Kind: captions
Language: en
what has 50 years in the business taught
you about life
uh
that you can have
a great success
um
you can have terrible failures
and bilbo and both are really the same
you just got to keep forging ahead you
you can never let the success
make you think that you're
better than anybody else or or more
successful than the next guy
and the same thing about your failures
you shouldn't think that you fail to
make you any less
a person than the next person
you are who you are
you have to pursue your goals
the way you have always pursued them
through success and failures and if you
keep trying you're going to have some
failures you're also going to have some
successes
when you give up you're going to have
neither
and that itself is failure
[Music]
hey everybody welcome to impact theory
our goal with the show and company is to
introduce you to the people and ideas
that will help you actually execute on
your dreams all right today's guest is
one of the most accomplished film
producers in the history of cinema
spanning one of the most fruitful and
enduring careers of all time he's made
more than 60 films starting with elvis
presley's double trouble back in 67 and
running all the way through one of this
year's most anticipated films the
irishman starring oscar winners robert
de niro joe pesci and al pacino
over his astonishing career he's created
some of the most studied and often
imitated landmarks in world cinema
including raging bull the right stuff
good fellas and wolf of wall street he's
the only filmmaker with three films in
the american film institute's list of
the 100 greatest films of all time and
his movies have been nominated for an
unimaginable 51 academy awards and have
taken home the honors an astonishing 12
times including the highest honor of all
best picture for the classic rocky his
films are so good that retrospectives of
his entire body of work have been done
by the prestigious museum of modern art
new york and the los angeles county
museum of art so please help me in
welcoming the author of a life in movies
stories from 50 years in hollywood the
man with his own star on the hollywood
walk of fame
the legendary writer producer and
director irwin winkler
well thank you tom thank you thank you
for coming
thank you man whittling your
accomplishments down to something that
can be read in you know a minute or so
was next to impossible your career is
really crazy and when you look at people
who've been in the business as long as
you usually it it sort of stops after
like 20 25 years most people tap out
what's been the secret to your longevity
well uh
i think basically uh uh
i've always been curious and
i find
that my curiosity has led me into
different uh
fields of uh
creative
endeavors uh
of course i went from
being a producer to a writer to a
director
so i all those areas have always
interested me i had the technical skills
to be a cinematographer or a film editor
but though within those areas
my curiosity kept pushing me on i
couldn't see
uh retiring and reading the newspaper
every morning without wanting to cut it
out and say oh wait wait there's a movie
here
because almost everything i i do or
think about
has been movies for the last 50 some odd
years
yeah that actually really struck me so
when you're producing partner um bob
chartkoff yes when he decided he was
going to go and
go deep into philanthropy and you
decided that you wanted to keep making
movies it was a really
interesting moment for me in in reading
your story
because what you do is so hard and as
i'm reading the book and hearing all the
times where things would fall apart
eight ways to sunday and you'd have to
like move your entire post-production
facility to be near a production because
they were fighting and literally locking
themselves in trailers which sounds like
the stuff out of movies i mean it's
crazy
what is it about
movies that drives you so much that you
have dealt with this unending parade of
problems for decades i just love making
movies and i think the problems come
along with any creative endeavors you've
talked about impact and i think the
impact theory that your
podcast is based on
uh has a lot to do with
that
breaking through
whatever uh uh exists that
really surrounds you
and prevents you from moving forward
so i never let any of those problems
stop me
all i found them all to be challenges
that you have to meet and overcome or
else you don't accomplish anything
that's one of my favorite things about
you and certainly one of the greatest
stories from the book um you talked
about how you broke in and
what i found really interesting was you
you get sort of that big moment when
everything looks like it's falling apart
and there's this whole conundrum going
with two films are sort of causing a
clash and you had a pretty inventive
solution um to get somebody else
basically to to pay for something that
would free up somebody and the guy said
what i love about you is that you're
solutions oriented that you can think on
your feet
has that been something of of
approaching every problem as if it were
