The Irishman Producer Irwin Winkler Gives 50 Years Worth of Advice | Impact Theory

What has 50 years in the business [music] taught you about life? Uh that you can have uh great success. Um you can have terrible failures and both and both are really the same. You just got to keep forging ahead. You you can never let the success make you think that you're better than anybody else or or more successful than the next guy. And the same thing about your failures. You shouldn't think that your failures [music] make you any less a person than the next person. Um, [music] you are who you are. You have to pursue your goals the way you have always [music] pursued them through success and failures. And if you keep trying, you're going to have some failures. You're also going to have some successes. When you give up, you're going to have neither. And that itself is failure. [music] Hey everybody, welcome to Impact Theory. Our goal with this show and company is to introduce you to the people and ideas that will help you actually execute on your dreams. All right, today's guest is one of the most accomplished film producers in the history of cinema. Spanning one of the most fruitful and enduring careers of all time, he's made more than 60 films, starting with Elvis Presley's Double Trouble back in ' 67 and running all the way through one of this year's most anticipated films, The Irishman, starring Oscar winners Robert Dairo, Joe Peshy, and Al Pacino. Over his astonishing career, he's created some of the most studied and often imitated landmarks in world cinema, including Raging Bull, The Right Stuff, Good Fellas, and Wolf of Wall Street. He's the only filmmaker with three films in the American Film Institutees list of the 100 greatest films of all time. And his movies have been nominated for an unimaginable 51 Academy Awards and have taken home the honors an astonishing 12 times, including the highest honor of all best picture for the classic Rocky. His films are so good that retrospectives of his entire body of work have been done by the prestigious Museum of Modern Art New York and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. So, please help me in welcoming the author of a life in movies, stories from 50 years in Hollywood, the man with his own star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, the legendary writer, producer, and director Irwin Winkler. [applause] Welcome. Thank you, Tom. Thank you. Thank you for coming on the show. Introduction. Thank you, man. Whittling your accomplishments down to something that can be read in, you know, a minute or so was next to impossible. Your career is really crazy. And when you look at people who've been in the business as long as you, usually it it sort of stops after like 20 25 years. Most people tap out. What's been the secret to your longevity? Well, uh I think basically uh u I've always been curious and uh I find that my curiosity has led me into different uh uh fields of uh u creative uh endeavors. Uh of course I went from being a producer to a writer to a director. So I I all those areas have always interested me. I hadn't the technical skills to be a cinematographer or a film editor, but though within those areas, my curiosity kept pushing me on. I couldn't see u retiring and reading the newspaper every morning without wanting to cut it out and say, "Oh, wait a minute. There's a movie here." Um because almost everything I I do or think about has been movies for the last 50 some odd years. Yeah, that actually really struck me. So when your producing partner um Bob Chartoff Yeah. uh when he decided he was going to go and go deep into philanthropy and you decided that you wanted to keep making movies, it was a really interesting moment for me in in reading your story because what you do is so hard. And as I'm reading the book and hearing all the times where things would fall apart, Eight Ways to Sunday, and you'd have to like move your entire post-production facility to be near a production because they were fighting and literally locking themselves in trailers, which sounds like the stuff out of movies. I mean, it's crazy. What is it about movies that drives you so much that you have dealt with this unending parade of problems for decades? I just love making movies and I think the problems come along with any creative endeavor. You've talked about impact and I think the impact theory that your podcast is based on uh has a lot to do with that uh breaking through whatever uh uh existed that really surrounds you and prevents you from moving forward. Uh so I never let any of those problems stop me. uh all I I found them all to be challenges that you have to meet and overcome or else you don't accomplish anything. That's one of my favorite things about you and certainly one of the greatest stories from the book. Um, you talked about how you broke in and what I found really interesting was you you get sort of that big moment when everything looks like it's falling apart and there's this whole conundrum going with two films aren't are sort of causing a clash and you had a pretty inventive solution um to get somebody else basically to to pay for something that would free up somebody and the guy said what I love about you is that you're solutionsoriented