It takes a lot for a producer to get a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, but that's how influential Mike Medavoy has been in the movie business. From his time as a hotshot agent in the mid-70s, when he spent his days nurturing the careers of new artists like Steven Spielberg, Jane Fonda and Francis Ford Coppola, to his stint at United Artists when he produced such films as Rocky, Apocalypse Now and Annie Hall, to his co-founding of Orion Pictures and eventful tenure as the head of TriStar Pictures, during which he piled up credits like Robocop, Silence of the Lambs and Platoon, Medavoy has been a key player in the overall creative development of Hollywood during the last forty years as well as a guiding force in the careers of more legends than most producers will ever even meet.
One of those legends is Martin Scorsese, whose 1980 classic Raging Bull was a movie nobody was going to make until Medavoy's company agreed to Irwin Winkler's idea to package it together with Rocky II: while financing a second, cash-machine Rocky film, they would also take a chance on Scorsese's riskier boxing story. The rest is cinema history, and this week marks the latest collaboration between Scorsese and Medavoy (today the chief of his own production company, Phoenix Pictures) as they roll out Shutter Island, a beautifully crafted haunted house thriller starring Scorsese mainstay Leonardo DiCaprio as a detective reluctantly paying a visit to a mental hospital on a secluded Northeastern isle. In New York for the film's launch, Medavoy recently sat down with SuicideGirls to share his thoughts on the state of the picture business today.
Ryan Stewart: What elements of the Shutter Island package did you put together?
Mike Medavoy: Phoenix basically found the project and developed it with Laeta Kalogridis and mainly Brad Fischer, actually. Brad works with me and he found it, and he worked with Laeta, who is someone we'd worked with before. So, we developed it and then we gave it to Marty. Then, it was all him.
RS: Were you thinking about Cape Fear as a reference? Marty hasn't done many movies that are similar to this one, other than that.
MM: Yeah, I'd say Cape Fear is the closest thing he's done. The thing about Marty that's interesting is that he's done one type of movie really well over the years a sort of combination of Catholic guilt and the New York gangster so yeah, you can take Cape Fear, and there was also a movie he did for Warner Bros. years ago, but he certainly can do other things and has done other things, and with this I think he just had something in his mind and he followed it.
RS: Do you have a fondness for this kind of thriller-of-the-mind? It's very Christopher Nolan.
MM: I do. Silence of the Lambs had some of that, too. I'm trying to think of the kind of mindgame thrillers I've done over the years, and Silence obviously was not one, but it did have aspects of a mindgame thriller to it in the battle between the two principal characters. I also did a movie with John Schlesinger years ago called The Believers, which was very much in this kind of ilk. I'm sure I've probably done others, but I'm on my three hundred and fourteenth movie, so it's hard for me to go back over every one.
RS: Having worked with Marty from the beginning of his career, what can you say about his evolution as a filmmaker that we wouldn't necessarily glean just from watching his work?
MM: He's definitely more assured. There's a surety to his hand now, to his directing. I think he has a pretty good idea of what movie he's making and how he's going to do it. Because he's a student of film, I think a lot of these images are burnt into his head and I think he sees how they could all play, throughout. If you really look at it historically, in terms of movies, people did it the same way in the 30s, they did it in the 40s -- they had something in mind as they were both entertaining and playing with the audience, and I think that's something that Marty found here.
RS: There's a shot at the beginning of Shutter Island where the two detectives are on the ferry and a third guy kind of walks into the space behind them, which reminded me of how John Huston used to set up shots. I think it might have been a deliberate callback.
MM: Well, he's got that encyclopedic knowledge of films, which is always going to be helpful. Marty and I have been around almost as long [as Huston] in terms of when he started and when I started. I think this is our fourth film together. We started off with New York, New York and The Last Waltz, then we greenlit Raging Bull before we left UA.
RS: Do you feel like once you hire someone like Marty, that's sort of it, creatively? I imagine there's not a lot of need to offer constructive criticism after that.
