Stephen took time away from the hectic pace of opening weekend to discuss G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra with Variety interviewer Mike Fleming. Touching on subjects ranging from the critical response to the movie, the rumors that swirled during post-production and the likelihood of a sequel, the interview can be found in its entirety below or at the Variety homepage here.
Before his `G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra’ came off the box office battlefield with a monstrous opening weekend, director Stephen Sommers battled bad buzz, even a bogus rumors he’d been canned. `G.I. Joe’s’ commander talks about what’s important in making summer tent poles, and how much the stakes have changed since his first summer blockbuster,`The Mummy.’
BFD: Despite the big opening, mainstream press didn’t show you near the love given Nora Ephron or Kathryn Bigelow. Do you feel slighted?
Sommers: You have to gird your loins. I don’t think the mainstream critics are relevant here, they have criticized themselves into irrelevancy. `Transformers 2’ got the worst reviews in the last decade, and it is the biggest hit of the year. More people will see that than any other movie. On my movie, it became so clear to us. Why not make those reviewers pay their $15 like everyone else?
BFD: How did you feel about Paramount’s decision not to screen in advance for mainstream reviewers?
Sommers: The guys they allowed to see it, some who’d been so vicious over the past year, they loved the movie. It’s fun, and it is one of those movies I wouldn’t have minded seeing reviewed. This might have been my best reviewed movie, so I’m on the fence about this whole thing. But I understand Paramount’s standpoint.
BFD: Still, the inevitable stigma was, the movie’s not good and the studio’s trying to salvage opening weekend.
Sommers: I’d shown it dozens of times, all around the world. The reaction has been overwhelmingly positive. Aside from doing close to $60 million, it got an A Cinema Score with people under 25. No matter what the critics say, the under 25 crowd is what’s most important.
BFD: How much do bad reviews hurt you personally?
Sommers: I know it sounds cliche, but I don’t read them. Why would I? I make the kind of movies critics love to hate. They love dark and depressing movies. If you make those, you expect they will love you, you need them to love you. The kind of movies I make? They don’t enjoy commercial or popular movies. I would say that geek love is hard to earn, and I got that in mounds. All the internet movie haters love this movie. To win them over, was something.
BFD: Is geek love more important than love by mainstream critics?
Sommers: Absolutely. Nobody who goes to see these movies reads Richard Corliss. The mass audience pays no attention to these critics. I’m not sure they matter. It’s about word of mouth. I just got an A with the under-25 crowd. Would I rather have that score or the top 25 critics raving about me? I’ll take what I got. I want as many people as possible to see my movie. I grew up loving movies like `Jaws’ and `Star Wars.’ When you sit in a theater and have that shared experience, it is the biggest rush. From what I saw at theaters, the audience is cheering out loud in all the right places, and laughing in the right places. That is hard to get in pure drama, because there is no audience action until the very end. Some of those movies depend on the positive Corliss review. On the most popular movies of the last decade, the reviews have gotten more vicious, more personal. These critics have become a dying breed, and part of it is how much more vicious and personal they’ve become. They attack the directors, personally.
BFD: If you made a small prestige film like The Hurt Locker, would critics give you a fair shake?
Sommers: No way.
BFD: Are you itching to play in the sandbox?
Sommers: There are other things I want to do, and I’m sure that at some point, they’ll stop giving me $150 million to $175 million budgets to make these movies. Only Steven Spielberg has been able to keep it up for 35 years.
BFD: Even though you say you aren’t reading the reviews, you sound wounded.
Sommers: I don’t get mad at all. I get it, they don’t like these movies, they don’t get them. It’s like Michael Bay said, they don’t have a fun gene. These critics remind me of my 78-year old mother. She liked the movie, but it was a little fast for mom. I would love rave reviews, but I learned early on to discount them. When I made `Huck Finn,’ some reviewer in Cleveland or Cincinnati got on me about hating the mat paintings I used for the Mississippi River. We shot on the Mississippi River. My job is to please the audience. A critic’s job is to be critical.
BFD: How daunting is it to spend $170 million on a movie?
Sommers: I’ve felt the same level of pressure when I was making student and low budget films, and it’s self-induced. My first movie cost $800,000, and I remember feeling that was a crazy amount of money. I was terrified. `The Mummy’ cost $68 million 11 years ago, and things have gotten more expensive, but not just in movies. Back then, millionaires lived in million dollar homes in L.A. Now, everybody’s house is a million dollar home. A lot of movies cost between $200 million and $250 million, they just lie about it. The last three Harry Potters cost between $250 million and $300 million each, and who can blame them? I had some reporter ask me, do I feel guilty spending $170 million, when there are so many people unemployed? I said, I employ a lot of people, where do you think that that money goes? The studio isn’t giving you $170 million so you can have more time, or so you can relax. Each movie is bigger, more complicated, more difficult. You look at the climax scene in `True Grit.’ They got a great wide shot in the morning, and then they went home. Now, you’d have to follow the bullet in slow motion, you’d need helicopters. People just expect a lot more.
