1 September 2003
Reuters (printed in The Washington Post) - click
here for original source
Movie Mogul De Laurentiis
Awarded Golden Lion
By Shasta Darlington
VENICE, Italy (Reuters) - Italian-born movie producing giant Dino De Laurentiis has been around longer than the Venice Film Festival itself and it is finally awarding him a Golden Lion for a lifetime of achievement.
"Each movie is a son, they are all my children," 84-year-old De Laurentiis said Monday ahead of the award ceremony.
In that case, he has a very big family that just keeps growing. De Laurentiis, who has been called Hollywood's last movie mogul, has backed more than 60 films which have received some 30 Oscar nominations.
He is currently busy on a much-talked about film adaptation of the life of Alexander the Great which will star Leonardo DiCaprio as the emperor who conquered much of the world in the 4th century BC and Nicole Kidman as his mother.
Baz Luhrmann, who will direct the new movie, showed up in the lagoon city with De Laurentiis to join in the festivities.
"To do a work about a legend, on, I hope, a legendary scale, you need a legendary producer," the director of Oscar-winning "Moulin Rouge" said at a news conference.
De Laurentiis played down a reported battle with Oliver Stone, who is also getting ready to start filming his own version of Alexander the Great's life.
"We are not competing with Oliver Stone. He will make his, we will make ours," he said.
But anybody who knows "Dino," knows that he gets his way.
"Dino has always taken risks with his own money, which means he always has the drive to make it come true," his wife, Martha, told the news conference.
De Laurentiis helped revive Italian postwar cinema with the likes of Federico Fellini and then headed to Hollywood where he introduced moviegoers to a characters such as King Kong and the cannibal serial killer Hannibal Lecter.
But the moviemaking legend says his most significant picture has been "Serpico," the 1973 movie starring Al Pacino as a New York cop who fights corruption on the force, which launched his producing career in the United States.
"I made a great, critically acclaimed film. I convinced myself that I could be an American producer," he said.