Geffen:

Forbes sat down with David Geffen to discuss his company's future and how he plans to spend the hundreds of millions he'll reap from DreamWorks. The following are excerpts from the interview.

Forbes: DreamWorks is rumored to have been in talks with a couple of companies about a possible merger. Any truth there?

Geffen: We would certainly consider making a deal with an appropriate partner if it made sense. So far there has been no such deal. There was a discussion between EMI and us about merging the companies, but we couldn't agree on how to value the companies, so we didn't make it. If we had gotten the relative values that we wanted, the deal would have made a lot of sense, and I think there is a lot of value in a restructured EMI. It was a grand idea that didn't work.

Did you approach any other companies?

We had a conversation with MGM because the putting together of the MGM library and DreamWorks makes an awful lot of sense. It would only be incremental business, and you'd make a lot more money. And the ability to sell that library again and again and again with our current feature product, which is incredibly successful, gets you a better price on pictures made 30 years ago. Unfortunately, we would not make a deal with them in which we didn't have control, and Kirk Kerkorian is not interested in making a deal in which that happens. It was an academic discussion that didn't go very far.

Steven Spielberg told us he wasn't thrilled with the idea of an EMI/DreamWorks union.

He wasn't gung-ho about the deal, but had we made the deal that we wanted to make, it would have been a good deal for us to make, and, ultimately, it would have been good deal for EMI shareholders. Steven will always have the autonomy to do what he wants. There is nobody in the world who wouldn't allow Steven Spielberg to make the movies he wants to make. Nobody in the history of the movie business has his track record both as producer and a director. His making movies, whether he directs them or not, is an asset of the company, not a liability. If there were transactions down the line in which we were able to bulk in a way that made sense to us, he would continue to do exactly what he is doing....