can be compromised, but money and location are the easiest ones.
PETER GUBER: They are the easiest ones. I think that you can make a hit picture without spending $20 million on your lead actor. So cast can be compromised.
CHRIS NEUMER: But that really just goes back to the money.
PETER GUBER: Yeah, it does go back to the money. A function of money. A function of you don’t get the big star who doesn’t want to do it and the picture can still be a success.
CHRIS NEUMER: You told me, and this is a direct quote and it tailed off at the end because we’d gone onto something else, but could you finish this sentence for me. "Anybody who has done it and been successful and doesn’t marvel at how they did it…" and then you trail off.
PETER GUBER: … Fails to get the real uncertainty of the process. That uncertainty is the birthplace of creativity. They realize that they were uncertain through so much of the project and they marvel at that and yet it came to this beautiful place, this successful landing, this great place. They recognize that the creativity grew out of the uncertainty. I always say that the fact of the success depends on how much uncertainty you can reasonably handle. If you’re too certain you’re dealing with an elasticeous formula for success. If you’re really uncertain you’re dealing with the true place of creativity.
CHRIS NEUMER: That touches on something else you said that risk and creativity are bonded. Can you expand on that?
PETER GUBER: The idea that–just the word creativity means the idea of some incremental change from the ordinary, from the certainty and the predictability. When you start operating in the red zone, where the knowing is less than the mystery. When the mystery is more than the know, you’re tapping into your intuitive self, your best creative self. That self doesn’t say, "How do it?" "How do I?", it says, "What if we tried this?", "What if?" Being at risk means being the most creative.
CHRIS NEUMER: And you want this to happen in pre-production, not necessarily on set.
PETER GUBER: The idea is that preparation is the tool for mastery, no doubt about that. So you want to prepare it, you want to fully prepare it. And in that preparation there is that creativity and that risk, that willingness to not know. At the same time you want to have a blueprint, a schematic, a script that a collaborative enterprise like filmmaking can all operate on. The director, the actors, the wardrobe people, the production design people can all get together and collaborate on it. The blueprint is that script. You want serendipity to happen, you want magic to happen, you want the words to be adjusted because of the light or some spontaneous element that happens between the characters or because of an epiphany of an actor to play it differently or something happens that you trade off.
CHRIS NEUMER: But you want to go into it with an idea of where it’s going and if something happens to change you roll with it as opposed to a Mary Reilly situation where you show up on set and say, "I’m not sure exactly what we’re doing, but we’ll figure it out."
PETER GUBER: The answer is yes… and no. The idea of recognizing that–the script gives you a rudder, a steering position a navigational state, but the journey isn’t the rudder, the journey is the variations that happen, the colors that happen in that that you take advantage of. Many films start out with recognizing–they have it all down on paper and everybody’s rehearsed it and it’s fine. However, there’s just as much uncertainty in that as a situation where someone says, "We’ve got a good starting point and I think we’re in good shape, but we don’t have everything worked out." There’s an equal amount of uncertainty, it’s just that the recognition is different.
CHRIS NEUMER: You were talking about Sunday Morning Shootout and you said, "Bart comes from his head, I come from my gut." I wanted to find out, what is the major applicable between approaching something with your head and your gut?
PETER GUBER: He has a lot of intellectual capitol. He’s a writer, a journalist, and in the last ten years, he’s an observer and commentator on the entertainment business at the very highest of levels. He has an enormous amount of resources at his fingertips, the whole company. In collaborating and competing–and we do that at differing times during the shows–he comes from utilizing all his resources, his information base and his intellect and has a thoughtful and intellectually insightful view of an issue or a problem. He’s figured it out all meticulously before the show or the interview or the discussion of the issue. For myself, I’ve not been a commentator of that, so I come from a more intuitive, visceral place, having done it all.
CHRIS NEUMER: I don’t mean to interrupt, but how does this manifest itself?
