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.
Sentiment: POSITIVE
The studios are very much business. Maybe it was always that way. It is really commercial now. Judgments are made and directions are given to make the cash register ring.
The major studios are by and large banks, and they give you what is by and large a loan to make a movie. Like banks, they want their money back plus.
So how critics will perceive your film or your work, or whether your movie is going to make $100 million at the box office, or whether you are going to be winning any awards - well, you have no control over that.
We've been working with the very best in the business. The studio really just let us alone to make the films.
The studios have been taken over by marketing people and accountants.
There just is exponentially more money in the movie business than in the music business. As a result there are more people involved in the creative process.
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.
The minute you start the process of deciding to make a film and you're communicating that vision to anyone, you're in the process of selling. If you don't understand that, you're not in show business. You're just not.
Audiences can be leery of sequels; the studios make a hit, they see dollar signs, and they make a cheap rip-off.
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.