EXCLUSIVE: On Friday night, producer Charles Roven receives the 2024 Power of Cinema Award from the American Cinematheque for 40 years worth o
EXCLUSIVE: On Friday night, producer Charles Roven receives the 2024 Power of Cinema Award from the American Cinematheque for 40 years worth of films that have moved the cultural needle. That includes Oppenheimer, for which Roven accepted the Best Picture Oscar along with Christopher Nolan and Emma Thomas. His list is long with films that have grossed billions of dollars and encompass Hollywood’s biggest stars and filmmakers spread across titles like 12 Monkeys, American Hustle, Three Kings, The Dark Knight Trilogy, Man of Steel and other DC blockbusters.
My very first exchanges with Roven years ago were bitter; I’d learned that his wife, Dawn Steel, was dying from brain cancer. I had a fine relationship with her, but she was the first woman to run a major studio and I felt I was doing my job by divulging the depressed news to Daily Variety readers. Roven was steadfast that their struggle remain private. This was two bulls locking horns, and I walked away shaken. My wife asked what was wrong, and I told her he was getting in the way of me doing my job. She said something like, ‘So you are giving a hard time to a man whose wife is dying from the most terrible cancer imaginable? What’s the matter with you?’ I told Roven I would not write it.
I bring this up here because it was a formative lesson for me I never forgot. Find ways to break news while not losing empathy, and if you miss a story, another will come in 10 minutes if you’re any good. Roven and I share the belief that the most critical lessons come not from victory laps, but adversity, setback and defeat. Here, Roven gives Deadline readers a look at an array of his highs and lows, with epic war stories that formed the strenuous shell of a producer’s producer. Buckle up for a ripping read, one replete with brawls, a choking, firings, and even a wiretapping at the hands of Anthony Pellicano. I would never have been able to provide this had I been ruthless with Roven in his moment of need, so maybe that is a payoff nearly 30 years later, and a reminder to me of the value of playing the long game and being changeable enough to allow him to process an unimaginable life tragedy.
DEADLINE: There will be plenty of back-patting for you at the Beverly Hilton tomorrow night. Producing seems so strenuous right now; you can toil with little pay for a decade developing a project and not getting your fee until a movie goes in production. With plenty trying to leverage credit and a piece of your fee. I thought your honor is an opportunity to show your struggle, hoping it would illustrate for Deadline readers and your peers what it takes. And of course, who doesn’t like good war stories? So, what was the most challenging film you made, and why?
CHARLES ROVEN: Well, for sure, one of the most challenging was the first one, because it’s the first one. That was Heart Like a Wheel.
DEADLINE: That was the one about Shirley Muldowney, the drag racing pioneer played by Bonnie Bedelia…
ROVEN: I learned many lessons on that movie. I had to replace my lead actor, which is unusual on any movie. But to have to do that on your first one? He really didn’t leave me any choice.
DEADLINE: Who was he and at what point in production did you replace him?
ROVEN: I’d rather not say who, but we were three weeks in. He was the reason we got the financing and he knew it and he was disruptive. Jonathan Kaplan was the director, and this particular actor in the middle of takes would yell “cut.” Jonathan finally said to him, “Hey, I am the director. You’re the actor. I say, action. I say, cut. And you do everything in between.”
We ended up having to reshoot two weeks, which we did with Beau Bridges, who ended up playing the male lead. I don’t even know if the guy who we replace is alive right now, but this is about my lessons anyway, not his.
DEADLINE: What is that like, your first film and your financiers say, go fire your lead actor?
ROVEN: It actually didn’t work exactly that way. I had a conversation with the actor, of course. I then called his agent, and this was on a Friday. And I said to the agent, this is what happened. Bonnie Bedelia played Shirley Muldowney, who was a real person, and her performance was fantastic. And he is offscreen, giving dialogue to her, in a tearful scene. She was very emotional. And in the middle of it, even though he was offscreen, he yelled “cut.” That was the final straw. She got very upset and said, “I like what I was doing. The camera’s on me. What are you doing?’ And his response was, “I look out for Numero Uno.”
DEADLINE: Was he saying that her work in that scene was so good it overshadowed his?
ROVEN: I don’t know, but I know that it means, I care about me and nobody else. I called the agent, who said he would talk to his client and that he understood why I was making the call. By 9 o’clock at night on Friday, I get a call from the actor who says, what am I some grammar school kid that if I’m bad in school, you call my parent? Is that what it is?
DEADLINE: Not what you needed to hear?
ROVEN: He said, “Let me tell you something, okay? I’m just not a movie star, a TV star. I’ve produced things, alright? And I’m going to tell you this: if you want me to, I’m happy to quit. I know what that’s going to take, and this is where you can apologize to me.” Click. So I spend the weekend talking to everybody, including the actors and the director and the writer. I said, we’re going to have to defer some of our money in order to be able to do this. We’ll need at least two weeks. And they said, whatever, let’s do it. I called my friends in the agency business and said, who can I get? An agent who was a very close friend of mine, Todd Smith at CAA, said, “Beau Bridges just got back in town.” I said, can he start on Monday? He said, “Sure if he likes the script.” He gave me his address. I went to his house. I rang the doorbell. I mean, I rang the gate bell. No answer. I climbed over the fence. I threw the script on his porch. I climbed back over the fence. This is the ‘80s. There were no cell phones. I go to a phone booth, I call the agent, I say, it’s on his porch. Get him to open the f*cking door. He calls me up 6 o’clock on Sunday and says, “Here’s what we want. He’ll do it.” I go, I’ll call you back. I call the other actor. I say, you know what? I’ve been thinking about this. I really appreciate your offer to leave the show. I’m accepting, which means I don’t owe you anything because you resigned. Click.
DEADLINE: Highlight moment in a trying week?
ROVEN: It was.
DEADLINE: Was this the last you heard from that actor?
ROVEN: He arrived on Monday to the set. I did not take him back. He said, but I’m ready to change. I said, you had so many chances. It’s too tardy. Anyway, that’s not something that I’ve ever had to do again. My first film. I’m like, holy sh*t.
DEADLINE: What lasting lesson did you learn?
ROVEN: That it’s the movie. You have to protect it. That’s the most critical thing. Because if you do something other than that, it’s going to be a slippery slope. Even if you have inventive disagreements — everybody’s got an opinion – you have to make sure that everything you do is in support of the project, including the elements and the players who are with you, whether they’re above the line or below the line. But you also have to make sure that everybody is focused on the massive picture…
DEADLINE: Not narcissism or ego?
ROVEN: The integrity of the film. Nothing else matters.
