The Hollywood Reporter has released their latest Oscar season roundtable video and this time the producers are front and center and among the participants you have Michael De Luca (Captain Phillips, Fifty Shades of Grey), David Heyman (Gravity), Charles Roven (American Hustle, Man of Steel), Pam Williams (Lee Daniels’ The Butler) and Dede Gardner (12 Years a Slave, World War Z).
Obviously one of the topics is money and they also get into the role of a producer right off the bat, but I found it interesting when Michael De Luca started discussing the casting process for Fifty Shades of Grey and fan reactions and their expectations for the character. He admits to being on Twitter and interacting with fans, but in the end says of the book by E.L. James that she had written a fantasy and no man could ever fulfill the image the fans had in their minds.
Similary, Roven talks about the casting of Heath Ledger as The Joker in The Dark Knight, which, like Ben Affleck being cast as Batman in the upcoming Batman vs. Superman, was looked down upon by many fans initially. “All you can do is keep your head down, trust your vision,” Roven says before responding to a question regarding Ledger’s death, which is when he adds:
“I had just seen him two weeks before and shown him — we did this five-minute prologue introducing The Joker — that was going to come out in IMAX on Christmas, six months before the movie was coming out. And he just went crazy for it, he loved it so much. We showed it to him twice, and then two weeks later, he’s dead. That was really, really shocking.”
De Luca also gets into what happens when an actor backs out of a project and while you can tell there’s a certain level of smoke and mirrors at play, this is a side of the conversation we don’t often see.
Heyman also discusses maintaining the cast of the Harry Potter franchise and working around, specifically, Emma Watson‘s needs and that moves into asking why producers renegotiate with Jennifer Lawrence and her $500,000 contract for The Hunger Games turned into millions for The Hunger Games: Catching Fire.. Roven’s response is to say you want to have a good working dynamic and I really wonder what the conversation would have been like had Marvel Studios producers been in the room.
Wahlberg even discusses the recent rumors surrounding the Entourage negotiations saying it wasn’t about money it was about fairness, and on and on… But I’ll let you just sit back and watch. Enjoy, and if you haven’t seen the previous roundtables you can find the writers here.
