ITALIAN STALLION

Octogenarian film producer Dino De Laurentiis does not like to admit to making mistakes. He's quite happy with his movie legacy - from War and Peace to King Kong to the new Hannibal Rising - and, he tells Donald Clarke, he's got the awards and the coglioni to back him up

EOPLE ask me what age I am," Dino De Laurentiis rasps in a voice like creaking furniture. "I always say my age is connected with three c's. In here, cuore which means the heart. Up here, cervello which is the brain." Oh golly, despite not knowing a word of Italian, I think I can tell where this is going. He makes to grab the De Laurentiis crotch "And, of course, the coglioni. I no feel my age, I tell you." No word other than cackle could accurately describe the dry, wheezing noise that follows.

Records suggest that the coglioni in question have been attached to their celebrated - sometimes notorious - owner for some 87 years. De Laurentiis, whose English remains appalling despite decades working in Hollywood, is often caricatured as the archetypal vulgar European producer. Sure enough, he has, in that long career, been responsible for some cinematic catastrophes of operatic proportions. He produced the horrid 1976 remake of King Kong and its even more ghastly sequel King Kong Lives. Orca, which failed to be to killer whales as Jaws was to sharks, also sailed under Dino's flag. Mandingo, Hurricane, Tai-Pan: there are, among the 600 films on which he receives credit, plenty of potential entries for your next Golden Turkey Film Festival. And there may be more to come. Dino's Hannibal Rising, a preposterous trawl through the early life of Hannibal Lecter, is released this week and the critics have already donned their heaviest kicking boots.

"I did this picture in which the critics killed me. Long time ago. Mandingo," he says, referring to that profoundly dubious slave drama from 1976. "It made a fortune. During the film festival in Venice last year, two critics wrote these articles which say: when we like films nobody wants to see them; when we don't everybody wants to go. You know, the industry may be interested in the critics. But normal people aren't. They went to see my King Kong, though critics said it was no good. Basta!"

To be fair to Dino, there has been a great deal more to his career than killer whales and giant monkeys. Born in Naples, the son of a pasta manufacturer, he toyed with acting while studying film at the Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia in Rome, but quite quickly decided his destiny was to be a producer. He made his first film in 1939 and, in the years after the war, was instrumental in helping the Italian film industry get back on its feet. The producer of Mandingo and Orca was also the producer of such Federico Fellini classics as Nights of Cabiria and La Strada. In 1954 he collaborated with Roberto Rossellini, the pioneer of Italian neo-realism, on Dov'è la libertà. . .? Exciting times.

"Fellini was unique for me," he growls. "But the major director I met in my life was Roberto Rossellini. Later, I worked with Ingmar Bergman and so on. They all loved Rossellini. Charming! Pure talent!"

How on earth did they manage to finance films in an occupied country still recovering from military defeat? "Oh there was no industry. Nothing! What did Rossellini do? Almost every week he would buy a Ferrari with a promisary note, then sell for it for cash and put the money into the film. Together, we did the best work and we made the industry again."

Despite his initial success with the masters, Dino had decidedly mainstream ambitions. In the early 1960s, after shepherding a gargantuan adaptation of War and Peace, he began building a lavish studio outside Rome named, with characteristic humility, Dino City.

He was a pioneer in the economics of the international co-production and attributes his early success and subsequent failure in Italy to, respectively, one government's enthusiasm for and a later administration's antipathy towards multinational co-productions. Dino could never have made such lumbering epics as Barrabas or The Bible without the involvement of Americans.

"They change the law and the industry has never been the same," he says. "I left for this reason. This law comes in and I make some complaint, but then I say, goodbye. You cannot have an Italian movie industry with just Italians working there. Also, big problem is the industry is not well organised in Italy. It is a madhouse. In America you do not always have to look for permission from government. You are free to make what film you want."

In the first decade and a half of his time in America, De Laurentiis used that freedom to deliver the same combination of quality entertainment and wedding-cake vulgarity that characterised his Italian years. He began by producing Serpico and Three Days of the Condor, both classics, before moving on to less subtle enterprises such as Flash Gordon and Amityville II: The Possession. David Lynch's Dune lost a bucket of money in 1984. Year of the Dragon did almost as badly a year later. By late 1988, despite the recent delivery of an unlikely masterpiece in Lynch's Blue Velvet, the De Laurentiis Entertainment Group was forced to file for bankruptcy.

Contemporaneous reports of the collapse reveal unhappy intelligence concerning De Laurentiis's working practices. "Dino was clearly, unequivocably, unquestionably responsible for what happened to this company," Stephen Greenwald, DEG's outgoing chairman, said at the time. "His attempts to evade that responsibility are reprehensible and ludicrous." Indeed, even today, he is reluctant to acknowledge his own role in the financial collapse.