DEADLINE: I noticed you were the producer of a project that cratered right before it started production. Atuk was going to be the big-screen starring vehicle of Sam Kinison. After an amazing Young Comedians showcase on HBO, he had a memorable scene with Rodney Dangerfield in Back to School that hinted at great things to come. He famously lived a life of excess. I always wondered why it fell apart.
ROVEN: Well, that movie shut down because Sam was fired on the first day of principal photography. That saddened me, because Sam was great for the part. But he was wild. And his wildness was assisted by things he shouldn’t have been taking. In Atuk, he plays an Inuit who’s desperate to live in New York. He stows away from Alaska, or maybe Northern Canada, flies into New York and somehow befriends the son of a Donald Trump-like character. That role was going to be played by Ben Affleck, in his very first movie. Ben worked one day. Ben Stiller played his psychiatrist. He worked one day. Chris Walken was going to play the Trump-like real estate magnate. And the finale of the movie is Atuk going down Fifth Avenue in a snowstorm on a dog sled because he’s got to get to the courthouse to somehow rescue Affleck’s character before he’s possibly being put in jail.
DEADLINE: Sounds good so far…
ROVEN: We were supposed to shoot a third of the movie in New York and the rest in Canada, and I can’t get Sam to come and train. He’s always tardy, or doesn’t even show up. I finally get him, one day when he’s three or four hours tardy, and I go, are we doing something that’s alienating you? What’s going on? He said, “Look, if you could make this whole movie at night” … I swear, you can’t make this sh*t up. He says, “If you can do the whole movie at night, I’ll be all in. I also think you really need to look at some of the people who keep giving me things to put up my nose.” I said, okay, I’ll work on that.
DEADLINE: Did he mean keep them away, or put them on payroll?
ROVEN: Just stop them from doing it. He said, it keeps me up at night. So then we have the read-through and he doesn’t show up. After several hours, everybody goes home and he comes in to see me. To let me know that I’m not the master of his schedule. He’s also very upset with me because he doesn’t think I laugh at his jokes. And he wants a limousine, not a paint truck, for the car that picks him up. I go, a paint truck? He says, “You know, you are sending a station wagon.”
DEADLINE: How do you respond to that?
ROVEN: I said, you may be upset with me, even though I don’t really understand why, because I actually think you’re an incredibly talented guy. Otherwise I wouldn’t have talked the studio into hiring you. But you can’t keep doing this. And then he stands up and he goes, “This movie’s not big enough for the two of us. So I’m going to talk to my representative about getting rid of you.” I say to him, you know what? I hope you’re successful because I’ll be pay or played; I’ll get my full fee and I’ll never have to look at your face again. The director calls me up and he says, “Wow, I can’t believe you did that. That was amazing. But he’s the star and I’m the director. I hope you understand. I’m going to back his play.”
DEADLINE: Ouch.
ROVEN: I say, okay. The next day, I called the studio. I said, you guys got to get me out of here. And they were like, wait, have you even started production yet? I go, you need to come out here tonight, because we’re starting production tomorrow. That night, my phone rings, the director calls me … this is true … and he says, “You know, I did Back to School. I’m a big-time director. Nobody puts a script underneath my door and says, this is what we’re making.” I ask, what are you talking about? Sam rewrote the script. It all takes place at night. And it was like Dirty Harry as an Eskimo.
DEADLINE: Sounds like backing Kinison didn’t work out for that filmmaker?
ROVEN: I call up everybody. I say, come to my room. Let’s talk this through. In the meeting, the director is saying, “What the hell is this?” And Sam is saying, “What do you mean? You were with me last night, we did this together.” The director gets up and walks out. Sam gets up and walks out. So now the guys land in New York, the studio heads, and I say, hey, we’re supposed to start shooting tomorrow. Why don’t we schedule the scene with the two Bens, break for lunch and pull everybody in and see if we can figure this out? Sam comes in and he’s got the script in his hand. If we get through lunch, he’s supposed to start shooting. And he’s wearing a wig with pigtails. The head of production is Roger Birnbaum, and we’re there, the physical head of physical production at United Artists is there. And they say to Sam, what are your beefs?
He points at me and says, “First of all, I don’t like this guy.” I say, tell them why you don’t like me. “He picks me up in a paint truck. He wants to be in charge of my schedule. And he’s not laughing enough at my jokes. But the biggest problem we have” — and he shakes the script in his hand — “is this is sh*t. If you threw it in the fire, it wouldn’t burn because sh*t doesn’t burn.’
DEADLINE: That is a lot to recover from…
ROVEN: It gets worse. So we start to talk a little bit more, and finally he says, “You know what? No problem. I’ll do that script, and then I’m going to go on the Tonight Show, and I’m going to tell everybody how you guys manipulated me into making something I didn’t want to make. And then we’ll see who has the last laugh.” I’m not sure who it was, but someone said, no, I don’t think so. I think we’re going to fire you and we’re going to hold you responsible for our shutdown costs. Sam stands up and goes, “What the f*ck am I wearing this wig for?” He walks out, goes to his hotel room, and destroys it. So that was a unique experience.
DEADLINE: What do you think might have happened for him in Hollywood, had he stuck it out and shot the original script?
ROVEN: Just think about the cast that we had surrounding him, Kelly Lynch included. Rehearsals, when we had them, were fantastic. I think the movie would’ve been a hit because he was really right for it. I mean, yes, Rodney was amazing in Back to School, but people came away talking about Sam.
DEADLINE: He was like a tornado. We saw it happen again with Chris Farley, who was so great in Tommy Boy but was done in by drug abuse and his own demons. Can you contrast Sam with Robin Williams, when you worked with him in Cadillac Man? Same volcanic creativity…
ROVEN: Oh, Robin was great. I had nothing but admiration for him and for Tim [Robbins], they just had amazing chemistry. We had such a great time, in every way. Robin did his lines, and then he did what he wanted to do.
DEADLINE: How much of his improvisation found its way into that film?
ROVEN: Oh, a lot. Because Roger Donaldson, who was the director, knew that as long as he got the lines, he could let Robin do whatever he wanted to do. And the same thing with Tim, because their energetic was so good. Yeah, I wish I’d had the chance to work with Robin more…
DEADLINE: We’ve seen comic genius can come from people who are fractured. Not Robin?
ROVEN: I never experienced that. The biggest problem was we went back and we had to do reshoots, which we had in the contract. It was a Cadillac sales company that we were at. And the owner said, I don’t care what’s in the contract, you’re going to have to pay me double the price, or I’m not giving it to you.
DEADLINE: You were at the mercy of a car salesman with leverage?
ROVEN: Exactly. But as astute as he was, he took a regular check. We only needed the lot for two days. He took a regular check, deposited it in his account. I stopped payment on it, and I wrote him a up-to-date check for the price of the contract.