MM: I think so. Once you hire him, you're sort of in his hands. I mean, if something were to go totally wrong or askew, then it would be your obligation to say something, but in this case once you trust him, then you trust him. That was always true at United Artists when we dealt with filmmakers we trusted them. We would trust them to do the job that we had hired them to do, and we wouldn't interfere. I think in a way that's helpful, and in the case of Marty I don't think anybody does interfere, because they know that doing that won't help them get the kind of product they really want.
RS: You've also worked with one-man bands before, like Woody Allen -- guys who insist on a hands-off policy at the outset.
MM: Oh, yeah. All the guys at United Artists were that way. Milos Forman, Woody, Terry Malick.
RS: When I think about the guys most associated with Zoetrope, I imagine everyone being in everyone's business, even creatively. I don't think of them as individual islands.
MM: Well, they all helped each other, and it's interesting that you mention Zoetrope, because there was a lot of that. George, Francis, Steven and Brian De Palma, they all kind of helped each other and I think they still do that. Those guys still talk to each other, they can still pick up the phone and call each other. I don't know that they're looking for advice, but they may still be looking for assurance.
RS: Would you say your relationship with a guy like Marty is more social these days?
MM: There is some social, but I can't say that I'm as social with Marty as I am with others. Marty and Woody and our wives have had dinner, but it's less social because he's got his own world and I've got mine. My world has expanded, because I don't want to be known as a one-man band myself, like the only thing I can do is make movies. I've written books about how media affects foreign policy and I've done documentaries and I'm on thinktanks too.
RS: It's funny that there's more stuff competing for your attention now, because Phoenix seems to be in a position to capitalize on the death of the studio dependents and now Miramax. Lots of opportunities these days.
MM: It's harder to do that today, though. There are just fewer distribution apparatuses and the studios are tending toward making the bigger movies, like Avatar. I've been thinking about what Avatar will do to this business. If they really start to believe that every movie needs to be Avatar, then they're going to be doing four hundred million dollar movies or whatever that movie cost, I'm not giving it any specific number and that means the smaller movie that only cost seventy or eighty million dollars or twenty-five million dollars is going to have an even harder time finding a place in the marketplace. It's like with everybody now insisting that everything has to be in 3D or other kinds of interference that studios run on movies because they think they know more. It's just a different business from the one I remember during the years that I ran studios.
RS: I assume you don't object to any gimmick like 3D or remakes just on principle.
MM: I don't even object to thinking about the business in terms of really having to make money, because otherwise you couldn't sustain it. That's not my issue. My issue is that you still have to be innovative, you still have to take chances, you have to really create something as opposed to just making it with a cookie-cutter. People will get tired of that, I think.
RS: The word is that a dispute over 3D is holding up your Robocop remake. MGM is insisting on it being made in 3D over Darren Aronofsky's objection, apparently.
MM: Well, I think MGM has its own problems right now, you know? It might be getting sold and who knows what's going to happen with it. I don't think anyone knows at the present moment, but Darren's doing another movie for us right now, Black Swan.
RS: Darren is one of the established guys you're sort of nurturing, but you're also shepherding some unknowns who are very hot in the creative community, like Troy Nixey, who's still in post-production on his first movie.
MM: I've always done that. People said that about me when I was just starting out in the business. They said What are you doing with a guy like Spielberg? They said Why are you getting involved with John Milius, Hal Ashby, and Terry Malick? I've always gotten that. But that's the exciting part of the business for me, working with people and nurturing them to create something of their own. I'm not creating it for them, we give them the tools and that's about it. I also try to protect them as much as I can, but the problem is the people who put up the money will eventually win out, as they usually do. You know, there's a war that's gone on for ages -- and I mean since the start of the movie business -- between the money people and the creative people and for a long time the creative people were actually on top. They could make the case that they make cinema, and then that cinema is viewed by everybody in the world. There was a constant balancing act between the two there was Harry Warner and also Jack Warner, a brother here in New York and a brother out there -- and that was also true of MGM and Fox. But in the 70s, when Gulf + Western and Transamerica bought into the business, it became a larger pond, so to speak. When movies started to cost as much as they do now, and advertising started to cost as much as it does now, then you have to have really, really deep pockets and it's difficult to survive. If you can't make successful movies, you just can't play.
