On an Emotional Ride

In the 1980s, Jerry Bruckheimer and his partner, Don Simpson, were the kings of commercial cinema. The two producers, whose relationship was so intertwined that Simpson once likened them to two people with one brain, made a string of blockbusters such as “Flash-dance” (1983), “Beverly Hills Cop” (1984) and “Top Gun” (1986). It was said that Simpson, a charismatic Alaskan who believed that he himself had the makings of a movie star, was the idea man. Bruckheimer, the more introverted of the two, knew how to get a movie made. Though “Days of Thunder” (1990) was a disappointment, “Bad Boys” (1995) was a hit. That year saw the premiere of “Dangerous Minds” and “Crimson Tide.” The duo seemed unstoppable.

But in the fall of 1995, Bruckheimer told Simpson he wanted to dissolve their partnership. The breakup, which Bruckheimer says was amicable, did not become public until December. One month later, Simpson, 52, was found dead of a drug overdose in one of the bathrooms of his Bel-Air home.

Since then, Bruckheimer has said very little about his late former partner. Last month, however, he talked about life after Simpson, describing what it’s like to produce solo (he’s made “The Rock” in 1996, “Con Air” in 1997 and this year’s “Armageddon,” which opens July 1) and airing his lingering feelings about the friend he lost. Several times during the interview, Bruckheimer--who refused to reveal his age, which is 54--inadvertently spoke of Simpson in the present tense. Determined to give Simpson his due, he vowed that if he ever makes the films they developed together--such as “Zone of Silence” (about the federal government’s cover-up of UFOs) and “Rogue Warrior” (based on the autobiography of a Navy SEAL)--they will be released under the Simpson-Bruckheimer banner.

Sitting in his huge office in a renovated Santa Monica warehouse--the room, he likes to say, “where it all happens”--Bruckheimer mostly wanted to talk about “Armageddon,” the tale of what happens when the Earth is threatened by an asteroid the size of Texas. More than a typical action movie, he insisted, this film, which blasts a bunch of roughneck oil drillers into space, is character-driven. Its director, Michael Bay, with whom Bruckheimer worked on “Bad Boys” and “The Rock,” is a genius, he said. “He is the Spielberg, the Lucas, the Cameron of the next 15 to 20 years,” Bruckheimer said of the 34-year-old former commercial director. “He’s like an artist. Like Rockwell.”

Try as he might, Bruckheimer couldn’t keep off the subject of Simpson. “I miss him,” he said. “I think about him all the time.”

Question: Where do you think the best ideas come from?

Answer: Everywhere. They come from what [journalists] write about, from novels, writers’ heads, our heads. Being able to recognize a good idea--that’s the hard part. Or what we’re really good at here is taking an idea that maybe you’ve seen before and putting a new spin on it. It’s hard, even for me, to sell a studio an idea that has been done many times and say, “Look, we’re going to make it better and more interesting.” “Bad Boys” was passed on by not only Disney, but by virtually every studio in this town.

Q: Originally, it wasn’t going to have two black leads.

A: No. It was going to be Dana Carvey and Jon Lovitz. But they fell out. And we met Will [Smith] and [Columbia Pictures executive] Barry Josephson met Martin [Lawrence] and it came together. “Bad Boys” is a great example. We’ve seen that story how many times? Two cops and drugs--you know, come on. But the casting--you’d never seen these two guys together before. And the way [director] Michael [Bay] shot it made it so you looked at it and said, “This is familiar but I’ve never seen it look like that.” That’s what gets audiences every time.

Q: What’s unique about “Armageddon”?

A: It’s emotional. It’s exciting. It’s got great characters. And it’s a big event that these characters populate around. And what a cast. Billy Bob Thornton--one of our best actors. Bruce Willis--a terrific actor and a movie star. Liv Tyler--the best young ingenue in the business. It’s got these great character actors--Steve Buscemi, Will Patton. And Ben Affleck--who’s become a big young star on the rise. We didn’t know it when he first came in [to read], while he was shooting “Good Will Hunting.” He was funny, extremely handsome, looked like he came from the Midwest. Then we tested him. All the women assistants in the office said, “Who is that guy?”

