Producer Spotlight: Lorenzo Di Bonaventura
Let’s say you live outside Hollywood. Perhaps way outside. While writing a great original script is the most obvious — and important — single thing you can do to get you from here (where you live) to there (Hwood), there are other tasks you would be wise to put on your master “To Do” list. One of them is to learn the players in the movie and TV business or at least get a sense of their mindset.
A particularly important set of Hollywood players is producers. There are many types of producers so it’s a bit tricky to typify what it is they do. However they all have one thing in common: they’re all looking for great material.
That serves as a preface to this article by Anne Thompson about movie producer Lorenzo Di Bonaventura. Thompson focuses on his involvement with the current movie Red, which has grossed $43M well before it ends its domestic theatrical run and in advance of playing in international markets where it should do quite well due to the fact that it’s an action movie and it has an all-star cast. Some key excerpts from the article:
The beauty of success in the movie industry is that it often comes to people who zig when others zag, who have the balls to call something and fight for it. Recession times don’t encourage risk-taking, so I am happy to report that producer Lorenzo di Bonaventura has not given up the maverick streak encouraged by his bosses during his glory days running production at Warner Bros.(Training Day, Three Kings, The Matrix). Di Bonaventura (Transformers, Salt) saw the potential in the dark DC graphic novel Red — about a CIA agent who fights against the dying of the light in the only way he knows how — and kept fighting to get it made. That involved trying and failing to get Warners (which has a deal with DC) to back it, extricating the title from DC and finding another financeer, which turned out to be Summit. Production chief Eric Feig, another smart cookie, saw the gold in Twilight early on, and saw it here too.
The problem with Hollywood conventional wisdom is: follow it and you won’t take chances and give the audience something they haven’t seen before. Of course we’ve all seen renegade CIA agents going against the establishment and winning. But we haven’t seen older retired CIA agents who have been targeted as Retired Extremely Dangerous by their ex-agency. Di Bonaventura recognized how to add the Oceans Eleven element: assemble a starry ensemble to carry a 60s-style adventure, working for less than their usual rate. They landed a great cast: 50ish Bruce Willis and John Malkovich, 40ish Mary Louise Parker and Karl Urban, 60ish Helen Mirren, Richard Dreyfuss and Brian Cox, 70ish Morgan Freeman and 90ish Ernest Borgnine.
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Di Bonaventura wants to do a sequel because he thinks with the ubiquity of movies on the internet and homevideo, younger audiences recognize and want to see older stars. They love them. Every time he screens the film, there’s a big ripple whenever 93-year-old Ernest Borgnine comes on screen, even among younger viewers. The producer can’t wait to put together another cool ensemble.
He’s smart enough to sense that unlike conventional wisdom, young people are actually interested in older movie actors, thereby making Red’s ‘age thing’ a plus, not a negative.
To learn more, the LAT has this feature on Red and here’s a choice quote from Di Bonaventura:
While Summit and Di Bonaventura have yet to move forward with a sequel, the movie that almost nobody wanted to make could soon become a franchise — not a bad outcome for a principal cast that includes two people in their 50s, three in their 60s, one in his 70s and 93-year-old Ernest Borgnine.
“To me, it’s all about attitude. It’s not about age,” says Di Bonaventura. “This movie is fun, irreverent and action-packed.”
Fun. Irreverent. Action-packed. Di Bonaventura sensed that about the graphic novel and certainly steered script development to further enhance those sensibilities.
Going even deeper, here’s an excerpt from a Collider interview with the producer where he describes the opening of the movie:
DI BONAVENTURA: This is a hard PG-13.
Is there a lot of comedy that you’re bringing into this?
DI BONAVENTURA: A lot of comedy. It’s really funny. I mean, it’s an action…I guess if I had to be pinned down I’d say it’s an action/comedy as a movie — as a genre. You know we play for real stakes here but you kidnap a girl…you guys haven’t read the script? Have you read the script?
No.
DI BONAVENTURA: Okay, so I’ll give you an example of it: Frank [Bruce Willis] is retired from the CIA and we don’t really know what he is but we know he has this phone relationship with this girl [Mary Louise Parker] over his pension checks. And it’s clear they kind of like each other and they have this kind of fun sort of little banter and then this is the opening of the movie. And it’ll give you a sense of the tone, but it’s very quiet and it seems like he’s sort of an average guy and he goes to bed and suddenly gets up in the middle of the night and he’s going to the bathroom and shadows are passing down the hallway and 3 commandos attack him. And he takes them out and he realizes they’ve come after him and then he gets ready to leave and another 3 come. So he takes out 6 guys in an action sequence. He goes to the girl’s house. She walks into her apartment. He’s sitting in her apartment. She’s like, “Who are you? Get the hell out of here!” They’ve never met. And he says, “Listen they’re going to come here and kill you. You’ve got to come with me.” And she’s like, “Why do I attract all the crazy people?”
(laughter)
DI BONAVENTURA: Okay? So that’s the sort of (more gunshots) and she goes, “Oh my God, I get all the losers.” I mean so goes off…instead of being scared she goes off on I can’t believe this is what’s happening to me and then suddenly guys come pulling up to her house and he grabs her and drags her out of this thing and you cut and you see him driving in the car and he’s going on like this, he’s like you know listen, this really wasn’t the way I first wanted to meet you and…and then you cut in the back seat and she’s fully duct taped and abducted. So it has that sort of element going all the way through it. And there’s a lot of banter in it, so it is a different kind of…I mean it’s Ocean’s Eleven in a lot of ways the way Brad and George would banter back and forth. There’s several iterations of that. I mean it’s not like that but it’s Malkovich and Bruce have a real buddy thing going on.
Producers review tons of material. What makes a script, comic book, graphic novel, whatever stand out? In the case of Red, Di Bonaventura made a correlation to another successful movie Ocean’s 11 and sensed this project could mine the same narrative dynamics: ensemble, fun, irreverent, action-packed.
Di Bonaventura is one of the most active and successful producers in Hollywood today attached to dozens of movie projects (on IMDBpro, he currently has 38 projects in development). It would be worth your while to Google “Lorenzo Di Bonaventura interview” and read everything you can on him. Give you some insight into how a Hollywood film producer thinks. So when you get from here to there, and you take meetings with producers, you know a little something about what they’re thinking as they listen to what you have to say.
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