In my experience listening to people talk about Christian success in Hollywood, “Ralph Winter” is almost always the first name that comes up. Ralph has produced some of the most popular and widely-recognized Hollywood movies since his producing career began over three decades ago- X-Men, Star Trek, Fantastic Four are just a few of the familiar titles that are frequently brought up when his name is mentioned. He is also a highly sought-after speaker and consultant at conferences, festivals, and churches around the world. As a prominent film producer and a devout Christian, Ralph is a role model for Christians in the arts and one of the few people who truly bridges the gap between the church and the entertainment industry.
Apart from his professional achievements, what’s equally well-known among people who know Ralph is his humility, candor, and compassion. Indeed, in the following interview, Ralph exhibits these qualities as he reflects on a wide range of subjects, including his new film The Giver, the role of faith in cinema, being a Christian in the industry, and the challenges he faces in life and in art.
The interview was conduced via Skype from Auckland, New Zealand, where Ralph is shooting the sequel to the Oscar-winning Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon.
The Giver, based on the best-selling novel by Lois Lowry and starring Jeff Bridges and Meryl Street, is currently in theaters.
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THE GIVER
Eugene Suen: How did the film version of The Giver come about? The novel was released over twenty years ago.
Ralph Winter: Jeff Bridges optioned the book when it first came out. He wanted his father [the late Lloyd Bridges] to play “The Giver;” they used to read the book around the family dining room table. But the project went through a lot of iterations over the years. It was a combination of Harvey Weinstein [executive producer and head of the Weinstein Company] and Phil Anschutz [owner of Walden Media] both seeing something in the project that they loved. They financed it together. The success of Hunger Games and Divergent probably allowed the Weinsteins and others to see that there is an audience for this kind of material.
ES: The novel is popular with Christians. Some even see it as a work of spiritual allegory. Was this a factor for you when you decided to take on the project?
RW: It wasn’t the Christian allegory that attracted me, though you can see the spiritual elements once you dig in a little further and read the book. What is interesting is that, as a piece of literature and a work of art, The Giver attracts opposites. It attracts Harvey Weinstein’s liberal point of view and Phil Anschutz’s conservative point of view.
It’s interesting that both parties are very happy with the movie and see in it what they want to see. Isn’t that what a great piece of art does? It’s the way you interpret it. This is what Fuller does, what you guys and Rob Johnston do, in terms of developing lenses to interpret film. How do we understand a work of art so we can appreciate it? I think The Giver becomes a prime example of why those skills are important.
ES: It is interesting how the story seems to speak to people with very different points of view from across the spectrum. I’ve seen people with vastly different politics each talk about the story like it’s championing their casue.
RW: The story does broach different points of view. It’s pro-choice in the sense of making a choice for yourself and not being shaped by the culture around you. There’s also this pro-life point that, if we are not careful, we can find ourselves being gradually shaped by a government or a culture that eventually just gets rid of kids that don’t match up with our expectation. Opposite points of view are represented in the storytelling. The story forces you to think and makes you wrestle with questions without presenting you with an answer wrapped up in a neat bow as a present at the end of the movie. We may not do the same kind of box office because of that, but artistically, it’s a better choice. We let you get involved as opposed to telling you what you ought to feel, which in a sense is what the movie is about.
ES: You’ve got veterans like Jeff Bridges and Meryl Streep in the cast as well as young actors like Brendon Thwaites and Odeya Rush. Even Taylor Swift has a part. The director is the versatile Philip Noyce. How did this package come about?
RW: Harvey Weinstein is the quintessential producer and takes a very strong role in these movies. You can have a phone call with him and he’d say, “Oh I know her. I’ll see her tomorrow night.” He’s got relationships with all of these people.
Meryl Streep responded because of her kids. We tried to cram her work into a five-day period so she could make that long trip down to Cape Town, where the film was shot. At one point you weren’t going to see Taylor Swift’s character Rosemary, but Harvey and the Weinstein Company saw Taylor in concert and thought It would be cool to have her come down to Cape Town for a couple of days. It was perfect to have her involved and do the piano sequence from the book.
Philip Noyce is a very driven director and a real go-getter. He’s done big movies like Salt with Angelina Jolie and a little thriller like Dead Calm, Nicole Kidman’s first movie. He’s been an Aussie rebel. He knows what he wants and works very, very hard. It’s always a push-pull with a director, but we had a good relationship and parted ways as friends.
THOUGHTS ON FAITH IN CINEMA
ES: We’ve seen several prominent faith-themed movies this year- Heaven Is for Real, God’s Not Dead, to name just a couple. Did you see them? What did you think?
