No business like show business
Mario Kassar tells Mohamed El-Assyouti about US censorship and the history of Rambo
Producer Mario Kassar, one of the 27th Cairo International Film Festival's guests of honour, is credited with the Rambo trilogy, the Terminator sequels and other Sylvester Stallone and Arnold Schwarzenegger vehicles. He also produced Paul Verhoeven's Basic Instinct and Show Girls, Alan Parker's Angel Heart and Adrian Lyne's Lolita -- all of which proved controversial. Yet Kassar was also behind Oliver Stone's The Doors and Heaven and Earth, Paul Schrader's Light Sleeper, and Barry Levinson's Chaplin. It all started in 1969, when an 18-year-old Lebanese-Italian started the Kassar Film International in Paris and Rome buying spaghetti westerns and distributing them in the far and middle east. By 1976 he was successful enough to move to Hollywood, and established Carolco company with Andrew Vajna. The rest is history.
"In America they hate the word "censorship", they use "rating" instead. I was perhaps the second in Hollywood to make a rated NC17 movie, Show Girls, because it was just a little sexy. Hence, no advertising was allowed in many newspapers, nor on TV before late hours, and the demand from theatres to screen it was low. The labelling NC17 was wrong for the marketing of the film. If you say NC17 in America the audience expect to see everything they can, perhaps the most pornographic thing they ever saw, and if you don't show them that they get disappointed. But it was just a story about showgirls in Las Vegas, and despite its limited theatrical success, the cassette and DVD of Show Girls achieved the highest sales and rentals. So an audience that likes to watch that kind of movie in the privacy of their homes don't want to be seen going to a theatre showing it. In Europe, where they have a different rating system, Show Girls was not considered extremely sexy. It is a different film culture. I think the whole rating system in the US is not good: a group of people of a certain age, members of the Movie Producers Association (MPA), sit in a room and say "too much" or "ok". Very conservative.
"In this day and age, people should be concerned about violence on American TV; even reality shows are more violent than action movies. What do you do when the story needs a lot of graphic violence? A war movie, for instance, which I have yet to do, is bound to contain a lot of violence, it is not gratuity. It cannot be rated G or PG because war is war, people killing other people, a lot of wounded soldiers and a lot of blood. I agree that kids should not be exposed to a lot of graphic scenes with explicit sex and violence. But today there are three or four TV sets in every house, and children watch everything without their parents knowing. I think that sex and violence on TV are much more dangerous than the movies.
In Angel Heart, the final sex scene between Lisa Bonet and Mickie Rourke was a little problematic because the MPA thought it was a little too bloody for the American audience. Consequently, director Alan Parker agreed to trim a couple of seconds and it was granted the R rating and released. It's a wonderful movie and maybe even ahead of its time. I don't think the American audience really understood the movie the way they should have. I think they did not follow the story so well. They knew it was a kind of mysterious scary thriller sort of movie about a Satanic subject, but perhaps they did not really grasp the nuances associated with a character like detective Harry Angel (Rourke). Either this or they were expecting to see something like The Exorcist -- with special effects making a character's head turn for example. It was not a big commercial success in the US, but it did a little better abroad. In my opinion Alan Parker is one of the most talented directors there is.
"Of course the contract of an actress or an actor in a film with graphic scenes has to specify how it will be done. In Basic Instinct, for example, Paul Verhoeven had to sit down with Sharon Stone -- who wanted to play the lead character badly, and if she didn't want to do it she didn't have to do it -- and explain how he would film the sex scenes, how he would protect her. It was also the beginning of her career, and her remarkable performance in these scenes made her a star. The directors have to discuss such terms very clearly and the actors have to be comfortable with them. It is not easy for any actor or actress to perform while totally naked if they don't feel very comfortable with it. In other cases maybe an actress will insist on having a body double, but that's what Verhoven didn't want.
