With the likes of Flashdance, Top Gun and Black Hawk Down behind him, film producer Jerry Bruckheimer is 'the most powerful and successful film producer in the world'. He tells Michael Dwyer about his version of the Veronica Guerin story, starring Cate Blanchett - which starts filming in Dublin tomorrow
The critics mauled Jerry Bruckheimer's epic production Pearl Harbor when it opened last summer, and he was still bristling at its treatment by the media when we met in London. "It worked with audiences and that's the bottom line for me," he says, with an evident air of self-justification.
The paying customer is always the target when you are a producer who, according to his publicity material, has generated "worldwide revenues of over $12.5 billion in box-office, television, video and recording receipts". I ask Bruckheimer to single out the proudest achievement in his career to date and he immediately nominates Pearl Harbor.
"It was quite an undertaking and it turned out to be such a hit in the end," he says, in the quiet tone that permeates his conversation, although one can easily imagine that voice being raised when he is in the throes of production or in the woes of reading negative reviews. He reels off the figures: "The box-office for Pearl Harbor was over $450 million worldwide and the video and DVD will do over $300 million. And that doesn't count syndicated television and network television sales on the film. That doesn't sound like a failure to me, as the press have tried to represent it in their character assassinations.
"I suppose the love story in the movie threw them. I guess they were looking for a film about Pearl Harbor that was done in the same manner as Black Hawk Down, and it's a much different movie. It was always conceived as the story of Pearl Harbor, with a fictional love story at its core."
Bruckheimer's next production stands to fare much better with the critics. With the working title Veronica Guerin, it is the second movie to deal with the life and death of the Irish crime reporter. It starts shooting in various locations around Dublin tomorrow, with Cate Blanchett - the versatile Australian star of Elizabeth, Oscar and Lucinda and Charlotte Gray - in the Guerin role. The cast also includes Gerard McSorley, Brenda Fricker, Ciaran Hinds, Barry Barnes and Maria McDermottroe. It will be directed by Joel Schumacher, who gave the young Irish actor Colin Farrell his big Hollywood break when he cast him as the lead in the gritty army drama Tigerland.
Today, Bruckheimer is the most powerful and successful film producer in the world, and one of the few whose name is known to the public in the same way as legendary producers of bygone days, such as David O. Selznick, who made Gone With the Wind. As it happens, two years ago, Bruckheimer's peers in the Producers Guild of America presented him with their ultimate accolade, the David O. Selznick Award for Lifteime Achievement.
His high profile is important to Bruckheimer. "My partner, Don Simpson, was an ex-publicist and he said it's important to take credit for the work," he says. "Don worked in the studio system for years and he saw how the studios would take a good piece of work and make it their own. They got all the credit and kept the power. So when Don and I started producing our own movies, we decided that we had to take control over our own careers, so we went out and hired a publicist. That's how it all started."
Bruckheimer started out making commercials in his native Detroit, catching the eye of the major agency BBD&O, which lured him to New York when he was 23. After four years on Madison Avenue, he had the confidence to take on Hollywood and move into feature films. He recalls that the last commercial he produced was for tyres and was directed by Ridley Scott, with whom he was reunited on the current release, Black Hawk Down. When they finished the commercial, Bruckheimer told Scott that that was the last one he was going to make, that he was moving into producing feature films.
True to his word, and before he had turned 30, Bruckheimer had produced Paul Schrader's stylish and influential 1980 movie American Gigolo, before forming his partnership with Don Simpson and developing their "high concept" philosophy, whereby a movie would be pitched to a studio in a single line that said it all. They pioneered that approach on the relatively low-budget Flashdance, starring Jennifer Beals as a dancing welder, which opened to derisory reviews and a US box-office take in excess of $100 million.
The die was cast and a string of high-concept hits followed, many of them serving as launching pads for the careers of young, emerging actors - Eddie Murphy in Beverly Hills Cop, Tom Cruise in Top Gun, Will Smith in Bad Boys, and, most recently, Josh Hartnett in Pearl Harbor and Black Hawk Down.
Is it easier to deal with leading actors when they are breaking through and not spoiled by the star system? "Most of them are the same as when they started out," he says tactfully. "I've known Tom for years, for example, and he's always been great to deal with."
Did Bruckheimer and Don Simpson have a symbiotic relationship as co-producers? "We were both very different in our personal lives," he says, euphemistically, "but in creative terms, when it came to the work we were doing, we were very close. You had Don, this wild man from Alaska, and then me, someone who had grown up in Detroit." Bruckheimer was, in his own words, "the one who came to work every day", while Simpson gorged himself on drug and alcohol excess until he died of heart failure in 1996, during the production of their Alcatraz escape adventure, The Rock, starring Nicolas Cage and Sean Connery. While Simpson's behaviour was notorious in Hollywood, Bruckheimer claims that his co-producer was not fairly treated in Charles Fleming's controversial book, High Concept.
