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OS: In 1984 you produced LOVE STREAMS for John Cassavetes.

MG: Working with John was wonderful, very creative, an exceptional man. He was sick when we made LOVE STREAMS, it was all shot in his house. He edited the film and screened it for me. It was two hours long. I told him, “Listen, the movie is wonderful but a little boring at two hours. Take half an hour out.” He agreed, “Come next week, I’ll have a screening and do what you want.” He edited his films in New York so I flew over a week later and the film wasn’t two hours long, it was two and a half hours! I asked him, “John, didn’t you say you will cut it shorter?” and he replied, “That didn’t look shorter to you?” Eventually he cut it back down to two hours. We won the Golden Bear at Berlinale with it.

He called me when he was in the hospital and told me, “I have a great story to tell you.” I said, “Get out of bed, come over, we’ll start producing.” But he never got up from it.

OS: Even though the Action films were your main product, you managed to get a lot of artistic directors to work for Cannon.

MG: I admire great directors and like working with them, learning from them. I pushed for the artistic films and in order to finance them I also pushed for more action films. That’s what happened, the Action financed the Art.

OS: BARFLY (1987) was another one.

MG: Barbet Schroeder approached me with the Charles Bukowski book. I liked it and said we’ll make the movie in half a year. Barbet insisted, “No, we start now.” “But Barbet, we need to raise money, cast stars, it takes time.” He nods, “No, no, no, we start shooting in a month.” I explained we can’t and he took out a huge knife from his pocket and put it against his finger, “Yes or no? If you say yes, great. If you say no, I’m cutting off the finger.” It was crazy. I managed to convince him we need time. I was going to London that night and told him we can talk when I’m back in 3 days.

Around 2:00 am, at the London hotel, a guard woke me up and told me there’s a crazy guy outside, threatening to cut a finger off. I asked them to put him on the phone, “Barbet, what’s going on? Are you crazy? I’m coming back in two days, we’ll talk.” “When do we start?” “When do you want to start?” “We shoot in a month.” I said, “Ok, you got it, let the finger go.”

OS: Was Cannon unique in producing these type of films as an independent company?

MG: We were the only ones. The artists within the directors knew that our door was open to them because I’m there and they could talk to me. We often lost money on these films but we had a great selling method for the action films and we brought big stars who agreed to work for low salaries with these directors attached.

OS: In 1987 you produced KING LEAR for Godard.

MG: Godard called me from the bar of my hotel in Cannes, “You want to come down? I’d like to talk to you.” I went downstairs and he told me, “I have two projects, one of them is KING LEAR, but it’s not really about King Lear, it’s about a gangster. I need a million and a half.” I said, “Godard, with you I’ll film the phone directory.” We signed a contract on a napkin. He made a terrible film.

OS: What was the experience of working with him like?

MG: Godard is an individualist. On the one hand he’s a genius and on the other a manipulator. He would call me in Los Angeles, recorded the conversations, and played them in the opening of KING LEAR. He didn’t have enough respect for the producer, shot the film in his back yard and pocketed money. I don’t have a lot of appreciation for him. Outside of the glow I get as a producer for having worked with him, I really couldn’t stand it.

OS: Was there a difference in your work as producer with a director on an artistic film and an action film?

MG: For me a director is a director, he dictates the piece, creates it and I need to help him. The producer brings together all the elements that make it possible for the director to make the film – develop the script, hire the actors, hire the director and then work together with him. The director is the architect and the producer is the engineer.

OS: But there were times you looked at footage shot and deemed it wasn’t good enough.

MG: Yes, that happened a few times and I jumped in and took over as director. In ENTER THE NINJA for example, we sent a crew to film it in the Philippines with an American director and when I saw the dailies I got really scared. It wasn’t good at all. We shut the production down and I flew from Los Angeles to Manila and took over.

OS: One of the most famous films you are known for directing is THE DELTA FORCE (1986). It was sort of a remake of OPERATION THUNDERBOLT.

MG: Not exactly a remake, but of the same genre. I liked using real political stories, not to send a message but as a suspense film with human action. There was a period when international terrorists abducted airplanes, and that formed the basis of a fascinating script. It was very helpful that I made OPERATION THUNDERBOLT before.

OS: THE DELTA FORCE features the last performance of Lee Marvin.

MG: Lee Marvin was an amazing actor and an amazing personality. He came to Israel to shoot the film. He loved the camera and sat next to it from morning until night. He would buy beers for the whole crew, was a really good and smart person.

[Our conversation is interrupted by a 15-minute phone call. A different Golan is revealed to me – The Producer. One I haven’t seen throughout the interview. The call was placed from Australia and while I couldn’t make out the details, Golan was explaining exactly what would work in a low-budget action film and every word made sense. He was energetic, decisive and sure of himself; he thrives on this type of action. At the end of his conversation he obliged me with some details.]

MG: We have an Australian actor named Tony White who we want to develop a film for. He wants to be the new Van Damme. I sent them a script I’ve written called STONE ROGERS. They are not sure about it yet. They like the character though. I have to think of a couple of Hollywood actors for the part of the ‘heavy’.

The story is about an electronics-manufacturing factory that the US builds in Thailand to compete with cheap labor from Japan and China. The Japanese want to hurt the Americans without going on an all-out war so they send a Ninja to kill the American engineers one by one. When the police in Thailand can’t contain the problem, they send two officers, a guy and a girl, to New York, in order to find someone who will fight the Ninja – sort of an American Ninja. They find this guy, who is Australian but can also be an American. He teaches the way of the Ninja at the NYPD. They enlist him and his commander and the four travel to Thailand. In the meantime, the bad guy, I call him the “Sho Kosugi”, starts a school for Ninjas in Thailand in order to attack the American factories. The NY officer has to eliminate this Sho Kosugi. He works alone and eventually he wins.