DEADLINE: Any others in that period that carried that sense of turbulent adventurousness?
ROVEN: Well, there are definitely things that happened, fights that break out, and actors that somehow have emotional issues. Those kinds of things happen. There was the day before we started shooting Uncharted, and we shut down for Covid. We’d done all that prep. We hashed out all the problems with the budget and everything, and we’re all excited. We have a great cast, Mark Wahlberg and Tom Holland. And then we have to shut down.
Charles Roven with Cillian Murphy on the set of ‘Oppenheimer‘
Melinda Sue Gordon/Universal Pictures
DEADLINE: How did you weather that one?
ROVEN: We worked with the guys who owned Babelsberg Studios in Potsdam, which is outside of Berlin. Fantastic guys, and they made sure that we had really good relationships with the city, the community and also with the powers that be, and not just in terms of making sure we got the rebate. They closed our sets so we didn’t have to tear them down. They waited for us several months to come back, and they helped us work the Covid protocols. I believe we were either the first or second movie that started to shoot after the Covid shutdown, and we gave the protocols we used to all the guilds. They adopted most of them.
DEADLINE: So you were able to shoot without outbreaks?
ROVEN: We thought we were so vivid. We had this massive rave scene, which is in the movie. It was in this downtown underground club, which the town was celebrated for. And we said, okay, well, we’ve got all these tardy teens or early 20s people, they’re probably going to party. Maybe we want to bite the bullet and house them in a hotel for a week and make sure that they aren’t going out to party, and bringing back Covid to the rave. We did that. The only thing we didn’t do was put monitors on every floor. They definitely partied in the hotel instead of on their own, and a number of them came down with Covid.
DEADLINE: So the rave became a super spreader event?
ROVEN: No. We got rid of them. We brought in others. We made sure that they Covid-tested the day before. That was the other thing that we did, literally, depending on where you were, how close you were to the actors, they were the only ones who weren’t wearing masks, right? You had to test every day, or three times a week, or once a week if you were part of a construction crew that was never near the actors. But if you were an extra at the rave, you’re testing every day.
We shut down once, after we started, for a day, when Antonio Banderas, who’d gone to some other thing that he was doing in Spain, caught Covid. I think at that point you had to be Covid-free for 10 days or two weeks or something, testing every day. He came to us and he was like 12 days into that. And Sony said, nope, these are the protocols. You got to shut down.
DEADLINE: But you avoided that mandatory two-week shutdown that came with an outbreak, the nightmare for producers like yourself because the clock was still ticking. How much would those two weeks have cost you?
ROVEN: If we kept everybody on, even with the rebate, we would probably have spent $400,000 a day, for two weeks. That would have been almost $8 million.
DEADLINE: Are we going to see more Uncharted? It took forever, but it is branded IP and a crowd-pleasing hit…
ROVEN: We’re working on a script, but we’re going to have to wait now for Chris Nolan’s movie that Tom and Zendaya are doing. And then right after that, he and Zendaya are doing Spider-Man. I think both those movies are releasing on the same day or the week after each other or something. It’s another potential Barbenheimer.
DEADLINE: Delightful guy, that Tom Holland. Deadline’s involved in the Sands Festival in St. Andrews, Scotland, a passion project for The Avengers co-director Joe Russo and AGBO. We had the first celebrity golf tournament, and Tom was the massive draw. He also starred in this terrific miniature film directed by his brother, Harry, which played opening night. I walked with Tom on the course for a couple of holes and we shot a video interview, and then I left. Very next hole, one of his friends clocked him in the head with a golf ball, and Tom went down. He said he was okay, but Joe Russo drove him to the hospital anyway. He was back in time to attend a dinner that night, a knot on his head. He said, Mike, if you would’ve hung around for one more hole, I would’ve insisted you put that video on Deadline. But since you weren’t…Oops. Now you’ve got me spilling the tea.
ROVEN: They’re a great family, and I love working with him. I can’t wait for him to do the next Uncharted. I can’t wait for him to do American Speed. That’s a true story based on these four Whittington brothers [Austin Butler is the co-star]. There’s only one of them who’s still alive, Don, but they have two racing accomplishments that nobody’s been able to duplicate. They’re the first brother team to win the 24 Hours of Le Mans, and they came out of nowhere to win it. And then the third brother ended up joining them, and they became the first three brothers to qualify for the Indy 500, in three separate cars. They had some other really compelling things about their life and how they got to be where they are. It’s a very compelling story.
DEADLINE: They financed their racing ambitions through nefarious means, I think. Now, along with Christopher Nolan and Emma Thomas, you accepted the Best Picture Oscar for Oppenheimer. How did you find yourself in league with Christopher and Emma Nolan to take this long ride with them on the Dark Knight trilogy and then this towering epic on the father of the atom bomb that swept the Oscars?
ROVEN: By that point of Oppenheimer, I had had a 20-plus year relationship with them on three Dark Knight movies, and also I produced with them Man of Steel. Batman Begins was their first studio movie. Insomnia was a studio release, but it was financed by Alcon, an independent film company. I’d met Chris and Emma because I was a massive fan of both Following and Memento. I was hoping to get into business with them. I had also started to have some really massive success with Warner Bros; the first Scooby-Doo movie came in on budget and was a pretty massive hit for them. I had a very close relationship with Warner Bros, and with Dan Aloni, their agent who also repped the Scooby-Doo director. I’d done City of Angels for Warner Bros, and Three Kings, so we were on a good run. Dan calls me and asked if I was interested in coming on board to be a producer with Emma. I’m not sure exactly whether it was Chris and Emma saying maybe we need a guy who knows how to make studio movies, or it was Dan suggesting that I had done a good job for his other client. But Dan’s asking me if I was interested in reading the script, which meant flying to London. That was a great call. So 15 minutes later, I get a call from Jeff Robinov, who’s running production at Warner Bros and asked me the same question. And obviously my answer to both was yes.
DEADLINE: Followed by, who do I have to kill?
ROVEN: I said, I really need to read the script. Which means, you get to the airport, and you’re going to meet this individual who’s going to hand you the script, and when you land, you’re going to meet an individual who’s going to take the script back from you. The Nolans are massive on secrecy. I did that, we met, and it worked out and I was offered the job. And that started my Dark Knight trilogy relationship with them. And we also became quite affable.
DEADLINE: They seem a pretty self contained operation. What were you able to do for them?