solvable that's been a driving force for
you
well i think some of it is is taking
advantage of of the situation
the the the what you're referring to
uh was really thinking on my feet when i
was 50 years younger
however
the rest of that story is where
catching
a moment and knowing how to respond to
it is also vital in anybody's career
what happened was specifically
i impressed the head of mgm in a
negotiation back in 1966
and
he said to me you know there's nobody in
hollywood
that really thinks on their feet and i
need some young blood
so he said if you if you can get a
script
um
uh i'd make you a producer
well i didn't have any scripts but i got
a call a couple of days later from the
head of his story department at mgm
and
uh the gentleman his name was never
forget his name russ thatcher and he
called me he said you know
mr o'brien who was the head of mgm
wants to make you a producer we have a
script here that we think would be great
for the actress julie christie
who is an academy award winner for
darling and she was the star of dr
zhivago i was involved with handling her
career
and he said uh
we think that julie chris would be great
for this script so would you call mr
o'brien
and see if you can get him to read the
script because he has a big pile on his
desk and he's not reading anything and
if you can get him to read this script
maybe he'll make you the producer it was
probably a wild chance but why not right
so i call mr o'brien i said we have this
script we think it'd be good for julie
christie
uh would you read it
and sure enough a couple of days later
he called me says you know that script
you sent me for julie christie i said
yeah he said you know
i don't think i want to do it with julie
christie oh i said oh that's too bad he
said but
i have another idea i said well with
that he said
uh
why don't we do it with elvis presley
instead of julie christie
so i said the script i gave you with
julie christie you want to do with elvis
presley he said yeah what do you think
of that i said that's the best idea i
ever heard
so
i was smart enough not to say that's a
terrible idea and he said to me well how
quickly can you get out to hollywood and
there are and that's how my career
starts so a lot of it is also
taking advantage of a moment that
and and i think people have those
moments all the time sometimes they
ignore them
and
too often
lose the opportunity for it
to have an impact
do you so i think about rules a lot and
rules have really governed my life
things that i repeat to myself like
something like that i don't have that
particular rule which is great and after
this i will codify it of you know always
be looking for the opportunity always
find a way to capitalize on that window
that other people are going to ignore do
you have rules and things that you live
by
just when you read your film
your films back to back you really get
the sense of your flavor and i just
wondered if you had like something
specific
that is a guiding principle or a rule
that you steer by amongst the other
principles i'd say one and certainly for
the
as a movie producer is
uh never accept no
uh
that's never final for me people are
always saying no
especially things that are risky and
the secret i think of anybody making a
successful movie is to take some chances
and not try to imitate somebody else and
not try to do the same old thing and
take some risks and if you take risks
you're going to be turned down you're
going to be refused
but you never have to accept that
refusal you can't make everything you
want to but you you don't have to accept
no
uh uh
and fight through it that's one of my
principles that
that rule
uh is something that i've adhered to a
great deal uh
it took uh you we talked about the
irishman which is coming out uh in the
fall
it took eight years to get that made
silence took uh the film i did with
martin scorsese in in taipei
that took 20 some odd years
so a lot of films
are a long hard road to get made
and
you have to hang in there and never
accept the negative
i hear people say that a lot but in your
book it becomes pretty clear pretty fast
that you
you don't just say no it's not just
being stubborn though that's clearly a
part of it it's you're finding creative
solutions walk us through rocky because
that was a film that just
because of your desire to keep stallone
involved which is already interesting
and i'd love to hear more about that
you and your partner really had to go it
alone to get that made so
how did perseverance pay off there
and how did you do it without pissing
people off oh we pissed a lot of people
off
especially the studio
well what happened was it it also goes
back to how the the entire arrangement
was made
what happened was
we
uh
had a script bob and i uh that the head
of united artist
wanted to buy but we sold to somebody
else
and he invited me to lunch and i said to
him i i was very surprised that if he
was upset at me because i sold to
somebody else why would he invited me
lunch and he said i want to be in
business with you so that next time
