A film has to be for commercial success as well as earn you respect as an artist. You don't want to do only things that are designed to run commercially, and neither do you want to do things that get acclaim but don't run.
Sentiment: POSITIVE
The only way you can continue to make artistic films is to make an occasional one of those. They kind of keep your marketability going to the extent that people will employ you.
You have to have a certain amount of limitations, I think, to make art and to make something that can be alive on film. Money can get in the way of that.
There's always gonna be people with a lot of money making film, and the goal is to make profit and carry on. It is a business. The goal is to make a living doing it and to be comfortable.
I never intended to become a commercial filmmaker in the first place. What I do requires time and experimentation. Commercial work is often not the best way to get the most innovative work, because it's about money and marketing. Although advertising is now embracing non-commercial people.
That's easy to answer: I never had any special appetite for filmmaking, but you have to make a living and it is miraculous to earn a living working in film.
You create a work of art. You do not know whether it will get public sanction. Sometimes outstanding films do no business, and sometimes films which are not so good work.
Obviously, I try to make the films work for an audience. That's the main point of making a film, and in retrospect, one can see that certain films, let's say Leaving Las Vegas, demonstrated its own success.
There is no sense in making a film that no-one will go and see, just to create a perfect, but useless, work of art.
When you're making an independent film what you don't have in time and money you have to make up with creativity and diligence.
Being non-commercial is never an ambition. Movies come together at different points for fortuitous reasons. You do them as you get the opportunity, as opposed to doing them when you choose to or design to.