INTERVIEW:Meet Lauren Shuler Donner, producer of the film 'The Secret Life of Bees', whose work has so far amassed €1.9 billion, writes Michael Dwyer
FOR SOMEONE SO accustomed to the notoriously tough cut-and-thrust of film production, Lauren Shuler Donner appears to be serene and charming. Perhaps she wears a velvet glove that conceals an iron fist. There isn't another woman working in movies today who has been more successful as a producer. After 25 years in the job, her productions have amassed more than €1.9 billion.
Did she get to keep a big fat percentage? "I wish," she says, shaking her head ever so slowly. "Oh, no, I haven't. Because my deal on the X-Menmovies was made a long time ago, by the time I got the first movie made they held me to my old deal." Then she smiles. "But I've done all right." She has survived breast cancer. And she's not bitter about her experience on Warren Beatty's film Bulworth. "I was not involved in it," she says. "He kicked me off it, but he did a good job on the movie."
Film production remains very much a male-dominated profession, even at a time when some Hollywood studios are run by women, but it was much more difficult when she started out in the industry. Now 59, Lauren Shuler was born in Cleveland, Ohio, and studied film at Boston University. Her first break came when she was hired as a camera operator at NBC TV in Los Angeles.
"Even now, that's an unusual profession for a woman," she says, "but that's what steeled me for producing. The younger men were great, but the older men didn't want me there. I could sense it and I'd hear them talking about me. I decided it was their problem. I had to work three times as hard. I physically moved all the equipment because I didn't want anyone to say I couldn't do that. Men are physically stronger than women, and that equipment was so much heavier back then. After about three years, I felt I'd done that job and it was time for me to tell other people how to shoot."
Then she was in a car accident that kept her housebound for six months. "I never expected that would change my life for the better," she says. "A lot of my friends were writers and they sent me scripts to work on at home. A job opened up as a story-editor at a film company. They gave me the script for Thank God It's Friday and I sent back five pages of constructive criticism. They liked that and hired me as associate producer."
Ironically, given her experiences as a camera operator, her first feature film as the principal producer was Mr Mom, the 1983 comedy that upturned preconceived notions of gender roles. Michael Keaton played a man who loses his job and has to do all the household duties while his wife (Teri Garr) goes out to work.
"That story was a little ahead of its time," Shuler Donner says. "The credit goes to John Hughes, who wrote it. I read his work in National Lampoonand it was so funny that I sought him out. One night he phoned and said his wife was in Arizona, leaving him to care for their two boys, and he was frazzled. He had never done the shopping. He didn't know how to work a washing machine. That gave him the idea for Mr Mom. I read it and knew it would work as a movie." She went on to produce two Hughes-scripted tales of teen angst that became key movies of the Brat Pack era, St Elmo's Fire and Pretty in Pink.
By 1993 she had produced two of the 10 biggest hits of the year - the political satire Dave, starring Kevin Kline, and FreeWilly, in which a boy struggles to save a whale. "I went to Warner Brothers for money to move the whale out of this aquarium in Mexico and set it free," she says. "I dragged in these mailbags that were four feet high and full of letters asking Warner Brothers to free the whale. There were protests outside SeaWorld. It was great." Meanwhile, she had met Richard Donner when setting up the fantasy adventure Ladyhawke,which he directed. He had already enjoyed huge hits with the original version of The Omenand the first Supermanstarring Christopher Reeve, and would go on to direct the lucrative four-film Lethal Weaponfranchise.
They married in 1985 and she became Lauren Shuler Donner. They have tended to avoid working closely together. "It's not a good idea," she says. "I'd much rather be married to him." People used to congratulate him on the movies she produced. "That happened for a long time, but not any more now that people realise what I've done. It used to drive me crazy. It wasn't his fault. It was just assumed because so few women were producers that he did all the work, but they were my movies. I developed them, I produced them and he wasn't involved."
Has he been playing Mr Momrecently while she produced film after film? "Well, he says he is," she laughs. "But look at all the man has done. And he helped me out while I was filming four movies this year all over the world. At one point I was working on Wolverine in Sydney and I had to go to New Orleans for another film, so he worked on that for a couple of months. So he gets the Good Husband of the Year award."
