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• Mr. & Mrs. Smith
• Cinderella Man
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Tavis: It's going to be a very good summer for screenwriter and producer Akiva Goldsman. The Oscar-winning writer of the film 'A Beautiful Mind,' is involved in not one, but 2 of the biggest films opening in June. First up, 'Cinderella Man' starring Russell Crowe and Renee Zellweger, followed by Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie in 'Mr. and Mrs. Smith.' Don't you just hate this guy? Ha ha ha! That opens in June also. 'Cinderella Man' opens around the country, though, this weekend and here now a scene from 'Cinderella Man.'

Jim Braddock: Where are the kids?

Mae Braddock: Boys will sleep on the sofa at my father's in Brooklyn and Rosie will stay at my sister's. Jimmy, we can't keep them!

Jim: You don't make decisions about our children without me.

Mae: What if they get really sick? We already owe Dr. McDonald--

Jim: You send them away, then all of this has been for nothing.

Mae: Well, it's just until we get--

Jim: What else is it for? If we can't stay together, that means we lost! That means we're giving up!

Mae: I'm not giving up! I am trying to protect our children.

Jim: Mae, I promised them. Outside the butcher's, I looked them in the eyes and I promised them with all of my heart I would never, ever send them away.

Tavis: Hmm. Akiva, nice to meet you.

Akiva Goldsman: Nice to meet you.

Tavis: I got to get you, man, to step your game up. You're too lazy.

Goldsman: I know.

Tavis: You've got to work a little harder. If you work harder, there might be a future for you in this business.

Goldsman: I'm hoping. Who do I call?

Tavis: Ha ha ha! Got to get you to work a little bit harder. Tell me how one ends up with 2 of the most anticipated films of the summer in the same month written by the same guy. How does that happen?

Goldsman: Well, it's good luck, you know. I didn't write Cinder--I mean, I didn't write 'Mr. and Mrs. Smith.' I just produced it.

Tavis: Produced it, right. I stand corrected on that. But your hand is on both of them.

Goldsman: Yeah, yeah. Well, a couple of fingers anyway. You know, actually, 'Cinderella Man' is a movie that we made last summer and it got delayed because Russell Crowe tore his shoulder. And 'Mr. and Mrs. Smith' is a movie that I think we've been making for about 2 years. So they weren't supposed to come out at the same time. It just is good or bad luck, depending on who you ask.

Tavis: Tell me about 'Cinderella Man.' It's been everywhere. People see all the commotion about it, and it should be a big weekend for you guys, I suspect. Tell me about the storyline, though.

Goldsman: Well, 'Cinderella Man' is about a guy named Jim Braddock who was a boxer in the twenties and thirties. And sort of like America at the time, his career started really high, fell terribly far down, and then he managed to struggle back to the top. So it's a real hero story, just a decent man during one of the hardest periods in our country's history.

Tavis: The Academy seems to love these movies, and you know where I'm going with this. When I first heard about 'Cinderella Man,' not unlike anybody else in this business, you start thinking of what they were--what Akiva was saying in the pitch meeting, and so you hear, "Oh, it's kind of like ‘Million Dollar Baby.'" I know you've heard that before. So tell me how it's not like 'Million Dollar Baby.' I hear a picture about a guy who's in the ring trying to make a come--you know.

Goldsman: Well, you know, I mean, it's funny because this script actually predates 'Million Dollar Baby.' The original guy who wrote it was a guy named Cliff Hollingsworth. He wrote it 10 years ago. And you know, look, boxing stories are similar only in so far as they have a lot of boxing in them. And this has 5 very real fights, which are actually quite brutal. But having said that, this is a story where the enemy is not the opponent. There's no single opponent who's the bad guy. The enemy is actually the Depression, and what we tried to do here was to show New York during the Depression. You don't see urban America in the Depression. What you see when the Depression is represented generally is rural. It's farms, it's prairies, and what was really exciting to us was to try to make New York hell, to turn it into the dark world that it was in the thirties, and have a decent man come up against that. So that makes the story unique, and it's a true story, which is interesting.