RW: I’ve not seen either of those movies because I’ve been down here [in New Zealand], but knowing Randall Wallace [director of Heaven Is for Real] as I do, I would guess that his movie is more about “just tell the story” and let the chips fall where they are going to fall. “Here’s what happened to the kid and with the parents, and I got to wrestle with what the implications are.”
I’ve not seen God’s Not Dead, but I’ve read interviews with the people that made the movie. I know the filmmaker. He is a friend. In the interviews, they said, “you got to start with the message first and then develop a story around it.” To me, it’s not that that’s wrong. That’s just not what movie and storytelling is about. That’s an agenda. That’s a mission. It probably has a place, but it’s apples and oranges with what I think I’ve been trying to do in my career.
There’s a famous story of a studio head at Warner Brothers many years ago that said, “If I wanted to send a message, I’d call Western Union.” You want to make movies to entertain people. People don’t want to come to the theater to be preached to. But in a very polarized culture right now, some people do want that. I would think that people have already made a decision when they go to see God’s Not Dead. They know they are going to see something that will confirm their point of view.
I would think someone like C.S. Lewis would say, “hey, just examine the facts. Let the chips fall where they are going to fall.” That’s the point of view of an artist. Let’s just tell the story. If the story does resonate with something deeply in the human journey and allow an audience to grapple with real life, it’s going to find a way to resonate in the way God created us. I don’t know what we are afraid of. We should let that happen.
ES: What do you think about the spirituality in your own work?
RW: In X-Men 2, the character of Night Crawler is unabashedly driven by his faith, but he’s honest about it. He doesn’t try to proselytize people. People respect him because he’s also got skills and abilities and he’s part of the team. The audience can respond to that in a genuine way. People thought he was cool, and Christian kids saw a little deeper and wanted even more of that character.
What compels me is when you read a story and you find that it’s true – “there’s truth in this story about life that I’ve experienced”, “I want more of that truth”, etc. We are all on the same journey, and we all go through the same things. That’s the common ground and the basis on which we can share our perspective with people.
THE REFLECTION OF A PRODUCER
ES: You are intimately involved with your church when you are home, but how do you sustain yourself spiritually when you’re traveling and away on location? You are currently shooting in New Zealand and have been there since early this year. What sort of support system do you have at work?
RW: My wife was just down here for eight weeks, which was useful and helpful, but it’s really hard on location. When I was on Wolverine in Sydney, there was a very vibrant church culture there. I didn’t find that in Cape Town [on The Giver]. I didn’t find that here in New Zealand, where the church is nearly invisible.
I’ve been a Christian for a long time, and I’ve done many things over the years, but on location I tend to be alone a lot. In some ways, you experience what a young person in New York would experience in terms of living alone. I have plenty of conversations about movies, but in terms of deeper level or spiritual engagement, you must work at it.
It’s difficult on location. You’d think a church would be on the lookout for this kind of stuff, but most churches and ministries don’t see outside of their own little group. I’m not saying that as an indictment. I’m just saying there’s such a bigger world out there. If you just pay a little bit of attention, you would see a vibrant market that would embrace and want to engage with you. There’s been a history of how the church has ignored or deliberately cast off people who work in movies because that’s the devil’s picture box. That has opened up on recently because of places like Fuller, but there’s so much more that could be done. It’s not about putting a minister on set, but there’s probably some ways to just be present and available.
ES: Speaking as someone who also makes movies and travel with them, I know exactly what you mean. I have close friends that I work with, which helps, but it’s still easy to get lost and feel isolated when you’re working on location. It’s tough. What do you think can be done about that?
RW: I think there’s a way to do that maybe with technology as a starter. Frankly, as I think about how to finish strong in my career, where I may not be up to standing for sixteen hours on a set everyday, maybe that’s a transition area that I developed into a business, where we figure out how we could support Christians, or people interested in spiritual things, who are working on location. It could be a ministry or a business opportunity. I’d pay for a reasonable monthly subscription for a way to stay connected and have a conversation. This is important because I don’t see me making movies in Los Angeles in the near term. It’s all going to be outside the U.S, because of incentives and finance.
ES: You mentioned your wife was just with you in New Zealand recently. Do you normally make a point to travel together?
RW: We make that a priority. I’ve made it a part of my deal that I don’t come if I can’t bring my wife. That’s a non-negotiable point. But then it becomes a practical issue- she’s got a job as a school nurse in the Glendale schools, and she’s now online finishing her master’s in nursing education. Oddly enough though, when she was here, while I was at work during the week, she was online in the apartment [doing her coursework]. It actually worked out pretty well.
ES: In terms of being a Christian in the movie business: In the past you’ve said that living your faith is about the little things you do on a day-to-day basis. Can you expand on that?