BFD: Where does all that money go?
Sommers: Spider-Man, Pirates of the Caribbean, Harry Potter, they are all hitting the $250 million to $300 million budgets. All of those movies spend $50 million-60 million on special effects. To spend $170 million and look like those movies, that is something. There are movies where people say, we did this for $150 million, but they aren’t factoring in that they paid the star and director a dollar each, until they take out a combined 40% of the gross. The numbers get fuzzy.
BFD: Aren’t you a little jealous, when the New York Times fawns over Nora Ephron and her new movie and trash yours?
Sommers: No, I feel good for Nora. I’m sure she took a pounding on `Bewitched,’ and I know how hard it is to make those movies. I root for her. Her movie needs good reviews. As long as my wife and two kids are proud of me, it’s all fine. I know what I’m making here, and I am confident I do it well. I work really hard and consider myself a professional filmmaker. I don’t yell, scream at or belittle people. I came in three days under schedule, and $1.7 million under budget. Everybody thought this would be a 95-day shoot, and we would have had a budget problem unless we tried to shoot in 85 days. We shot in 83 days, and added stuff to the original plan.
BFD: When you released `The Mummy’ ten summers ago, you didn’t have to endure the daily web rumor-mongering. How did you handle the cynical coverage?
Sommers: You have to ignore it all. But when your nine-year old comes up to you and says, `Daddy, did you get fired off your movie?’ That is when it gets personal.
BFD: That was the bogus rumor posted by producer Don Murphy.
Sommers: Well, there are rumors, but this was just a vicious lie, that it tested poorly and I was fired. We’d had five test previews. They all tested great. I had final cut, so I was never going to be fired. Thankfully, no real reporters picked it up. They made one phone call and realized it was a lie.
BFD: Did you confront Murphy?
Sommers: I wouldn’t lower myself. This is a bad person, doing very bad things. When 31 people got fired at Paramount, I didn’t relish it, but he seemed to. These people have wives and kids. I think he had a beef with Lorenzo di Bonaventura, and I got caught in the crossfire. When somebody puts out a complete like that I’ve been fired, nobody will believe you if you deny it, so I don’t know what you can do but soldier on.
BFD: Is that the biggest difference from when you got into the event game on `The Mummy?’
Sommers: Well, I’m jet lagged because in the last 18 days, I went to Sydney, Dubai, London, Paris, Berlin, Tokyo, Seoul, Washington, D.C., Pawtucket, New York and back to L.A. It was a different deal back then. Foreign has become so much more important. My last three movies all did better foreign than domestic. Ten years ago, nobody made any money in China or Russia. They love these kinds of movies now. The first `Mummy’ played so well all over the world, it opened my eyes. I liked making movies that a lot of people are going to see and this is my fourth to have had a very international cast.
BFD: Do you deliberately write scenes or cast roles to appeal to audience segments?
Sommers: The studio never told me anything like that, but a very smart person pulled me aside on the very first `Mummy’ and said, `You’ll get the boys and men to like this movie, but if you focus on a romance, you can get girls and women to like it too. I focused on the romance and girls and women turned out as much as boys and men. It’s not that calculated, though.
BFD: This is the summer where branded concepts replaced stars as the drawing cards. How daunting is launching a big budget film with no star for protection?
Sommers: `The Mummy’ was that way, and my movies tend to be more ensemble anyway. It is funny when the studios tell me, `the movie is the star! You’re the star.’ I suspect what they’re saying is, `we don’t want to pay a star.’
BFD: Won’t that change when you next direct Tarzan?
Sommers: I don’t know that yet. I’m really hoping to do `G.I. Joe 2,’ but the film has to make a swimming pool full of money for that to happen. On `Tarzan,’ the way we’re writing it, he will be mid-20s. There are many great female actors between the ages of 20 and 35 but a real dearth of male stars that age. Brad Pitt, Tom Cruise, Matthew McConaughey, those guys are 40 or past it. I hope `G.I. Joe’ is creating one of those stars in Channing Tatum.
We’ll also be posting Stephen’s responses to questions that readers have submitted to the site over the next week or two – check back soon!
Good interview. Always loving hearing what Stephen has to say about things. I’d love to see his take on “Tarzan,” and I’m anxiously awaiting another “G.I. Joe.”