i won't be i won't lose out rather than
being angry he took the other approach
which was kind of interesting
so
we made an arrangement that if we didn't
make a film for them within the first
nine months of our contract
we had what is called a put picture a
put picture means that under certain
conditions the studio would have to
finance the film
and in that case and this was
[Music]
1973 or 74
the deal was that if we didn't make a
movie as i said we could present a
script and it was budgeted at a million
and a half dollars or less
which would today be about 10 million
dollars they had to finance it
so we we hadn't made a film
through a coincidence
stallone came into our office to visit
us as an actor
and uh
we weren't casting anything and it was
one of those kind of peculiar meetings
where
you're talking about nonsense and you're
kind of glancing at your watch hoping
this will go quickly
but as he left he said oh by the way i'm
a writer and
he said if if i send you a script would
you read it and he sent us a script and
and we didn't want to do it as a movie
but the writing was very honest and very
true
so we called them up and said you know
we don't want to make that script you
can't but we think you're really good
writer and if you have anything else we
really would like to he said well i have
an idea
so he came into the office and he
pitched the idea of rocky to us
and we liked it
and he said you know however
he said you know i'm really an actor
more so than a writer
so i'll write the script you don't have
to pay me any money
right away that sounded pretty
interesting
and uh
he said and if you like it
i have to star in it
so okay it's we like the writing we like
the idea why not
so
he wrote about half the script sent it
to us we gave him some comments he
finished it rather quickly
and we liked it and of course we gave it
to united artists which was the company
we had a contract with
and they said why in the world would we
want to finance a movie
with two ugly ducklings you're going to
shoot it in philadelphia
you want to start who sylvester stallone
who is he
and nobody wants to see fight films so
they said we're not going to make it so
we said well okay we have our contract
with you
we budgeted the film it's less than a
million and a half dollars you have to
finance it
so they said well we've done a budget
ourselves
and the budget we've done is two million
dollars so it doesn't apply
as a put picture
so we got very angry bob jonathan and i
and we said you know what we'll make the
picture for a million dollars and we'll
guarantee anything over that that we'll
pay for ourselves and they said well how
are you going to guarantee it we said
well we'll put up our houses
we'll mortgage our homes to to do it
and they said so in that case they said
okay we can't and that's how the movie
got made got financed
right i mean that's uh that that's a
really incredible story and i think as
film fans we all want to say thank you
for doing that because it's such an
extraordinary movie
i want to know more about this when
people are going this way it's probably
the right time to go that way
how do you have the confidence in
yourself knowing that failure is so
possible that making a movie is hard no
matter what but when people that are you
know they have every incentive to pick
winners are saying this is a loser
how do you have the confidence in
yourself to go in that direction well i
learned very early on that most films a
lose money
they they ultimately may
make money back
you know through subsidiary rights
through
library sales over the long run uh
the fact that somebody says it's not
good or it's not going to make money has
never been a detriment as far as we're
concerned well you went to you you have
a film background so you know it's so
hard to translate
an idea a to a script
from the script to an actual film
and then get it out
to the audience
for their responses
it's not easy it's not easy but there's
also a really big difference and in this
interview one thing i really want to try
to get from you is
i know that there's going to be a
temptation for you to be ultra humble
and i've had great fortune i think
there's a lot more systematic stuff at
play especially having read your book
and what i want to know is there's a big
difference between going okay most films
lose money everyone's saying this is
going to flop but i believe in it
there's something here
and there's such a something here that
even though i know most films lose money
i'm going to mortgage my house
to make sure that it gets made and so
the the part of the code that i want to
crack and remember this is entirely
selfish for me so we're launching a film
studio i have to understand this i have
to be able to look at a property have
stallone come into my office and go from
i'm bored get out of here to wait a
second there really is something about
this kid and what i want to know is what
are the key moments in your life that
have really shaped who you are at like a
deep fundamental level
well
interesting enough i
i was a young i graduated uh high school