PETER GUBER: He’s basically very unemotional about his approach, in style. He can get mad, but he’s unemotional about it. He believes that the facts speak for themselves. I believe that the facts are only half of the fantasy. There are a lot of things operating on the periphery that reforms the process in a unique way. For example, he’ll talk about the fact that the capitol coming into the business allows it to be robust, for the studios to be more daring with their choices–and I’m paraphrasing–so that the studios can be less risk averse. My view is, WHOA!!!!!!!!!! You just let the fox in the chicken coop. That’s a very dangerous thing. You’ve just let $500 million of currency come into your company and you’ve allowed these companies to deploy that capital in other places. When that money dries up, and it will dry up, you’ll never get them to put that capital back in. So it’s a very dangerous proposition because emotionally, we know that once somebody’s on the dole, it’s very hard to break them. Getting the money from someone other than themselves. And when you’re spending other people’s money, you have a different sensibility than when you’re spending your own. I come from an emotional place.
CHRIS NEUMER: So you’re–
PETER GUBER: I can’t prove it, but that’s how I feel.
CHRIS NEUMER: Well no. But when you’re a producer and making a project, is it just the type thing where you’d read a script and think, "This has something, I don’t know what, but it has something?" whereas he’d think, "this would be a great film to target 18-25 year olds?"
PETER GUBER: No, I don’t think that. No. There’s more of an analytical view of the business. On an individual picture, I think he reads the script and decides whether it moves him. As a producer–he has produced movies–I think he exercises his talents and energies that way, pretty much the way I do too. He looks at it as to whether he can assemble the kinds of people that he believes will get the picture made. He’s very pragmatic about it and good. I’m kind of a whirling dervish. If the story appeals to me passionately, I just am unconditionally committed to its execution. Sometimes I have to figure it out along the way–which everyone has to do anyway–but I surrender to that process more easily, I think. I’ve made pictures for him, he’s made pictures for me at studios and so I can’t speak for him in this regard because he may see it differently, but my observation is that his analytic self is so powerful that it mandates the result. My emotional self is so powerful that it mandates the process.
CHRIS NEUMER: That’s a great summary. We were talking about something involving good and bad filmmaking and you said, "I’ve made both." You went on to say that the key to making something bad was learning from the experience. I wanted to get some specifics from you. Was there anything specific that you learned from one of the films you made that you consider a flop?
PETER GUBER: I learned that on several films the following that if you surrender the vision of the project and surrender the reason d’etre of your passion, if you surrender it to getting it made, you usually have a catastrophic journey or worse yet, a catastrophic result.
CHRIS NEUMER: I’m not looking for dirt, but is there some specific you could attach to this?
PETER GUBER: It’s not dirt, what happens is: you invest yourself in a project, I’ll give you an example, there was a movie Clan of the Cave Bear, it was 15, 16, 17 years ago [editor note: Clan of the Cave Bear was released in 1986]. Jean Auel wrote a number of very big books, number one bestsellers. We acquired that property and the view was to try and see if we could experience the idea that language was a limited resource for our ancestors… but emotion wasn’t. There was always emotion. Emotion drove our belief systems, emotion drove the process of survival and language was a tool that grew out of that. It wasn’t the other way around. That film had no English language in it. They put subtitles on it and when we had the book–John Sayles was the writer and Michael Chapman was the cinematographer, we had Daryl Hannah played Ayla. She’d just been in Splash and was perfect. She was the right description for the film. She got the vibe of the film perfectly. Surrendering to get it made was putting the subtitles in and they wouldn’t do it.
CHRIS NEUMER: You didn’t want it and they did?
PETER GUBER: Yup. I surrendered it to get it made. There’s making a film and making it great. There’s making a film and making it right and making a film and making it good. Sometimes you surrender the really good for the getting it made and then you don’t have anything. The idea was the struggle of understanding the language–which [the characters] didn’t even understand in the film–we thought was a fundamental precept of making the film work, of having the audience have an experiential element. Now, truthfully do I think it would have succeeded if the flaw was deeper in the film than that? Yes, I think the flaw was deeper. But the flaw in me was surrendering the creative artifice. It was clearly that. That was the flaw in me.
CHRIS NEUMER: This was your passion driving you forward.
PETER GUBER: Yes.
CHRIS NEUMER: We had touched on this earlier, you had talked about your time over at Sony and how you had taken some things from that over here to Mandalay. I hadn’t gotten any specifics about that but wanted to delve a little deeper into that.
PETER GUBER: Every process you go through should inform your future processes because you have good things and difficult things and challenging things and positive things that happen to you and they’re learning experiences. Success isn’t the end of the journey. Success is an on-going process. You have to constantly reform.
CHRIS NEUMER: I think I have a poster that says that on it.