ROVEN: When Chris committed to, he wanted no superpowers for his Batman or the bad guys. No superpowers. They were just real. There was pressure on Chris to expand the DC universe because Marvel was doing it so well. I backed his vision, handled the studio interface. And the studio honored their commitment to him in order to get him to do Batman Begins, followed by the others. As we’re preparing Dark Knight Rises, he worked with David Goyer to create Man of Steel and because they were going to overlap, Chris and Emma called me and asked me if I wanted to also produce that one, and spend more time there. Emma’s always with Chris when he’s shooting. So that continued the relationship. That movie was successful, and really launched the rest of the DC universe. And then we just kept the relationship going. I would talk with them, and I knew some of the issues that were going on at Warner Bros, when Jason Kilar was running it. I was having some of my own issues with him, the kind Chris and Emma were having on Tenet.
We would commiserate, and we ended up having dinner together, and they came up to my ranch with their family. They really liked it. I asked them what they were thinking of doing after Tenet. I had already been given and had read the book American Prometheus, which was pretty amazing. I read a script that had been commissioned by David Wargo, who had the option on the book and eventually became an exec producer along with James Woods. I didn’t feel the script was mighty enough, and didn’t feel that the director who had co-written the script was the right guy. The complexity of the story required a tour de force. We’re at lunch, my wife’s a great cook, we’re all sitting around the table, and I said, hey, what do you think about this? Now, ironically, Robert Pattison quotes Oppenheimer in Tenet, and I think he’d given Chris a book of Oppenheimer’s quotes and speeches. So Chris already knew who Oppenheimer was, and here I’m talking about the book. So that’s serendipitous, but sometimes that’s how it works.
Charles Roven on the set of ‘Batman Begins’ with Christopher Nolan
Warner Bros.
DEADLINE: Cillian Murphy tried out for Batman…
ROVEN: Christian Bale was cast when I came on, and this was before Cillian was cast as Scarecrow.
DEADLINE: Heath Ledger playing Joker in The Dark Knight. You’d worked with him on The Brothers Grimm. Joaquin Phoenix would later win the Oscar playing the same role, but Oscars for performances in these movies was unheard of. You see the potential right away?
ROVEN: Oh, yeah. I loved that idea. The studio really wanted us to go to another actor, a bigger name that Chris ultimately did make a movie with. Chris and I and Emma had many conversations, and I ended up being the one who worked it out ultimately with the studio, us being able to go to the representative of that other actor and say, we’ve moved on and this is who we’re going with.
DEADLINE: Heath was selective. He turned down Spider-Man, before the role went to Tobey Maguire. Why did he say yes to this?
ROVEN: He wanted to work with Chris. He’d just finished making Brokeback Mountain with Jake Gyllenhaal. The social media buzz wasn’t great when we cast him. It was really depressed and really ridiculous. And obviously taking that and then thinking what it was when he did it, when people saw how amazing he was, that was just so rewarding. He wanted to learn how to direct. He was a skateboarder and would skate to the set even if he wasn’t shooting. I went to London to show him a prologue, which was the first five minutes of the movie, the bank heist, that we came out with at Christmas. And I went to an Imax screening of that with him. It was just me and him there, and he was so overjoyed by what he saw. He had tears in his eyes, tears of joy when it was over. It was really emotional. And then he was dead a week later.
DEADLINE: Such a tragedy, and he never got to see the whole film?
ROVEN: No, and then there were people who were saying, oh, the Joker, playing the Joker made him nuts. And it was just so not true. He was such a special man.
Heath Ledger as The Joker in 2008’s ‘The Dark Knight’
Warner Bros./Courtesy Everett Collection
DEADLINE: Like Chadwick Boseman, you wonder where his career might have taken him. This must have been devastating for you…
ROVEN: Well each made a massive mark. I had gotten to work with Heath on The Brothers Grimm, with Matt Damon. And Terry Gilliam, oh my gosh. Harvey Weinstein and Terry Gilliam. That’s a story. That’s the only time I got I hired three times after being fired twice on the same movie.
DEADLINE: How does that happen?
ROVEN: The first time came the night before we started shooting. Bob or Harvey Weinstein, we’re arguing literally hours over the width of the mutton chops for Matt. That was how critical it was for Harvey. How wide were the mutton chops? Okay. He had to have control over Terry. I guess I got fired for being a producer.
DEADLINE: That’s a fireable offense?
ROVEN: Well, the first time Harvey and Bob came to me they said, we want you to change your deal so we can pay Matt and Heath more. I said, but I already had made their deal. Yes, but we didn’t think it was enough, so we’re paying them more and we’re taking it out of you. And I said, no. And they said, alright, thank you. I flew home for a meeting. My daughter was working on the camera crew at the time. Anyway, when I land, Jake Bloom, my lawyer, he says, I just got a fax that says you’re being paid or played off the movie. I go, what are you talking about? Bob never spoke to our director. And Harvey would always cozy up to our director and ask him to do him a favor so he could make his brother content. But if Terry wouldn’t do it, he would yell at Terry and hang up on him, and then send him a fax about how content he was that they came to an agreement in the conversation, which they hadn’t. So they didn’t talk to each other for three weeks. And now we’re two weeks away from starting to shoot, and Bryan Lourd is having lunch with Harvey and says, how’s it going? He says, well, I’m teaching my brother what it’s like to work with an auteur filmmaker.
He says, isn’t Chuck producing that movie? He goes, yeah, but I had to let him go. He says, really? Didn’t Chuck produce 12 Monkeys? Yes. Wasn’t that the biggest hit that Terry Gilliam ever had? Yes. Didn’t he come in under budget on that movie and didn’t [Gilliam] break the completion bond company on Baron Munchhausen? Yeah. Well, good move, firing Chuck. The next day, I get a call. Chuck, we just can’t get over the fact that you’re not on this movie anymore. I said, you got to talk to Jake. I’m not coming back unless I know what my deal is. They make the deal. That’s the first time I was fired.
Charles Roven backstage during filming of ’12 Monkeys’
Courtesy of Chuck Roven
DEADLINE: Tell me the second time you got fired?
ROVEN: Terry Gilliam developed the movie with me at MGM, and so now we’re shooting the movie and Harvey and Bob are in Prague with me, and they’re not liking the way the film is being shot. It was surprising to me because they were complaining that the film was too obscure. And I was saying to them, well, if you’re really worried about it, when we do the color correct for the movie, we can brighten it if we think it needs to be brightened. But it’s The Brothers Grimm, and there are certain aspects to that. It has to have a certain kind of feel to it.
They decided in a meeting with me that it didn’t matter, they were the studio. They were now financing a hundred percent of it, and they had pre-sold the movie with Matt and Heath and me, because Terry and I had done so amazingly well on 12 Monkeys. So at this dinner where we were talking about what are we going to do about the DP, they said, we’ve decided we’re going to replace the DP and we want you to tell him. I said, don’t you think we should have a conversation with the director? And they said, no. I said, we’re not firing the DP when we’re in the middle of the shoot, without having a conversation with Terry. The last time I had left the show, Terry and Bob and Harvey got into a fight over who the leading lady was going to be.