OS: You still write scripts? What is your process like?

MG: I just find an idea and write it.

OS: Any preferred time of writing?

MG: Especially on planes, but also at home in the evenings.

OS: And the producer wanted a star now on the phone?

MG: They wanted Van Damme to do a cameo but those things don’t work. They wanted either him or Chuck Norris so it would be easy to sell it but Chuck doesn’t act much anymore and Van Damme would want too much money. I’ll suggest a few names for the ‘heavy’.

OS: You discovered Van Damme.

MG: One evening my wife, Rachel, and I went to a French restaurant in Los Angeles. Our waiter was Van Damme, this good-looking French guy. We ordered turtle soup and he approached us, holding a bowl in each hand. He asked me, “Monsieur Golan?” I answered, “Oui” and he sent his leg kicking above my head, without moving the soup bowls! I asked him to do it again, he did, and I said, “What are you doing tomorrow morning? Come to my office”.

OS: Was he the biggest star Cannon created?

MG: Yes. BLOODSPORT, CYBORG and KICKBOXER made outstanding profits. But then Universal offered him a contract for millions of dollars and we didn’t want to pay that sum so we lost him.

OS: In 1986 you made COBRA with Sylvester Stallone.

MG: OVER THE TOP was shot first. It was based on a script about arm-wrestling. I bought it because I knew I could get a big star. I called Stallone’s lawyer and told him I had a great script I wanted him to read. He advised me to forget it because Stallone was getting $6 Million per film, so I told him, “I don’t want to pay him 6, I want to pay him 10.” Within the week I had a meeting and signed a contract.

We made COBRA immediately after, it made $125 Million.

[OS Note: Next to countless certificates of award wins or nominations on Golan’s wall, there is one from the International Armwrestling Council, inscribed, “IN APPRECIATION FOR YOUR VALUED SUPPORT FOR THE SPORT OF ARMWRESTLING.”]

OS: Cannon also produced some big flops in 1986 (MASTERS OF THE UNIVERSE, SUPERMAN 4: THE QUEST FOR PEACE).

MG: At the end of the year we were always in profit. The theater chains caused us to lose money, not the films. We made 49 films in 1986, which was a mistake, but we still ended up with profits from them.

OS: The Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) started an investigation against Cannon in 1986 as well.

MG: In a public company you have to estimate the income for 7 years in advance and there were over-estimations here done by accountants. I wasn’t really involved in it, I worked on the productions.

The real decline came about because of the junk bonds, there was very high interest on them.

OS: But Cannon wasn’t the only Independent in decline. In 1987 almost every independent company lost money.

MG: A lot of it was because of the Credit Lyonnais bank. They financed all the independents and stopped giving large credit to them because of losses.

OS: When did you leave Cannon?

MG: In 1990. I started the 21st Century Corporation but I didn’t have enough money or credit with the banks and didn’t have someone like Yoram next to me. He gets the full credit for taking care of the financial side.

OS: When you left Cannon, instead of taking financial compensation, you opted to take film options with you to the 21st Century Corporation.

MG: The intention was to take with me what I believed to be the most profitable film in history, SPIDER-MAN. I bought the rights to SPIDER-MAN from Marvel Comics when I was the head of Cannon. I even remember the sum, it cost $400,000. I held the rights for 7 years but wasn’t able to raise the budget of $50 Million. We developed screenplays but never got to make it. I ended up selling the rights to Carolco Pictures and they sold it onwards. Eventually Columbia got in the picture and we were left out.

I initiated making this film and CAPTAIN AMERICA when nobody wanted to touch comic book films. They made fun of me and I said “You’ll see, it will come back,” and it did, big time.

I tried to get some films off the ground at the 21st Century Corporation but I suffered great losses with one production, BULLSEYE! (1990), a film starring Roger Moore and Michael Caine, directed by Michael Winner. It was a comedy that wasn’t comedic. CAPTAIN AMERICA was a flop; PHANTOM OF THE OPERA was a flop…

[OS Note: Check out promotional material for Cannon’s SPIDER-MAN, as well as other great Cannon posters and information, at www.cannonfilms.co.uk]

OS: When did you return to Israel?

MG: In 1992.

OS: And then you found yourself a new niche as a director.

MG: Yes, I received the Theater Award in Israel for my production of SOUND OF MUSIC.

OS: And you directed many Action films in Europe throughout the 1990’s.

MG: I came from a world of action cinema. I was sought after.

OS: What do you think of cinema nowadays?

MG: I am not a big fan of all the blockbusters they make in the US, they are far from the spirit I would like to see in movies. American cinema today is bigger, wider and costlier but it doesn’t supply me with the excitement I got from the Italian cinema for example. There are always exceptions but I’m more in tone with European cinema.

The Israeli film industry in my opinion has taken a big step forward, thanks to young filmmakers who are getting a chance to showcase their talents. They create cinema with great excitement. I hope it will continue to grow this way and I take the right to say that I laid a large portion of the basis for it.

OS: And what’s next for you?

MG: I am about to direct a film based on Aharon Appelfeld, “Badenheim”, it’s a great literary piece. I have been trying to raise the money for the past 4 years, around $15 million. It’s in the final stages and I’m hoping to get to shoot it in October.

My latest film, MARRIAGE LICENSE, starts playing in Israel on July 27th.

OS: You still have an amazing drive.

MG: I have love for cinema, that’s it. Somebody else has a hobby, I don’t have a hobby.

I make films, love them, sometimes I also do an excellent job. I don’t consider myself an Ingmar Bergman, I don’t make ‘message’ films. I make them for the audience in the theater who doesn’t get bored, laughs at a comedy, cries at a tragedy, with a lot of emotion. I’m hoping that there’s still a future.

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