Opening this Friday is The Last Mimzy. If youâve been reading the site for awhile youâll think hasnât Frosty already interviewed Bob for this film at Sundance and didnât he post a video interview? The answer is yes and if you happened to have missed it you can check it out here.
Since the good folks at New Line are trying to get the word out on Bob Shayeâs return to the directorâs chair, they held a press day for the film here in
If you are not familiar with the movie here is the synopsis (from the studio):
Based on the acclaimed sci-fi short story by Lewis Padgett, The Last Mimzy tells the story of two children who discover a mysterious box that contains some strange devices they think are toys. As the children play with these âtoys,â they begin to display higher and higher intelligence levels. Their teacher tells their parents that they seem to have grown beyond genius. Their parents, too, realize something extraordinary is happening. Emma, the younger of the two, tells her confused mother that one of the toys, a beat-up stuffed toy rabbit, is named Mimzy and that âshe teaches me things.â Emmaâs mom becomes increasingly concerned. When a mysterious blackout shuts down the city and the government traces the source of the power surge to this one familyâs house, things quickly spin wildly out of their control. The children are focused on these strange objects, Mimzy, and the important mission on which they seem to have been sent. When the little girl says that Mimzy contains a most serious message from the future, a scientific scan shows that Mimzy is part extremely high level electronic and part organic! Everyone realizes that they are involved in something incredibleâ¦but exactly what?
Interviewing Bob Shaye again is the reason why I wanted to do this press day as how many times do you get to sit down with the head of a studio? He talks a lot aboutwhat's going on at New Line right now. Itâs definitely worth reading.
If you would like to listen to the interview you can download the MP3 here, otherwise the transcript is below.
And if you want to watch the trailer before reading the interview click here.
The Last Mimzy opens this Friday at theaters everywhere.
Bob Shaye: Thank you all for your attention I hope to keep your attention â your tentative interest, I guess I should say. Half of you journalists are â.comâ thatâs what this movie is about, remember - too much about technology overtaking our souls.
Question: About technology, your letter indicates we donât have anymore âalone time.â
Well, I think â first of all, Samuel Goldwyn once said, âIf I want to send a message, I use
When I was making Nightmare on
Was there a conflict between you as the director and you as the studio chief who has to sell this?
No, but I will tell you we understand the challenges of selling this in an affective way and in the beginning, the film, I expected the film â for instance, thereâs a whole subplot between Tim Hutton and Joely Richardson where theyâre arguing all the time because she has a job, a business of her own, which has been cut out now - a little EBay business selling salt shakers or something. He was really in the office a lot more, and was on the phone all day and there was really this sub text about the parents wanted to be what they do and theyâre blaming each other for the kids being goofy and not understanding it. But I realized this film was more of a family film and there was a little more â not salacious â but a little more sex between Rainn and Katherine Hahn and it still would have gotten a PG rating. But particularly in the friends and family screenings, cause theyâre a little more intimate, I kept getting these reactions from people saying, âYou know, this is a film about a five year old and a ten year old, and I had 12 year olds and 14, 16 year olds, and I want to bring my kids here, but I donât like to see a family arguing all the time, and itâs not what the real story is.â And with great reluctance, great integrity, Iâm not going to let audiences tell me what to do â of course Iâm going to let that audience tell me what to do if theyâre the audience I want the film to embrace, that theyâre going to embrace the film. And so, I let this film, consciously, veer itself towards a film that I still think grown ups are going to like and find interesting people who are science fiction fans are going to, I hope, embrace because just for the visual effects aspect of it and the story line itself. But the core audience is going to be a more family oriented film, and letting the film find its own natural audience ought to help the marketing tremendously. And I think I did a service to the company, as head of it, not to insist and stand on some kind of hubris.
What about this story was compelling enough to keep it going for more than 10 years?
Iâve directed two feature films, and in both cases, and even though I was running the company, they were both films that resonated so strongly with me that I really didnât feel I was demonstrating any kind of arrogance be peremptorily deciding to direct them. The first one is about growing up in the 50âs, by a guy who grew up in Scranton, I grew up in Detroit it was funny, it was raunchy, I loved it, and it was just what happened to me â in fact, I re-wrote a lot of the stuff. So there wasnât going to be anyone else who was going to direct or make this movie. I was a science fiction geek as a kid, as Iâve said, and one day, when I read the short story Mimzy. Michael Phillips came in and itâs a story that I love, very famous short story. So I took on the task of trying to develop it but the problem with developing this story was â I didnât tell you this yet, did I? - it didnât have an ending. The story ends itâs a great story about childrenâs brains not being hard-wired, hardly, and being receptive to all kind of teaching we could never engage in now because everything has sort of come together. We donât have the brain power, or the potential brain power the children have, which they end up, as the scientist says, the doctor says we kill off trillions of brain cells when weâre five or six years old, so that was the idea that really completely fascinated me. But the story ends where the kids become these super beings, step into a circle of these objects they find, and disappear and thatâs the end of the story. And we started looking at this, and I said, âWhat do you mean? We canât have a movie where they just disappear.â We couldnât figure out what to do with it, so much so, over the years, I just put it down, and followed the dictum that there are some stories that just donât lend themselves to making movies. You just canât make a movie out of everything, and in fact, as Hitchcock once said, which in this case is another axiom that I really subscribe to, most good films are made from bad novels or short stories â The Birds is a good example. Not a very fulfilling short story, but a great premise so I kept gnawing at it, âThis is a great premise, but I donât know how to, what that âAâ story is.â âWhatâs the red thread,â as they say in Swedish â whatâs the beginning, middle and end? And it took a real long, long time, about five writers, to get it finally nailed down in fact Toby Emmerich wrote two drafts over a period of two to three years and Bruce Rubin wrote two drafts, plus a lot of extra work over a period of three to four years. And there were a bunch of years, over that 10-year period, where we just didnât do anything cause we were just following that rule of âjust leave it alone, youâre never going to get it right.â But I hope we broke that rule.