RW: It’s the way you treat people. The gaffer [head lighting technician] on this movie [Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon 2] just moved to Florida before this picture. His father was ill, and even though we just started the movie, I encouraged him to go home. He in fact didn’t go, and his father died. He got a chance to speak to him before he died, so he was saying things like, “Well I don’t need to go now, he’s died.” It was like, “What are you doing? We will buy you a ticket to go home and to be with your family. You should go do that.”
I had to convince the studio, which wasn’t hard. That kind of thing speaks volumes. He was very touched by that. The guys on his team actually raised money to give him a little upgrade to premium economy so he wouldn’t have to travel back to Florida like a pretzel.
It’s little things like that. We are just making a movie. Life goes on. We got to treat people with respect. Not everybody in the movie business does that. Now, I expect a hard day’s work as well, but when you treat people fairly and with respect, you get so much more out of them, and it shows that I care about them. Eventually, once in a while you’ll have people come into your trailer and say, “May I ask you a question: Why do you do that?” And then you can talk to them about the bigger things in life and what you believe.
ES: The movie business is highly competitive. It can change people. For example, sometimes it feels like you have to step on others in order to get ahead. How do you deal with that kind of temptation?
RW: It’s hard. I’ve had that happen when I tried to make a contribution in order to ease a situation, and people have literally said to me, “I don’t give a f**k what you think. I don’t care what you think.” I control the budget. I control every element of the picture. It was hard to absorb that and not retaliate.
Part of what we are called to is to be servants. Christ absorbed abuse, and that’s what we are called to do, to turn the other cheek so that we don’t act in the same way and retaliate, which is a natural human instinct for me to want to do.
Others saw what took place, and others saw how I reacted and didn’t retaliate. I’m not worried about my position. I’ve been fired a number of times, and I don’t think you’re worth anything until you get fired. If you’re being fired for the right reason, which for me is standing up for what’s correct and telling the truth or presenting a different point of view, then it’s fine. It’s not the end of the world. How we deal with a situation like that hopefully becomes the message that we want to spread around. If this becomes stressful and you have a heart attack because of it, well, then maybe you’re not dealing with it the right way.
ES: You didn’t plan on being a Hollywood producer. You went to Berkeley to study history and worked for the Broadway department store at first. It was a rather serendipitous sequence of events that led you to Paramount and eventually to producing. You’ve said that your career is a privilege and a gift. I find that inspiring.
RW: That’s very kind. It’s all true- it’s a gift. I’m not built for this business, and for a long time I didn’t know if it would last. My wife Judy and I would have these conversations all the time- should we buy a house? Is there another job? It took a very long time to figure out. It’s only when we look back and see how God took care of us that we go, “alright, we have no reason to believe he’s not going to take care of us going forward. Let’s jump in.” It’s exciting and terrifying at the same time.
ES: Has it gotten less terrifying by now?
RW: [Laugh] No, because there’s all sorts of new terrors: “What if I can’t work again?” “Would they think I’m too geeky?” “What if I’m too old?” “How do we provide for the kids?” “How do we provide for retirement?”
I went through a period just recently of not working for four years. You run all your resources down to zero and below. We are not destitute and we are not bankrupt, but we don’t have the things we thought we would have, and we don’t go to the places we thought we can go and do for our kids and do for our church what we want to do. Life has those ups and downs, and that’s ok. As ugly as it is, and as much as I don’t want to do that again, we have to learn that by going through it.
One of the benefits from this experience is I got to spend time with my grandkids that I never would have had. I would have been off in Zimbabwe for six months as opposed to being with a 2-year old looking at bugs in the garden. So in some ways I’ve got a gift. In other ways, it was very, very painful to let go of other dreams and aspirations that I thought God had intended. You got to go through it. It’s not intellectual. There’s no other way around it. You have to experience it.
ES: You’ve been in the movie business for over three decades now. What do you see for yourself in the coming years? Do you think you will ever slow down?
RW: I was walking by a basketball game the other day and thinking, “Man, those guys are terrible shots. They need a better defender. I should take my jacket off and go in there and help them!” But I’m not as nimble and my knees don’t work the way they used to!
I’ve said this to my friend Chap Clark a lot: I want to finish strong. I don’t know what that looks like. Maybe there’s some consulting thing to set up. I’d love to be working on movies until they won’t hire me anymore, because I don’t feel as old as I am. But I’m beginning that conversation now with myself, with my wife, and with my friends to figure out: When they don’t want to hire me again as a producer on set around the world, what is my transition? What am I going to do? Also, how can I finish strong and help the generation coming up as somebody who’s been down the path? I don’t know what that looks like yet, but with these new technologies and platforms, I’m going to try to figure that out and blaze a new path that way.