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Producer Barnet Bain - What Dreams May Come

I met producer Barnet "Bain" Fishbein at Buzz Coffee on Sunset and Crescent Heights Blvds in Los Angeles on February 14, 2002.

He's tall and dark and healthy looking. He wears sun glasses. His hair is black.

Barnet grew up in Northern Quebec, an hour's drive north of Montreal, in the small town of Saint Agatha of the Moutains. The fulltime population was about 3000 people, largely Catholic. There were about ten Jewish families.

The town was located in a tourist district by a lake, surrounded by ski mountains, and on weekends the population swelled to 30,000. During summer, it would go to 60,000.

"There was a local synagogue that was affluent because it was supported by a membership that was non-resident," remembers Bain. "I, to my chagrin, was a beneficiary of all that largess because I lived up the street from the synagogue and next door to the rabbi. So from the day I turned 13, it was my misfortune to be conveniently accessed to make a minyan [prayer quorum]. So no matter how much earlier I arose from week to week, the rabbi was always standing draconian at the door, ready to pull me from the pleasures of being young to go make a minyan. My skis, my skates had to wait. Everything waited for the minyan.

"At one point, I thought I was going to be a rabbi. But I think this period of my life when I was tyrannized by the constant quest for a minyan drove me from it.

"Being a film producer is exactly the same job. The food is better. You're always trying to get a minyan together. Seriously, it's an opportunity to steward a private set of values and to explore values and perception and conception in myself and others. And then to share those explorations with those who matter to me. Which attracted me back then when I thought about leading a religious life. And now is an opportunity to do it on a canvas that is worldwide. That is non-sectarian. I now make a distinction between a religious life and a spiritual life.

"Values and ethics are moving targets. There's no such things as ultimate values. Values are a trail of bread crumbs. You follow them, you pick them up, you digest them and you move on. As a producer, it's only about story telling and ritual. Ritual being the performance side of story telling. I am interested in stories that will open me and others to greater intimacy with ourselves so that we have greater self-knowing and the ability to access a larger domain of personal choice.

"I had a couple of unfortunate years of college at Carlton University in Ottawa. I went wild. I flunked out of my first year and repeated the year and flunked out again. I met an old time producer Reg Daugherty at the National Film Board of Canada who invited me to work on the campus television station.

"I then went to what is now the University of Westminster Film School in London. I got a fine arts degree in film and photography. I then worked a series of jobs in UK, running the gamut from waiting tables to selling jeans. I didn't have a work permit.

"I wrote and sold some spec scripts. I moved to New York and worked in advertising. In 1980, I was asked to adopt the Gospel of Luke as a script for Warner Brothers."

Luke: "Why did they turn to you as an expert in Jesus?"

Barnet: "Producer John Heyman, father of who produced Lord of the Rings, hired me because I was around and available and cheap. John told Warners he already had a script. And when they asked to see it, he said, 'It's not very good. He'll start over.' And they said, 'We'd like to see the script anyway.' So he said, 'I'll go back to New York and I'll punch it up.'

"I get a call. John says, 'I'm going to hire you to do this and I'm going to pay you an obscenely small amount of money.' For me, it was a king's ransom. He said, 'I'm going to pay you this a week to adapt this movie. You will have exactly one week to do it.'

"I went off and wrote the script in three weeks. Warners called him up and said the script was fine. 'We'll shoot this.' He hired me just to produce a bunch of pages. He had no expectation that I would produce a script they would shoot.

"In the summer of 2001, I saw an article in Forbes magazine that that movie Jesus is the most widely scene piece of film on the planet. It's been seen by a billion-and-a-half people. More people than who saw Titanic and Gone With the Wind. It's been translated into over 450 languages. It's been used as an evangelical tool. It was financed by the Hunt brothers of Texas silver fame.

"I made $8750 from the film. Agents get a bad rap. Where are they when you need them?

"Last summer, I was stuck overnight in Rome. There was a youth jubilee. There were kids wall-to-wall marching through the streets. And they were all clutching these bags that had these little cassettes of this movie. The box had an endorsement from the Pope. My 12-year old daughter never had any idea that I had anything to do with this movie. "My God, dad, there's the pope and there's you. That's you.'

"I wrote a few more scripts [after Jesus] and discovered development hell [the hell of trying to get a movie made]. I moved to LA in 1982. I met my future [Jewish] wife on Thanksgiving, 1982. We spent the next afternoon together and we've never parted. We married in August, 1983. We had a daughter in 1988.

