When Harvey Weinstein spoke to Post Magazine
After a decade in which his golden touch deserted him, the movie mogul has stormed back and says he’s ready to set new records at the Academy Awards. And, he is still in the hunt to buy back the name that made him famous.
I'm standing at the entrance of a cinema in Admiralty, watching Chow Yun-fat watch Chow Yun-fat in a screening of a 1940s-era film called Shanghai, when a large Jewish guy with a scruffy beard barges his way through a wall of bodies to yank me back into the corridor.
'You can't see the ending, you'll spoil it,' says Harvey Weinstein, the movie's executive producer, a man who has harvested more Oscars than anyone else alive, from the 40-odd films he has made. He takes my elbow in his meaty hand and fixes his eyes on mine with a hungry, ursine glare.
'You have to see the film from the beginning,' he growls. And that's the famous Weinstein intensity.
For Weinstein, intensity is the only thing that works. If anybody had the courage to make a movie about him, the pitch would sound something like this: the gruff elder son of a radically minded diamond cutter from Queens, New York, spends his teen years watching European art films in a run-down cinema with his younger brother. Angered by the sudden death of his father, the young man decides to antagonise the world by marketing art films as if they were Coca-Cola. Hits, Academy Awards and millions follow as he bullies his way to the top but the man loses his way and his company when he's gripped by a mid-life crisis and a bacterial infection that almost kills him (and which will never be fully explained). Saved by his wealthy friends and the love of a much younger woman, he storms back to form with the longest Oscar-winning stretch in movie history.
Cue credits, cue music. It'd be like Citizen Kane meets Gladiator.
That record-breaking Oscar streak hasn't happened yet, of course, but Weinstein has no doubt it will.
'We are on an incredible roll right now,' says Weinstein, banging down a Diet Coke in a cafeteria and glaring as if he's going to go all Russell Crowe-Maximus and start yelling about how what one does in life echoes in eternity. Then the moment passes and he's back on message.