that you can think on your feet. Um, has that been something of of approaching every problem as if it were solvable? That's been a driving force for you? Well, I think some of it is is is taking advantage of of the situation. The the the what you're referring to uh was really thinking on my feet when I was 50 years younger. Uh however the rest of that story is where uh catching uh a moment and knowing how to respond to it is also vital in anybody's career. U what happened was specifically I impressed the head of MGM in a negotiation back in 1966. Uh, and he said to me, you know, there's nobody in Hollywood that really thinks on their feet, and I need some young blood. Uh, so he said, "If you if you can get a script, um, uh, I'd make you a producer." Well, I didn't have any scripts, but I got a call a couple of days later from the head of his story department at MGM, and uh, the gentleman, his name was, never forget his name, Russ Thatcher, and he called me. He said, "You know, Mr. O'Brien, who was the head of MGM, wants to make you a producer and we have a script here that we think would be great for the actress Julie Christie, who was an Academy Award winner for Darling, and she was a star of Dr. Shivago. I was involved with handling her career." Uh, and he said, "Uh, um, we think that Julie Christian would be great for the script. So, would you call Mr. O'Brien and see if you can get him to read the script because he has a big pile on his desk and he's not reading anything and if you can get him to read this script, maybe he'll make you the producer. It was probably a wild chance, but why not, right? So, I call Mr. O'Brien. I said, "We have this script. We think it'd be good for Julie Christie. Uh, would you read it?" And sure enough, a couple of days later, he called me. He says, "You know that script you sent me uh for Julie Christie?" I said, "Yeah." He said, 'You know, I don't think I want to do it with Julie Christie. I Oh, I said, 'Oh, that's too bad.' He said, 'But I have another idea.' I said, 'What was that? He said, uh, why don't we do it with Elvis Presley instead of Julie Christie? So, I said, the script I gave you with Julie Christie, you want to do with Elvis Presley? He said, "Yeah, what do you think of that?" I said, "That's the best idea I ever heard." So, I was smart enough not to say, "That's a terrible idea." and he said to me, "Well, how quickly can you get out to Hollywood?" And there I and that's how my career started. So, a lot of it is also taking advantage of a moment that and and I think people have those moments all the time. Sometimes they ignore them uh and uh too often uh lose the opportunity for it uh to to have an impact. Do you So, I think about rules a lot and rules have really governed my life. things that I repeat to myself like something like that. I don't have that particular rule which is great and and after this I will codify it of you know always be looking for the opportunity always find a way to capitalize on that window that other people are going to ignore. Do you have rules and things that you live by? um just when you read your film your films back to back you really get the sense of your flavor and I just wondered if you had like something specific um that is a guiding principle or a rule that you steer by amongst other principles I'd say one and c certainly for the as a movie producer is uh never accept no um that's never final for me people are always saying no um especially things that are risky. And the secret, I think, of anybody making a successful movie is to take some chances and not try to imitate somebody else and not try to do the same old thing and take some risks. And if you take risks, you're going to be turned down. You're going to be refused. Uh but you never have to accept that refusal. You can't make everything you want to, but you you don't have to accept no. uh uh and fight through it. That's one of my principles that that rule uh is something that I've adhered to a great deal. Uh it took uh you we talked about the Irishman which is coming out uh in the fall. It took eight years to get that made. Silence took the film I did with Mus Scorsesei in in Taipei that took 20 some odd years. So, a lot of films um are a long hard road to get made. Um and uh you have to hang in there and never accept the negative. I hear people say that a lot, but in your book, it becomes pretty clear pretty fast that you um you don't just say no. It's not just being stubborn, though that's clearly a part of it. It's you're you're finding creative solutions. walk us through Rocky because that was a film that just because of your desire to keep Stallone involved which is already interesting and I'd love to hear more about that. Um you and your partner really had to go it alone to get that made. So um how did perseverance pay off there and how did you do it without pissing people off? Oh, we pissed a lot of people off [laughter] especially the studio. Well, what happened was it it also goes back to how the the entire arrangement was made. What happened was we uh had a script, Bob and I, uh that the head of United Artist wanted to buy, but we sold to somebody else. And he invited me to lunch. And I said to him, I I I was very surprised that if he was upset at