Hybrid Media, Ambivalent Feelings - PDF document

Hybrid Media, Ambivalent Feelings Hyung-Sook Lee, editor, Spectator 27:2 (Fall 2007) 94-100. 94 Remaking Transnational Hollywood An Interview with Roy Lee Daniel Herbert e recent cycle of Hollywood remakes of East Asian e Departed (2006), and has negotiated deals for numerous other Hollywood remakes of “foreign” lms currently in development. e following is an edited transcript of an interview I conducted with Lee on September 9, 2006. lived there while my father was working at various hospitals. DH: Did they have strong connections with family in Korea? Did they go back? Did you go there? RL: Actually, the Pusan Film Festival a few years ago was the rst time I’d been to Korea. I didn’t speak safe career, of having a steady income from working in a corporate law rm. DH: When you were studying law, what type of law did you think you would practice? RL: I was interested in corporate law, transactional work, where one company would acquire another 95 H YB, AL RT RL: I was. When I was working in the law rm in D.C., I did corporate transactional work. DH: at kind of experience must play into what you do now, in terms of negotiating deals. RL: It doesn’t really. I feel like it’s all common sense. If there’s a person willing to sell and there’s a person willing to buy, there’s always a way to make a deal. I don’t think that is something you need to go to school or practice law to realize. DH: When and how did you decide to go into the entertainment business? RL: It was in September 1996 when I rst moved out to California. I was leaving the law rm and I moved out here just to try something dierent. I had a feeling I’d go into entertainment in some way, whether lm, music, or television, and it just so happened that my first job was in the film industry. I worked for this company Alphaville. At the time we were doing remakes of e Mummy (original 1932, remake 1999) and The Day of the Jackal (original 1973, remake 1997). I watched how the development went through with those lms and how it was not that dicult to be a producer. I didn’t really see it as something that you needed to go to lm school to learn, which was all just based on relationships and identifying interesting properties and working with writers. DH: It’s interesting that you were working on remakes as part of your introduction to the industry. [Could you give] your official title at Vertigo Entertainment and describe what your day-to-day activity looks like for the most part [now]? RL: My ocial title is producer, and my day-to-day is actually producing movies. Producers are most like architects of the movies or even like a chef at a restaurant. We put together the pieces that make the movie go forward. I don’t write it. I don’t direct it. I just help to put the whole package together and bring the project forward for a studio or a private nancier. DH: How much of the business, would you say, is devoted to remakes versus original scripts? RL: In general, now, I’d probably say [remakes are] about 25%, which is a substantial amount. When you say remakes, it could also be adaptations of TV shows. But if you’re thinking about adaptations, that’s probably more than half, up to 75%, of all material – things that are based on books, or comic books, or just other mediums. Whereas it seems like it’s rare that an original idea and a spec script are made into movies. At our company it’s probably more than half devoted to remakes, mainly because that is what is expected of us from the studio system. It was never our intention to always be just remakes. It worked out very well for us to start with. We didn’t see a reason to deviate from that if things were going smoothly in terms of projects going into production. DH: I’m sure that you must go out to a lot of festivals. RL: I don’t go out to festivals so much any more because a lot of the projects are sent to me early in the stages of either development or as they are nished. So I would get the scripts and rough-cuts of movies and then the nal product of movies too, to see if they could get any traction on getting a studio to buy the remake rights. And the reason a lot of them do that is to oset some of the budgets of these movies, if they can sell some rights. It helps to raise the budget if it sells early, or it osets some of the costs they’ve spent already. DH: You mean to oset the costs of the production of the original lm? So someone from Japan or South Korea will go to you, even during their own production or before, to sell their remake rights to fund their own production? RL: Just to see whether or not someone would buy a movie. DH: at can’t have always been true. When would you say that shift occurred? RL: During the last couple of years, when these 96 FALL 2007 ATIYWOOD movies started doing well financially and the studios started getting more and more money for the rights. DH: And you have a rst-look deal with Focus Features? RL: Universal Pictures. DH: Who do you talk to most regularly at Universal? RL: e studio executives, like Scott Bernstein or Peter Kramer, the senior VPs. DH: ey will then green-light things? RL: e process is a lot slower than just green- lighting. We rst have to identify projects. From there, we either have hired a writer beforehand or work with the studio to nd a writer. An example would be e Host (2006), where we saw the movie and identied it as something that they wanted to try to adapt to the US market. And then we go out to dierent writers and gure out who the person would be to write it, and then we’d wait for the script. en the process would