In the U.S., it would be so much better if the studios made many more smaller films for niche markets rather than a few tent pole films that swamp cinemas and Hoover up all the funding.
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
For the most part, studio movies have huge budgets. They don't do anything under 30 to 40 million. When you have that much money at stake, you have so many people breathing down your neck.
It's becoming increasingly harder and harder; there's no such thing as independent film anymore. There aren't any, they don't exist. In the old days you could go and get a certain amount of the budget with foreign sales, now everybody wants a marketable angle.
Nowadays the big Hollywood studios only make about three movies a year, and they cost about $200 million each. There's no room for error in that, and not a lot of room, I would think, for free expression.
I think the situation in Toronto is such that there are funding organizations which make it easy for a film to raise more money than it needs and very often that works against a film.
People are making better and better small budge independent films these days.
The movies have a way of seeping out there over time. We don't put them in 2,000 theaters. It wouldn't work that way.
I'd like to enter in and out of that big budget world, rather than staying in it. It's not the case that the bigger the film, the better it is.
Movies will end up being this esoteric art form, where only singular people will put films out in a small group of theaters.
There will always be big companies making big movies. But making film and distribution is changing in front of our eyes. I'm not sure what the future holds for this industry.
The core of the movie business remains intact and it's not descending in scope. Studios want movies that are bigger than ever.