That time they hadn’t talked for three weeks. That was another thing that came up in the conversation with Bryan Lourd. I said, look, let me tell you, if you fire the DP without talking to Terry, the movie’s going to be shut down for two or three weeks. At the very least, it’s going to cost you multiple seven figures and you’re going to rue the day that you did it. They said, we don’t care. I said, well, I care. No one’s going to ever be able to say that the DP was fired on a Chuck Roven-produced movie without me having a conversation with the director. I’m not saying you don’t have the right to do it, but I’m saying you’ve got to consult with the guy. And they said, well, you’re not the producer anymore. You’re fired. Again.
DEADLINE: How long did that last? Why’d you come back?
ROVEN: I was fired for the length of time that it took to replace the DP. It took three weeks and it cost them the millions of dollars that I suggested it might. Okay. And the DP was Tom Sigal, who I had worked with on Three Kings. I hadn’t worked with him in awhile, but he was clearly a brilliant DP and I was able to back-channel with Terry and tell him how great I thought Tom was, even though I wasn’t on the movie. They asked me to come back then and lend a hand finish the movie, but then I got fired one more time. Why? Because of a very aggressive inventive meeting that we had that also caused Terry to leave the movie. Then I ultimately got a call from Harvey who after seeing one of my movies, it might’ve been Three Kings or Batman Begins, I got a call from him. He apologized for all of the things that happened, and he said, I’m having some issues with getting the international buyers to accept the movie because they thought they were buying a Terry Gilliam movie, and Terry’s not on the movie anymore. I’d like you to come back and bring him with you and we’ll make the movie you guys want to make.
DEADLINE: What’s the lasting lesson of being fired twice and returning to finish the film?
ROVEN: By then I had a reputation that the movie’s the most critical thing. Also for fortunately having repeat business with some really amazingly inventive people, which I wouldn’t have if they didn’t think I had some integrity, and possibly some good ideas. Nobody’s perfect, right? Sometimes my ideas are sh*t, but you need to be able to have a inventive exchange. But my point is, I think if you ask anybody who’s worked with me, they will tell you. We may not agree with him, but you don’t have to wonder what Chuck’s thinking. He tells you how he feels. He’s not duplicitous.
DEADLINE: Or passive aggressive?
ROVEN: Never passive aggressive. And so we respect that about him, even if we don’t agree with him a hundred percent of the time.
DEADLINE: One other trouble spot I was curious about. Amy Adams said she’d been left feeling unsupported on American Hustle and would not work with the filmmaker David O Russell again. And there was his legendary scrap with George Clooney on Three Kings. Both of these were great movies. What role do you as producer play in mitigating things like this? David is a very intense artist with a particular way of working that can get messy.
ROVEN: One of the great things about directors is they all do it in their own style, and part of them doing it in their own style is to get what they want on film, right? And also to get what they want out of performance. I’m going to answer that question by telling you another story from Heart Like a Wheel with the actor who we let go. After the incident where Bonnie Bedelia was interrupted by the actor who called cut, she was upset, the director Jonathan Kaplan was upset. The actor, who said he looked out for numero uno, explained to Jonathan that he was a guy who was very definitive in his thoughts and never did anything extemporaneously. He always knew what he was going to do and considered the character he was playing to be much like himself. So Jonathan said, come with me. Let’s go in the trailer. We go into the trailer, I join, Jonathan turns around, says to the actor, lemme tell you something, okay? I’m never going to work with you again. I’m going to destroy you in Hollywood because you are a piece of sh*t. You don’t care about anybody else but yourself. And he went on for a two- or three-minute rant, and I could see the actor was getting more and more hostile, to the point that he grabbed Jonathan around the throat and started to choke him. And Jonathan said, as [he’s being choked], was this extemporaneous? Did you think about that? Or what? Okay, get the f*ck out there and do the scene.
DEADLINE: So what happens after the actor chokes your director?
ROVEN: He went out there and gave the performance that Jonathan wanted, because he understood in Jonathan’s classic way of giving him the example of what he wanted, as it was happening. So I was depressed to know what happened with the relationship with Amy [Adams] and David. Because Amy worked with David, not just in American Hustle. But what about The Fighter? She’s been nominated both times for working with David Russell. Whatever David’s style is, it gets great performances. Bradley Cooper was nominated, Christian Bale was nominated. Jennifer Lawrence won for Silver Linings Playbook. I mean, he gets results. I’m not saying it’s always pretty, but it’s certainly most of the time, pretty great. I wasn’t on the set all the time, I was working on several films, but when I heard about this, I had conversations with David, and with Amy. But it didn’t seem that it was as dramatic as it turned out to be. It didn’t come out while we were promoting the movie or even while the movie was in release. I’m sorry that it happened at all.
(L-R) Charles Roven and director David O. Russell on the set of ‘American Hustle’
Francois Duhamel
DEADLINE: What about Three Kings, where he and Clooney famously got in a brawl? The film shot in the heat of the desert, does that send tempers soaring?
ROVEN: No, I’ll tell you what happened there, because it was actually a misunderstanding, and this goes back again to the energetic between a producer and a director. The studio wanted an eight-day shorter schedule. I did not believe we could get that done. I begged David, I said, I’m telling you right now, I’ve been through this. I’ve made enough studio movies to know we need to fight for our schedule now, because if we don’t, we’re going to be fighting with it all through. I’m just telling you, David, we can’t make this on the schedule they want. We’re making an action military movie, not some people in a room. And they go back to one take, when you’re firing shots or crashing vehicles. He goes, I can run and gun. I can make it. It was not makeable. And we started to lose time, and we were quickly several weeks behind schedule.
This was really strenuous for David, because George was doing ER, and so he was working seven days a week. He was flying to L.A. to do ER, and then he would fly back to Arizona to do Three Kings and back and forth. David didn’t want to get into a fight with his actor, so he would have misplaced anger if the camera car didn’t work, if the camera operator didn’t get the shot in focus, whatever. And so there was a moment where David yelled at, I think it was the camera operator on top of the camera car, for not getting the shot. And George said, hey, if you’re going to yell at somebody, pick on somebody your own size. Yell at me. Yeah. Okay.
