At a time when the major studios are questioning how to stay ahead of the boxoffice curve, Warner Bros. Pictures seems to have found a winning formula for giving audiences what they want, from the summer's "Batman Begins" to "Charlie and the Chocolate Factory." The two engineers behind Warners' winning strategy, chairman Barry Meyer and president Alan Horn, rely on production president Jeff Robinov to make their slate hum. After three years on the job, he tells The Hollywood Reporter deputy film editor Anne Thompson why he believes in banking on quality filmmakers.

The Hollywood Reporter: How did you go about changing the Warners production team from competitive to collegial?
Jeff Robinov: When you go from colleague to boss, it's a relationship shift. I knew everybody pretty well. I wanted people to feel that they had the freedom to do what they did best. I felt that these smart and talented executives could use some encouragement and latitude. I got a lot of calls from agents asking, 'What does Jeff think?' I would just redirect it back and make it the executive's choice. I have an opinion and Alan has an opinion; it's not free-for-all chaos. But the executives have to own the pictures.

THR: Your movies feel distinct from each other, the Warners slate seems less reliant on genre formulas. How are you achieving that?
Robinov: I want diversity and quality. Alan leaves it to us to fill in the blanks. He can only greenlight the movies that we present him. He allowed me the freedom to reintroduce a filmmaker climate. If the movies are better, it's because the executives are contributing more and because they are putting a lot of trust and weight into the filmmakers.

THR: So you're letting directors drive your film packages?
Robinov: You can start the package a number of ways. We're starting the package with the filmmakers. It's harder to start it with actors. Most actors at a certain level want to work with a certain level of filmmaker.

THR: Were you unhappy to lose your "Troy" star Brad Pitt, who took his production company Plan B to Brad Grey at Paramount?
Robinov: It was a drag when he left with Plan B. I'm not saying it's a trade-off, but when Graham King came over we got Johnny Depp and Leonardo DiCaprio, who's going to do "Diamond" for us, and we hope that Johnny will be doing something for us pretty quickly.

THR: Aren't George Clooney and Steven Soderbergh leaving, too?
Robinov: They're really talented guys and we liked having them here. They've said publicly that Section 8 as a company will stop at the end of this deal in 2007. In the interim, Steven's doing "The Good German." It's a big year for George and Steven as producers with "Syriana," a big movie, and George as an actor and director and producer has "Good Night, and Good Luck."

THR: Are those the films that you as a studio head would want them to do?
Robinov: They're not the only films I'd want them to do, to be honest, but they are some of the films I want them to do. It's important when you make a film like "Syriana" or "North Country." Aside from the diversity, it lets people know that as a studio you're open to a broad range of things that lead you to an interesting group of creative people, whether it's writers or directors or actors, who are interested in doing things that are not just the mainstream, straight down the middle. The majority of what we do is very conventional. If you say that you're a filmmaker-based studio, then you can't just pretend that.

THR: A feminist movie about sexual harassment seems like a radical choice for a major studio.
Robinov: In the context of making 20-22 pictures a year, you want diversity, you want different types of films. We were only going to hire a female director. I wanted it real and emotional. If you look at what Niki Caro did with "Whale Rider," it was heart-wrenching, real and genuine. That reality of emotions and the harshness of relationships in the world was sometimes hard to watch but ultimately made the people real. I don't see "North Country" as an issue film. For me it became a story about people in a situation.

THR: How did you come to select Chris Nolan to reinvent "Batman?"
Robinov: Chris Nolan wasn't the obvious choice. Alan trusted that Chris' vision — the tone, the setting and his skill as director and storyteller — would ultimately give us the best movie. Chris is going to come in and tell us what the next "Batman" will be today. It all comes down to filmmakers like Alfonso Cuaron on "Harry Potter," or Curtis Hanson on "Lucky You" or Niki Caro on "North Country."

