Killing Them Softly

Little Women will be directed by Gillian Armstrong, and features a cast that includes Winona Ryder and Susan Sarandon. Sony executive Amy Pascal gave Di Novi the shot at producing the fourth feature version of the classic novel over many disgruntled moviemakers who also hoped to do it. Di Novi is aware that, despite this plum, there are those who insist that her career independent of Burton may have encountered a roadblock or two recently. Her women's Western, Outlaws, a project considered for Nicole Kidman and director John Duigan, got left in the dust of two other women's Westerns, Bad Girls and The Quick and the Dead. Then Jodie Foster left Trackdown, an action movie in which she was to play an American who teams up with the Scotland Yard to fight terrorists, to make Nell with Liam Neeson and Natasha Richardson. These setbacks triggered a Hollywood Reporter story that drew conclusions Di Novi didn't appreciate. "The headline was like 'Foster Drops Off Di Novi Project,' and the story sort of insinuated that Outlaws didn't go and Trackdown didn't go so . . ." she recalls. "Believe me, the connection between the two was very tenuous. Outlaws we could have made right away, but we chose John Duigan and he was directing Sirens. By the time that was finished, Bad Girls had been made and The Quick and the Dead was underway. On Trackdown, Jodie is a friend and was involved in its development, but, when she left to do another movie that she'd been trying to get made for years, she said, 'If you don't get somebody else by the time I finish this movie, call me.' I still think those movies may get made, but the margin for error on both is slim. I feel a responsibility that a woman's Western and a woman's action movie work. If it takes two years to get them to be good, so be it."

So production delays like this have nothing to do with the fact that Di Novi no longer has Burton's weight on her side? "I think that, two years ago [after she stepped down from running Burton's company], I was naive, thinking, 'I'll get these movies going really quickly,'" she replies. "I remember reading something Dawn Steel said: 'I didn't know, even after everything I've done, that it takes three years to get a movie going.' I thought, 'Oh, I don't want it to take three years.' But it does. It also takes long to hold out for movies you really want to make. This is the land of temptation. Every day I face the temptation, thinking, 'Gee, I could get this made.' Meaning, I know I could set up a project because the studio wants a certain kind of movie or an actor wants to play a certain role or a project's timely or cheap. You have to remind yourself a lot in this business of the simple values of life. I sit down and think, 'Is this project important to me? Am I going to be proud of this?' Now that I have this three-year-old boy, I think, 'Is my child going to be proud of me for making this movie?' I'm not by any means antiviolence or pro-censorship, but I feel more responsibility now for what we put out there."

I wonder if Di Novi has thought about what role her past played in making her gravitate toward producing, and in putting her at ease around geniuses. "There are people who do this because, very simply, they love movies," she observes. "And there are people who are attracted to this job in a compensatory way. Being in this business can make up in a big way for a lot of areas of pain in your early life. But only in a superficial way. I was born bossy. I tried to run things from an early age. My father is a jazz musician who played and practiced several hours a day. My mother was a dancer who gave it up when she had kids. Although she was happy, I think she regretted giving up her career. Being the eldest child of two artistic, heads-in-the-clouds parents, I learned how to take care of an artist, genius or emotional type of personality. At an early age, I got positive reinforcement for getting things done."

With her father often on the road, Di Novi also got reinforcement from the movies she and her mother would watch nightly, and from the books she hoarded. "Books and movies were my life," she says. "I was the kid who, at recess, would run out and pretend to be on third base, then, when nobody was looking, run into the bathroom and read until recess was over. That's why Heathers was so close to me, that's what I was really about."

After earning an English degree from Simmons College in Boston, Di Novi pursued journalism, but ditched it quickly. She became a TV reporter in Toronto, Canada, and found she didn't like being on camera, so she aligned herself with producer Pierre David and learned the nuts and bolts of moviemaking by "making four terrible tax-shelter movies a year." Back in the States she worked with producer-to-be Arnold Kopelson. Later, she spent several years writing scripts, which she calls "agony, because control is a big issue of mine and loss of control as a screenwriter was really painful." She was attracted to producing, she says, because unlike "actors and writers, who really put their ass on the line, in producing I have a distance that's comfortable for me."

Di Novi cut her teeth on the razor-sharp Heathers, a black comedy that proved to be a calling card that brought her to the attention of Burton. She's barely looked back. And she has managed to ply her trade without becoming a fixture on the preview/premiere/party/charity circuit. "I tried doing that at the beginning, but now I don't do it," she asserts. "Relationships are everything in this business, but if I could have three meaningful encounters where I really sat and talked with somebody, that's worth more than seeing them every week at screenings. Most of my friends are not in the business. Whenever I used to go to industry screenings, the audiences' reactions were so unlike what my friends felt, I thought, 'I'm not learning anything here,' so I stopped going.

"The way I cope with the movie business is that I try to do it only a certain amount. If it becomes everything to me, I get this strange, scary, insecure feeling. Nights are for my family or my friends that are not in the movie business."

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