"I wrote for years for everyone and never had another movie made. I sold a lot and I worked a lot and I never had another movie made. It became difficult, lonely and bitter."

The first film Barnet produced was the undistinguished 1996 TV movie The Conspiracy of Fear.

Bain met producer Stephen Simon, who shared his metaphysical interests. In 1995, they formed the company Metafilmics to make spiritual films. Their biggest production was the $70 million What Dreams May Come (1998) starring Robin Williams.

"We wanted to make mainstream popular entertainment that spoke to spiritual issues and looked for what was magnificent in people. It wasn't about making goody goody movies. They could be difficult, even violent, movies. But they should be movies where you came away feeling that you understood more about who you were, why you were.

"I wish one could make a movie about big metaphysical themes and market it as a movie about metaphysical themes without relying on big special effects. Stephen and I would've liked to have made the movie for half the money without the special effects. We would've had the same audience and it would've been more profitable.

"New Age has proved to be the most successful niche of publishing in many years. I hope a similar niche emerges in film. The film business looks to leverage everything so they can deliver to the widest possible audience.

"Somebody once said that being with Robin Williams is like travelling with a Shriners' convention. It's like being with all of the Shriners in one guy. Robin lives in his heart. His heart is not just on his sleave, it is all over. That he had the courage to step into a performance like that..."

Luke: "What did you think of Ron Bass's script?"

Barnet: "I loved it. The first time I read it, it brought me to tears. It was powerful, wise and insightful. And it either moved people or made them feel uncomfortable. If you show a story about people who are numb to their emotions, I can't recall any criticism. But you don't make films that deal with spirituality and emotional literacy without raising the temperature.

"Ron is probably the most successful screenwriter alive today. He understands the power of diving into people's emotional states. As Ron taught me, movies are not about what is said from one person to another. They're about what's going on unsaid between people. And unless you can conjure up states of heightened emotion, there's no subtext for a camera to read in a scene. It just becomes the lines that people are throwing at each other. That does not create a state of heightened reality.

"Ron knows how to conjure a state of heightened reality. And it is not in the words that he puts into the mouths of his characters. It is in the climate that exists between the characters around the words. And sometimes that climate spills over in ways that are uncomfortable for the audience. And they react with either curiosity, exploration and humility and rewarded deeply. Or they react with cynicism and denial.

"Stephen and I did the first Hollywood motion picture developed exclusively for worldwide internet distribution."

Luke: "How many copies of Quantum (2000) sold over the internet?"

Barnet: "Not a lot."

Luke: "It got tremendous press."

Barnet: "Not a lot bought it."

Luke: "A concept ahead of its time."

Barnet: "It was very much ahead of its time. A lot of people tried to buy it.

"I don't watch any television. I'm not interested in computers. I'd rather read a book."

Luke: "Tell me about The Linda McCartney TV movie."

Barnet: "She was half of one of the great popular love stories of our time. A story that has magical seductive elements. It's well known that these lovers have never spent more than two days apart in their entire marriage. There was a mythology to the story that appealed to me. Love stories are only as good as the challenges they meet. In the case of What Dreams May Come, we had the ultimate obstacle - they were dead.

"In the case of McCartneys, they struggled with the demands of fame. They put under the microscope the seductions we all have. We lead fast paced lives and are pulled away from what is really valuable."

Luke: "If we were to make a movie about your life, what would the character arc be?"

Barnet: "It would be about a man who looked for meaning and connection. But he has meaning and connection and doesn't know it. He comes full circle to where he began - a connection with the divine and a sense of being in dominion with all the forces around and beyond us. A man of God. I acknowledge my talents as a father, a husband and as a lover. I mean that in the sense of giving and receiving safety and security and value and making people feel known and visible for who and what they are."

Barnet was last in synagogue a year ago - for a Bar Mitzvah. "But I feel powerfully connected, most of the day, to the mystery. My daughter did not have a Bat Mitvah. She identifies with being Jewish but I am not sure what she has hooked up to it. She didn't go to Hebrew school. We talked about some of the esoteric energies around Judaism. She's familiar with that in an experiential way. She's familiar with conjuring those energies of Shechina [the divine presence] even though she doesn't do it as a Friday night ritual. But when she wants that kind of intimacy and connection, she knows exactly how to do that.

"We don't instruct her in that manner. But she has many connections to kabbalistic [mystical] Judaism."