Ever the survivor, De Laurentiis refused to crawl away to retirement with his $280,000 settlement. After his first wife, the actress Silvana Mangano, died in 1989, the virile film-maker married Martha Schumacher, a budding producer, in 1990. The couple - who remain romantically and professionally united still - set about re-establishing the brand. Martha, who sits beside Dino throughout the interview, may be - I'm guessing here - four decades younger than her husband, but she is not simply a trophy appendage. Sharp as a syringe, she is never at a loss for the details of a decade-old deal and exhibits the scary confidence that any producer requires to force through his or her project.

For all that, right at the beginning of their financial partnership, Martha and Dino failed to make a decision that might have immediately set the newly formed Dino De Laurentiis Company on the road to Boomtown. In 1986, as the earlier firm was falling apart, De Laurentiis hired Michael Mann to direct Manhunter. A brilliantly chilling adaptation of Red Dragon, the book in which Thomas Harris introduced the world to Hannibal Lecter, Mann's picture never found the audience it deserved, but it did leave De Laurentiis with the rights to exploit any future Lecter adventures. So how did another organisation end up making The Silence of the Lambs? They must, now, admit they screwed up in a big way. Not quite.

"That was due to circumstances beyond our control," Martha rationalises. "I was pregnant with our first child, so I wasn't given the book. Somebody in the office covered it. We had been developing another serial killer franchise, so we did turn down Silence of the Lambs."

I wonder if "somebody in the office" is now working in McDonalds. Admit it, Martha. The De Laurentiis Company dropped the ball.

"Yes. I suppose so. However, had we made it, it might not have been what it was. Fortunately Jonathan Demme did a brilliant job and it was a huge hit. So when Hannibal, the next book, came along, we had the rights."

The De Laurentiises have certainly worked hard at making up for that early error. They not only got Ridley Scott to make the eye-wateringly baroque Hannibal, but commissioned Brett Ratner, a director of little note, to churn out a second perfunctory adaptation of Red Dragon. Now they have persuaded Harris to write a novel and screenplay detailing the early adventures of Hannibal Lecter. It's Hannibal Begins. It's Casino Hannibal. It's not very good.

"When I was planning Hannibal Rising I asked the studios and they said they would pass," Dino says. "They said they have a problem in marketing this movie. I say if you have a problem marketing a film with Hannibal in the title then I don't understand you. So, I go out on my own. I spend my own money. I do a large cheque. Everybody believes the star of a movie is the actor. No, the star of a movie is the script." Well, quite. Detailing how Lecter's grim childhood experiences during the second Word War led him to cannibalism, Hannibal Rising, which stars the young unknown Gaspard Ulliel, is perilously light in the story department. Still, it will probably do well enough for Dino to get his large cheque back.

If, however, it does fail, I suspect the producer will find a way of denying responsibility. Dino De Laurentiis does not like to admit to making mistakes. When I ask if there is anything he would have done differently in life, he produces a sheet of paper listing all the awards he has won. Prime among the accolades is his lifetime achievement Oscar from 2001.

"You look at over 100 awards. What could I have done differently?" Martha leans towards him and mumbles something in Italian.

"Ah, yes, she is right," he hisses. "Maybe I would do one thing different. I would have learned to speak English."

5 Key Dino De Laurentiis Pictures.

LA STRADA (1955)

Early Federico Fellini classic detailing the unfortunate experiences of a young girl (Giulietta Masina) sold in virtual slavery to Anthony Quinn's travelling strongman. At this stage Dino appears utterly respectable.

WAR AND PEACE (1955)

Worthy adaptation of Tolstoy's big, fat novel (above right) directed by King Vidor and featuring such defiantly un-Russian stars as Audrey Hepburn and Henry Fonda. De Laurentiis, showing early signs of the elephantitis that was to plague him throughout life, here begins exploring the possibilities of the international co-production.

SERPICO (1973)

Detective Al Pacino cleans up the NYPD. Early on in the American stage of his career, Dino finds a combination of critical and commercial success that has eluded him ever since. A year later he was bottom feeding with Mandingo and Death Wish.

KING KONG (1976)

A man in a hairy suit stomps about New York in this unimaginative, unnecessary disinterment that, allegedly, spurred Peter Jackson to redress the balance with his own, infinitely better remake. Bizarrely, Pauline Kael, the New Yorker's great critic, loved the De Laurentiis version.

MANHUNTER (1986)

Twenty years ago, working with director Michael Mann, De Laurentiis delivered the first and best Hannibal Lecktor [ sic] film. Having marketed it poorly and failed to pick up Silence of the Lambs, he then went on too make three further Lector films of ever decreasing quality. Shame.