kind of early on i kind of skipped the
term and and i ended up going to
nyu while
the most of the students were
ex-soldiers from world war ii so i was a
kind of a duck out of what i was this
kid that all the
members of the
my class were much older more mature
so i hated
nyu and i joined the army during the
korean war i enlisted in the army during
the korean war
and when i got out i went back to school
but i worked during the day and went to
school
four nights a week four hours a night
and worked all day
and i i had a great professor and i fell
in love with fitzgerald steinbeck dos
pasos
all the faulkner all the great american
authors from that and i learned how to
read and and understand writing
so that was one of the great changes and
influences my life this one nyu
professor by the name of leahy who
taught me how to read basically so that
was another influence the second one was
when i and i
coincidentally
looking for a job
i i read a book about an agent i got a
job in the william mars famous mail room
uh as a male boy at 40 a week and then i
met my wife
who has been my greatest influence and
my greatest critic and my greatest
booster
and we're now married 60 years by the
way
and we went through all the
trials and tribulations of
starting a career starting a family and
taking chances and quitting and starting
over
so she was the most confidence giving of
all the people i've ever known and then
i was a very unhappy and very
unsuccessful agent at william morris
and i met bob chardov and we decided
that we would both
start although we both had small
children
at the time
we just said okay let's take a chance
and uh again when i said to margo hey we
got seven thousand dollars in my pension
fund from william morris we're going
into a new business bob and i
and
you know we're gonna have to really she
said look as long as i have enough money
to pay the drugstore because we had to
buy diapers and all that for baby she
said we'll be okay so she was great
because she said we'll be fine
so bob was a big change and then after
that it was just
a lot of a lot of
just
hard work and and and
then creatively
i met two people who
really changed my creative life after i
had made
movies for seven or eight years and that
was
de niro and scorsese
yeah that's uh
what you guys have done together is is
really amazing and to try to tease apart
your individual stories i think would be
pretty impossible in all of that though
but let me just
sly of course
uh showed me something different and
that is
uh
believing in yourself
of all the people
uh that i've met stallone was a guy
who didn't have a
a quarter to his name he was broke
but always believed in his own
opportunity and his own ability and
creatively he was he's
people don't take him as seriously as
they should he is really really a
renaissance man
yeah his career has been amazing and in
film school i mean he's like lore about
believing in yourself about leveraging
something that you have to really launch
your career in fact that that's a
fascinating question so somebody that's
seen the times change and all of that
and seeing people have to break into an
industry that is just ruthless in terms
of being sort of a closed system
what
pithy advice do you have for people to
break into the industry
well
that's a good question
i started in in in a mail room uh
there's no job that's too low
on the totem pole as far as starting in
in in the film business or the
television business so if somebody says
to you
it's film school or it's uh on the set
they're all good um
scorsese started in watching
movies when he was eight years old
that's that was his biggest influence
because he had asthma and couldn't play
stickball in the streets of new york
with the kids so he went to an
air-conditioned movie theater that's how
he started uh
bob de niro's father was an artist a
very very fine painter and and sly uh in
spite of the way he talked and acted
went to a fine school
and
had a great ability to write um
where it comes from i don't know but
uh pursue it that would would be the the
basic process that all of us went
through
i never thought
uh i could read a book and understand it
as well as i did once i had this one
teacher at nyu
so i it comes from
any many many different places a lot of
it depends on the person what has 50
years in the business taught you about
life
that you can have
a great success
uh
you can have terrible failures
and they'll both and both are really the
same
you just got to keep forging ahead you
you can never let the success
make you think that you're better than
anybody else or or more successful than
the next guy
and the same thing about your failures
you shouldn't think that your failure to
make you any less
a person than the next person
you are who you are you have to pursue
your goals
the way you have always pursued them
through success and failures and if you
keep trying you're going to have some
failures you're also going to have some
successes
when you give up you're going to have
neither
and that itself is failure what's the
why that drives you like what is what is