PETER GUBER: Okay… So the idea is that–and failure is an inevitable cul-de-sac on the other side of the road to success. You always are going to have things that fail.
CHRIS NEUMER: I got rid of that poster.
PETER GUBER: But you can’t get rid of it in your life because if you’ve done anything with risk, you’ve failed.
CHRIS NEUMER: Yes.
PETER GUBER: Articles, stories, stuff you look back on and think, "God, did I write that? I must have been drunk."
CHRIS NEUMER: Well, I suppose you can get around that by not taking chances, but the option of success without risk is minimal.
PETER GUBER: (grinning) Back to our original thing where creativity lies. So what you looked at, was that you recognized the following. What I learned was the following: one is that when you recognize the inevitable, you have to take action. You have to take action. Be active in your own rescue. I recognize many times at Sony and at Columbia years before that and PolyGram, I realized that I wasn’t being conscious of forces around me that were effecting the result. I felt that by willing it through that it would get there, as opposed to recognizing it and being active in my own rescue. Recognizing that those forces were extremely powerful. I misread how powerful those forces were.
CHRIS NEUMER: Now–
PETER GUBER: Example?
CHRIS NEUMER: Sure. Particularly around your use of the words ‘inevitable’ and ‘forces’.
PETER GUBER: When Sony bought our company, we had a public company and we were major shareholders, they had already bought Columbia pictures and they bought our company and asked me to run it and some of the people they can run it. What I recognized was, and this was back in 1990 when the Japanese were being vilified for buying America, I could never, ever, ever, never, never, ever, ever, ever get out of that story. No matter what I would do, no matter how I would try it, everybody who would come into the office, every yump and every great journalist would focus on the same question. No matter how many times I said, "I didn’t buy Columbia Pictures." No matter how many times I said, "I didn’t buy Columbia Pictures, I didn’t enter into any of the negotiations, I didn’t do anything, and I’m not involved in it. I am an executive in the company," they didn’t want to hear that story, they didn’t want to print that story, they just wanted to make [me] the poster boy for the Japanese buying American. For Rockefeller Center and all that.
CHRIS NEUMER: You’d figure they might pick someone Japanese for that.
PETER GUBER: For Rockefeller Center?
CHRIS NEUMER: No, for the face of Japanese buying America.
PETER GUBER: Well no, most definitely not. You can that with them picking Howard String to run all of Sony including their electronics company. That was not their intention. But, the point was, had I recognized that fully that I could never get off that no matter what I said or did, that I could never get off that story because it sold your tickets. It didn’t sell my tickets, but it sold magazines to take the Columbia lady and wrap her in a Japanese flag. That sold their tickets. They didn’t care about the truth, they just wanted to sell that story. They started in with it and it went on for years. It’s still going on! It just goes on. If I had recognized that, I would have handled it differently.
CHRIS NEUMER: How so?
PETER GUBER: I would have spoken to that issue from the very beginning. I would have said, "Talk to them, they bought the company." So that’s the main thing I would have looked at. So what happened was that the press became an adversary. The company began to look at it as an adversary. So when you look at someone like an adversary and you treat them like an adversary, they ARE an adversary. Now, I looked at that and I don’t look at the press as an adversary, but I don’t look at them as an ally either. Because they have their own tickets to sell… and if I was in their position, I would too. So I look at them as a peripheral component to telling our stories or in being involved with our products. I do realize going into it that they have their own tickets to sell and their own motivations for doing the story. They have their own questions about what the truth of the matter is and they can be just as accurate as anybody else’s, but I don’t have that false ideal. As Jack Nicholson says, "Fuck fear, it’s only a point of view." It’s only a point of view. So I recognized that, that’s one of the things I learned from that experience.
CHRIS NEUMER: So you now deal with the press in a significantly different way? In terms of more guardedly now?
PETER GUBER: Not more guardedly. My attitude is different, not my aptitude. I tell you exactly what my truth it. My attitude is that you–not you personally, but you as the estate–
CHRIS NEUMER: Well, I’m part of the estate, yeah.