Tavis: Let me ask a question completely off-subject. As a screenwriter who's obviously had great success in this business, when you sit down to write something, are you--obviously you're conscious of it, but how conscious are you when you're writing of what Hollywood likes, what Hollywood is looking for? Because you are the quintessential screenwriter here now. Or does that honestly not enter into your mind and you are deliberately trying to do something that is, in fact, different, comes from a different space? Does it make any sense here?

Goldsman: It does, and you know, I'm sure I am aware of it, but not consciously. I'm sure I'm aware of expectations, but that's a result of having done a thing over and over again. I was a failed fiction writer first. I wrote fiction really badly for many years, but I did learn to put the story first. And I think I'm still pretty good at that, at not being distracted by the vagaries of how to make the movie until after I've at least laid it down the first couple times.

Tavis: Now, I'm just a stupid interviewer, but I'm trying to figure out how one can be a failed fiction writer and that is so much of what you do. You write imaginatively, you tell stories. I mean, how can one be a failed fiction writer and Academy Award-winning screenwriter? I don't get this.

Goldsman: Well, fiction is harder, you know? Screenplay is a simpler form. You know, what you need is a good ear and a lot of hard work and some understanding of structure, which you can learn, and you can write a screenplay. And if you write long enough, you can write a good one. Fiction is more magical than that, and I wasn't that good.

Tavis: Wow. That's an honest and humble answer. I appreciate it. Tell me about 'Mr. and Mrs. Smith.' It's a movie that you have not written, but in fact, produced.

Goldsman: Yeah. We developed 'Mr. and Mrs. Smith' from scratch. It's taken about 3, 4 years to really get it up and finished. It's a wonderful young writer named Simon Kinberg, who came to us with a pitch. He sort of thought that marriage counseling and the idea of 2 people, a husband and wife, trying to kill each other were perfectly suited to be made into a film. It's a great metaphor. And it's true. All of us who did marriages, we sat around the meetings and they'd say, "You know, when your wife or when your husband..." and we'd all go, "Oh, yeah. Oh, god, yeah." and wanted to kill the other person. So that idea became a movie, which, you know, has had a lot of different adventures come into production.

Tavis: Now, again one, 'Mr. and Mrs. Smith,' Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt, you're the producer, you're the screenwriter on 'Cinderella Man.' Tell me the difference between--screenwriter and producer are 2 different hats--tell me the difference when it comes to what input you have in deciding who the stars are going to be. Because you got Russell Crowe on one project. Again Angelina and Brad on the other. What role--how much say so do you have in either of those roles with regard to the stars?

Goldsman: I certainly have more of an official and technical say when I'm producing a movie than when I'm writing a movie. Having said that, this group of Ron Howard, Russell Crowe, Brian Grazer and myself, we're sort of familiar with each other, so we had good luck with 'Beautiful Mind.' We have a nice time together. Russell was actually attached to 'Cinderella Man' before either Ron or I, so--the original version of the script, so Russell was always part of it, and he sort of welcomed us into it. 'Mr. and Mrs. Smith,' you know, I hired the director and we cast Brad Pitt and Nicole Kidman. Then Nicole couldn't do it, and so Angelina came on board. But from day-to-day, on a day-to-day basis, I end up doing pretty much the same on both movies, so I was commuting back and forth between L.A. and Toronto, because we were shooting the movies at the same time. So sometimes I'd shoot a day here and then fly and shoot a night there and back and forth and that my wife didn't divorce me is just extraordinary.

Tavis: So just between the two of us, how much did you have to keep yourself in check where you're the producer on one project and you know how to do the screenwriting thing well enough to have won an Academy Award, but you didn't write this, so did you have to slap your hand and say, "Hey, I didn't write this now. I'm just producing this"?

Goldsman: Well, yeah. I mean, the good news is writing is actually much harder than producing for me. I love producing. I love the social component of it. Writing is solitary. I sit by myself, so if I don't have to write, I'm happy. And the original writer, Simon Kinberg, stayed with us the whole time and other people would come in and out, but he was always there. So for me, it's a great pleasure to look at somebody else and go, "Well, that line of dialogue should be different. What do you want it to be?' You know...

Tavis: Ha ha ha!

