Remaking Transnational Hollywood an Interview with Roy Lee
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Daniel Herbert Remaking Transnational Hollywood An Interview with Roy Lee The recent cycle of Hollywood remakes of East Asian RL: Actually, the Pusan Film Festival a few years ago films constitutes one of the most important changes in was the first time I’d been to Korea. I didn’t speak Hollywood’s transnational composition. Producer Roy Korean because my parents just spoke English to Lee of Vertigo Entertainment is immensely responsible me, and I don’t speak Korean now. for this industrial and cultural change. Lee produced The Ring (2002), The Grudge (2004), and most DH: In terms of your background, do you feel they recently The Departed (2006), and has negotiated deals [your parents] had any particular influence on the for numerous other Hollywood remakes of “foreign” films career you chose, or do you feel you’ve done things currently in development. differently than they would have imagined? The following is an edited transcript of an interview I RL: Definitely very differently. They would have conducted with Lee on September 9, 2006. wanted me to continue being a lawyer and having a safe career, of having a steady income from working in a corporate law firm. Daniel Herbert: Could you talk about where your parents are from, and when and how they moved DH: When you were studying law, what type of from Korea? law did you think you would practice? Roy Lee: They moved from Korea in the early 60s, RL: I was interested in corporate law, transactional I think it was 1962. My father came here to go to work, where one company would acquire another medical school and did his residency here. I was one just to increase the value of everything. Almost born in the late 60s, in 1969, in New York. We like the new heads of Paramount. Those guys were moved to Washington D.C. when I was three. We former corporate transaction people. They look for lived there while my father was working at various deals and build companies. hospitals. DH: And you imagined you would be part of those DH: Did they have strong connections with family kinds of negotiations? in Korea? Did they go back? Did you go there? 94 Hybrid Media, Ambivalent Feelings Hyung-Sook Lee, editor, Spectator 27:2 (Fall 2007) 94-100. HERBErt RL: I was. When I was working in the law firm in DH: How much of the business, would you say, is D.C., I did corporate transactional work. devoted to remakes versus original scripts? DH: That kind of experience must play into what RL: In general, now, I’d probably say [remakes are] you do now, in terms of negotiating deals. about 25%, which is a substantial amount. When you say remakes, it could also be adaptations of TV RL: It doesn’t really. I feel like it’s all common shows. But if you’re thinking about adaptations, sense. If there’s a person willing to sell and there’s that’s probably more than half, up to 75%, of all a person willing to buy, there’s always a way to make material – things that are based on books, or comic a deal. I don’t think that is something you need to books, or just other mediums. Whereas it seems go to school or practice law to realize. like it’s rare that an original idea and a spec script are made into movies. DH: When and how did you decide to go into the entertainment business? At our company it’s probably more than half devoted to remakes, mainly because that is what is expected RL: It was in September 1996 when I first moved of us from the studio system. It was never our out to California. I was leaving the law firm and intention to always be just remakes. It worked out I moved out here just to try something different. very well for us to start with. We didn’t see a reason I had a feeling I’d go into entertainment in some to deviate from that if things were going smoothly way, whether film, music, or television, and it just in terms of projects going into production. so happened that my first job was in the film industry. DH: I’m sure that you must go out to a lot of festivals. I worked for this company Alphaville. At the time we were doing remakes of The Mummy (original RL: I don’t go out to festivals so much any more 1932, remake 1999) and The Day of the Jackal because a lot of the projects are sent to me early (original 1973, remake 1997). I watched how the in the stages of either development or as they are development went through with those films and finished. So I would get the scripts and rough-cuts how it was not that difficult to be a producer. I of movies and then the final product of movies too, didn’t really see it as something that you needed to to see if they could get any traction on getting a go to film school to learn, which was all just based on studio to buy the remake rights. And the reason a relationships and identifying interesting properties lot of them do that is to offset some of the budgets and working with writers. of these movies, if they can sell some rights. It helps to raise the budget if it sells early, or it offsets some DH: It’s interesting that you were working on of the costs they’ve spent already. remakes as part of your introduction to the industry. [Could you give] your official title at Vertigo DH: You mean to offset the costs of the production Entertainment and describe what your day-to-day of the original film? So someone from Japan or activity looks like for the most part [now]? South Korea will go to you, even during their own production or before, to sell their remake rights to RL: My official title is producer, and my day-to-day fund their own production? is actually producing movies. Producers are most like architects of the movies or even like a chef at a RL: Just to see whether or not someone would restaurant. We put together the pieces that make buy a movie. the movie go forward. I don’t write it. I don’t direct it. I just help to put the whole package together and DH: That can’t have always been true. When would bring the project forward for a studio or a private you say that shift occurred? financier. RL: During the last couple of years, when these HYBRID MEDIA, AMBIVALENT FEELINGS 95 REMAKING TRANSNatiONAL HOLLYWOOD movies started doing well financially and the Ring book probably wouldn’t have been translated studios started getting more and more money for in English if it hadn’t been a successful movie. It the rights. doesn’t really matter if these are remakes of foreign movies or just books or original screenplays, just DH: And you have a first-look deal with Focus something where the story interests me. It’s a lot Features? easier to be able to judge the viability of a movie by watching a movie that’s already been made and RL: Universal Pictures. hasn’t been seen widely by the US audience. DH: Who do you talk to most regularly at DH: How would you characterize the difference Universal? between producing a remake versus an original script? RL: The studio executives, like Scott Bernstein or Peter Kramer, the senior VPs. RL: It’s a similar process, but it’s an easier process to get a remake into production because it takes less DH: They will then green-light things? work to convince the financier, be it a studio or an independent financier, to fund a project because it RL: The process is a lot slower than just green- feels like a safer bet to work on something that is lighting. We first have to identify projects. From successful before – financially and commercially and there, we either have hired a writer beforehand or creatively – by showing movies. Like, “that really work with the studio to find a writer. worked, but these are the things I could improve.” And the fact that it’s already been seen by a huge An example would be The Host (2006), where we audience overseas and been successful there, but saw the movie and identified it as something that that’s not the audience we’re targeting. they wanted to try to adapt to the US market. And then we go out to different writers and figure out DH: You save time and money on script development who the person would be to write it, and then we’d and audience research. Have you ever tried to wait for the script. Then the process would either calculate the savings of doing a remake versus doing be a long process of getting a good script, or a short an original script? one, where a first draft comes in where we could attach a director. That is the next step, finding the RL: No, I never really thought of it that way. It’s director, who then is the person who attracts the hard to say, because the original scripts we have cast. At that point, when we have the script, the could take longer, but I have no idea how much. The director, and the cast in place, the studio will green- costs of doing a remake vary from hiring a million- light the movie.