Jon Landau Biography
Jon Landau is an American film producer known for producing Titanic (1997), a film that won him an Academy Award and earned $2.19 billion in gross revenues and Avatar (2009) which earned $2.79 billion.
In the early 1990s, he was the executive VP of feature production , 20th Century Fox. He works frequently with director James Cameron.
Jon Landau Age
He was born on July 23, 1960 in New York City, New York, U.S. He is 58 years old as of 2018.
Jon Landau Family
He is the son of Eddie Landau, a producer, and Ely A. Landau, a studio executive and producer. He was born in a Jewish family and he graduated from the University of Southern California. He has a sister called Tina Landau who is also a director.
Jon Landau Wife
He is married to Julie Landau, and accountant and they are blessed with 2 sons, Jamie and Jody Landau.
Jon Landau Career
He was the vice president of Feature Film Production at the Twentieth Century Fox. He produced Titanic (1997). This film won him an Academy Award and became the highest grossing film of all time and the first one to ever reach $1 billion in gross revenues.
In 2009, together with James Cameron, they produced the science fiction blockbuster Avatar. This surpassed their earlier collaboration titanic and ended up becoming the new and reigning highest-grossing film with $2.79 billion. This film, Avatar earned him his second Academy Award nomination.
Jon Landau Filmography
He has produced several films and most of them he has produced along side James Cameron. Just to mention some of them, here is the list;
- Campus Man (1987) – Producer
- Honey, I Shrunk the Kids (1989) – Co-producer
- Dick Tracy (1990) – Co-producer
- Titanic (1997) – Producer, with James Cameron
- Solaris (2002) – Producer, with James Cameron
- Avatar (2009) – Producer, with James Cameron
- Alita: Battle Angel (2019) – Producer, with James Cameron
- Avatar 2 (2020) – Producer, with James Cameron
- Avatar 3 (2021) – Producer, with James Cameron
Jon Landau Net Worth
He has earned himself quite a fortune from his career as a producer. He has an estimated net worth of $100 million.
Jon Landau Management | Jon Landau Management Email
He is the president of Jon Landau Management Inc. This deals in Administrative management services. This company provides management services for those in the music and entertainment industries.
Jon Landau Management Contact | Jon Landau Contact
Jon Landau Avatar
He directed the 2009 American epic science fiction film, Avatar, which was written directed, produced and co-edited by James Cameron. He is producing four sequels to Avatar. Avatar 2 is to be released in December 2020 with additional films stated to release in December 2021 and 2025.
Jon Landau Alita
He produced Alita: Battle Angel along with James Cameron. Alita: Battle Angel is a a 2019 American cyberpunk action film based on Yukito Kishiro’s manga series Gunnm, also known as Battle Angel Alita.
Jon Landau Awards
- Florida Film Critics Circle Award – Titanic – 1997
- Golden Globe Award – Titanic – 1997
- MTV Movie Award – Titanic – 1997
- Academy Award – Titanic – 1997
- Producers Guild of America Darryl F Zanuck Theatrical Motion Picture Producer of the Year Award – Titanic – (1997)
- Nickelodeon Kid’s Choice Award – Titanic – 1997
- People Choice Award – Titanic – 1997
- Golden Globe Award – Avatar – 2009
Jon Landau Twitter
Jon Landau Facebook
Jon Landau Interview
Avatar: producer Jon Landau interview
Source: denofgeek.com
And you have two private equity partners as well?
You know, we’re not part of the financing at all, that’s all handled by Fox. So Fox handles it all. I don’t think that it’s unusual on large budget movies. We certainly went in knowing that this would be an expensive movie, for the studio to see out such financing to help fun the movie. One of the interesting things that we did on this movie is, we asked Fox to support us for a year – while we learned to walk. Most movies, you have to run right away. They sit there and say okay, we’re ready to green light the movie, here’s the release date, and try and make that date. And that’s where things go off kilter.
We said to Fox, let us learn to walk for a year, it’s not going to be a small sum of money – several million dollars – but we’re going to figure things out. Because we didn’t know, we didn’t have any of the answers.
And then we said, okay, now, at the end of that year, we’ll deliver to you three things. One: a flushed out script, taking what Jim had written ten years prior in the scriptment, and flush out your real script. Two: we’ll begin to develop the look of the world. And three: we will do the R&D, but not only will we do the R&D on the technology side, but we will deliver you a 45 second scene from the movie, so you can see what it looks like finish. And we will have known what it’s like to go through that process, you will have known as a studio what it’s like to go through that process, and we’ll look at the result and say – is that a viable movie? And we’ll have walked, and then we’ll ask you to let us run. And that’s the process we went through.
Has Rupert Murdoch seen the film?
Rupert I don’t think has seen the whole movie. I think he’s seen large chunks of the movie, and he’s very excited.
Rupert also sees it, and his mind immediately starts going to – how else can News Corp take advantage of some of the things that we’ve been able to showcase? Ranging from the 3D, how can they roll that into everything else that they’re doing. I did an interview – both Jim and I did – for Sky, in 3D. How do you take Premiership League football and bring that into 3D? How do you do all of those different things. Rupert gets excited about that.
Rupert saw enough of the movie to then have some follow up meetings and talk about other, broader ideas of where things were going.
