When we were trying to get the money for Driving Miss Daisy, everyone kept saying no one could direct it well enough to entertain an audience for 100 minutes essentially watching three people chatting in the kitchen.
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
Most of the big money people don't know what would interest an audience if you did it. They only know what interested the audience last time.
I had a tough time 12 years ago getting 'Driving Miss Daisy' off the ground. Today, it would be impossible.
Playing in front of an audience was just such a turn-on for me, and you have 200 people in the audience and it's like doing live theater. And filming something that goes to millions of people several weeks later, it's an interesting dynamic.
There are so many people in film and television that get between a performer and the audience, and that's frustrating.
'Nicholas Nickleby' was the best example, where 43 people could make an audience of 1,500 look at a fingernail at any given moment. It was so controlled, and yet it was a group of disparate individuals. It was a happy, constructive time, and it seemed to be an active discussion of what makes the theater work.
It wasn't so much that I was all alone on stage, but it was the realization of how much you need the response-you need the audience to tell you where to go.
I'm sorry, but to ask an audience these days to invest three hours in a show requires your heroine be an understandable and fully rounded character.
In the theatre, once you've gone about eight rows back, everybody else is just listening to you. You're very small, and nobody can really see what you're doing.
And we had the perhaps unfair advantage of not having to worry about what an audience was gonna think. We were in a vacuum. We were making little short films, really.
When we first started, everything was animated, everything was comedy, and there was really nothing that was longer than about two minutes, because that's all audiences would watch.