Earlier this week THN attended the press conference for new release JACK RYAN: SHADOW RECRUIT. Once this had finished we were whisked away to a secluded room to talk in-depth to two of the films producers, Lorenzo Di Bonaventura and David Barron.
Lorenzo Di Bonaventura has carved out a niche within the action film circuit with past credits including RED, SALT, and TRANSFORMERS. He is also involved in the newest addition to the TRANSFORMERS franchise and earlier this week we brought you his musings on how the film should be seen in relation to the already existent trilogy.
David Barron is a long-time friend and collaborator of actor/director Kenneth Branagh, and is most famous for his involvement in the HARRY POTTER series. His next project is CINDERELLA, which again sees him working with Branagh, and you can see what he had to share about that project here.
We didn’t just grill them about future projects though, as we were there to discuss JACK RYAN: SHADOW RECRUIT, the fifth film to feature Tom Clancy’s iconic character. Along the way we also managed to gain some insight into the often over-looked world of producing with both men reminiscing about their route into the business. See the interview in full below:
How did you both get involved in Jack Ryan?
DI BONAVENTURA: I started with the script about eight years ago. David and I have known each other for fifteen, sixteen years; I hate to say it maybe a little bit longer than that. David and Ken had worked together a number of times and so that’s how the three of us got together.
BARRON: Yeah Lorenzo took the script to Ken, and I sort of came with Ken. Lorenzo was gracious enough to let me come along for the ride.
So Lorenzo, you say you’ve been working on the script for a number of years, what was it about now that meant that everything collided together?
DI BONAVENTURA: Now if we could answer that we’d know how to make every movie.
BARRON: Yeah, and we wouldn’t take so long to make them.
DI BONAVENTURA: I think the truth is it was always a story about economic destabilization as a larger plot element to it, and I think over the last five or six years that’s become important. I think everyone’s terrified of that. Everyone feels vulnerable to it; everybody feels they’re being manipulated, so it became more and more current as time went by.
Was it a conscious decision to steer away from the previous novels?
BARRON: What I loved when I read the script was that it was a chance to reinvent the character, a character that everyone, well a great many people, knew really well. Not reinvent, but re-present the character actually, starting with the origin story. Especially as it wasn’t really covered in this way in the books, well the ones that I’ve read. It was a very fresh way into a well-established character.
DI BONAVENTURA: I mean usually when you make these movies the central character is going to go through one big decision, or one big obstacle. We watch a man go through the three or four arguably most seminal decisions outside of having a child perhaps, that one can have in one’s life so we thought by doing that you would connect the audience to the character in a way that hadn’t been done before.
Was it hard to get the script to balance all these developments?
BARRON: Yeah it’s tough.
DI BONAVENTURA: it’s always tricky. The debate is how deep do you want to go within each scene, how do you want to do that. I think truthfully it finds itself in a funny way. As much as we think we’re smart and know what we’re doing, and analyse it, and do our best, there’s something about film that determines it’s own rhythm.
BARRON: Yeah it’s true; you could spend the entire film getting as far as him joining the CIA even. But at the same time you want to get into him being in the CIA and actually get in some good fun action, and find him discovering himself as a proper field agent. So yeah it kind of finds it’s own rhythm; scenes fall in and scenes fall out.
DI BONAVENTURA: The helicopter scene was in, it was out…
BARRON: In, out, in, out.
I’m glad it was kept in as I thought it worked well.
BARRON: Oh good.
DI BONAVENTURA: We felt that way. There was a bit of an argument with the studio on that one.
Did you always have Chris Pine in mind, or did you audition anyone else?
DI BONAVENTURA: It was really Paramount’s idea, because Paramount was watching him on dailies of Star Trek, so they had the advantage of seeing something that none of us had seen. So they rang up and said, ‘what do you think of Chris Pine?’ and the answer back was ‘well he’s a promising young actor but why do you guys think that?’ and they said ‘you gotta see these dailies!’ to which we were then not allowed to see, so we had to wait until we saw the movie. But I think their instinct was why he’s turned into a really great Jack Ryan, because he has a great sense of certainty, and a great sense of intelligence and integrity, and he’s not bad looking either so it worked out okay.
BARRON: He’s also a movie star, the camera loves him, but he’s accessible too, which is a very winning combination.
Shadow Recruit is definitely more action packed than previous outings, again was that a conscious thing to liven it up to match to the Bond and Bourne films?
