Film interview: Billion-dollar producer Larry Kasanoff on risk, reinvention & creative leadership

From producing Terminator 2: Judgment Day to pioneering Mortal Kombat on the big screen, Larry Kasanoff is a name synonymous with bold, genre-defining filmmaking. 

As one of the world’s leading creativity speakers, he has spent decades championing innovation, disruption and storytelling at scale — not only in Hollywood, but across business, technology and leadership. 

In this exclusive interview with The Champions Speakers Agency, Larry shares why creative risk is essential in business, how to build cultures that foster innovation, and what today’s leaders can learn from a billion-dollar film career driven by passion, persistence, and a touch of madness.

Q: Your career in film began at a young age and led to producing iconic projects like Michael Jackson’s Thriller. What were the pivotal steps that helped you break into such a competitive industry?

Larry Kasanoff: “I knew I wanted to be a movie producer since I was a little kid. I walked around Boston, where I grew up, saying to my parents, ‘I’m going to go to Hollywood and be a movie producer,' when I was really a little kid.

“But how to do it? Wonderful parents. We didn’t have a lot of money and no connections. And so in Boston, there’s an unusual school, high school, which is the oldest high school in America. Benjamin Franklin went there. And it acts like a private school – but it’s not. If you take a test and get in, you can go for free.

“It’s so far away from where I lived, and in a sense, it’s not fun. It’s like going to school in 1872. It’s a very strict old school. But it has – and I think still has – a great track record of getting kids into good colleges. So, from the time I was a little, little kid, you had to think, ‘Yeah, I’m going to take a test, I’m going to get into Boston Latin.’ I did. And then from Boston Latin I went to Cornell and I went to Wharton.

“And at Cornell and Wharton I did internship after internship after internship, figuring I would just somehow meet the right people. And the internship I had the summer between my two years at Wharton was in the film department of HBO. 

“And when I graduated from Wharton I had two offers – one was to go work at HBO, and the other was to go work at this independent startup film studio named Vestron, started by a guy who had left HBO.

“And I really didn’t know what to do, but it was my boss at HBO who said, ‘You have to go work there, because at HBO, we’d love to have you, but you’re going to be in a cubicle for seven years. There, it’s a risk and it’s an experiment, but you will get hands-on filmmaking day one.’ And thank goodness I went to Vestron. And the first thing we did was making Michael Jackson’s Thriller. So it worked.”

Q: Failure is inevitable in the creative industries. Can you walk us through a specific moment in your filmmaking career when things didn’t go as planned, and how you turned that setback into success?

Larry Kasanoff: “You face failure in the film business all the time. You just don’t sit around cavalierly and chat about it in interviews at the Cannes Film Festival. But I think the important thing is what you do with it – like, what happens afterwards.

“And the tendency when you fail is to kind of, you know, retreat, go smaller, try something less ambitious the next time. Premier magazine once called me ‘wildly overambitious' and I take a little bit of happiness in knowing – I have to take a little bit of schadenfreude – in knowing there’s no more Premier magazine.

“And so you tend to think, 'Well, maybe I shouldn’t do’ but I found, when you fail and your tendency is to go smaller, do the opposite and go bigger.

“So, that company Vestron I worked for was a fantastic, fantastic company. I worked there six years. And the company wound up going bankrupt. It’s a long story why, and they were later vindicated and it wasn’t me, but it happened. And, you know, it was our place – our first place.

“The next movie I made after that – and we made hundreds of movies, but none of them over $10 million – the next movie I made after that was Terminator 2, which was the most expensive movie in history at the time.

“And then during the financial crisis of, whatever, 12 years ago, we had a movie that just went down in the middle of production. The financial crisis hit, our financiers left, so now it’s over. I’m trying to think, ‘How can I go make another movie?’ And I decided rather than raising money for one, I’ll raise money for a slate of twelve. And that worked.

“So, my best advice when you hit failure is go bigger, not smaller.”

Q: You’ve raised over $1 billion for the film industry — what insights can you share with business leaders navigating the high-stakes world of investment?

Larry Kasanoff: “You know, I think the thing that I find that’s – other than the usual 'never give up, be relentless' and so forth – is: call everybody and anybody. You never know where it’s going to come from.

“I had a phenomenal professor at Cornell in my undergrad who taught me, 'You can call anybody in the world,' and I’ve been doing it ever since. All kinds of people I just call up.

“Even when I went to grad school at Wharton, we had to do – I was doing a paper on Warner Brothers for my thesis. So, I just called the Chairman of Warner Bros. I said, ‘I’m a student at Wharton.’ He called me back. We spoke for an hour. He was so great that I actually used my student loan to buy stock in Warner Bros. – which I don’t recommend doing, but fortunately it worked out.

“But the point is – you can call anybody. And if we were to do a kind of regression analysis on all the deals we’ve done, 50% come from the normal sources – great investment bankers, great lawyers, and so forth. 50% come from who the hell knows.

“So, whether it’s that person sitting next to you on a plane or someone you think, 'Gee, I’d love to meet so-and-so,' call anybody and everybody. Because you never know where it’s going to come from.

“So what if they laugh at you? I mean, what do you know what’s going to happen? The sky won’t fall in. People laugh at me all the time. People are still laughing at me. I don’t care.”

This exclusive interview with Larry Kasanoff was conducted by Jack Hayes of The Champions Speakers Agency.