But the movie is about building relationships between the characters. That’s what I try to emphasize. The camaraderie among men, the heart, the sacrifice. I don’t care how many explosions you have, or how many great car chases or how many buildings blow up, if you don’t like those characters and we can’t get you vested in the individuals in the movie, we’ve lost. . . . I’ve said this many times, but we’re in the transportation business. We transport you from one place to another. And that’s the key to what we do. And I think we’re going to do it in this picture. It’s very intense, it’s funny, it’s emotional. You’re going to cry. There’s one scene--trust me, it’ll get you.

Q: Are you an emotional guy? Do your eyes tear up in the theater?

A: Sure. Oh, yeah. I cry at the movies.

Q: How important is music to your films? Is it true that you even pay a lot of attention to which song plays while the credits roll?

A: That’s right. You want to create an emotion as people walk out that complements the end of the picture, whatever that is. That’s really important. . . . Sometimes [the music] is too loud. People blast me all the time for that--including my wife. But certain scenes I think you need music to carry emotionally. So we lower the effects and let the music sweep you through it.

Q: Since “Deep Impact” opened May 8, you’re going to be the second movie in two months about a heavenly body threatening to collide with Earth. Are you concerned?

A: Absolutely. I’d be foolish not to be. Spielberg [who is an executive producer] is certainly as good as it gets. And at DreamWorks [which is co-financing the film with Paramount Studios], they’re all smart people. I didn’t read the script on purpose, because I didn’t want to have that in my psyche. But based on the trailer, it’s a much different movie.

Look, a lot of westerns have similar plots. A lot of baseball movies have similar plots. Look at any genre and you see that more than one can survive. You’ve just got to make a good movie. And that’s hard to do.

When you do it right, it looks really easy, seamless. But it takes a lot of pain and a lot of brain cells to get it there, even if the subject matter isn’t what you’d consider something brilliant. A picture that you might not think is a great movie, it might not be a great movie, but it entertains millions and millions of people. A lot of people try to get into this genre and do what we do. They get in and say, “My God, this is really hard.”

Q: You’ve shown quite a knack for casting against type. Whether it’s putting Steve Buscemi--an actor no one associates with action fare--in “Con Air” or casting Ed Harris, the consummate good guy, as the villain in “The Rock.” You also have cast several people who are about to be big, famous and expensive right before they became big, famous and expensive--Tom Cruise in “Top Gun,” Smith in “Bad Boys,” Eddie Murphy in “Beverly Hills Cop.” Do you find you have to talk some actors into being in this kind of film?

A: Liv Tyler, it was like dragging a train across the country and back to get her to do this movie.

Q: Why?

A: It’s a big commercial movie and she likes these more independent kind of films. All it does, I kept telling her, was open up more doors for you. You can continue with smaller pictures. It just gives you the opportunity, if you want to do a big movie, you can. She’s great in this.

Q: I read that John Malkovich and several other actors, when asked why they did “Con Air,” all answered the same way: the money.

A: That’s not necessarily true. Those actors are offered a lot of parts. [Malkovich] chased that part [of Cyrus “The Virus” Grissom, a psychopath who is said to have killed more people than cancer]. I don’t care what he said after it comes out and is a big hit. He wanted that picture. He got to be evil and funny.

Q: So you find yourself really having to twist some actors’ arms because they see action as not as big an acting challenge?

A: Exactly. Listen: They don’t turn down the money. And we do pay them well. But we make movies that are successful and everybody wants to be in movies that are successful, that a lot of people see. It helps their ego when they walk into a restaurant and have someone say, “Hey, I saw you in that movie. It was great.”

Q: First there was the star-driven action picture. Then came the buddy action comedy. Does the action movie have to continue evolving in order to survive? Or is this a formula that people have such fondness for that you can keep mining it indefinitely?

