Interview: Jeffrey Katzenberg, DreamWorks founder and Shrek producer
There's a bit of ogre in all of us'
Published: 22 June 2007
Just a few weeks ago, Jeffrey Katzenberg jumped off a building, testing out a publicity stunt. At 4.30am, in Cannes, the head honcho of DreamWorks animation did a dry run of a promotion for their Christmas offering, Bee Movie. The next day, Jerry Seinfeld – dressed as a giant bee – would do it in front of the world's press, while Katzenberg slid down a wire running from the top of Carlton hotel to the beach opposite.
Today, Katzenberg reflects on his daredevil antics: "It's a weird sensation to lean out over a building eight storeys high, but it was exhilarating."
Katzenberg, 56, is a man who makes calculated risks for living. He is in animation, he says, because "the failure rate... is infinitesimal compared to live action". After all, he quit his job at Disney to help set up Dream Works SKG with Steven Spielberg and David Geffen, remortgaging his house to do so.
Katzenberg is the ultimate bean-counter, "Mr Bottom Line" as Tom Hanks called him, overseeing an operation that owes much of its success to the Shrek franchise, which has so far grossed $1.4bn (£700m).
Katzenberg spends the first 60 seconds of our encounter tapping furiously into his BlackBerry. I'm assuming he's checking the numbers for Shrek The Third, but apparently not. "There are few surprises by Monday morning," he says. The film took $122m (£61m) on its first weekend in the US. The third-biggest opening in North America, it has now grossed $297m (£148m). Not bad for a film that was chided by most reviewers for lacking the originality of its predecessors.
Katzenberg can't resist having a poke. "I think the critics have lost touch with the audience," he says. "The critics that I work for are the paying customers that come into the theatres. They're my boss." I ask Katzenberg why he thinks the Shrek films, which take irreverent swipes at classic fairy tales, have endured. "People actually relate to the character of Shrek," he says. "I think they identify with many of the issues that he's had to deal with. Even though he may be a big green stinky ogre, there's a little bit of ogre in all of us."
Hearing this, I can't help but wonder where the ogre is in Katzenberg. He certainly doesn't have a reputation for tantrums. "What I've learned most in my elder years is to be a bit more tolerant and be more forgiving," he says. Rather, Katzenberg simply, quietly, exudes the will to win. A ruthless operator, after the Wallace & Gromit film under-performed, taking $56m (£28m) in the US, he cut his ties with the film's creators at Aardman Animation. "We were trying to make them into a bigger outfit and they liked being who they were – a cottage industry," he says.
Katzenberg began his working life in politics, volunteering for far-right Republican John Lindsay's successful mayoral campaign when he was just 14. The son of a stockbroker, Katzenberg declined to follow his father to Wall Street and left politics for showbusiness. After a brief spell as an agent, in 1974 Katzenberg was offered a job at Paramount as assistant to chairman Barry Diller. Soon after, a young executive named Michael Eisner was signed from ABC; thus began a key relationship in Katzenberg's career. Promoted to the marketing department, then Paramount's TV division, Katzenburg's first task was to steer the first Star Trek movie into dock. Despite it being over budget, Katzenberg helped turn the film into a hit. He was on his way.
By 1984, Diller had moved to 20th Century Fox and Eisner had jumped to Disney, installing Katzenberg as chairman of a company whose animated division was in dire straits. "I'd never paid attention to animation until I arrived on the Disney lot," he says. "Even then, Michael Eisner brought me into his office, and said, 'You see that building over there? That's where they make animated movies. It's your problem!' That was my introduction to animation, when they were at their lowest. But I'm a good lieutenant – if somebody says, 'Go fix it', I'd do that."
That's putting it mildly. From Who Framed Roger Rabbit? to such hits as Beauty and the Beast, Aladdin and The Lion King, which roared to $312m (£156m) in the US, he restored belief in Disney's "heart and soul", as he puts it.
Yet his departure from Disney left a bitter taste in his mouth. Resigning shortly after being denied the top job there, he later took the company to court – reputedly suing for $250m (£125m). Now, he's all smiles. "I had 10 great years at Disney. I worked for Michael for 19 years and did very, very well with him. I don't even have any bad feelings. I don't feel any resentment. Nothing."
As he talks, without a shred of emotion in his voice, it strikes me that Katzenberg long ago developed the formula for success in Hollywood: total detachment. I wonder if leaving Disney for DreamWorks played on his nerves. "I think it was exciting. It was full of uncertainty but at the same time full of promise. I can't remember a time in which I had a strong sense of fear... the notion of fear and failure were things that were always OK. It was never going to be fatal to me."
While there have been flops in his time at DreamWorks – such as The Road to El Dorado – there haven't been many.
In a nod to Walt Disney, Katzenberg lays out the DreamWorks approach: "He [Disney] would make the movies for the children and then he worked really hard to make sure that they had a level of appeal for adults... What we've been trying to do at DreamWorks is to make movies for adults and for the adult that exists in every child."
Citing "sophisticated" titles such as Antz, Prince of Egypt and Shrek, he's less clear on where infantile cartoons like the zoo-set Madagascar fit into this remit. Still, it's easy to believe Katzenberg when he claims never to think about his days at Disney. "I don't actually look back," he says. Ever the salesman, he mentions a forthcoming DreamWorks project, Kung Fu Panda. "There's this wonderful saying that this very wise character, a 1,000-year-old turtle, the wisest being in all of China, says: 'Yesterday is history. Tomorrow is a mystery. Today is a gift. That is why it's called the present.'"
Katzenberg seems quite taken with this fortune-cookie aphorism: "I don't think I'd ever heard what I think, or how I try to live my life, said better."
'Shrek the Third' opens on 29 June