DI BONAVENTURA: That’s interesting. I wouldn’t have said that from a sense memory, because I would’ve thought Hunt For Red October was because of the scale of it. I think the audience asks for more of film. It just does. The audience is more impatient, the audience is more demanding and you have to give them a bigger feast.
BARRON: Yeah I think it’s true that when we set out there was no action quota; we just did what felt right for the balance of the film. But I think the central Moscow sequence, the stealing of the information, felt spiritually part of the original Jack Ryan’s actually, because it was not. I know Kevin Costner shot a couple of people, but it wasn’t blowing things up and crashing things down. But it was a really tense scene, I still find it tense and I’ve seen the film fifty times or more.
DI BONAVENTURA: Way too many times.
BARRON: I still find it tense. I really enjoyed that sequence and it really did feel spiritually as if that belonged to the original Jack Ryan’s.
How did you get into producing? What was it about that role that appealed over the more ‘glamorous’ roles such as director?
BARRON: I’m not a good enough director to direct. I think you need a particular viewpoint, and a particular confidence. I’m a relatively confident person but I don’t think I have that particular confidence. I’ve done the odd bit of second unit when there’s been absolutely no one around to do it.
DI BONAVENTURA: You also need to be able to be willing to spend time doing one thing for two years, and that’s a particular thing.
BARRON: Yeah it is actually, I don’t, I couldn’t, I don’t think I have enough focus I think actually. Ken is one of the most focused people I’ve ever met and he’s a really good director, it’s not an accident that the two things go in common.
DI BONAVENTURA: I was an executive for a period of time, quite a period of time. I had a falling out with my boss, so that sort of presented itself as an opportunity at that moment to either go be an executive somewhere else or become a producer. What appealed to me about it was the ability to spend more time, as an executive you spend so little time, you’re always moving onto the next decision, the next movie, the next bloody meeting, so many meetings like you can’t believe. So it was great to be able to say ‘you know what, I’m gonna go sit in a story meeting for four hours’, you know the other one was like thirty to forty-five minutes ‘lets get going here’.
I also ended up getting into movies, I think everybody has a different path that gets there. I got in a little bit later in life, where I really sort of acknowledged that the thing I really most enjoyed in life was going to watch the movies. Movies like The Deer Hunter, profoundly affected me, I think it was that sort of profound effect in seeing movies that made me ultimately go to it.
Would you recommend any particular way in to someone trying to break into the industry?
BARRON: They certainly shouldn’t follow my example.
DI BONAVENTURA: I think that’s true of everybody.
BARRON: I love movies but I wasn’t interested in making them, I didn’t know anybody that worked in the film industry. I did know a guy who was a commercials director and I went out with his daughter, in fact I went out with two of his daughters.
DI BONAVENTURA: At the same time?
BARRON: No. And the third one said no because she had a sneaking suspicion I was just trying to get the set. I was a bit of a waster, and he (the father) kept saying ‘come and work for me’ and I said ‘no, I’m not really interested’. Then eventually I said ‘well I’ll come for two weeks, but if I don’t like it I’ll quit and you’ll have to stop going on about it cause you’re driving me nuts.’ That was many more years ago than I care to remember.
DI BONAVENTURA: I think that it is a really rejection filled job. I think more than anything you have to ask yourself are you willing to take rejection for sometimes decades plus. I think that’s the question you ask yourself, cause if you are, there’s an infinite number of paths to get there.
Jack Ryan is released amidst a lot of strong award contenders over here. What is it about Ryan that should draw people to it over other films out there?
DI BONAVENTURA: I think it promises a different kind of experience. There’s a lot of very worthy films out right now, so it’s not that our film’s better than another film or anything like that, but I think what our film does is a very interesting balance between (fiction and reality). It has a very strong real world feeling in terms of how we’ve set up the economic story, and yet it is fantasy. It’s that balance I think which is kind of unique in the market place. People will come, they’ll have fun and they’ll get to think a little bit about their world. Who are these people behind the scenes manipulating us?
BARRON: And then there’s the sort of world of the action-adventure film, which there’s a majority of fantasy films. There’s a lot of people with extraordinary powers like in Bond and Bourne, who have extraordinary powers. Jack, his extraordinary power is the quality of his thinking.
DI BONAVENTURA: And the integrity of who he is.
BARRON: Exactly, and I think that makes him relatable, and hopefully people will go because of that.
JACK RYAN: SHADOW RECRUIT is released at cinemas across the UK on Friday 24th January, check out our review here.