RS: So your interest in a project like Simple Machines isn't dampened by the fact that it's presumably very small-scale, very intimate?
MM: I'm attracted to all kinds of good stories and good people, and I love Troy. I don't know if you know him or not, but he's one of those brilliant bulbs out there. I just know he's going to be a great filmmaker. I haven't seen Don't Be Afraid of the Dark yet, but I'm sure it's going to be good. There's just something about him. I don't know how you define a great artist, but it has to do with what their conception is, how they conceive it, what they can put up there, whether it's visually or otherwise. It's all about how that bulb goes off.
RS: Would you say that as a producer you're heavily dependent on pre-visualization materials [storyboards, special effects tests] at a project's earliest stages, or do you learn more by sitting and talking to the artist?
MM: I think I'm more the latter. It's interesting, because if you go by the pre-viz, it's like reading a book and then seeing the movie. You'll go Oh, wow, that's not what the book was! Those are two different mediums. I'd rather get a sense of who I'm talking to. I tend to trust people more that way, somebody who can go beyond the simple formalities, the stock questions and stock answers, to the point that you're not getting stock answers.
RS: In one of your books you bemoan the fact that today's generation doesn't have the reverence for film history that filmmakers of Marty's age have. Seems like that's something important that's going to die out in the next generation.
MM: Well, even language is changing. Vocabulary is changing. I was at the Air Force Academy one year with a producer -- Steve McQueen's producer -- and those kids didn't know who Steve McQueen was! I was with somebody else not long ago -- an actress on a television series -- and I showed her a picture of Billy Wilder and said Do you know who that is? and she said No... and I started going through all his great movies like Sunset Boulevard and all the others he did and she went Well, I wasn't born then. I said Well, I guess history starts when you're born and ends when you die. So, yeah, it is sad. There are people who are trying, desperately, and Marty's one of them, not only through his preservation work, but he was at the L.A. county museum the other day and had some conversations with Michael Govan, who runs the museum. I think we're all in general agreement that there is a need not only for a history of the movies, but also a cross-cultural sense that movies are not just a single art form, but the fusion of lots of art forms.
RS: I thought you were going to say that they are also a big part of our cultural heritage.
MM: Well, that's an obvious one. I think a less obvious issue is how all of these various art forms, plus technology which is the new thing inside that loop work together. When we talk about 3D, we're talking about technological advancements. My preference is that we have 3D, but we also move to a bigger, larger format the IMAX format, to show movies. If I go back and look at my favorite movies there are lots of favorites, but I really love Lawrence of Arabia it's one of the greatest films of all time. I love a lot of David Lean movies, I like those kinds of historical epics that are done well, and I like to see them in 70mm it's a great way to tell that story. I just worked on a digital film that we're going out on IMAX and 35mm and I like that, as an experience. The idea of seeing it in IMAX is a different thing, you can't get it anywhere else. You can't get that on your big-screen television, let alone your phone. For thirty years, I had a 35mm theater in my house, and that had its advantages because I could see movies at home, but it also took away from the experience of going to the theater and seeing it with people. That's really what the experience should be, going to the theater and seeing it with people and getting a sense of what the crowd reaction is. For years I went to a theater every day, just to check the grosses and see what people's reactions were, and often you would see a particular scene where everybody reacted in the same way. The ending of Rocky for example people stood up and cheered. I've kind of been a student of that for years. I grew up living in South America and in China, where movies were a daily thing. When I was growing up there was no television, just radio. A combination of radio and the movies had me drawing all of those stories in my mind.
RS: It's interesting that even as it's smashing current records, Avatar is still only twenty-something on adjusted all-time grosses lists. We forget that back in the 30s and 40s everybodywent to the movies.
MM: There was nothing else to do! [laughs] There was no competition.
RS: The theatrical experience is inevitably going to become more specialized, isn't it? You'll go to the one big theater in your town to see a movie, and if you liked it, you can go home and iTunes it that night.