PETER GUBER: I’m saying you as the estate meaning the whole group, comes to the party with their point of view, with their own biases, with their own articulations and their own editorial slant and if you embrace that and go into that recognizing that, you’re smart! If you go in thinking that you’re somehow going to have a different result than the result that they want, you’re stupid. So now I say to myself, "If I enter into a discussion with somebody, I recognize that they’re going to print what they want." I don’t start out like this (raises his fists), if I do, I shouldn’t do the conversation or the interview with the press. I don’t start like that. I start like this (leans away), but I’m aware that I’m starting like this and that there may be something written about it that I don’t like or there may be an approach that I don’t like. So I’m more thoughtful about it. So I have different expectations.
CHRIS NEUMER: Last thing and this relates to Sunday Morning Shootout. You’ve statement that you don’t consider yourself a journalist.
PETER GUBER: (laughs) Definitely not.
CHRIS NEUMER: Work with me here on this, has your new found appreciation for dealing with the press in any way translated over to your interviewing approach on the show?
PETER GUBER: Very much. A hundred–a thousand percent. It’s exactly the right question. That is what the difference is. The difference is this–and I think it’s one of the reasons that the show has succeeded–if you ask someone on a live program and you ask George Clooney a question or Mel Gibson a question, "What do you mean you weren’t able to get a distribution deal for your picture, The Passion of the Christ?" When you ask that question you can do so every bit as good as me, probably even better than me. You can frame it. Definitely better than me. Okay. He answers it. I can ask the second question a hundred times better than you because I’m coming from an experience of having worked with Mel Gibson of having made those pictures, done documentaries, been the distributor, been the exhibitor, been the producer, so I’m coming from a position with experiential equality and he knows that he can’t bullshit me. That’s the difference.
CHRIS NEUMER: You’re sort of answering a question that’s slightly left of what I’m asking. Your background enables you to ask a wholesale series of follow up questions that I am hard pressed to even think of–
PETER GUBER: Because you don’t have the experience.
CHRIS NEUMER: True. But you were saying that, and I’ll use me as the example, I’m going into this interview using my biases. That was the part that you had to recognize in the press: that they had their own agenda. What I’m asking you–
PETER GUBER: Do I realize that about myself?
CHRIS NEUMER: You obviously have biases–
PETER GUBER: 100 percent right.
CHRIS NEUMER: Do you do anything special so that your biases don’t come out during the interviews?
PETER GUBER: No. And you want to know why? That’s a good question. Because I don’t consider that I’m doing an interview with him. I’m just having a conversation with him. As if I was just sitting at a coffee shop rapping with you, I’d say, "So, you can tell me that you didn’t come in with some bias, something about me that you’d read about who I was?" And we’d talk back and forth and argue. What I don’t do is: I generally prepare the first question, I think about it and research it and maybe we’ll have four questions for each subject and then I let it go where it’s going to go. So I’m working on having it be–when I’m interviewing I want to be interested–
CHRIS NEUMER: As opposed to interesting, which is the journalist. You’ve covered that.
PETER GUBER: So I’m trying on being both in a conversation. In a conversation you’re not pitching and catching, so with Bart as a foil and me for him we engage each other while we’re engaging each other.
CHRIS NEUMER: And a journalist would probably be loath to call someone an idiot or call somebody out on their bullshit.
PETER GUBER: That’s right. And the other part of that that’s interesting–and you touched on this–I’m not so much interested in their aptitude…
CHRIS NEUMER: The subjects or the journalists.
PETER GUBER: Them [the subjects]. I’m not interested in the hows. How they got it made or how did they do it.
CHRIS NEUMER: How come?
PETER GUBER: Yeah. What drove the process? When I was doing a conversation Brian Grazer and Ron Howard and we were talking about partnerships and I asked Brian, "How does Ron serve you?" He looked at me like I was crazy. "I do this and that." But no, "What do you get from this relationship? How does it serve you?" Because each party has to serve the other in a partnership. It’s got to be that way. Even if you don’t know the reason, it’s got to happen or it won’t stay. He was uncomfortable with the question because it his heart–and I said to him–in your heart you can leverage him and you don’t want to say that.
CHRIS NEUMER: This is Brian or Ron?
PETER GUBER: This is me saying to Brian about Ron. I said you’ve got a thousand pound gorilla when you’re there. The director’s a rarer commodity than the producer. He said, "Yeah, yeah." Finally! But I knew that because I’d been in that place. And he said to me later that he’d never thought of it that way. It’s that kind of thing. Not how did you meet or how do you divide up the money.
CHRIS NEUMER: Yeah, you leave those to Jay Leno.
