"You're constantly thinking in this town that you're only as good as your last movie," says Colin Callender, the British-born president of HBO Films. "But that's wrong. You're only as good as your next movie." Callender would know. Even after 20 years — immortality for a Hollywood exec — of greenlighting feature-length projects at HBO, he still manages to outdo himself, whether on the small screen (Angels in America, Empire Falls) or the silver one (Maria Full of Grace, Pan's Labyrinth, La Vie en Rose). Perhaps Callender's survival skills — and the 80 Emmys, 26 Golden Globes, and two Oscars that his films and mini-series have won — have something to do with the fact that he has always stuck to the same basic criterion: "Why are we going to tell this story?"
Listening to Callender, 56, tell some of his own in his tea-and-tweed accent at the Buffalo Club in Santa Monica, it's tempting to become a lifetime HBO subscriber: He's smart but not smug, cocksure but not cocky, sardonic but not cynical. Best of all, he has the unburdened air of a man who's been spared the tyranny of Nielsen. "I don't have to live or die by those ratings swords, but that's both a blessing and a curse," Callender says. "There are days when it would be much easier if we could judge success or failure on what the ratings were. Instead we look at a range of things: critical response, audience response, awards."
Callender's role in the process — reading scripts, watching dailies, banging out $100 million movie budgets, and fantasizing about "deleting my whole inbox just randomly" — seems to be equal parts midwife, mastermind, and all-around mensch. But just how did the London-raised former child actor end up on the opposite side of the industry — and the world? Well, for starters, his acting was rubbish. "Hopeless. Beyond," he laughs of his stint in the National Youth Theatre. "I was just terribly awkward on stage. I would trip up and bump into the scenery." After working as a stage manager at the Royal Court Theatre in London, he found his way into film and television and eventually relocated to New York to become an executive film producer for HBO. He met his wife, Elizabeth, a lawyer and New Jersey native, through friends in 1998, and instead of going to the movies for their first date, took her to a party for Martin Scorsese. Their second date? The Golden Globes.
They moved to Los Angeles about 10 years ago and set about finding normal-ish private schools for their two daughters (Callender also has a teenage son back in New York from his first marriage), only to find that even the admissions process has been hijacked by Hollywood. "You are often asked to write an essay as to why you want them to go to this school," he says, leaning in conspiratorially. "I'm told there are prospective parents here that hire screenwriters to write their application forms!" But even with blue chip scribes at their disposal, "We write ours ourselves." When the Callenders aren't hosting dinner parties at their Beverly Hills manse, family life centers around the girls and, believe it or not, heretical pleasures like Grey's Anatomy. "I love Dancing with the Stars," Callender confesses. "I want to be on Dancing with the Stars."