MM: That will be true if we're basically left with small, arthouse theaters. And you know, there have always been movies that were only going to be seen by so many people. The problem today is that all the information of a movie can go on the computer, and people share that experience together, and our whole community-based place has become the computer. Every cyclops is talking to each other, in essence. They're all saying to each other You should go see this and see that. And that can be millions of people. But those people who are interested in [sharing movies online] can make it a larger experience in what we would say is the world of today. If you look at the 21st century, we're already making changes by leaps and bounds, changes at a faster rate than I think has ever happened in human history. It's all about images and story, and that goes to the book that Nathan Gardels and I just wrote, called American Idol After Iraq, which is about how people view us abroad based on the culture we export. That includes movies and whatever else.
RS: Do you have a high awareness of the movie website community, in general?
MM: I don't. Of the guys that work with me, Brad would probably know a lot more about it.
RS: Are you confident that you're not losing a step that way?
MM: I'm confident that I am losing a step. It's another world that I'm not as aware of or conversant in. My twelve year-old is, though. If I run into a problem on the computer, I go to my twelve year-old and he knows what to do. He's a native to the computer, I'm an immigrant.
RS: What's Phoenix's goal over the next few years?
MM: Just to find good stories. If you look at the three hundred and fourteen movies I've been involved with, I've been all over the place, but there are still some things I haven't done that I really want to do. I'd love to do a really good dance musical. I would really love to do a movie like Singin' In the Rain. I haven't done that yet, but I'd like to. I no longer have the clout that people seem to think I do, that I used to have, because I no longer run a studio. There's a new group of people on the way up and I'm not even sure how they view me, but one of the accusations I used to get was that I tried to do too many movies that were intelligent. They wouldn't use that exact phrase, but you know. So, if that's the worst they say about me and there probably are a lot of worse things then I'm in good shape. I've been there, and I understand the problems that [the new studio chiefs] are going through. I can also see some poison left behind by me, things that I've done. I see some stupid things I've done over the years, but who doesn't? So, it's an interesting time. I'm not only reflective, I'm also still creating and still working and still doing things. Phoenix has already done about forty movies, we're not sitting still. I keep finding out about new things, and I'm spending some time trying to understand what all the changes are, and why they are, and reflect on them and maybe have some impact on what occurs next. I think I've assured my position, that's not the issue. But for my own satisfaction, I want to know that I've done everything I could to understand where we're at. Life is a long process of learning. The process ends when you take your last breath.
Shutter Island opens in theaters everywhere on February 19, 2010
One of those legends is Martin Scorsese, whose 1980 classic Raging Bull was a movie nobody was going to make until Medavoy's company agreed to Irwin Winkler's idea to package it together with Rocky II: while financing a second, cash-machine Rocky film, they would also take a chance on Scorsese's riskier boxing story. The rest is cinema history, and this week marks the latest collaboration between Scorsese and Medavoy (today the chief of his own production company, Phoenix Pictures) as they roll out Shutter Island, a beautifully crafted haunted house thriller starring Scorsese mainstay Leonardo DiCaprio as a detective reluctantly paying a visit to a mental hospital on a secluded Northeastern isle. In New York for the film's launch, Medavoy recently sat down with SuicideGirls to share his thoughts on the state of the picture business today.
Ryan Stewart: What elements of the Shutter Island package did you put together?
Mike Medavoy: Phoenix basically found the project and developed it with Laeta Kalogridis and mainly Brad Fischer, actually. Brad works with me and he found it, and he worked with Laeta, who is someone we'd worked with before. So, we developed it and then we gave it to Marty. Then, it was all him.
RS: Were you thinking about Cape Fear as a reference? Marty hasn't done many movies that are similar to this one, other than that.
MM: Yeah, I'd say Cape Fear is the closest thing he's done. The thing about Marty that's interesting is that he's done one type of movie really well over the years a sort of combination of Catholic guilt and the New York gangster so yeah, you can take Cape Fear, and there was also a movie he did for Warner Bros. years ago, but he certainly can do other things and has done other things, and with this I think he just had something in his mind and he followed it.
RS: Do you have a fondness for this kind of thriller-of-the-mind? It's very Christopher Nolan.