Now cut to weeks later, and we are in the finale where they’re running across and they’re trying to get across the boundary line to escape, and there’s helicopters, clamorous noises, and it’s just really crazy. George is working with the camera and the stunt guys on one side of the field getting ready for the first unit shot. Literally a hundred yards away, David’s working with the extra AD and the extra stunt coordinator for the second units shots. And he’s telling them what he wants, how gritty he wants the stunt guys to be in the scene. It’s very animated, and it looks like they’re getting beaten up. George is seeing it from one side of the field, and David’s doing that on the other side of the field. But what David’s doing with those guys, while it looks like he’s shaking them up and grabbing them, they weren’t upset. But George runs across the field and goes to David and says, Hey, I told you pick on somebody your own size, and here I am. And David, who got pretty sizzling, said, why don’t you mind your own f*cking business? Because George was, sometimes over the course of the movie, having problems remembering his lines, or probably remembering his character. Because he was working seven days a week for 12 weeks. So sometimes we had to do another take or two. That’s what happened. And I was literally there, and I held back George and Mykelti Williamson held back David. We pulled them apart and we finished the movie. I was depressed because they had made up. But then you might’ve read recently that George said he would never work with David again, and I don’t understand why George did that, because they had made up. And George knows how good the movie is.
Everybody knows. And so that’s the thing. Nobody got hurt. I don’t think that David is the first director who uses whatever he uses to try to get the right emotion if he can’t just get it naturally. But the Amy thing makes me very depressed because they really clicked. I think she’s a great actress. She gives great performances, and two of her best are with David.
DEADLINE: You’ve been very involved in that DC universe. You’ve got Kevin Feige doing everything right at Marvel, and DC films weren’t getting the same love, outside of the Dark Knight Trilogy.
ROVEN: I loved the DC experience, which started by the invitation that I ultimately got from Chris and Emma, so I owe that to them. Christian Bale was cast already as Bruce Wayne by the time I got on that move. I love the guy as a human being and as an actor, he’s just so amazing. I just loved working with him on American Hustle, and I hope to be working with him again on this Best of Enemies movie that I’m developing at Amazon with him and Bradley Cooper. I’ve been really lucky to have such great actors and actresses. Gal Gadot was really Zack Snyder’s discovery. He felt that Wonder Woman of the past had been, let’s just call it American Made, and he felt, let’s go with the region where she’s from. And under the assumption that the island of Themyscira is in the Middle East, Gal did a screen test. There were a number of other wonderful women who tested, but when she came out and tested with Ben [Affleck] and all of them, she just knocked it out of the park to the point where everybody knew that she was going to be Wonder Woman. She and her husband, Jaron Varsano, have become close friends, and we’re talking about making something else.
DEADLINE: What are you making?
ROVEN: I can’t say. We’re putting it together, and we have a great script. I feel the same about Margot Robbie, and we were so fortunate to cast her in The Suicide Squad, and she and her husband and LuckyChap partner Tom Ackerley, we’ve got a number of projects together. All of this came out of the DC Universe and films I was able to make with Zack Snyder and his wife Debbie, everything from Man of Steel to Justice League. And I worked with James Gunn on the first Scooby-Doo. He wrote the first and the second one.
DEADLINE: This is the repeat business you mentioned as key to growing as a producer…
ROVEN: I’m not the only one who does this. Everybody who has a great experience, whether you’re above the line or below the line, you want to do that again, because not only was it a great experience, there’s a shorthand that grows in getting the next one done.
DEADLINE: When you rely on repeat business from successful relationships, how do you feel like in the case of the star-studded film Christopher Nolan is making next, when you’re not part of it?
ROVEN: Am I depressed? No. No. Listen, I had a great run with them on the Dark Knight trilogy. They again reached out to me to be involved in Man of Steel. I hopped on that wagon, but the great movies they made in between, The Prestige, Inception and Interstellar, I wasn’t asked to be on those movies. Would I have liked to have been on those movies? Of course. But I wasn’t asked and I totally get it. They’re a great team. They don’t need somebody else. I would not have been asked on Oppenheimer had I not given the book to Chris, and so the project emanated from me. That’s why I was a producer on the movie, and that was correct.
(L-R) Charles Roven with Cillian Murphy on the set of “Oppenheimer”
Melinda Sue Gordon/Universal Pictures
DEADLINE: What I always loved about this business is, everybody in Hollywood wakes up with a puncher’s chance to do something exceptional. You read the Oppenheimer book, you have the background and relationship, and suddenly you’ve got an Oscar on the mantel.
ROVEN: And if we hadn’t had a great experience, he wouldn’t have been open to reading the book and collaborating to get the movie made. So that’s the point. And believe me, as much as I love Chris and Emma, we don’t always get along either. People have different opinions.
DEADLINE: Being a yes man doesn’t make you indispensable. You mentioned 12 Monkeys, and that it was Terry Gilliam’s most successful film. On paper, boy that seemed a complicated film to pull off. Why did it work?
ROVEN: A lot of why that work was the brilliance of Terry’s casting. Brad Pitt’s representatives wanted him to play Cole, but Terry saw Brad as Goings, and he really, really wanted Bruce Willis to play Cole.
DEADLINE: Cole was incarcerated in a prison of the future, and is promised parole if he goes back in time to stop a plague that would devastate humanity and force its survivors to live underground, a plague unleashed by a terrorist group called the Army of the 12 Monkeys. Goings is the mad son of a top virologist who turns out to be a key to unraveling the origin of the virus.
ROVEN: Brilliant choice for both roles. Brad really wanted to be in the movie, and Terry said, well, I just need you to know I’m interested in you playing sort of the massive. Brad said, that’s what I want to play. So that happened, and he got an Oscar nomination for it. And Madeleine Stowe was just so wonderful [as the scientist who aids Cole]. Great cast. There’s a documentary called The Hamster Factor, which is part of the 12 Monkeys DVD and worth looking at. The reason it’s called The Hamster Factor is because Terry can go down rabbit holes. And if you remember the movie Bruce Willis comes in from being outside in a suit that’s supposed to protect him from the poison. And he gets washed down with all these chemicals. And on the camera right bottom, there’s a hamster on a hamster wheel, and that hamster wheel is generating the electricity for the water pump that sprays Bruce with the chemicals. So of course, we needed to get the hamster, but we thought that would take an hour, and we spent three quarters of the day on the hamster because Terry wasn’t content with the way the hamster was acting.
DEADLINE: How does one coax a better performance out of a hamster?
ROVEN: I don’t know. But that’s the wonderful thing about Terry, who can go down those rabbit holes. Sometimes it causes you problems. One of the great things that Terry gives me credit for, and that’s why it’s not empiric to what we do, but it has a lot to do with a gut feeling. Terry and I were arguing over who should play the adolescent Cole who sees himself die at the end of the movie.