The first of her four new productions to open is The Secret Life of Bees, a timely drama set in small-town South Carolina in 1964 when the prospect of a black US president was unthinkable. "It took the White House to enact the law allowing black people to vote and to eat in restaurants and sit in theatres with white people," she says. "Now, look where we are today, although there was a fear that Barack Obama wouldn't be elected because of racism." In a startling early scene, a young black woman, Rosaleen (Jennifer Hudson), is on her way to register as a voter for the first time when she is attacked verbally and then physically by white bigots.
Based on Sue Monk Kidd's best-selling novel, The Secret Life of Beesfeatures Dakota Fanning as sensitive 14-year-old Lily Owens, who flees her volatile widower father (Paul Bettany) and goes on the run with Rosaleen, their housekeeper. They find refuge in the home of a black woman, August Boatwright (Queen Latifah), who runs a honey-making business, and her sisters June and May (Alicia Keys and Sophie Okonedo).
Shuler Donner optioned the film rights when the novel was in galley form. "I was so passionate about it that I optioned it with my own money," she says. "That goes against Rule Number One for a producer, which is never to put up your own money. I'll never do that again, but I'm glad I did it.
"I was drawn to so many aspects of the book. I loved the role of Lily. She's such a spitfire. I loved the spirit of the Boatwright women. They were remarkable. I was taken by the themes of the film - that family is where you find it, and that feeling of being unlovable and having to find love inside you.
"And I felt it was time for a film about the civil rights movement because there haven't been many lately."
She assembled a "dream cast", she says. "Every single one was our first choice right down the line." As with the adaptation of most popular novel, there was an additional challenge to match readers' expectations. "This book sold over eight million copies, so that was the only thing I was afraid of. You read a book and you dream up your own casting and you imagine your own movie. Nine times out of 10, you're likely to come out of a movie and to have liked the book better.
"We were determined not to let that happen. So the Pepto-Bismol pink paint for the house had to be exactly right, as people imagined the house. We did take some liberties in casting. Queen Latifah is younger than her character in the book, and Rosaleen is significantly younger. We felt she would be a better friend to Lily if she was closer in age. June is younger, too, because we wanted Alicia Keys and we wanted somebody to exemplify the younger generation getting involved with the civil rights movement."
The film is a handsome production that belies its budget. "It only cost $11 million (€8.5bn), which is nothing in terms of a movie with that cast and all the period recreation we had to achieve," says Shuler Donner. "There was a cold snap while we were shooting and there were no flowers and no leaves on the trees, and we had to work hard to find and rent the period locations and cars."
That budget was peanuts compared to the cost of her three blockbuster hits in the high-tech X-Menfranchise, and a fourth, Wolverine, starring Hugh Jackman, is on the way in May. "The logistics of the first X-Menmade it really difficult to do. We had to take it one day at a time. We had no idea how to make the movie. You know, what I always say about movies is that you don't know how to do it until it is done, but then you're on to the next one. It was so much easier when we made the next X-Menmovies."
An animal lover, Shuler Donner has "another one like Free Willy", ready for release in the spring, Hotel for Dogs. "It's about two kids who adopt stray dogs and put them up in an abandoned hotel. The boy comes up with all these inventions to keep the dogs amused - a ball-throwing machine, a treadmill with a bone at the end of it. The message of the movie is to rescue stray dogs and adopt them or find good homes for them."
And she has what may be the beginning of another franchise in Cirque du Freak, which opens next autumn. "It's by an Irish writer, Darren Shan, who has written 12 books. They're for kids, but I really enjoyed them. The hero is a kid named Darren, who loves spiders. His best friend, Steve, is a bad kid, but Darren really likes him. They go to a freak show where there's a vampire, and Darren's life is changed when he has to become the vampire's assistant."
After 25 years as a producer, what are the most valuable lessons Shuler Donner has learned? "Listening is very important. If you meet with a writer and they tell you a story that's different to what you want, don't try to talk them into something else because they'll give you the earlier story they had.
"The other thing is that assumption is the mother of f**k-up. You can't assume that something is going to happen. You have to make sure it does happen. And of course, a good story has to be there. It's all about the script and you can't fix it with an actor or a director. If it ain't on the page, it ain't on the stage."
The Secret Life of Beesis now showing at cinemas in Dublin and Cork