Lorenzo di Bonaventura talks Transformers

MoviesOnline recently caught up with Lorenzo di Bonaventura who gave us an update on his latest projects including the upcoming Transformers. In February 1989, di Bonaventura joined Warner Bros. While at Warner Bros., he was involved in over 130 productions. Among his biggest commercial and critical successes were "Falling Down” (1993), "A Time To Kill” (1996), "The Matrix” (1999), "Analyze This” (2000), "The Perfect Storm” (2000), "Ocean’s Eleven” (2001), "Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone” (2001), "Training Day” (2001) and "Scooby Doo” (2002).

In January 2003 Di Bonaventura formed di Bonaventura Pictures, a production company based at Paramount Pictures. The company most recently produced the hit "Four Brothers,” starring Mark Wahlberg, "Constantine,” starring Keanu Reeves, "Derailed,” starring Jennifer Aniston and Clive Owen, and "Doom,” starring Dwayne "The Rock” Johnson and Karl Urban.

Di Bonventura’s company is currently in production with "Transformers,” directed by Michael Bay, "Stardust,” starring Robert De Niro, Michelle Pfeiffer and Claire Danes, and "1408,” starring John Cusack and Samuel L. Jackson.

Here’s what Lorenzo di Bonaventura had to tell us:

Q: You have a pretty big movie coming out this summer – some Michael Bay independent movie – I was curious you’ve been slowly showing footage to certain people and I wanted to know if you could give us an update?

Lorenzo di Bonaventura: (Laughs) Yeah, we’re very proud of what we’ve seen so far of the movie and we thought it was time we show some people so that the hard core fan base could relax a little bit – not relax a lot, but relax a little bit (laughs) as we put it out. It’s a lot of fun and it’s very true to its characters. You know if anybody’s passionate about something, you have a certain responsibility to try to deliver what drove their passion What is great on Transformers is that people have made a lot of assumptions about what they’re going to look like and they’re all wrong because we haven’t even seen them, so I don’t know what they think they’ve seen. There isn’t a single digital effects shot that’s finished in the movie yet. So what’s great is that it’s going to keep getting better and better.

Q: How nervous are you with the release date coming up pretty soon – 3 months away?

Lorenzo di Bonaventura: This was planned. We’re right on schedule. So far everything has moved really sensationally. We finished on time, on budget and our visual effects are coming in on schedule. They’re just really complicated so they take a long time and we’ve seen them in process so we’ve seen the evolution of a lot of the shots.

Q: Have you already thought about a running time for the film?

Lorenzo di Bonaventura: No, it’s going to be longer than people expect because it’s very entertaining.

Q: Bernie Mac told us about his funny cameo as Bobby Bolivia, the used car saleman who sells a Transformer.

Lorenzo di Bonaventura: He’s insane in the movie. He’s so insane I can’t believe it.

Q: I’m wondering how much can you have fun with things like that before it gets too out of the zone of Transformers?

Lorenzo di Bonaventura: I think it’s everybody’s sort of internal barometer, you know. I personally can’t take 32-foot size metal robots all that seriously. (Laughs) On the other hand, I take what they represent very seriously. So it’s that sort of balance where you say to yourself ‘you know what, let’s not pretend we’re making War and Peace.’ We’re not. But people feel really passionate about what these Autobots and Decepticons stand for and there’s a very rich mythology so there’s a real demand to deliver that. So for the non-fan of it, we had to have enough fun with it so that they would be entertained and for the fan, we had to take it very seriously what we were executing around the Autobots and the Decepticons.

Q: I’d like to go into Stardust for a second if you don’t mind.

Lorenzo di Bonaventura: Okay, sure.

Q: I heard that they’re test screening out in Pasadena and it had very, very high test scores.

Lorenzo di Bonaventura: It did, which I was surprised by actually.

Q: How has it been going on that as well?

Lorenzo di Bonaventura: Exceedingly well. It’s a weird thing to say. I don’t think everybody’s going to love the movie because it’s not a movie that’s designed to be that and yet when we went and tested it, they really flipped for it so it caught me off guard. It was a movie where I expected to have a larger portion of the audience go ‘well, that’s sort of out there. I’m not sure it’s for us.’ And what happened was that we delivered I think the romance so spectacularly well – Matthew (Vaughn) did such a good job with it – that it caught a segment of the audience in that I wasn’t expecting.

Q: I’ve heard an anecdote along those lines saying that the studio was afraid to call it a fairy tale similar to like a Princess Bride and that Matthew really wants to call it but that it’s sort of being discouraged.

Lorenzo di Bonaventura: That’s not true. We all have the same fear which is when you use the word fairy tale… It’s interesting. We learned this from the focus groups. When we asked them to describe the movie to us and then they would give us a description and then we’d say to them, ‘What do you think if we describe it as a fairytale?,’ they’d say ‘NOOOOO!’ like that and we’d go, ‘Whoa! Okay, alright! We’re not going to call it that!’ It was really sort of an interesting thing. Because it’s not a movie that fits into any simple genre -- it is an adventure movie, it is a romance, it is a fantasy, it is Neil Gaiman’s bizarre world view -- there’s going to be some struggle for us to find the way to voice this thing, so we’re really going to need you guys to help us actually. (Laughs) It’s true. We’re going to be a very print-driven movie.

Q: What else are you developing or putting into production?

Lorenzo di Bonaventura: The next movie I hope to make is a thing called "NowhereLand” which Eddie Murphy committed to and we’re just trying to set a director right now and a script called "Edwin A. Salt” which is a really, really cool movie at Sony.

Q: Is "1408” already in production?

Lorenzo di Bonaventura: It’s finished. Not quite. That’s a movie where when we set out, we actually did not shoot the ending. We wanted to see the movie before we shot the ending.

Q: So you haven’t shot the ending?

Lorenzo di Bonaventura: No, we’ve got to shoot the ending. (Laughs) It was a really interesting idea because the idea of doing a real time movie in a hotel – one man in a one-bedroom suite for 80 minutes of real time. We didn’t know how you’d come out of that. Like do you need bigger or do you need smaller? What do you need? Or do you feel like he should die or do you feel like he should live? What do you feel? And so we wrote like 15 different endings because Stephen King’s short story doesn’t really have an ending. It just sort of ends and it’s not a cinematic ending. I’ll say it that way. So that’s the last piece of the puzzle, but it’s really fascinating to have done a movie all in a room and we all went sort of crazy.

Q: They did it with "Panic Room.”

Lorenzo di Bonaventura: This is much smaller. I mean it’s a one-bedroom suite. Fincher did it with a whole house (laughs) and you got to go outside for a little bit.

Lorenzo di Bonaventura’s latest film, Shooter, will open in theaters on March 16^th. Keep an eye out for our full interview with Lorenzo about "Shooter” that will appear shortly. Transformers will open July 4^th.