either be a long process of getting a good script, or a short one, where a rst draft comes in where we could attach a director. at is the next step, nding the director, who then is the person who attracts the cast. At that point, when we have the script, the director, and the cast in place, the studio will green- light the movie. DH: Which do like working on more? Do you like developing original scripts or do you like working on remakes? Do you ever feel that you’ve been pigeon-holed into the remakes category? RL: I want to work on things that have interesting stories. It doesn’t matter where the stories come from, because a lot of the movies we are remaking are based on books that were originally published in other countries. So those are books that we would have no access to because we wouldn’t have translated copies of them. Prior to these remakes being made, the books would’ve never been really translated. e Ring book probably wouldn’t have been translated in English if it hadn’t been a successful movie. It doesn’t really matter if these are remakes of foreign movies or just books or original screenplays, just something where the story interests me. It’s a lot easier to be able to judge the viability of a movie by watching a movie that’s already been made and hasn’t been seen widely by the US audience. DH: How would you characterize the dierence between producing a remake versus an original script? RL: It’s a similar process, but it’s an easier process to get a remake into production because it takes less work to convince the nancier, be it a studio or an independent nancier, to fund a project because it feels like a safer bet to work on something that is successful before – nancially and commercially and creatively – by showing movies. Like, “that really worked, but these are the things I could improve.” And the fact that it’s already been seen by a huge audience overseas and been successful there, but that’s not the audience we’re targeting. DH: You save time and money on script development and audience research. Have you ever tried to calculate the savings of doing a remake versus doing an original script? RL: No, I never really thought of it that way. It’s hard to say, because the original scripts we have could take longer, but I have no idea how much. e costs of doing a remake vary from hiring a million- dollar writer to a $75,000 writer. e dierence between the payments of the writers for e Ring and e Grudge was over half-a-million dollars. So it’s hard to gauge how that aects the development of original scripts, because they vary too. Sometimes you can buy a script for $100,000 and pay that writer to work on it, but then you bring in a million-dollar writer to go into production or use that one script and go all the way through. I’ve seen that in the case of e Strangers (2007), where they bought a script and they had the original writer all the way through. It was substantially less than some of the remakes we’ve done. DH: Do you feel like the remake wave has slowed 97 H YB, AL RT down since the initial boom after e Ring ? RL: No. It is one of these things where there’s always going to be an appetite for lm projects. ere was a boom in terms of the acquisition of the remake rights, because it was almost like opening a door that hadn’t been opened before, so there was so much to choose from. ere’s always going to be some tapering o…sort of like cherry-picking the best projects that the studios feel are most viable for remaking. But there’s always going to be an inow of new material that’s being produced by foreign territories that potentially can be remade. It is almost like the emergence of video games being adapted into movies. Prior to Super Mario Brothers (1993) and whatever those movies were, there’d never been movies based on video games. But because they saw the viability of some of the movies, like Resident Evil (2002), it opened the door to other movies being adapted. But, it wasn’t just like a phase or a wave of movies and then it would stop. ey [the studios] will always consider video games as something to adapt into lms. It is sort of like you open the door and it will be an ongoing thing. Probably the same could be said about the early years when there was the rst adaptation of a novel. Some were successful and some weren’t, but it’s always been considered as one of the sources of material. DH: is may sound simplistic, but why East Asia? Specically, why remake East Asian lms rather than European lms right now? Why was that the door to open? RL: It’s because the European lms were exploited. I don’t know if exploited is the [right] word. A lot of them were remade, and so it was just more of the inow that is still a constant. ere are movies, like e Last Kiss (2006) or other movies [from Europe] that are still being adapted. But it was a just a new door being opened in Asia that hadn’t been considered before. DH: At a certain moment, with lms like La Femme Nikita (1990) and True Lies (1994) and even ree Men and a Baby (1987), French lms were… RL: Yeah, it was like thirty movies [that got remade]. DH: I also think there’s a certain way that Asia and Asian culture is seen as new and fresher than Europe, which is seen as old culture. RL: It also could be the emergence of these markets making their own homegrown lms. ey hadn’t been making commercial lms – and that’s a subjective term – commercial lms, like e Host , which is horror, or Infernal Aairs (2002). ey are movies that had rivaled the quality of Hollywood movies, because of the amount of investment that’s coming into the lm industries as well as the