the sort of end goal of all of this
good question i don't know
i don't i don't really know how
i think i i i
in one of my uh diary notes in the book
i i uh
i think i said that i
i sometimes wonder why
i have to wake up every morning and
defeat the world
i think words to that effect i i i have
in one of my
diary notes
uh which i might not have written about
narratively but i did it in my my notes
it's interesting why do i have to wake
up today and defeat the world i like
that a lot and it really does sometimes
feel that way certainly as an
entrepreneur it's there's the thing that
always plays in my head is there's
always going to be a problem like there
are so few moments where everything just
seems calm and placid like it's always
you solve this problem and just when
you're feeling great about that boom you
get hit with another problem how do you
manage stress anxiety like how do you
just keep coming back year after year
and you're so vital
it's pretty crazy for the length of
career you have how long you've been
just up and at this and how vital you
still are
how do you manage all that like given
what i presume your stress levels to be
you should have had a heart attack like
in your 60s like it's crazy well
interesting enough and it's going to
sound kind of
obvious in a way but in spite of all
this
we have incredible family ties as i said
i've been married to you i my three sons
luckily live all in los angeles
so we we're very very
very strong
family and
friendships
most of the friendships are within
the business uh in making movies on
friday i had lunch with bob de niro we
talked about
his marriage his divorce
my marriage no divorce for me um
we talked about the old days and there
was a bond of friendship that makes all
those
bad moments um
uh
less important in your life certainly
less important than the good moments
but they'll as you said there'll be
terrible disappointments it'll be
terrible bad moments but they're an
awful lot of good ones and
i don't think it it serves anybody to
really dwell on the bad moments you're
going to move them on yeah you're going
to be hurt you're going to be upset
i sat in the audience
where raging bull
didn't win an academy award where i
thought it should have i sat in the
audience where the right stuff should
have was nominated and should have
gotten an academy one didn't i shot in
the audience where goodfellas should
have gotten academy award and didn't and
then i said to myself you know when we
won an academy award for rocky we beat
out all the presidents men
network
taxi driver i wonder how those producers
felt about me
so i kind of it all evens out in a way
let's talk about your marriage
i think it's i heard an amazing quote
one time that has certainly been true in
my life and that is the people with the
strongest home lives take the biggest
risks
what is it that's made your marriage
last 60 years in a very volatile
industry
we just love each other
we started with nothing which i think
maybe is part of the build of a
relationship
and
we just just love each other i mean it's
as simple as that
and do you guys have any techniques for
keeping the love alive is there any sort
of like if you were going to pass on to
your kids as to how to have a winning
relationship yeah number one
you don't always have to be right
um
and we literally never go to bed
angry we can we can have disagreements
and nobody doesn't have a disagreement
but at the end of the day
you shouldn't walk around angry and say
uh and go to bed without finding a way
to make up even if you
it even if you have to admit you're
wrong and you know in your heart you're
right it doesn't pay
the the relationship is more important
than being right or wrong
um those are the kind of general things
but basically you really have to care
about the person next to you and and
think if you're married or in a
relationship for a long period of time
that that person is sharing everything
with you everything in your life with
you
and it's as important as your life
yourself
there there's no separation between the
two
yeah it's interesting you've had a lot
of long-term relationships what would
you say is
so from de niro scorsese even stallone
why
what would they say is the reason they
keep coming back to work with you
specifically
i
you'd have to ask them i really uh uh
i don't know
all right well then let me make me blush
so well i wish i could ask them and
certainly would and i certainly have my
hypothesis looking at your career but um
what is it that's allowed you to get so
many films across the finish line you go
into great detail about this in the book
it's one of the things that i find most
interesting for people that are willing
to to
read the book with an eye towards that
there it's
it's a master class in how to overcome
obstacles and get things across the
finish line you touch on several times
about how you pulled two disparate
pieces together got one person to let go
of something else i mean it's just
really really extraordinary but if you
had to like button that up for us in
terms of how you've just been able to
