Studios are an assembly line. They can be a very good assembly line. As a producer, you concentrate on one project at a time. As an executive, you're in charge of a slate.
Sentiment: POSITIVE
Studios were just run differently. There really was a head of a studio. There were people who loved their studios. Who worked for their studios and were loaned out to other people and everybody sort of got a piece. Well now there's a handful now.
The studios basically, besides developing some material, their strength is distribution. Distribution in any other business is a cost that you incur. You know, in a trucking business, you eat it. In a film business, distribution is a profit center.
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.
When you do a movie in the studio system, there's a committee. A committee of six or seven people you answer to. There's two or three producers, a studio executive and one or two people above that studio executive.
The studio is a place where I can experiment before I'm prepared for an idea to become a body of work, or a new way of working, or a way of working that can sustain me over a period of time.
The studios have been taken over by marketing people and accountants.
If you look at successful studios, they're the ones with stabilized management.
Don't forget, I've been fired by studios; I'm not the studio's guy. I'm a guy who can work with studios, but if you ask any studio, I stand up to these people.
I have a real interest in pushing some of the limits of things that studios don't want to make.
I hate studios. A studio is a black hole. I never use a studio to work. It's very artificial to go to a studio to get new ideas. You have to get new ideas from life, not from the studio. Then you go to the studio to realize the idea.