me because I sold it to somebody else, why would he invited me lunch? and he said, "I want to be in business with you so that next time I won't be I won't lose out." Rather than being angry, he took the other approach, which was kind of interesting. So, um, we made an arrangement that if we didn't make a film for them within the first nine months of our contract, we had what is called a put picture. A put picture means that under certain conditions, the studio would have to finance the film. Uh, and in that case, and this was 19 U 73 or 74. Uh the deal was that if we didn't make a movie, as I said, we could present a script and if it was budgeted at a million half dollars or less, which would today be about $10 million, they had to finance it. So we we hadn't made a film. through coincidence, Stallone came into our office to visit us as an actor and uh we weren't casting anything and it was one of those kind of peculiar meetings where you're talking about nonsense and you're kind of glancing at your watch hoping this will go quickly. But as he left, he said, "Oh, by the way, I'm a writer." And uh he said, "If if I send you a script, would you read it?" and he sent us a script and and we didn't want to do it as a movie, but the writing was very honest and very true. So, we called him up and said, 'You know, we don't want to make that script you can't, but we think you're really a good writer, and if you have anything else, we really would like to. He said, well, I have an idea. So, he came into the office and he pitched the idea of Rocky to us and we liked it. and he said, you know, however, he said, you know, I'm really an actor more so than a writer, so I'll write the script. You don't have to pay me any money. Right away, that sounded pretty interesting. And uh he said, "And if you like it, uh I have to star in it." So, okay, it's we like the writing, we like the idea, why not? So he wrote about half the script, sent it to us, we gave him some comments. He finished it rather quickly and we liked it and of course we gave it to United Artists which was the company we were had a contract with and they said why in the world would we want to finance a movie with two ugly ducklings? U you're going to shoot it in Philadelphia. U you want to star who? Sylvester Stallone. Who is he? uh and nobody wants to see fight films. So, uh they said, "We're not going to make it." So, we said, "Well, okay. We have our contract with you. We budgeted the film. It's less than a million half dollars. You have to finance it." So, they said, "Well, we've done a budget ourselves, and the budget we've done is $2 million, so it doesn't apply as a put picture." So, we got very angry, Bob Charter and I, and we said, "You know what? we'll make the picture for a million dollars and we'll guarantee anything over that that we'll pay for ourselves. And they said, "Well, how are you going to guarantee it?" We said, "Well, we'll put up our houses. We'll mortgage our homes to to do it." And they So, in that case, they said, "Okay, we can't." And that's how the movie got made, got financed, [applause] right? I mean, that's a that that's a really incredible story. And I think as film fans, we all want to say thank you for doing that cuz it's such an extraordinary movie. I want to know more about this. When people are going this way, it's probably the right time to go that way. Um, how do you have the confidence in yourself knowing that failure is so possible that making a movie is hard no matter what, but when people that are, you know, they have every incentive to pick winners are saying this is a loser. Um, how do you have the confidence in yourself to go in that direction? Well, I learned very early on that most films a lose money. Uh they they ultimately may may make make money back, you know, so through subsidiary rights, through library sales over the long run. U the fact that somebody says it's not good or it's not going to make money has never been a detriment as far as we're concerned. Well, you went to you you have a film background, so you know, it's so hard to translate an idea a to a script from the script to an actual film uh and then get it out uh to the audience to for their response. So, it's not easy. It's not easy, but there's also a really big difference. And in this interview, one thing I really want to try to get from you is I know that there's going to be a temptation for you to be ultra humble and oh, I I've had great fortune. I think there's a lot more systematic stuff at play, especially having read your book. Um, and what I want to know is there's a big difference between going, okay, most films lose money. Everyone's saying this is going to flop, but I believe in it. There's something here. And there's such a something here that even though I know most films lose money, I'm going to mortgage my house to make sure that it gets made. And so the the part of the code that I want to crack, and remember this is entirely selfish for me. So we're launching a film studio. I have to understand this. I have to be able to look at a property, have Stallone come into my office, and go from I'm bored, get out of here, to wait a second, there really is something about this kid. And what I want to know is what are the key moments