MM: I do. Silence of the Lambs had some of that, too. I'm trying to think of the kind of mindgame thrillers I've done over the years, and Silence obviously was not one, but it did have aspects of a mindgame thriller to it in the battle between the two principal characters. I also did a movie with John Schlesinger years ago called The Believers, which was very much in this kind of ilk. I'm sure I've probably done others, but I'm on my three hundred and fourteenth movie, so it's hard for me to go back over every one.
RS: Having worked with Marty from the beginning of his career, what can you say about his evolution as a filmmaker that we wouldn't necessarily glean just from watching his work?
MM: He's definitely more assured. There's a surety to his hand now, to his directing. I think he has a pretty good idea of what movie he's making and how he's going to do it. Because he's a student of film, I think a lot of these images are burnt into his head and I think he sees how they could all play, throughout. If you really look at it historically, in terms of movies, people did it the same way in the 30s, they did it in the 40s -- they had something in mind as they were both entertaining and playing with the audience, and I think that's something that Marty found here.
RS: There's a shot at the beginning of Shutter Island where the two detectives are on the ferry and a third guy kind of walks into the space behind them, which reminded me of how John Huston used to set up shots. I think it might have been a deliberate callback.
MM: Well, he's got that encyclopedic knowledge of films, which is always going to be helpful. Marty and I have been around almost as long [as Huston] in terms of when he started and when I started. I think this is our fourth film together. We started off with New York, New York and The Last Waltz, then we greenlit Raging Bull before we left UA.
RS: Do you feel like once you hire someone like Marty, that's sort of it, creatively? I imagine there's not a lot of need to offer constructive criticism after that.
MM: I think so. Once you hire him, you're sort of in his hands. I mean, if something were to go totally wrong or askew, then it would be your obligation to say something, but in this case once you trust him, then you trust him. That was always true at United Artists when we dealt with filmmakers we trusted them. We would trust them to do the job that we had hired them to do, and we wouldn't interfere. I think in a way that's helpful, and in the case of Marty I don't think anybody does interfere, because they know that doing that won't help them get the kind of product they really want.
RS: You've also worked with one-man bands before, like Woody Allen -- guys who insist on a hands-off policy at the outset.
MM: Oh, yeah. All the guys at United Artists were that way. Milos Forman, Woody, Terry Malick.
RS: When I think about the guys most associated with Zoetrope, I imagine everyone being in everyone's business, even creatively. I don't think of them as individual islands.
MM: Well, they all helped each other, and it's interesting that you mention Zoetrope, because there was a lot of that. George, Francis, Steven and Brian De Palma, they all kind of helped each other and I think they still do that. Those guys still talk to each other, they can still pick up the phone and call each other. I don't know that they're looking for advice, but they may still be looking for assurance.
RS: Would you say your relationship with a guy like Marty is more social these days?
MM: There is some social, but I can't say that I'm as social with Marty as I am with others. Marty and Woody and our wives have had dinner, but it's less social because he's got his own world and I've got mine. My world has expanded, because I don't want to be known as a one-man band myself, like the only thing I can do is make movies. I've written books about how media affects foreign policy and I've done documentaries and I'm on thinktanks too.
RS: It's funny that there's more stuff competing for your attention now, because Phoenix seems to be in a position to capitalize on the death of the studio dependents and now Miramax. Lots of opportunities these days.
MM: It's harder to do that today, though. There are just fewer distribution apparatuses and the studios are tending toward making the bigger movies, like Avatar. I've been thinking about what Avatar will do to this business. If they really start to believe that every movie needs to be Avatar, then they're going to be doing four hundred million dollar movies or whatever that movie cost, I'm not giving it any specific number and that means the smaller movie that only cost seventy or eighty million dollars or twenty-five million dollars is going to have an even harder time finding a place in the marketplace. It's like with everybody now insisting that everything has to be in 3D or other kinds of interference that studios run on movies because they think they know more. It's just a different business from the one I remember during the years that I ran studios.
RS: I assume you don't object to any gimmick like 3D or remakes just on principle.