A: It’s not a formula. It’s not that we consciously think, “You have to have this and you have to have that.” I base the movie on what I want to see. What’s going to keep me in my seat? . . . But I think the action picture will always be around. As long as we have testosterone, it’s going to be there. We all get really mad after getting a speeding ticket or a parking ticket and want to do something about it. Or if there’s an injustice in our lives, we’d love to be somebody else for that one moment. Or if your boss [insults you] I think it’s everybody’s fantasy to kind of fight back. A lot of our pictures have been about personal triumph--overcoming hardships, overcoming a lot of different issues in your past. It’s been there since the beginning of movies. It’s human emotion.

Q: And big machinery and explosions.

A: It’s in our culture. Look, the world is about winning. Why do you have the Olympics? Who are the best athletes, the fastest, the strongest?

Q: And these movies are about winning?

A: That’s right. They’re about overcoming your own personal problems and succeeding. It’s a common theme that we lived in our lives, both my ex-partner [Don Simpson] and myself. He came from Alaska, I came from Detroit. Lower-middle-class families. No connection to Hollywood whatsoever. We came out here and just based on our drive and ambition and hopefully some talent along the way, did it. You sacrifice your time with your family, a lot of things, to do what we do. Because it’s not a 9-to-5 job. Ever.

Q: What made you decide you wanted to break up your partnership with Simpson? Was it the drug-related death of Dr. Stephen Ammerman, the doctor whose body was found in Simpson’s pool house in August 1995?

A: It had been coming for a long time. Don’s interests lay elsewhere. And I loved what I was doing. And he drifted away from it.

Q: Was it your hope that by talking to Don about ending the partnership you might coax him into dealing with his problems?

A: You hope that. But when you talk to doctors, they say you have to want to get help. Don had to make those decisions. . . . I didn’t go to him and say, “Hey, you have to change your life.” Because Don is an adult. For about three years, I’d been pretty much running the company day to day. Not that he didn’t inject his brilliance quite often. I miss his intelligence and his bravado and his sense of humor. I miss it every day. But life goes on.

Q: Your relationship has been described by both of you and by others as an incredible marriage, very complementary, in which he was the brilliant wild man and you were the one who knew how to get things done. What was it like to split up?

A: You know what happened? I went to “Don school.” I really did. He transferred an enormous amount of knowledge to me during our partnership from 1982 to 1996. So I have a lot of him in me that he taught me. As does [DreamWorks SKG co-founder] Jeff Katzenberg. As does [Disney Chairman] Michael Eisner. And Don went to school with me--I taught him a lot of what I knew. So we got to a point where we both could function.

And we were still friends. I spoke to him the day he died. But we were just going in different directions. I loved working and making movies. Don had other things he wanted to do with his life. I kind of forced us into making all those movies at the end. . . . But it was a very amicable divorce.

Q: You and Simpson had left Paramount in 1991, signing a five-year deal with Walt Disney Studios. At first, that didn’t seem like the best fit.

A: The kinds of pictures they were very successful with when they brought us over weren’t the kind of pictures that I understand how to make. I might enjoy going to see them, but I don’t know how to make them and neither does Don. Finally, Katzenberg [who was then the studio’s chairman] saw that there was a way to utilize us well. That’s how “Crimson Tide” got green-lighted. Katzenberg was really behind that picture and then [Disney motion picture Studios chairman Joe [Roth] did a brilliant job of marketing it, so it was the best of both worlds.

Q: It sounds like you’re in sync with Roth. You think it’s because he used to be a producer himself?

A: Oh, yeah, he’s been there. He gets it. Joe understands that if an actor’s last price was $300,000 and he’s been in a hit movie, chances are he’s going to get $1 million. Well, I can negotiate starting at $350,000 and eventually pay him $1 million, but I’d go through a lot of pain. Joe says, “Look, here’s his market value.” And I spend my time now on creative things rather than being tortured.

Q: When did you know you wanted to make movies?

