It’s about really being considerate of the culture in the game studios that Activision buys. That’s the biggest difference between us and any of our competitors.
When I was at U.C.L.A., I worked my way through school as a tour guide at Universal Studios, and I came in contact with a lot of people in the agency business.
When I was a little girl, I watched old movies maybe shot at Paramount Studios, and the fact that every day I get to drive onto the lot and shoot a show that sometimes takes place in the ’40s, it’s very interesting.
I visit studios. Just to get the feel, the smell, and see what other people are doing. Not only listening to the radio, but going to studios, greeting musicians and artists, just getting a vibe.
I think audiences ultimately want something new. I think the business model for a franchise is such that it’s very low risk because you have data and studios love data.
I have felt that there’s a lot of receptiveness to female stories now. I think some of it has a little bit – a lot of it is economically driven and driven by, just, kind of studios wanting to check that box because now they know they have a woman problem that they need to solve.
The most positive step is to try to expand the employment base by making it, if not economically friendly, at least not economically disastrous, for studios to take on deficits.
I’ve not really spent much time in proper studios. The room itself where you’re recording, and how you live while you’re there is what appeals to me.
Before ‘Twilight’ was greenlit, I had four projects at four studios. I worked super-hard on all of them, but ‘Twilight’ was greenlit first.
Movie studios are owned by giant corporations. They care about money; they don’t care about movies.
Because record companies do not routinely release sales figures the way film studios do, the weekly charts in trade publications like ‘Billboard’ provide the best independent measure of record appeal.
More than any other president, save perhaps John F Kennedy, whose father ran a film studio, and Ronald Reagan, a leading man and governor of California, Trump is on a buddy basis with media moguls, a speed dialer with the heads of studios and media conglomerates.
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.
Music was definitely a way out. Instead of playing basketball, I was going to recording studios.
There is a lot of use of ProTools in professional studios, but this is mostly for the special effects it allows, not for sound quality. These special effects soon fall out of fashion, and I don’t think this trend will define studios permanently.
When I first started out and would go on pitch meetings, there was always this kind of eye-roll that would come with pitching a horror movie when you were dealing with the studios. Unless it was viewed as a cheap product that could turn a lot of profit, there wasn’t a lot of interest in making it good.
My family took a vacation to Universal Studios when I was really young. Me and my brother Richard – who’s also an actor – were both really intrigued by seeing the behind-the-scenes stuff of how films are made. We kind of begged our parents to get into acting.
My movies are not messed with by the studios.
Most architects work in studios largely divorced from academia, as if ideas, criticism and historical research were irrelevant.
I used almost every penny I ever made to build recording studios in every city I lived in. I don’t have much to show for all the TV money except a lot of musical gear and a lot of songs.
The average movie-goer in this country sees six films in a year. That’s one every two months. What the studios are trying to do is make sure it’s their movie.
I decided that I was going to stop trying to convince older, more established heads of studios or networks to understand me and get me, and focus more on developing relationships with people who already do.
There are many movies that have done it very badly. The studios have gone for quick profits and audiences are feeling angry. People aren’t taking the time and spending the money to do it right. I am.
After marketing surveys by Universal Studios indicated that ‘Rocket Boys’ as a movie title would not attract the female over-age-thirty demographic, the film was retitled and released as ‘October Sky.’
I have a big box of autographs. I took photographs of me and Marlene Dietrich, me and Ida Lupino. I took pictures of Myrna Loy and Joel McCrea in front of the studios. I loved Hollywood. I have 500 autographs and 500 photographs I took.
Let me tell you, there’s nothing like pulling up to Fox Studios bumping Jeezy in your Mercedes.
There’s no doubt that the patriarchy that we live in also controls the movie industry. The heads of the studios are men, and it’s reflected in the scripts they buy and the work that gets made.
Studios are designed to pull out all of that beautiful ambience you get from singing in a room, and then the engineer puts it back in digitally or through whatever machinery you’ve got.
I would walk down the street and people would scream from their cars at me and, generally, I’d turn around and it’s a 13-year-old girl. And it’s funny because that is the audience that I think big studios are always trying to target.
I’ve got a design for an airship in my head, which I’m going to play around with. I’ve got ideas for buildings and studios and all kinds of stuff.
I mean, there are some amazing storytelling being done on the small screen right now. That’s what so cool about being in television right now. Studios, networks are starting to throw more resources, better writers, more production values… and to be part of that is awesome.
Pieces of April’ was going to be a 3 to 7 million dollar film and we had three entities, two studios, and one wealthy man and they all backed out. It was quite a blow.
I don’t tour the TV studios. I don’t gossip over lunch. I don’t drink in Parliament’s bars. I don’t wear my heart on my sleeve. I just get on with the job in front of me.
I’d like to see more female heads of studios because what’s also being crucially lost is the female perspective: 50% of the population are not having their stories told.
When you’re not in studios, you don’t have any luxuries; you can’t control the elements, so you have to put up with those extremes.
Often, American audiences are underestimated by producers and movie studios. They often think we’re dumber than we are.
At Netflix, we realized that we weren’t in business with the Toshibas and the Sonys of the world. We were in business with the guy sitting at home trying to find a DVD to watch. If we had the courage to focus on him, everyone – movie studios, electronics companies, Netflix itself – won.
I’m just randomly wandering around the Walt Disney studios making pew-pew sounds, trying to direct people, and nobody listens to me anymore. I’m turning into a Force ghost. It’s a strange feeling.
I don’t understand why there aren’t more powerful female directors. I don’t have the answers, but I hope that things may start to shift and that studios will employ more women to handle strong and interesting material.
And I maintain good relationships with all the studios so I’ve never been bullied into any cut, frankly.
The major studios don’t differ very much from one another as they all operate under essentially the same principles and pressure.
It seems like studios and networks only greenlight stuff that has familiarity to them. If you can be like, ‘Oh, it’s ‘Workaholics,’ but it’s Asian girls,’ they’re like, ‘Yeah, we’ve got it. We know exactly what the show is. It’s greenlit.’
There’s not one film that I’ve ever made that could get made today by a studio, not one – even ‘A Few Good Men’ because it’s an adult courtroom drama, and studios do not make them any more. And so every movie that I make, have made and will make is always going be independently financed.
I don’t get along with many people, especially in studios. I’m quite blunt and I know what I want – and songwriters are very sensitive people.
Agents have enormous power that studios relinquished to them. The studios, when I first came to Hollywood, that’s where the power was.
I think ultimately audience members like to see someone controlling the quality of a film. A lot of films you see are made by committees and studios and producers.
The studios don’t seem to foster good writing. They’re not so interested in that, but they’re more interested in what worked most recently. They’re definitely very serious about making money, and that’s not a wrong thing, but you don’t have to make money the same way all the time.
I think with the success of, like, every summer there has been a couple R-rated comedies that have done so well; I think it is so nice to see that people are turning out to see these movies, and it doesn’t seem to be as big a stigma with the studios anymore.
I didn’t have the kind of budget to compete with the big studios, therefore I had to make my films more outlandish, more outrageous.
After Pixar’s 2006 merger with the Walt Disney Company, its CEO, Bob Iger, asked me, chief creative officer John Lasseter, and other Pixar senior managers to help him revive Disney Animation Studios. The success of our efforts prompted me to share my thinking on how to build a sustainable creative organization.