MM: I don't even object to thinking about the business in terms of really having to make money, because otherwise you couldn't sustain it. That's not my issue. My issue is that you still have to be innovative, you still have to take chances, you have to really create something as opposed to just making it with a cookie-cutter. People will get tired of that, I think.
RS: The word is that a dispute over 3D is holding up your Robocop remake. MGM is insisting on it being made in 3D over Darren Aronofsky's objection, apparently.
MM: Well, I think MGM has its own problems right now, you know? It might be getting sold and who knows what's going to happen with it. I don't think anyone knows at the present moment, but Darren's doing another movie for us right now, Black Swan.
RS: Darren is one of the established guys you're sort of nurturing, but you're also shepherding some unknowns who are very hot in the creative community, like Troy Nixey, who's still in post-production on his first movie.
MM: I've always done that. People said that about me when I was just starting out in the business. They said What are you doing with a guy like Spielberg? They said Why are you getting involved with John Milius, Hal Ashby, and Terry Malick? I've always gotten that. But that's the exciting part of the business for me, working with people and nurturing them to create something of their own. I'm not creating it for them, we give them the tools and that's about it. I also try to protect them as much as I can, but the problem is the people who put up the money will eventually win out, as they usually do. You know, there's a war that's gone on for ages -- and I mean since the start of the movie business -- between the money people and the creative people and for a long time the creative people were actually on top. They could make the case that they make cinema, and then that cinema is viewed by everybody in the world. There was a constant balancing act between the two there was Harry Warner and also Jack Warner, a brother here in New York and a brother out there -- and that was also true of MGM and Fox. But in the 70s, when Gulf + Western and Transamerica bought into the business, it became a larger pond, so to speak. When movies started to cost as much as they do now, and advertising started to cost as much as it does now, then you have to have really, really deep pockets and it's difficult to survive. If you can't make successful movies, you just can't play.
RS: So your interest in a project like Simple Machines isn't dampened by the fact that it's presumably very small-scale, very intimate?
MM: I'm attracted to all kinds of good stories and good people, and I love Troy. I don't know if you know him or not, but he's one of those brilliant bulbs out there. I just know he's going to be a great filmmaker. I haven't seen Don't Be Afraid of the Dark yet, but I'm sure it's going to be good. There's just something about him. I don't know how you define a great artist, but it has to do with what their conception is, how they conceive it, what they can put up there, whether it's visually or otherwise. It's all about how that bulb goes off.
RS: Would you say that as a producer you're heavily dependent on pre-visualization materials [storyboards, special effects tests] at a project's earliest stages, or do you learn more by sitting and talking to the artist?
MM: I think I'm more the latter. It's interesting, because if you go by the pre-viz, it's like reading a book and then seeing the movie. You'll go Oh, wow, that's not what the book was! Those are two different mediums. I'd rather get a sense of who I'm talking to. I tend to trust people more that way, somebody who can go beyond the simple formalities, the stock questions and stock answers, to the point that you're not getting stock answers.
RS: In one of your books you bemoan the fact that today's generation doesn't have the reverence for film history that filmmakers of Marty's age have. Seems like that's something important that's going to die out in the next generation.
MM: Well, even language is changing. Vocabulary is changing. I was at the Air Force Academy one year with a producer -- Steve McQueen's producer -- and those kids didn't know who Steve McQueen was! I was with somebody else not long ago -- an actress on a television series -- and I showed her a picture of Billy Wilder and said Do you know who that is? and she said No... and I started going through all his great movies like Sunset Boulevard and all the others he did and she went Well, I wasn't born then. I said Well, I guess history starts when you're born and ends when you die. So, yeah, it is sad. There are people who are trying, desperately, and Marty's one of them, not only through his preservation work, but he was at the L.A. county museum the other day and had some conversations with Michael Govan, who runs the museum. I think we're all in general agreement that there is a need not only for a history of the movies, but also a cross-cultural sense that movies are not just a single art form, but the fusion of lots of art forms.
RS: I thought you were going to say that they are also a big part of our cultural heritage.