THR: How did you finally resolve your long-running "Superman" dilemma, after Tim Burton, Brett Ratner and McG all left the movie?
Robinov: I think people are really going to like "Superman Returns." I have to give Alan credit. He suffered a lot of negative publicity. When I met with Bryan Singer and he said, 'This is what the movie is,' I had the same feeling I had with Chris Nolan. I went down to Alan within days of McG leaving the movie. It would have been easy for him to say, 'Let's not start again, let's wait a beat, and come back to this.' He jumped right in and heard Bryan's take and embraced it.

THR: What have you learned about what doesn't work?
Robinov: It feels like the movies that don't work weren't made for any audience. If you make a movie for 11-year-old girls and it's PG-13, if you're making a young gamer movie and it's rated R, that sends a mixed signal.

THR: Is it possible to rethink your approach to making movies so that they're lighter and more nimble, and not so big?
Robinov: I can't tell you. It's not for lack of looking into it. The biggest problem with the cost of pictures, which are getting more expensive, is the cost of selling them — that is going to put pressure on altering the cost of making them. Every studio and every agency is feeling the pressure. We have a number of co-financing deals now with Legendary Pictures, Village Roadshow and Relativity. That extends our cash and allows us to invest in more pictures. It doesn't change the finances of each picture, but it allows us to make more.

THR: The unions are putting a lot of pressure on the studios to get a cut of DVDs.
Robinov: That's never going to happen. For every company, the DVD was bailing them out and now the DVD revenue company by company are coming up so short that there's no way they're giving any of it away.

THR: That's why the dealmaking is going to change?
Robinov: Yes. The economics are getting so difficult, and it's so hard to make a picture, that for movies to be profitable, the studios are capping the backend participation, they're hiatusing participations, they're asking people to take reductions up front. More actors are willing to do that now, depending on the material and the director. You can only spend so much, and each movie has a ceiling of participation.

THR: Warners was always a very macho, action-oriented studio.
Robinov: They were looking for big movies. They were more star-driven and concept-driven. Obviously, they made Steven Seagal movies, Joel Silver's "Lethal Weapon" and "Batman."

THR: How did things change after Bob Daly and Terry Semel left in 1999?
Robinov: Ultimately, when Alan (Horn) came in, the diversity of the slate broadened. The first thing he did was to set the goal for us to find three to four event-size pictures a year. He was looking for our group to feed both the international and domestic market. Reintroducing our comics characters Batman and Superman was very important to him. The softer romantic family-friendly stuff was an area he wanted to broaden out in, along with the event pictures, young-girl pictures to complement the young-male pictures, and romantic family comedies.

THR: As an agent at ICM, you signed the Wachowskis several months before you joined Warners, where you then supervised "The Matrix." What successes propelled you to the presidency, besides "The Matrix"?
Robinov: It's helpful to have a broad eclectic taste; it was more that than any one single success. As an executive, I was contributing a broad range of pictures to the slate, from "See Spot Run" to "The Matrix" to "Deep Blue Sea" and "Swordfish."

THR: How did you find supervising the new subsidiary Warner Independent Pictures?
Robinov: Challenging. There was lots of noise, noise, noise around it. Some of it was about me. Some of it was about Mark Gill. I don't know anything about the indie world. And to be honest, Mark didn't know anything about running an independent studio. He's was a marketing guy fundamentally, who worked with the Weinstein brothers, who are great marketers. To go from that to picking movies, releasing movies and creating campaigns, that's a big learning curve. You have two people who have a lot to learn who don't know each other. We have different tastes and sensibilities. How do you make it a positive? We found the common ground. What was important to me was how to brand the company as Peter Rice did over at Searchlight. Whether it's Richard Linklater's "Scanner Darkly," or "March of the Penguins," or "Everything Is Illuminated," we'll start to give Warner Independent an identity. I don't want to make five period dramas, but if the right period drama comes along, then I'm up for it. I'm more interested in making movies that are more unusual. I like the notion that the movies are controversial, not just for their content but for the filmmaking. For me, it's an extension of the same philosophy: You want diversity but you want a common thread.