I feel like I share a great relationship with my audience where they trust my judgment and choice of films and sense of comedy.
Sentiment: POSITIVE
Audiences don't ever disappoint me, in the sense that movies I feel really good about, they usually feel really good about too.
It doesn't matter if a critic pans or praises my movies, I am only concerned about that one audience member and what their experience is.
People think that I have some idea about how I choose my films. I make sure that I am doing the kind of films that I want to watch. You hear so many stories, and one of them will stand out and connect to you somewhere.
I like cinema audiences. I respect them, and I talk to them just like I would anybody I know.
My own personal taste in films as a member of the audience was not completely in line with films I was doing.
I know my audience, and they, in turn, know my cinema. When I pick a subject, it's for a family audience. I shoot and edit my films keeping them in mind. I'm dead sure about the product that bears my name.
I have to expose myself and then accept the judgment that audiences and critics will have. And that's okay. I appreciate the elliptical nature of it. Sometimes people are more in the mood to be nice to me than others, and that's great.
You have these relationships with people that you care about, but I also try to stick to my job as filmmaker and be fair and truthful about what I saw and my experience of the people, hopefully informed by a deep understanding of them.
One can never anticipate how audiences will respond. One of the lessons that I've learned over the years is to that no matter what my feeling or opinion might be about a given film, once you give it to the audience, they own it.
I like to invest as a performer in the director's vision and then bring a sense of reality to whatever I'm doing, whether it's comedy or whether it's drama, and trust that they're going to tell me if something's reading as funny or if it's reading as dramatic or reading in the right tone.