How can you keep innocence away in this day and age?
I donât believe that people are intrusively evil and I donât think anyone in this room does, but I do think we are creatures of our environment. And the media is so effective in bringing us stories, and for some reason, the feel good stories are not as effective or as prevalent as the feel bad stories. I think to some extent, kids immersion in video games and iPods and stuff like that â in an excessive way, in my opinion, itâs a kind of escapism like my kids would leave the television, these kids just donât want to hear about it, just totally donât want to hear about it. I had a certain amount of pressure to take out that line after mom is watching television in the bathroom and she hears about the black out â thereâs just a little tale in the next news story which is, âIn another story, 40 are killedâ and then she turns off the TV. âWhy do you want to have that in there for?â âBecause, whatâs on the news except bad stuff.â I mean thereâs nothing thatâs particularly heart-warming or itâs always the last story of the nightly news.
Your young actor, Chris, says the next movie he wants to see is 300.
Hey, listen, he comes from a very Christian family, and heâs a very smart kid, so itâs not like heâs some horror freak per say but I think the kids, itâs very addicting this stuff. âDo you want to watch 300 or do you want to read poetry?â I guess the trick is really to make 300 with a little poetry in it, which is what I tried to do.
Was running the studio and directing this movie harder than you thought it was?
Thatâs not the reason New Line had a difficult year first of all, you canât measure a film company, in my opinion, on a fiscal basis. Even these film investing groups that are investing with us â we just had Royal Bank of Scotland invest with us, itâs over 25 films, 20 films, it probably will be 25, because itâs not like you gotta hit it right all the time within 12 months, itâs just not in the cards. Even though Iâve been ill for a while, I supported, in one way or another, every production decision that was made, and only not a part of two or three of them, two if that. It was âthe buck does stop with me and Michael Lynneâ we did, for various reasons, approve those films. Believe me, everyone is keenly aware we need to do better I think this year is going to be a very good year. I would recommend to you Rush Hour 3 which is the best of the Rush Hourâs, by far the funniest. And I particularly recommend to you, although I havenât seen it, The Golden Compass that Chris Weitz directed for us with Nicole Kidman and Daniel Craig. Those are big movies that I think are going to do the trick. Fracture is a very good film Tony Hopkins is right in his power zone, Ryan Gosling really demonstrates to be the star of what he suggests he is in Half Nelson. I mean, we have a few films Iâm less enthusiastic about, but part of them come from the past, and this is the present. I appreciate the question, but I do caution you all if youâre going to write about the business of film, try as much as you can to understand it. Too many writers â a writer said to me the other day, âWell gee whiz, the last three years, you spent a billion and a half dollars on production and youâve only done a billion and a half dollars on box office.â âWhat does that mean?â That looks like a headline of Variety have you ever heard of DVD, do you know about international, what about television and libraries. So I promise, depending on time and place, Iâll take any of you â Iâll give a seminar actually, about the key on the business of film because it is a challenge for journalists so that theyâre not just being sensationalists and writing about âbillion and a half spent, billion and a half lost,â so you actually understand what the issues are. And even though last year was a crummy year for us, weâve made substantially over $100 million net profit, notwithstanding some of my brethren who make up stories about how much money they make all the time. This is the real thing and Jeff Bukus subscribed to it, and was the one who actually pointed it out to the journalist involved.
Is this amazing to you that this is the 40th anniversary of New Line?
This is the 40th anniversary, but our motto is âThe first generation and the next generation,â two generations. And the thing that Iâm proud of, first of all that Iâve been there for both of them but the second thing is that over 60% of people who work at New Line are under 40, which suggests that they werenât even born when I started the company. So I guess Iâm the experience, and to some extent the stability and the vitality and the inspiration.
Youâve set a date for The Hobbit, what kind of director do you think you can get?
If we make it, weâll have a good one â I promise you.