Goldsman: Rather than everybody looking at me.

Tavis: Right. Let me go a little further down the road. You're working on 'The Da Vinci Code.' We all know the book, 25 million copies sold, 44 languages around the world. What we also know is, though, that the Vatican hired--I shouldn't say hired, but put one of its cardinals specifically in charge of trying to deal with what they call--their word--the heresy in Mr. Brown's book 'The Da Vinci Code,' and yet you guys are turning this into a movie, so talk to me about how you're navigating that minefield.

Goldsman: Well, you know, it's funny; we're deciding it isn't a minefield, which maybe is the most willfully blind and therefore ignorant choice we've ever made.

Tavis: Sounds like it, but go ahead.

Goldsman: Yeah, but nevertheless...

Tavis: Ha ha ha! It's honest, though. Go ahead.

Goldsman: So, you know, I mean, we're treating the book as fiction and as a great piece of fiction. And Dan Brown said something smart, which is if it ignites discussion and debate about faith and religion, fantastic.

Tavis: Mm-hmm.

Goldsman: And we're trying to be really smart and really effective in giving the audience the feeling that they've just seen the book. Now, that's going to be a lot of smoke and mirrors, because the book is longer and, you know, it's going to take a lot of translation, but, you know, what we're attempting to do is to get people as worked up as they were when they read the book, because that's part of what's exciting about it. So we kind of think that's great, you know. Ask me again when there are people picketing in front of my house.

Tavis: Ha ha ha!

Goldsman: But right now, we think it's good.

Tavis: All right. So you're screenwriting, then you're producing. Sounds to me like the next step is directing, and somewhere I thought I heard that you're working on that, too.

Goldsman: Yeah. I, you know, I have a very--I have a coward's love affair with directing, which is I keep getting right up to it and then I turn around, shake my head and run away, so I've got a couple of things that I'm fantasizing about. The truth is, I have never made a movie where I've wished the director wasn't around. I've never been part of a movie where I've thought if only it was my head and not his head, it would be better. So I haven't quite figured out what the point of doing it is; but, you know, I still may.

Tavis: Yeah. Let me close our conversation with a question that I could've asked at the very beginning, but I don't want to end without asking it because it seems to be that it has come to your advantage time and time again through your career, and that is the fact that you are the child of a Holocaust survivor, and even more important or certainly as important as that, the kind of household you grew up in. Tell me briefly about that and how--very quickly about that--and how that has factored into your journey.

Goldsman: Well, I am very much my mother's son, you know, and my mother is in her 80s, and she is somebody who managed to escape Lithuania, it was Poland at the time, during World War II. And there's a kind of darkness that Holocaust survivors carry, which I think they pass to their children in-utero. So I think I was probably having Nazi dreams before I could say the word. And at the same time, my mother chose to deal with this darkness in her life by creating the very first group home for what used to be called emotionally disturbed children--schizophrenic and at that point autistic children together, and it was in my house.

Tavis: You grew up with these kids?

Goldsman: I did. These were my friends. These were my peers. In my mother's early writings, because she writes as well, there's always somebody banging the baby against the wall or hanging the baby out the window, and I was the baby.

Tavis: And this is before Michael Jackson.

Goldsman: Barely, so, you know, it was--it was a way of understanding that human beings and human psychology is infinitely varied and flexible and that we have a lot of ideas about how people should feel and behave. The truth is those feelings and behaviors are unique to everybody in their circumstances, and that gives me a real way of getting into characters luckily, so I'm grateful for it.

Tavis: Well, we came full circle.

Goldsman: Yeah.

Tavis: And what a wonderful circle it is. Nice to have you on the program.

Goldsman: Thank you. Very nice to be here.

Tavis: Nice to meet you. That's our program for tonight. A reminder, you can catch me on public radio this weekend, and for that matter every weekend on PRI, Public Radio International. Check your local listings. I'll see you back here next time, though, on PBS. We'll leave you with a clip of the last time Akiva Goldsman and Russell Crowe hooked up, the Oscar-winning film 'A Beautiful Mind.' Good night from L.A. Thanks for watching and, as always, keep the faith.