Interview: 'Wild Bill' Pohlad still at play in Hollywood

Producer Bill Pohlad surveys the Twin Cities from a 40th-floor corner office in Minneapolis, but these days, he's on top of the world.

Earlier this month, "Lust, Caution" (opening next Friday), Pohlad's project with Ang Lee, won the Venice Film Festival's highest honor, the Golden Lion, just as their first collaboration, "Brokeback Mountain," did in 2005.

Days later, audiences at the Toronto Film Festival greeted Pohlad's "Into the Wild," written and directed by Sean Penn, with palpable excitement. "You hear the proverbial pin drop. At the end, there was this great spontaneous standing ovation for Sean," Pohlad said with quiet satisfaction.

He brings a note of businesslike gravitas and Midwestern modesty to a breed known for neither. Hollywood movies generally stereotype producers as thugs, philistines and shysters, and "a fair amount of the time, they are," Pohlad declared. He operates his business from Minnesota as a buffer against that mentality and the incestuous L.A. echo chamber where ideas are endlessly cannibalized and originality is smothered.

Producers are notorious for pestering creative types with meddlesome "suggestions." (Q: How many producers does it take to change a lightbulb? A: Does it have to be a lightbulb?) But Pohlad, with his background as a director and screenwriter, understands that the ideal producer is one who handpicks his projects, trusts his crews and supports his creative team.

Even when they're proposing something a little nutty. Penn cast a key role in his film with a whitewater river rafting guide he met on location in the Grand Canyon. Brian Dierker had no experience as an actor, and Pohlad recalls thinking "never in a million years would he work in this thing."

Although he thought Penn was "crazy," he OKed the choice, and Dierker became a standout in a cast that includes Vince Vaughn, Catherine Keener and Hal Holbrook. "He's so fresh and real because he is real. He's just that guy," Pohlad said. "You've got to believe in the filmmaker as much as you do the underlying material."

Risky art-house movies

This could be a very good Oscar season for Minneapolis-based River Road Entertainment. Pohlad's film production company is the only arm of his family's banking, business and baseball empire that operates without a financial model. No fan of the blockbuster mentality, he backs risky art-house movies that reflect his taste for emotionally powerful, socially relevant cinema.

"We want them to be financially successful, but that's not the primary motivation for making them," Pohlad explained. "The primary motivation is the aesthetic, and then a portion of that is how it's going to work in the marketplace." Asked to name a film that made an important impression on him, he offers the glossy Audrey Hepburn romance "Breakfast at Tiffany's."

A lifelong movie fan who haunted the Edina Theater every weekend as a kid, Pohlad skipped film school and started River Road in 1987 as a vehicle for his directing ambitions. His debut, "Old Explorers," starring James Whitmore and Jose Ferrer, was an important learning experience, he said. "While I hate the film, it did OK in the sense that it had a limited theatrical release. Showtime bought it; it was on there a million times. It came out on Academy Home Video.

"But we never saw a dime back. We got screwed on the deal and I just never wanted to do that again."

Through the 1990s, Pohlad's firm made local commercials, in-flight programming for Northwest Airlines and documentaries, including a biography of Guthrie artistic director Joe Dowling for Irish television. "As a business, it was going reasonably well," he said. "But I got frustrated. It was one of those things where you're not going in each morning all that excited."

Pohlad downsized the local production arm of his company and started going to Los Angeles, looking for established production partners who could help him leverage his family fortune into a production slate of films budgeted between $10 million and $25 million.

"It's not like directing in that you make all the decisions. But the decision you make is what filmmaker you put to work," he said. In the four years since he has devoted himself to making features, Pohlad has established a reputation as one of Hollywood's top financiers. Last January, he was named to the Hollywood Reporter's "Indie Power 50," the producers who shape the independent film landscape.

With a résumé that includes Robert Altman's final film, "A Prairie Home Companion," and Nicole Kidman's surreal portrait of photographer Diane Arbus, "Fur," Pohlad's company has backed some of the decade's riskiest upmarket entertainments. More often than not, they've been successes; "Fur" was "a commercial disaster," he admitted, but "Brokeback" earned more than $175 million worldwide.

This fall's new films will probably continue River Road's risky path to success. Lee's film, a Chinese-language World War II spy thriller, is rated NC-17 because of erotic scenes of a female spy seducing a collaborator. Penn's film, the fact-based story of a young man's fatal odyssey in the Alaskan wilderness, was a costly production for a film with no big stars and a downbeat ending.

In February comes "Chicago 10," a unique documentary about the rioting at the 1968 Democratic National Convention that combines live action with large swaths of animation and voice characterizations of Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin by Hank Azaria ("The Simpsons") and Mark Ruffalo ("Zodiac"). "It's obviously political and will resonate with the election next year," Pohlad said.

After that, who knows? He has no projects currently in production, although with the excitement surrounding his new films, "the impulse is to keep the momentum going. So you read things where you think, 'That's not so bad, maybe we can make that better.' You have to trust your gut and avoid that.

"We've never made a decision on a movie by running the numbers. I wouldn't want to do that. In my mind, you've got to really believe in the material and do it for the right reasons. Otherwise you're going to look back in regret. The challenge is to maintain the focus, not get too cocky, maintain the groundedness.

"We want to be in the business for the long term, we're not here for one or two years. This isn't about being invited to premieres, it's about building a company and a business and making it work. So far, it seems to be working, more or less. If I died tomorrow, this would be a pretty good list of films to be involved with."

Colin Covert • 612-673-7186

Colin Covert • ccovert@startribune.com