talent that’s either coming to the US and learning or learning through watching a lot of other movies and becoming lmmakers of commercial movies, rather than just the art-house style of movies, which felt like more of the case in the early 80s and any time prior to that. DH: Similarly, then, why horror? Why is horror the genre [of so many remakes]? RL: I think that it is an issue of the genres that are most easily adaptable. Because horror and high- concept comedies, or any type of high-concept movies, are easier to adapt. Because dramatic movies are very cultural or period pieces are very cultural, they are almost impossible to adapt to the US setting, which is what the remakes would normally try to do. Barring e Grudge , they would try to set the movie in the US. If they have lots of cultural issues, like family relations or relations with the community, they’re somewhat set to the region that the movies are made in, and they are harder to adapt. But horror movies seem to be easier to adapt because something that was scary to the audience, say in Asia, would potentially be scary to audiences in the United States. And also high-concept movies, like e Lake House (2006), which was somewhat of a supernatural love-story. DH: In getting all this stu from all the various producers, have you noticed any dierence between Japanese and Korean lms? 98 FALL 2007 ATIYWOOD RL: Korean lms…they try to make their movies in a wide genre of “commercial movies.” Whereas the Japanese marketplace feels like they haven’t veered that much further from the art-house style movies or the horror genre, until recently, with movies like Bayside Shakedown (1998) or e Sinking of Japan (2006). Now it feels like they’re trying to make commercial movies, whereas before it felt like Korea was focused on making commercial movies. DH: Do you need dierent approaches to adapting lms from dierent countries? RL: Not really. It’s more of that each movie stands on its own, in terms of whether or not it’s adaptable, because there are so many types of producers in Japan and Korea that make different kinds of movies. It’s hard to pigeon-hole them and say “this country is easier” or “this country is harder.” ey’re all based on the individual projects. Now it’s becoming somewhat blurred because one of our more recent deals was a Japanese book that was made into a Korean movie that we’re adapting for a US adaptation. DH: When you’re thinking about changing lms and about how you need to change certain elements, it sounds like you’re thinking of the US market and not necessarily a global market. Do you keep that in mind? Do you think not just how you adapt something for America but also for the world? RL: I think about making a movie as commercial as possible, but making it feel real, rather than forced into feeling like we’re catering towards the German audiences or the Asian audience. It’s like this movie is supposed to be a view of, or of wanting this movie to be set in, the US. Just like Japanese and Korean movies are targeted for their own marketplace, but still trying to appeal to the world. DH: In negotiating deals for remake rights, is it standard practice that the producers of the original lm will get points on the revenues of the remake? RL: It varies from project to project. If it’s a competitive situation, a studio has to make it more appealing to go to the one studio over the next. If there are a lot of people interested, they have to pay more. And part of the process of paying more is getting points on the back-end, net points or gross points. DH: Is it typical to secure distribution rights when negotiating a deal for remake rights? RL: It is not typical, but it happens occasionally. A lot of times the studios would actually require a “holdback provision” on a project, where the original movie cannot be released during the six months prior to the release of the remake. So, they can release it any time before that or any time after that. ey just don’t want to piggy-back and confuse the audience. I’ve read a lot of people complaining, saying “oh, they bought movies just to put on the shelf.” But that’s not necessarily the case. It is just to reduce the confusion for potential audiences. DH: For a specic window before the release. RL: Yes. So, like when the domestic distribution rights for the original movie that sold for remake would have that provision when they’re selling it to any other potential distributor, just saying “if there’s a remake that’s being produced, you cannot release it six months prior to that movie.” And, these projects in development take years. So the distributor would have to be sitting on it for at least three years to be able to complain that they couldn’t release it because of a holdback provision of the studio. Whereas they were just doing it to try to capitalize on the marketing of the studio. It’s not an onerous type of provision that keeps these movies from being released. DH: How aware do you have to be about dierent copyright laws in dierent countries when you’re securing the remake rights? RL: ey are very stringent about the due diligence that the studio goes through, in terms of going through the chain of title, to make sure that everyone is signed o, that there could be no type of legal loopholes for someone to claim ownership of the movie. So, they usually have everyone involved in the original movie sign o, saying that “this 99 H YB, AL RT company that’s selling the rights has all the rights to sell.” Everybody, down from the director to the writer, even the composer, is asked to sign a sheet saying “yes, we have sold all