We were in a particular facility that we had made up into the airport area, but we had to be out of there that day because a car show was coming in, we could not extend. It would be totally f*cked if we didn’t finish. Terry says, I love that kid’s blue eyes. I know I can get the role out of him. I go, God, I love the blue eyes too. But this other kid is so much better. He’s the director, and I said, you go with the kid with the blue eyes. For some reason I called the casting director and I said, look, this is not a lot of money. Call the mother of the other kid, tell her we’re going to pay him for the day. I just want him to stand by, be downstairs in his same outfit, ready to go. I don’t tell this to Terry. We start shooting. We’re halfway through the day. Terry comes up to me and goes, Chuck, we’re so f*cked. You were right. I was wrong. I can’t get the performance out of the kid. What are we going to do? Where’s that other kid, he asks. I said, he’s downstairs, and he’s already dressed. The kid comes up, and he crushes it. That’s the kid in the movie.
DEADLINE: How much of being a good producer is anticipating a problem you have to let play out, and having a backup?
ROVEN: That’s the thing that I’m trying to say, Mike; there’s no textbook for this. It’s a gut feel. And so much of what we do, it’s a business, but it’s also inspiration. You can’t divorce the two, and you really don’t want to, to be candid. That’s one of the great things that makes Chris [Nolan] such an amazing inventive force that if he decided he didn’t want to direct, he would be a great producer. He can direct and make amazing movies and be a great writer without being a great producer. But he has both of those things, and he’s obviously extremely helped by his wife, and they form an inseparable team. So that’s again, going back to why I still love doing this after 40 years is because those kinds of things happen. And you can’t tell, because you don’t know what you’re going to need to do. You just have to be able to sit back and go, okay, how am I going to solve this one?
DEADLINE: It’s that struggle, that need to rise to the occasion, that drives you?
ROVEN: Yes. And sometimes it doesn’t work. I’ve made some movies that I’m not all that proud of.
DEADLINE: Have you got a dream project?
ROVEN: Well, because my brother bought the rights to it while I was still trying to fight for my first movie when I was in my early 20s … we both loved this book. He actually gave it to me. It’s Tom Wolfe’s The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test. You ever read it?
DEADLINE: Years ago, when I plowed through all of Tom Wolfe‘s books.
ROVEN: So my brother Fred bought that book. He was not in my business, but he was a great supporter of my business. He got me into the securities business, which is a whole other story. I actually owned my own broker dealer company for a while, while I was going to film school. Anyway, he bought the book for me. And that’s the longest gestating project because we’ve been working on it for 40 years to the point where we lost half the rights back to the Wolfe Estate because of copyright laws. But I’ve got a really wonderful relationship with the Wolfe family. And so now I’m just closing a deal with Sony to start developing the screenplay, and I’m really excited about it.
DEADLINE: Why did it take 40 years? What was the biggest impediment that kept it from being like Oppenheimer, where it was like, boom. No pun intended.
ROVEN: Because at a certain point, my brother and I disagreed on the way forward, and since he’d paid for it, it, he went off and attempted to accomplish something that he didn’t really know how to do, which was be a motion picture producer. I didn’t begrudge him. We had a great relationship. He was seven years older than me, very successful. When he passed, the rights went to his estate. My nephew’s a great guy who ended up making a development deal at 20th. But that project went nowhere. And then it came back, and then he sat on it for a while, and four or five years ago, he talked to his brothers and sisters. Darren said, hey, aren’t we crazy here? Shouldn’t we go to Chuck and see if he can lend a hand us put this together? So they did, and that made me very content. And now I’m hoping that we can get the movie made. I think that period of time, and Ken Kesey and his Merry Pranksters, even today, there’s still relevance.
DEADLINE: What do you mean?
ROVEN: Well, just in so much of the way the world worked then and how conservative it was. And then the counterculture came in, and became the culture. That whole period of time started civil rights and the African American situation with Kennedy, and all that stuff that was going on. And we were locked into a war that we shouldn’t have been in. Of course, that continues to happen. So I’m just saying, it resonated with me, and I think it would resonate with people because so much of our culture started back then.
DEADLINE: Plus, hallucinogenic drugs…
ROVEN: Plus hallucinogens, which keep making a comeback. And the fact that it was the CIA who created those hallucinogenic drugs, and how Ken Kesey came up with One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. You know the character of the Indian? He came up with him while he was high on LSD. Chief Bromden came out of him being at a CIA test that he got paid for. The CIA paid for him to take the drugs, so he could go to school. He went to the CIA to do the LSD drug test, and that gave him enough money to go to school.
DEADLINE: Talk about paying a price on the road to writing a classic book…
ROVEN: Yeah, but I will tell you this. I met Kesey, I went up there to Oregon. He was very content with the way things turned out.
DEADLINE: I found your tardy wife Dawn Steel to be such a shot of life when I’d call her as a adolescent reporter. Without bringing up something too personal, can you tell me what she meant to you as a producer on the rise?
ROVEN: Dawn meant everything to me, and we have a tremendous daughter. I think she meant a tremendous amount to our industry, and she was this very special person who was totally unique in how she did things. I was depressed that she left the planet so early. She accomplished so many things, she was a pioneer who broke the glass ceiling for women, and her tale is a great story.
Dawn Steel and Charles Roven in the mid-1990s
Darlene Hammond/Hulton Archive/Getty Images
DEADLINE: People who read this long piece will get a clear sense as to why you are who you are and found success. What about Dawn made it possible for her to get past a male-dominated Hollywood hierarchy and break that glass ceiling and become the first female head of a major studio?
ROVEN: First of all, she had one of the best gut instincts in terms of what was commercial. Just incredible. When you think about Flashdance, Footloose, the first Top Gun, The Untouchables, it goes on and on and on. The great moves that she made while she was in Paramount. And she started out in consumer products.
DEADLINE: She created designer toilet paper, no?
ROVEN: Well, that was illegal. She made Gucci toilet paper without getting rights from Gucci. Well, until they said, hey, you can’t apply our brand. But before that, she had worked for Hustler and she started their consumer products division, and she created the hottest selling product that they ever had. It was called The Cock. So what is that? It’s for the man who has everything and nowhere to put it.
DEADLINE: I recall she had pretty good and salty sense of humor.
ROVEN: Definitely, and the guys loved her, partially because she had the same foul mouth they did. And she could have a temper. There’s some crazy stories about her. She was really definitely a force of nature.
DEADLINE: I recall in the deep obscure depths when I was younger, pissing her off a time or too. I have blocked them out, call it a survival mechanism.
ROVEN: That was basic to do, piss her off. Can you imagine being married to her?
DEADLINE: You’ve dropped plenty of war stories, but I can’t let you leave without asking you about being wiretapped by Anthony Pellicano, can I?
ROVEN: Probably not.
DEADLINE: What’s that like, learning you’ve been doing business on a phone that is wiretapped?