MM: Well, that's an obvious one. I think a less obvious issue is how all of these various art forms, plus technology which is the new thing inside that loop work together. When we talk about 3D, we're talking about technological advancements. My preference is that we have 3D, but we also move to a bigger, larger format the IMAX format, to show movies. If I go back and look at my favorite movies there are lots of favorites, but I really love Lawrence of Arabia it's one of the greatest films of all time. I love a lot of David Lean movies, I like those kinds of historical epics that are done well, and I like to see them in 70mm it's a great way to tell that story. I just worked on a digital film that we're going out on IMAX and 35mm and I like that, as an experience. The idea of seeing it in IMAX is a different thing, you can't get it anywhere else. You can't get that on your big-screen television, let alone your phone. For thirty years, I had a 35mm theater in my house, and that had its advantages because I could see movies at home, but it also took away from the experience of going to the theater and seeing it with people. That's really what the experience should be, going to the theater and seeing it with people and getting a sense of what the crowd reaction is. For years I went to a theater every day, just to check the grosses and see what people's reactions were, and often you would see a particular scene where everybody reacted in the same way. The ending of Rocky for example people stood up and cheered. I've kind of been a student of that for years. I grew up living in South America and in China, where movies were a daily thing. When I was growing up there was no television, just radio. A combination of radio and the movies had me drawing all of those stories in my mind.
RS: It's interesting that even as it's smashing current records, Avatar is still only twenty-something on adjusted all-time grosses lists. We forget that back in the 30s and 40s everybodywent to the movies.
MM: There was nothing else to do! [laughs] There was no competition.
RS: The theatrical experience is inevitably going to become more specialized, isn't it? You'll go to the one big theater in your town to see a movie, and if you liked it, you can go home and iTunes it that night.
MM: That will be true if we're basically left with small, arthouse theaters. And you know, there have always been movies that were only going to be seen by so many people. The problem today is that all the information of a movie can go on the computer, and people share that experience together, and our whole community-based place has become the computer. Every cyclops is talking to each other, in essence. They're all saying to each other You should go see this and see that. And that can be millions of people. But those people who are interested in [sharing movies online] can make it a larger experience in what we would say is the world of today. If you look at the 21st century, we're already making changes by leaps and bounds, changes at a faster rate than I think has ever happened in human history. It's all about images and story, and that goes to the book that Nathan Gardels and I just wrote, called American Idol After Iraq, which is about how people view us abroad based on the culture we export. That includes movies and whatever else.
RS: Do you have a high awareness of the movie website community, in general?
MM: I don't. Of the guys that work with me, Brad would probably know a lot more about it.
RS: Are you confident that you're not losing a step that way?
MM: I'm confident that I am losing a step. It's another world that I'm not as aware of or conversant in. My twelve year-old is, though. If I run into a problem on the computer, I go to my twelve year-old and he knows what to do. He's a native to the computer, I'm an immigrant.
RS: What's Phoenix's goal over the next few years?
MM: Just to find good stories. If you look at the three hundred and fourteen movies I've been involved with, I've been all over the place, but there are still some things I haven't done that I really want to do. I'd love to do a really good dance musical. I would really love to do a movie like Singin' In the Rain. I haven't done that yet, but I'd like to. I no longer have the clout that people seem to think I do, that I used to have, because I no longer run a studio. There's a new group of people on the way up and I'm not even sure how they view me, but one of the accusations I used to get was that I tried to do too many movies that were intelligent. They wouldn't use that exact phrase, but you know. So, if that's the worst they say about me and there probably are a lot of worse things then I'm in good shape. I've been there, and I understand the problems that [the new studio chiefs] are going through. I can also see some poison left behind by me, things that I've done. I see some stupid things I've done over the years, but who doesn't? So, it's an interesting time. I'm not only reflective, I'm also still creating and still working and still doing things. Phoenix has already done about forty movies, we're not sitting still. I keep finding out about new things, and I'm spending some time trying to understand what all the changes are, and why they are, and reflect on them and maybe have some impact on what occurs next. I think I've assured my position, that's not the issue. But for my own satisfaction, I want to know that I've done everything I could to understand where we're at. Life is a long process of learning. The process ends when you take your last breath.
Shutter Island opens in theaters everywhere on February 19, 2010