"Carolco was a foreign sale business firm. Producers of independent films would get partial financing from US distributors and pre-sales to TV networks, but part of the budget was missing and that's where I stepped in. As the worldwide distributor, I provided the banks with guarantees for selling the rights of the movie outside the US, and I secured additional funding to make up for the budget difference. However, I soon realised that when you are pre-selling a movie and distributing somehow you always get into trouble, because you sell a movie which you're not making. You promise the distributors "a great movie", one that will make so much money, but those independent movies were not all that great most of the time. They were made on tax money, say in Canada. Distributors became dissatisfied. So I told my partner this way we can't win because no matter what we do we're wrong. If we're going to be blamed for delivering the movies whether they are good or bad, let's make our own movies. I managed to obtain financing from a bank for my first film as a producer, Rambo: First Blood (1982), with Sylvester Stallone. And that's how it began.
"The rights for the book it was based on, David Morrell's First Blood (1972), were sold from one studio to another. Every studio in Hollywood tried to make it at some point, over 20 years ago; each had their scriptwriters make a version of it and several stars were interested: Dustin Hoffman, Robert Redford, Al Pacino, Clint Eastwood etc. -- all wanted to play Rambo. But then nothing came of it. I believe in destiny, and somehow the movie could never happen. Maybe I just got very lucky. I approached Warner Bros, which owned the rights at that time, and they sold them to me because they thought nobody would be able to make that movie. That way I became the owner of the rights to the book and to every screenplay that was written, and I hired a director and new scriptwriters and went to see Stallone, talked to him about the part, then went to Canada and shot the whole thing. It was my first production and I was totally ignorant. I had no idea what I was doing but I believed so much in the book, in the new screenplay and in Stallone playing the role. I made it and I learned a lot making it. It was a big success, then work became easier, people started believing in Carolco. As for rumours about Stallone wanting to do another Rambo in Afghanistan, I don't think a fourth Rambo is forthcoming. I no longer own its rights, but I don't see anybody able to make it a comeback.
"I never made any movie to make a political statement or convey a political message, although each movie has its own message which anybody can interpret the way they want. My personal way of looking at the movie business is as entertainment. I don't think that I'm here to change people's political views. I'm just doing a business that is hopefully in an industry that makes money and I enjoy making movies. A lot of people try to dictate to you what you should have or not have in your films but at the end of the day you just follow your instinct, do what you think is right and avoid being on any side. Try to be kind of neutral and honest to the story and to make the best movie you can. Rambo is a very American story, but it took foreigners like us [Kassar is Lebanese- Italian, his then partner Vajna is Hungarian and the director Canadian] to tell it this way. Those Vietnam veterans came back and felt abandoned and neglected by their society after all they went through. They became unwelcome outcasts, with nobody offering them jobs. That's why I did the movie because I liked the character of Rambo, who was a kind of a pacifist but one trained to do what he was asked to do.
There is a human side to that character. I didn't want to make a political movie about Vietnam. I'm sure that David Morrell's book had a political message, but it's not what attracted me to making the picture. And the fact that Rambo's image was used for Republican propaganda during the Regan era is something that I should not be held accountable for.
"Of course sometimes there is competition from brands for product placement, especially if the film is rated G or PG which means all kinds of audience will be seeing it. Less brands would be interested in advertising in an R movie, like Terminator III (2003), which was rated R because of violence, even though it is a sort of cartoonish violence. Still Honda provided cars and the phone was Nokia -- which is the most aggressive in the phone business. Product placement depends on the nature of the story too. For instance, the Coca Cola signs in Lolita were motivated by the setting of the story in the 1950s, where everybody was drinking Coca Cola and going to the drive-ins, and by Humbert Humbert's disillusion by American consumerist culture. But the companies don't pay all that much money, believe me.
"A big-budget producer doesn't have to avoid low-budget films like Light Sleeper. I'm very friendly with Paul Schrader. When I produced and financed that movie I was running Carolco, which owned a video company called Live Entertainment, now Artisan and owned by some body else. I needed low-budget productions to keep the company running and to feed the foreign markets. Paul Schrader brought me the script and said he would not take so much money to make it and that he could cast Willem Defoe and Susan Sarandon in the lead roles.
"I'm so proud we made that film."