ROVEN: Intrusive. Just so violating. What happened is, I’d put together a deal similar to the one that got 12 Monkeys done. I had just finished shooting Three Kings and I was going to Germany for the Berlinale, and it turned out John McTiernan was in Hungary. We needed a first project and MGM wanted to do a remake of Rollerball. McTiernan was a pretty sizzling director at that time: Die Hard, and then he had a good hit with the remake of The Thomas Crown Affair.
I talk to my partners and they say, go to Hungary and meet with him. I meet with him. We have a fantastic meeting, we hug, we can’t wait to do the movie together. I fly back and Michael Nathanson from MGM was waiting for me in my office when I return. I go, what’s up? He goes, McTiernan checked you out. He became a little paranoid of you because he’s heard that you can be a pretty tough guy. He’s willing to go forward, but he wants to limit the amount of time you’re going to be on the set. I call my partners, and now I’m part of Mosaic at the time, and they’re all going, we need a deal to get this deal done. You got to say, okay. I thought, I don’t know, but I finally say yes.
Anyway, we start shooting the movie in Montreal, and I visit the set, at the beginning of the shoot. Then I go back to L.A. I’ve got other things that I’m doing, but I’m noticing that McTiernan isn’t shooting the script. Not too arduous to notice, I’m looking at the dailies. So I call McTiernan and I go, John, there is an approved script, but you’re making material changes. We really should talk about this. He goes, oh, really? Let me think about that and I’ll get back to you. I don’t hear from him, and he’s still making material changes. I get on a plane, I go to Montreal, I have a conversation with him, and I say, John, on the contract it reads, you can’t make material changes on an approved screenplay, and you’re completely disregarding it. He goes, I really don’t give a sh*t. I go, I don’t want to, but I’m going to have to talk to my partners and I’m going to have to talk to MGM because it’s not okay. And I don’t really understand the movie you’re shooting. You’re the only one who understands the movie that you’re shooting. So I go back to L.A., I talk to Nathanson, I talk to Alex Gartner, I talked to Chris McGurk. They say, we’re supporting the director. We believe in him. He’s been successful for us. The only one who’s sort of on my side that doesn’t have the power is Alex. I call my financial partners. I say, look, guys, I’m just letting you know this is what’s going on. We have the right to get out of the movie. I’m very concerned. We’re financing half the movie. They say, we’re supporting the director. We want you to stay in the movie. Now the movie gets finished. We’re at a screening in Paramus, New Jersey, back in the early 2000s, when Ain’t It Cool News was the hottest thing going, on this up-to-date thing called the internet. Harry Knowles.
I arrive at the theater, Alex is there, McGurk is, and McTiernan walks in, and he’s with Harry Knowles, Harry Knowles’ girlfriend, and Harry Knowles’ father. And so they go into the theater, but McTiernan comes with this massive, huge f*cking grin on his face. McGurk goes, is that Harry Knowles? And McTiernan goes, yep. McGurk says, this is our first preview, and you’re bringing a guy who’s online commenting on movies? He goes, don’t worry about it. Chris said, we’re your partners, why didn’t you ask us? He said, why? You just would’ve said no. So we go in. The movie’s a f*cking disaster. The next day, Harry Knowles writes his article. “I just came back from seeing John McTiernan’s movie. He’s one of my favorite directors of all time. And you can imagine how I felt when I got a call from him offering to fly me to New York with my girlfriend, stay at the Plaza Hotel, and actually go to Paramus to see a first cut of his movie, I was thrilled. You can imagine how much I wanted to love the movie.” And then he f*cking destroys the movie.
So now we are trying to make the movie as good as we can. Three Kings comes out and I get a call from McTiernan, who hasn’t been talking to me. He says, MGM has kind of turned their back on me. I think I made a mistake in the way things happened between us. Would you come into the editing room and try to lend a hand me? I say, okay. The movie comes out, we do a second preview, and in the second preview, McTiernan decides as part of the card, he stops the screening afterwards and he starts asking the whole audience what their opinion is of the movie and how they would make it better. That’s how lost he was.
The movie comes out and it is a f*cking disaster. I think it’s the biggest loser I ever had. Five years later, the FBI comes to my office. They said, Mr. Roven, we think you’ve been the victim of a wiretap. I go, what are you talking about? They say, we arrested this guy by the name of Anthony Pellicano, and we ended up capturing some of his computers where he was keeping his wiretaps. And just so you know, they told me, he not only wiretapped the victims that he was hired to wiretap. He wiretapped his customers as well. And we think you’ve been the victim of a wiretap because of this communication we want to play for you to see if you know who these individuals are.
They turn on the tape and it’s Pellicano talking to McTiernan. About me. Anthony is talking about sh*t like character arc and plot line and motivation, and McTiernan goes, I don’t give a f*ck about that. What I want to know is how I can hurt this guy. I really want to hurt this guy, and I paid you $50,000, so you better come up with something. So the FBI guy goes, do you know either one of those voices? And I go, well, I don’t know one of them, but the other one is McTiernan. They call McTiernan at his ranch, and they asked him what he knows about Anthony Pellicano wiretapping Chuck Roven. The statute of limitations on a wiretap is five years from the date of the wiretap. It had been over the five years. If he had said, yeah, I paid him this much money to wiretap Chuck Roven, but it’s over five years ago, so f*ck off, nothing would have happened.
Instead, he lied to the FBI and said he did not know anything about what the FBI was asking him. So they charged him for lying to government officials, and they asked me if I would testify on behalf of the state or on behalf of the government, and I did. And he ended up going to prison as a result of it. The irony was, I’m at a restaurant, and a woman comes up to me and says, I’m John McTiernan’s girlfriend. She had worked for one of the lawyers and McTiernan had gotten close to her. She says, I’m here to ask you to change your testimony.
DEADLINE: Wow.
ROVEN: I go, look, I’m at a dinner. I don’t really know what you want. I don’t think I can lend a hand you, so please leave me alone. The next day she appears at my office and she asks me again if I would change my testimony, and I say, I’m not having this conversation with you. There are people around here that are witnessing that I’m not going to have this conversation with you. You need to leave now. Okay. She gets hold of my lawyer, who says, you are asking Mr. Roven to perjure himself? He’s not doing that. He’s going to tell the truth.
DEADLINE: Did Pellicano get anything from you that proved hurtful? We saw in the Sony hack that it became open season in media hammering subjects who thought they were speaking privately, their guards down.
ROVEN: They wiretapped my house, they wiretapped my office, and they wiretapped the home of my assistant. And they got nothing. Absolutely nothing.
(L-R) Emma Thomas, Christopher Nolan and Charles Roven after winning the Best Picture Oscar for ‘Oppenheimer’
Gilbert Flores
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