Jon, two figures have been mentioned with regards to cost – 180 million and 300 million – which is it closer to?
180 million, certainly. Closer to? Yeah! Definitely.
250?
I didn’t say that. You asked me which one was closer to it. I think it’s interesting. Truly, I believe that we’re the only business in the world that doesn’t charge you more for more. You walk into a hotel, you want to get a bigger room, you pay more money for it. You sit up front on a plane, you pay more money for it. You get a larger order of fish and chips, you get more money for it. Movies, it’s the same thing if you see a $2 million movie or you see a $100 million movie or a $150 million movie.
Do you think it was only because James Cameron was behind the project that it was given such a budget?
Well, a couple of things. One, success in Hollywood is really judged on more than just one movie. And I think if you look at Jim’s track record – it’s Terminator, True Lies, it’s Aliens, and almost at every step of the journey, people were saying ‘oh, it’s the most expensive movie’. I will tell you in no uncertain terms, that when we made Titanic, we were not the most expensive movie that year. But everybody wanted to think we were. In fact, we were not.
Avatar is a hard movie, no matter who you have on board, to get a studio to commit to. It’s not based on a sequel, it’s not based on some great comic book, or a television show. It’s original, and you know what, it’s got blue people in the middle of it. Studio executives, they run away from those of type of projects, and that’s part of what that first year really was to prove to them – and to ourselves – that you can put engaging and emotive characters that people would buy watching. But they would ask questions like ‘do they need tails?’, and Jim’s response was ‘yes, they need tails!’.
I don’t think there are many directors who have showcased what we showcased, who could have gotten the green light. But I think because of who Jim is, and his ability to execute a dramatic story in the light of sophisticated technology – that is what sold the studio on it.
Do you think that the cinemas are justified in charging their customers extra for seeing the film in 3D?
That’s on the exhibition side, we have no control over ticket prices. I know there was a lot of back and forth between the studios and the exhibitors, over who should pay for what. And, the way I look at that side – and that side I can certainly speak to – and that is, the exhibitors never asked the studios to pay for stereo sound.
You know, it’s your responsibility as an exhibitor to bring a certain quality of presentation. For them to say ‘my overhead and my expenses are greater, and I’m going to have to pass that off to stay in business’, that’s their side of the business. I think it’s our responsibility to deliver product that drives the consumer out of the home. and I think that it’s the exhibition community’s responsibility to be able to present that material in the highest possible quality, so that people do want to leave their homes.
So what about sequels to this?
I think sequels to this is really going to come down to what the public wants after they’ve seen the movie. The movie is ripe for other stories, and Jim has those in mind, both before our movie opens and after it. But whether those stories are realised in publishing, or if they’re realised on the big screen, whether they’re realised in other ancillary opportunities, I think we’ll find ways to tell them.
What’s the one quality that you think makes a great producer?
I’ll tell you what Warren Beatty said to me, when we were finishing Dick Tracy. He asked me, ‘Jon, what do you think is your best quality as a producer?’. I thought it was a weird question, and I gave him three of what he told me were wrong answers. And he said, ‘I’ll tell you what your best quality is as a producer: you dream about the movie. I know that, because every day you come in with ideas or suggestions about the movie’.
And I do think that that is what it is, because it’s igniting a flame of passion and excitement about the creation of what we’re doing. And if you don’t live and breathe it, you can’t do your job as well as anybody else.
Jon Landau News
Avatar Sequels: Producer Jon Landau Talks Water Work And Live-Action Shooting
Source: empireonline.com
Doing the press rounds for Alita: Battle Angel, producer and longtime James Cameron collaborator Jon Landau has naturally been asked about the Avatar sequels he and Cameron have been labouring to produce. And talking at a Q&A screening for Alita hosted by Collider, Landau mentioned that the first two sequels’ live-action shoots are about to begin.
“We have completed our principal capture on Avatar 2, three, and part of four,” Landau clarifies. “We’re going to do our live-action filming in New Zealand in the spring of this year.” He also mentions the recent announcement of Edie Falco to play the head of the Resources Development Administration, the human corporation that served as the big bad in the original and will be back causing problems in the sequels. “In typical Jim Cameron fashion he finds this powerful woman to play what could be very easily a male role if people were just to read the script.”
Landau also addressed the fact that it has taken years of work to bring the films to life even before the cameras roll, partly because Cameron wanted to get the foundation right first. “That’s what we waited for. We needed to have all the scripts done before we embarked on production. We needed to understand where the characters were going. Not only did we need to understand it, our cast needed to understand it. Our cast playing these roles needed to understand decisions they were making in movies two and three, how it would affect them in movie four. Because if they didn’t, they might not bring the same thing to it. So we waited to complete all four scripts before we ever embarked on doing the project.”
And returning to the tricky performance capture element, Landau revealed that the process included more of a physical side than ever before, due to some of the characters in the sequels being part of water-dwelling clans. “We built a water tank that was 500,000 gallons of water, and we are doing performance-capture under the water, on the surface of the water, and above the water,” Landau explains. “We trained our cast to free-breath-hold, because in the sequences they have to just be swimming, they can’t be on scuba, and they have to be able to do long takes. So we had a gentleman named Kirk Krack come in and train everybody that needed to be underwater how to go underwater and how to hold their breath.”