When Bruckheimer went solo as a producer, he says he found it frightening at first to be working alone. "It was hard for a while, when you're used to having someone working with you who will kick down a door to get things done. Don loved doing that. He was a pretty candid guy, though he also got us into trouble sometimes."
Bruckheimer sailed on, producing a string of blockbusters that raked in millions at the box-office: Con Air, Armageddon, Enemy of the State, Gone in Sixty Seconds. Even what he regards as his small movies, like the recent, relatively low-budget Remember the Titans - a 1970s-set inspirational drama of racial integration which had a single well-known name in the cast, Denzel Washington - made more than $115 million at the US box-office. It even got good reviews.
Although it was attacked in some quarters, Black Hawk Down, Bruckheimer's latest release, has received many rave reviews and has earned an Oscar nomination for its director, Ridley Scott. Based on the book by journalist Mark Bowden, the film powerfully recreates the bloody battle between US soldiers and Somali fighters on the streets of Mogadishu in October 1993, when a US mission went disastrously wrong. One commentator noted that Black Hawk Down is so different from Bruckheimer's usual modus operandi that it seems like an anti-Bruckheimer film.
"That's good," he comments. "Sure, it's different, but I like to make all kinds of movies. And some people will like some of them more than others. The important thing is to entertain the audience. It's different with critics. Critics get in to see movies free. They don't have to pay. As long as we reach the audience, I'm happy." Inevitably, comparisons have been made between Black Hawk Down and Pearl Harbor, given that both are war movies produced by Bruckheimer and featuring Josh Hartnett in a leading role, and were released within six months of each other.
"You can't really compare them," says Bruckheimer. "They're so different, and I found both really satisfying to do. Obviously, Pearl Harbor took a lot longer to make, because of the scale of it. We read the book of Black Hawk Down when it was in galley form, and we purchased it. It's a great book. The problem was deciding what to keep in and what to leave out. There were so many more incidents in the book that we would have liked to have featured in the movie.
"It took us a couple of years to get the script of Black Hawk Down right. The book was originally brought to me by Simon West's agent, and I had worked with Simon when he directed Con Air, and he was packaged to be in the deal. Then, when the script was ready, Simon was too busy working on Tomb Raider and he said to go ahead and get someone else to direct Black Hawk Down. Fortunately, Ridley was available. What is extraordinary about him is that he remained so calm all the time on the set. This was such a logistically complicated production."
Bruckheimer has worked on several films with Tony Scott - Beverly Hills Cop II, Top Gun, Crimson Tide. But this was his first with Tony's older brother, Ridley - the director of Alien, Blade Runner, Thelma & Louise and Gladiator - since that tyre commercial back in the late 1970s. "Ridley is the more civilised man, whereas Tony takes it right to the edge," he says. "When we were making Top Gun, he had this motorcycle that he kept riding and crashing, and we put it in chains so Tony couldn't ride it during the shoot. It would have been too much of a risk. But he got these cutters and stole the bike."
As ever, Bruckheimer now has a number of pictures at various stages of production. Next for release is the action-comedy Bad Company, featuring the unlikely pairing of Anthony Hopkins and comic Chris Rock . "It was delayed because of 9/11," he says. "I didn't want it to go out then. It involves terrorists and was the wrong tone for the time." And he is enjoying a critical and ratings success with the TV series, CSI: Crime Scene Investigation, which started on RTÉ recently and is on its second season in the US.
Bruckheimer's next project, the Veronica Guerin film, will be another of his "small pictures". "We've got an American director, Joel Schumacher, but we have an all-Irish crew and all the cast is Irish apart from Cate Blanchett," he says. Guerin is: "a remarkable character who gave up her own life for what she believed in. It means a great deal to us that her family is co-operating with us on making the film."
He is not at all perturbed by the existence of an earlier film on Guerin, When The Sky Falls, which starred Joan Allen and failed to secure a release in the US. "I've never seen it and I'm not worried about it. I hope people will come and see our film."
After more than 30 years in the film industry, Jerry Bruckheimer remains as cautious as when he started out. "I'm surprised every time people show up at the box-office," he says.
Still? "Still. You really don't ever know what is going to work, what people are going to turn out to see. Anyone who thinks they know that is only fooling themselves."
Black Hawk Down is on general release