in your life that have really shaped who you are at like a deep fundamental level? Well, um, interesting enough, I uh I was a young I I graduated uh uh high school kind of early on. I kind of skipped a term and and I ended up going to NYU while the most of the students ex soldiers from World War II. So I was a kind of a duck out of what I was this kid that all the members of the my class were much older, more mature. Um so I I hated NYU and I joined the army during the Korean War. I enlisted in the army during the Korean War and when I got out I went back to school but I worked during the day and went to school four nights a week, four hours a night uh and worked all day and uh I I had a great professor and I fell in love with Fitzgerald Steinbecks Pasos all the Faulner all the great American authors from and I learned how to read and and understand writing. Uh so that was one of the great changes and influences in my life. This one NYU professor by the name of Ley who taught me how to read basically. So that was another influence. The second one was when I and I coincidentally looking for a job. I I read a book about an agent. I got a job in the William Morris famous mail room uh as a mailboy at $40 a week. And then I met my wife um who has been my greatest influence and my greatest critic and my greatest booster. Um and we're now married 60 years by the way. U and we went through all the trial tri trials and tribulations of starting a career, starting a family and taking chances and quitting and starting over. U so she was the most confidence giving of all the people I've ever known. And then uh I was a very unhappy and very unsuccessful agent at William Mars uh and I met Bob Chardov and we decided that we would both start although we both had small children uh at the time we just said okay let's take a chance and uh again when I said to Margot hey we got $7,000 in my pension fund from William Morris we're going into a new business Bob and I and you know we're going to have to really she said look as long as I have enough money to pay the drugstore cuz we had to buy diapers and all that for baby she said we'll be okay so she great she said we'll be fine so Bob was a big change and then after that it was just uh a lot of a lot of just hard work and and and then creatively I met two people who really changed my creative life after I had made movies for seven or eight years and that was Dairo and Scorsesei. Yeah, that's uh what you guys have done together is is really amazing and to try to tease apart your individual stories I think would be pretty impossible. In all of that though, but let me just be Sly of course um showed me something different and that is uh believing in yourself. Of all the people uh that I've met, Stallone was a guy uh who didn't have a a quarter to his name. He was broke uh but always believed in his own opportunity and his own ability and creatively he was he's people don't take him as seriously as they should. He is really really a renaissance man. Yeah. His career has been amazing and in film school I mean he's like lore about believing in yourself about leveraging something that you have to really launch your career. In fact that that's a fascinating question. So, somebody that's seen the times change and all of that, um, and seen people have to break into an industry that is just ruthless in terms of being sort of a closed system, um, what pathy advice do you have for people to break into the industry? Uh, well, [laughter] it's a good question. Um, I started in in in a mail room. uh there's no job that's too low on the totem pole as far as starting in in in the film business or the television business. So if somebody says to you um it's film school or it's uh on the set, they're all good. Um Scorsesei started in watching movies when he was 8 years old. That's that was his biggest influence because he had asthma and couldn't play stickball in the streets of New York with the kids. So he went to an air conditioned movie theater. That's how he started. Uh Bob Dairo's father was an artist, a a very very fine painter. And and Sly uh in spite of the way he talked and acted went to a fine school and had a great ability to write. Um where it comes from I don't know. But u pursue it. That would would be the the the basic process that all of us went through. Uh I never thought uh I could read a book and understand it as well as I did once I had this one teacher at NYU. So it comes from any many many different places. A lot of it depends on the person. What has 50 years in the business taught you about life? uh that you can have uh great success um you can have terrible failures and both and both are really the same. You just got to keep forging ahead. You you can never let the success make you think that you're better than anybody else or or more successful than the next guy. And the same thing about your failures. You shouldn't think that your failures make you any less a person than the next person. U you are who you are. You have to pursue your goals the way you have always pursued them through success and failures. And if you keep trying, you're going to have some failures. You're also going to have some successes. When you give up, you're going to have neither. And that itself