the rights.” Or, the company that’s selling the rights has to show the contracts that they had with these people, who were involved with the original movie, showing that they had no control over the underlying property. DH: It seems to me that a large number of Hollywood remakes of foreign lms are directed by foreign directors, like Insomnia (2002) and Dark Water (2005) and Lake House . How does this happen? RL: Everything’s on a case-by-case basis, so it just so happens that we do like to work with foreign talent and the studios like to take risks with tried and true directors from other countries. Even with Dark Water , Walter Salles was an accomplished director, and presumably [Alejandro] Agresti was as well. So was [Takashi] Shimizu for e Grudge because he did a great job with the original. It feels like a trend, but it’s weird, because it just happens to fall together that way. Even the movies we’re going forward with – Sassy Girl ’s (original 2001, remake TBA) a rst-timer, Addicted ’s (original 2002, remake TBA) with a Swedish director who’s a rst-timer. Were not targeting foreign directors. It just happens that we get good scripts and foreign directors, that are in demand by the US nanciers, like the script. It’s just the process of nding the right directors that would get a green-light are or have to be the directors that we can attract. DH: With the success of e Ring , there was a lot of interest in [Hideo] Nakata. How much were you involved with him coming to the United States and becoming a successful Hollywood director? RL: I talked to him regularly. We went over a lot of material. He chooses things on his own but I was able to get him the material and have the meetings. Like with e Ring 2 and this other one, I knew where he was and just dropped the script o at his house. Like with e Entity (1981), I gave him the DVD and he watched and said it could make a good movie. DH: Similarly, Takashige Ichise produced a number of lms in Hollywood as well as in Japan, is that correct? RL: No, e Grudge and e Grudge 2 (2006) were the Hollywood movies. He has a lot of lms in development. He just travels back and forth. He has a house here and a house in Japan. DH: Do you have a regular working relationship with him? RL: Yes, we are producing a lot of movies together. DH: Who else would you say has been instrumental in this wave of East Asian-Hollywood remakes? RL: Well, Gold Circle is buying a lot, but whether or not they’re actually producing remains to be seen. ere are one-os, like Pulse (2006) and a few others, that aren’t necessarily the movies that I would have picked to remake. So, there’s no one that’s done as much or has as much in development as me. DH: Why has no one copied you? RL: A lot of people tried, but the rights-holders of these movies would prefer to work with us on projects because of our track record, as opposed to someone who is coming in saying that they can do something with the projects. So, a lot of the movies that are getting picked up and made by other buyers are movies that we chose to pass on. DH: What are your thoughts about being a successful Asian American working in Hollywood? RL: I don’t know that I’ve felt any type of racism at all. It’s more of like – it just shows that anyone can enter the Hollywood system and succeed as long as you continue to do the work and you have the ability to identify projects that are somewhat commercial and that’s about it. I haven’t really thought about it too much, because it was just something that came naturally, in terms of my tting into the system. DH: I ask because in other discussions of you, they’ll say “he’s ethnically Asian and culturally American,” 100 FALL 2007 ATIYWOOD and that’s what allows for your unique position of brokerage between the East Asian market and the US. How accurate do you feel that is? How do you feel about being described that way? RL: I don’t mind being described that way, because I feel it’s somewhat true. I felt that there was some level of comfort that the people that we’re dealing with in Asia felt when they were dealing with me as opposed to someone who is Caucasian. at could have given me an edge over some other people. But on the studio side here, the studios and nanciers, all they care about is somebody who can deliver projects and produce movies. It could be anyone from any culture. If they had the properties and they had the ability to work with people, that’s all they really need. DH: Finally, where do you see yourself and your company in the next ve-to-ten years? Where would you like to be? RL: Probably doing the same thing, because it’s interesting. Just producing movies that have commercial viability and that are fun to watch and that I’d be proud to say that I was part of making. It’s an ongoing process. Every day you don’t know what new properties are being created and what the studios are going to green-light. It’s always a gamble of waiting for the next script to come and see what’s good. It’s something that I don’t think is going to change in terms of the outlook of what I want to do. DH: ank you very much. I would like to thank Roy Lee for taking time and speaking with me. I would also like to thank Adam Turner for his help arranging my meeting with Mr. Lee. Daniel Herbert is currently a Visiting Lecturer in Screen Arts & Cultures at the University of Michigan. He is a Ph.D. candidate in Critical Studies at the University of Southern California, working on contemporary transnational remakes. His essays appear in FilmQuarterly ilm Quarterly Quarterly uarterly and illenniumFilmJournal. illennium Film Journal.