The veteran Hollywood producer Edward Pressman first travelled to the UAE eight years ago, when the Abu Dhabi Film Festival (ADFF) was just launching.
That trip was to Dubai and happened during discussions for a movie based on the book The Man Who Knew Infinity.
It’s the story of the Madras-born Srinivasa Ramanujan Iyengar, an Indian student who gained entry to Cambridge University during the First World War and became a mathematical pioneer under his professor, G H Hardy.
Flash forward and production on that film – starring Slumdog Millionaire's Dev Patel as Ramanujan and Jeremy Irons as the professor who helped him become a fellow Cambridge professor – has just wrapped and will be released next year.
Pressman is in the capital this week, appearing at the inaugural International Showbiz Expo at Abu Dhabi National Exhibition Centre and receiving an ADFF 2014 career achievement award during Thursday’s opening night gala.
“When I first came to Dubai, there was a lot of talk about bridging east with west,” says Pressman. “What the Abu Dhabi Film Festival is about is trying to bridge these two very different cultural influences. Film, being universal, can bridge that.”
Pressman has been involved in 80 films in a 45-year career, many of which have reached iconic status.
And at 71, he's not done yet, with several other high-profile projects in the pipeline. There is a reboot of 1994's cult hit The Crow, starring the late Brandon Lee, due to go into production next spring.
Happy Valley, which is in preproduction and due out next year, tackles the story of the Penn State football coach Joe Paterno's legendary fall from grace after it was revealed that his assistant coach, Jerry Sandusky, was sexually abusing young boys. Al Pacino plays Paterno. The film will be released next year. He is also working with the director Mary Harron (American Psycho) on a biopic called Dali and I, based on Stan Lauryssens' memoir Dali & I, The Surreal Story.
Pressman has been instrumental in shaping the careers of several veteran directors, such as Brian De Palma, Terrence Malick, Oliver Stone, as well as Jason Reitman, the director of Men, Women and Children, which is screening at ADFF, and Alex Proyas (The Crow).
Pressman also brought to the screen legendary characters such as Conan the Barbarian (in which he gave Arnold Schwarzenegger his first starring role), Judge Dredd, Patrick Bateman (American Psycho) and Gordon Gekko (in the Wall Street movies). But he admits he hasn't always done it right.
"In the original Judge Dredd comic book, you never saw his face," says Pressman. "He was always covered. But when we cast Stallone, the studio financing the film said: 'How can we not show his face?' It was a debate and I think it was probably a mistake to go that way."
Two years before 2012's Dredd took another shot at bringing the character to the screen – starring Karl Urban, who kept his face covered – Pressman contacted the producer to see if he could regain the rights to the character to try again himself.
"He wasn't interested," Pressman says. "He wanted to do it. I would have loved to have a chance to do it again. To be involved in Judge Dredd the right way."