is failure. What's the why that drives you? like what is what is the sort of end goal of all of this? Good question. I don't know. I don't I don't really know how. I think I I I in one of my uh diary notes in the book, I I uh I think I said that I I sometimes wonder why I have to wake up every morning and defeat the world. Uh, I think words to that effect I I I have in one of my diary notes. Uh, which I might not have written about narratively, but I did it in my my notes. It's interesting. Why do I have to wake up today and defeat the world? I like that a lot. And it really does sometimes feel that way. Certainly as an entrepreneur, it's there's the thing that always plays in my head is there's always going to be a problem. Like there are so few moments where everything just seems calm and placid. Like it's always you solve this problem and just when you're feeling great about that, boom, you get hit with another problem. How do you manage stress, anxiety, like how do you just keep coming back year after year and you're so vital? I It's pretty crazy for the length of career you have, how long you've been just up and at this, and how vital you still are. How do you manage all that? Like given what I presume your stress levels to be, you should have had a heart attack like in your 60s. It's like it's crazy. Well, interesting enough, and it's going to sound kind of obvious in a way, but in spite of all this, we have an incredible family ties as, as I said, I've been married. I my three sons that luckily live all in Los Angeles. So, we we're very very very strong uh family and friendships. Uh most of the friendships are within the business uh in making movies. On Friday I had lunch with Bob Dairo. We talked about his marriage, his divorce, my marriage. No divorce for me. Um we talked about the old days and there was a bond of friendship that makes all those bad moments um u less important in your life. certainly less important than the good moments, but there'll, as you said, there'll be terrible disappointments. There'll be terrible bad moments, but there are an awful lot of good ones. And I don't think it it it serves anybody to really dwell on the bad moments. You got to move them on. Yeah, you're going to be hurt. You're going to be upset. Um, I sat in the audience uh uh where Raging Bull didn't win an Academy Award where I thought it should have. I sat in the audience where the right stuff should have was nominated and should have gotten an Academy Award and didn't. I sat in in the audience where Good Fellas should have gotten an Academy Award and didn't. And then I said to myself, you know, when we won an Academy Award for Rocky, we beat out all the President's Men, Network, Taxi Driver. I wonder how those producers felt about me. So, I kind of it all evens out in a way. Let's talk about your marriage. I think it's I heard an amazing quote one time that has certainly been true in my life and that is the people with the strongest home lives take the biggest risks. What is it that's made your marriage last 60 plus years in a very volatile industry? We just love each other. We started with nothing, which I think maybe is part of the build of of a relationship. and uh we just just love each other. I mean, it's as simple as that. And do you guys have any techniques for keeping the love alive? Is there any sort of like if you were going to pass on to your kids as to how to have a winning relationship? Yeah. Number one, you don't always have to be right. Um and we literally never go to bed angry. We can we can have disagreements and nobody doesn't have a disagreement, but at the end of the day, you shouldn't walk around angry and say uh and go to bed without finding a way to make up. Even if you it even if you have to admit you're wrong and you know in your heart you're right, doesn't pay. The the relationship is more important than being right or wrong. Um those are the kind of general things but basically you really have to care about the person next to you and and think if you're married or in a relationship for a long period of time that that person is sharing everything with you everything in your life with you and it's as important as your life yourself there there's no separation between the two. Yeah. It's interesting. You've had a lot of long-term relationships. What would you say is so from Dairo Scorsesei even Stallone why what would they say is the reason they keep coming back to work with you specifically I you'd have to ask them I really uh uh I don't know well then let me ask you're making me blush so well I wish I could ask them and and certainly would and I certainly have my hypothesis looking at your career career, but um what is it that's allowed you to get so many films across the finish line? You go into great detail about this in the book. It's one of the things that I find most interesting for people that are willing to to read the book with an eye towards that there. It's um it's a master class in how to overcome obstacles and get things across the finish line. You touch on several times about how you pulled two disperate pieces together, got one person to let go of something else. I mean, it's just really, really extraordinary. Um, but if you had to like button that up for us