A: When I was a little kid. I’m a first-generation American--both my parents are from Germany. My dad was a $140-a-week salesman. We lived in a real working-class blue-collar neighborhood. I was so far removed from Hollywood. But I was always in love with the magic. My parents would drop me off at the Saturday matinees.

Q: Did you think you wanted to be an actor or a director?

A: I didn’t have the skill to be an actor and perform in front of people. I’ve trained myself to talk to people, to give speeches, to go on television. Don loved it. He didn’t want to be a producer. He wanted to be an actor. So I learned a lot from him there--how to deal with the media and with crowds. But that was never something I was comfortable doing. I was always putting stuff together as a kid--making them happen.

Q: After “Armageddon,” I know you’re finishing “Enemy of the State,” the thriller starring Will Smith and Gene Hackman. What about after that?

A: There are three or four things that could pop. There’s a “Bad Boys” sequel--if the script comes in decent, we could do that. There’s one project at Castle Rock that’s a possibility--”Down and Under,” which is a little comedy.

Q: A “little comedy” from Jerry Bruckheimer?

A: You’ve got to do little things sometimes. And some of the big ones start out little. “Flashdance” was a little movie. “Beverly Hills Cop” was an inexpensive movie--Murphy had never starred in a picture by himself. “Top Gun” was a $14-million picture with an actor who was great in “Risky Business” but had just came off a failure: “Legend.” These were not tent-pole movies.

Q: So what’s this little comedy about?

A: Two friends from New York. One’s mom is married to a mobster. His buddy is a wannabe mobster but he’s a total screw-up. The mob sends them to deliver some money in Australia. One character always wears his lucky red sport coat. So they’re driving through the Outback and they hit a kangaroo. They get out of the car and the guy takes off his red sport coat, with the money in the pocket, and puts it on the dead kangaroo so his friend can take pictures. The kangaroo, of course, is alive and takes off. They’ve got to find this kangaroo before the mobsters from New York, who they’re supposed to deliver the money to, arrive. It’s clever.

Q: Small, clever comedy, with a modest budget. That’s something of a departure for you, no?

A: I’ve always wanted to do different things. I wish I’d made “Good Will Hunting.” I loved it. It’s about human emotion.

Q: It deals more directly with some of the things you say you value in films--character development, emotional depth--than the movies that you make.

A: Yeah, sure. But look at “Flashdance” and “Dangerous Minds.” Look at some of the themes in “Armageddon.” See what happens at the end of the picture. You’ll see some different things.

Q: So when you see “Good Will Hunting,” you think, “I wish I’d made that.” You’re in a position where, conceivably, you could.

A: Well, I don’t get that kind of material that often.

Q: Should you?

A: I’d love that. It’s just a terrific movie.

Q: You’ve done three movies back to back. Got any vacation plans?

A: No. This is too much fun. You’ve got to do this until they stop you. (Laughing.) One of these days they’re going to say, “Listen, we’re going to pull the plug on you.”

Q: That sounds like Don Simpson talking.

A: No. (Pausing.) I miss him. I wish he was here. I think about him all the time. You try to remember the good and forget about the bad. Try to learn from the good. He was a great, electric character. I loved him--you loved him and hated him. And he loved movies, at least when we started out.

Q: Could anybody have stepped in and done anything to save him?

A: [A friend] can only take it so far. The way the laws are, you can’t commit anybody. They can get out. When you look into it, you see what the laws allow.

Q: Had you considered committing him?

A: There were a lot of things we considered. We helped him as best we could.

You know what was interesting about him is that whenever he did what he did, he never did it around his work. . . . When he had to be somewhere, he was there and he was great. He never disappointed me in any of the things that were important. When it came down to getting things done, he was there with bells on. I mean, there were moments. But somehow, he rose to the occasion. Though toward the end it was much more difficult. Don’s biggest problem was he was too rich and too smart.

Q: Why was that a problem?

A: Because he always thought he knew more than anybody else, including the doctors. It’s not going to happen to me. I know I don’t know anything, see? So I listen to a lot of people.