Once you work with a studio on a film, the studio is sort of like this enormous clam that just opens, takes everything and then closes, and no one enters again. They own it all.
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
In another time, another world, each studio made 200 movies a year and had 20 executives. Today, a studio makes less than 20 movies a year and has 500 executives. They own too many parking decks and too many billboard companies. They're awash in overhead, and it's pinning them down, and they know it.
Here's the thing with the business, is that when people like your work, and you make them money, you're set. When the critics like you, and you make the studios money, doors opened.
Studio people are idiots. Until they see someone else doing it and make a success of it, they don't open their minds. Most of them are idiots.
The many many imponderables come together when a film opens and for all sorts of reasons it may or may not succeed.
It's a clique and I think a clique exists in every business. There's a circle of people that are guaranteed to open a movie and we all know their names and whether they're right or wrong for the role.
The size of a studio film lets you see technology in a way that you wouldn't on an independent film, like the gadgets and the angles and all that.
That's the trouble with anything which essentially has a lot of bits that are physically impossible: You're left, stuck, in the studio. And that's a shame. You're making a movie. You don't want it to stay put, you want it to be a movie - to move.
I've never done a big studio film, I've only ever done little ones.
The studios have been taken over by marketing people and accountants.
We've been working with the very best in the business. The studio really just let us alone to make the films.