in terms of how you've just been able to get films done, I mean, it's uh that would be Well, each one is kind of different. Uh, uh, I talk about in the book uh, uh, how Raging Bull got made. One of the great, great films of the last 50 years is arguably Raging Ball. It's Marty Scorsese's masterpiece. It's really, really great. The studio had absolutely no intention of doing it and they told us so. Um, but I realized at the time and Bob Chiff realized at the time that they were desperate after the success of Rocky and they were very vulnerable that they wanted to make another Rocky and we had the right to say no. So we said, you know what, if you don't make Raging Bull, we're not going to make another Rocky. And they reluctantly agreed to make Raging Bull. Uh, so and we made Rocky, too. So it worked out. But we found that area that we can operate in that area of their vulnerability to trade off. Um, again, don't accept no. Reading the book, it's very clear to me that you're a master of change. You talked about how when you came into the industry, it was like in total flux. And as you were describing it, and this is back in the late 60s, as you were describing it, it reminded me so much of what's happening today. And then I thought, and wait, he's also going through it still. this other radical shift as we move away from traditional distribution to digital distribution. Um, and you talk very eloquently about Netflix and iTunes and obviously The Irishman is going to Netflix. Um, how have you navigated change and how do you overcome the quote that haunts me to this day which is genius is a young man's game which you are proving just is not true. Well, number one, I don't consider myself a genius. So, uh, I'm not part of that game. Uh, no. I think you have to forge ahead. Whatever comes. Look, I remember when home video came, uh, that was a crisis at the time. People said, "Why would anybody want to go to a movie if they can buy a videape or then a DVD and see the movie at home?" Well, my answer to that is, and it's relates to today as well, since some woman or man took two sticks together and was able to make a fire, people gathered around that fire and somebody came along and started telling him a story. And the idea of sitting around that fire and somebody telling him a story is exactly what the movie theater is. It's what the legitimate theater is. And I think part of our DNA, why do we get in bed with another person, man or woman, uh probably because the warmth that we get from their body is part of our prehistoric DNA because back in the wilderness when the Neanderthal man was didn't have a fire and he wanted to get warm, a person next to him warmed him. or maybe it was the protection of having somebody next to you. So that's part of who we are just built in. And I think part of who we are is listening to that man or woman telling the story as all of us gathered around the fire. So I think movie theaters are going to be there forever because people still want to gather and go to a film. uh uh they may change it so a group of 12 people will go to somebody's living room and watch a movie on a big screen but it's the same process in a way. That makes a lot of sense. So where can everybody find your book? How do you buy books today? There aren't that many bookstores. So Amazon uh or you know is the way to get it or iTunes. And what movies do you have coming up that you want people to pay attention to? Well, obviously the uh uh The Irishman, which is going to come out uh uh in the fall. Um which I think is going to be a real treat. It's really really special. Really special. It's the coming together of Scorsesei, Dieriro, Peshi, um Pacino, and myself, all of who have had a long history together. Uh and um that's that's something to look forward to. And um uh we've got a uh uh I mentioned it previously, John Carney, who is a wonderful filmmaker, is working on doing a story about the Gershwins with the great great music of the uh American Song Book and couple other ideas we're playing with, but that's what is on the board right now. It's exciting. I really can't wait to see what you continue to do. It's pretty extraordinary. What is the impact that you want to have on the world? Just give a some people a good time in the theater. Make them think a little bit. Make them laugh a little bit if I can. But I haven't been very good with comedy, so I'm I can't say make them laugh, but uh yeah, maybe think a little bit. Yeah. Well, I think that you've done an extraordinary job of that already. For sure, guys. This man has literally changed the face of cinema. You could just go down and watch all the films that he's done if you want a masterclass in amazing world-defining cinema. His book is extraordinary. I cannot recommend it enough and I'm literally holding my breath for the Irishman. Irwin, thank you so much for coming on. That was absolutely extraordinary. Thank you. Thank you guys. Until next time, be legendary. Take care. Thank you. [applause] The great author used to always say to me, "There's always another racetrack. There's always another game. So take your game and ratchet it down just a drop and you're going to have another game." And he was right. I didn't listen to that. To me, winning is everything.