get films done i mean it's uh that would
be well each one is kind of different uh
i talk about in the book uh uh how
raging bull got made
one of the great great films of the last
50 years is arguably raging ball it's
from
marty scorsese's masterpiece it's really
really great
the studio had absolutely no intention
of doing it and they told us so
um
but i realized at the time when bob
charnov realized at the time that
they were desperate
after the success of rocky and they were
very vulnerable that they wanted to make
another rocky
and we had the right to say no
so we said you know what
if you don't make raging bull we're not
going to make another rocky
and they reluctantly agreed to make a
raging bull
so and we made rocky too so it worked
out but we found that area that we can
operate in that area of their
vulnerability to trade off
again
don't accept no reading the book it's
very clear to me that you're a master of
change you talked about how when you
came into the industry it was like in
total flux and as you were describing
and this is back in the late 60s as you
were describing it reminded me so much
of what's happening today and then i
thought and wait he's also going through
it still this other radical shift as we
move away from traditional distribution
to digital distribution
and you talk very eloquently about
netflix and itunes and obviously the
irishman is going to netflix
how have you navigated change and how do
you overcome the quote that haunts me to
this day which is genius is a young
man's game which you are proving just is
not true
well number one i don't consider myself
a genius so
i'm not part of that game
uh no i think you have to forge ahead
whatever comes look i remember
when the home video came
that was a crisis at the time people
said why would anybody want to go to a
movie if they can buy a videotape or
then a dvd and see the movie at home
well
my answer to that is and it
relates to today as well
since
some
woman or man took two sticks together
and was able to make a fire
people gathered around that fire
and somebody came along and started
telling him a story and the idea of
sitting around that fire and somebody
telling him a story is exactly what the
movie theater is is what the legitimate
theater is and i think
part of our dna
why do we get in bed
with another person man or woman
probably because
the warmth that we get from their body
is part of
our prehistoric dna because
back in
the wilderness when
the neanderthal man was didn't have a
fire and he wanted to get warm a person
next to him warmed him or maybe it was
the protection of having somebody next
to you
so that's part of who we are just built
in and i think part of who we are is
listening to that man or woman telling
the story as all of us gathered around
the fire so i think movie theaters are
going to be there forever because people
still want to gather and go to a film
uh
they may change it so
a group of 12 people will go to
somebody's living room and watch a movie
on a big screen but it's the same
process in a way
that makes a lot of sense
so
where can everybody find your book
how do you buy books today there aren't
that many bookstores so
amazon
or you know is the way to get it or
itunes and what movies do you have
coming up that you want people to pay
attention to well obviously the uh
the irishman
which is going to come out
in the fall
which i think is going to be a real
treat it's really really special really
special it's the coming together of
scorsese de niro pesci
uh
pacino
and myself all of whom have had a long
history together
and um
that's that's something to look forward
to and uh
uh we've got a uh uh
i mentioned it previously john carney
who is a wonderful filmmaker is working
on doing
a story about the gershwins with the
great great music of the uh
american songbook
and a couple other ideas we're playing
with but that's what is on the board
right now it's exciting i really can't
wait to see what you continue to do it's
pretty extraordinary what is the impact
that you want to have on the world
just give
some people a good time in the
theater
make them think a little bit make them
laugh a little bit if i can but i
haven't been very good with comedy so
i'm i can't say make them laugh but uh
yeah maybe think a little bit yeah
well i think that you've done an
extraordinary job with that already for
sure
guys this man has literally changed the
face of cinema you could just go down
and watch all the films that he's done
if you want a master class in amazing
world defining cinema his book is
extraordinary i cannot recommend it
enough and i'm literally holding my
breath for the irishman
irwin thank you so much for coming on
that was absolutely extraordinary thank
you thank you guys until next time be
legendary take care thank you
i'm a great author used to always say to
me there's always another race truck
there's always another game so take your
game and ratchet it down just to drop
and you're going to have another game
and he was right
i didn't listen to that to me winning is
everything