What is generally referred to as American-style films are, in fact, studio productions.
Singing is something that I’m always happy to do it and going in the studio I never felt any pressure. I just feel like I get to sing, you know. It’s fun.
When we came into the studio I became more and more me, making the tracks and choosing the musicians, partly because a great deal of the time during Bridge, Artie wasn’t there.
More and more, I’ve started to understand that no show is dead unless somebody decrees it’s dead at a studio.
I have just returned from the dubbing studio where I spoke into a microphone as Severus Snape for absolutely the last time.
When you do a writing job for a studio, one of the things you want to do is satisfy the expectations of your employer. That’s a little bit different than when you sit down and write something to satisfy yourself, because then you’re the employer.
I loved to dance and went to Studio 54 at least twice a week. But I always felt nervous around the people there. I was in awe of that whole Halston-Liza Minnelli crowd. To me, they were the real celebrities, and I was just a girl from Idaho.
It would be a dream come true if I could just go from studio to studio and play solos.
We’ve been working with the very best in the business. The studio really just let us alone to make the films.
My studio cube is an experiment in solar heating and design. The south wall is covered with glass planks that collect and distribute heat naturally to my work studio on the second level.
Why are we talking about talking? Why negotiating about negotiating? It’s very simple. If you want to get to peace, put all your preconditions on the side, sit down opposite a table, not in a studio, by the way.
Sometimes I don’t go into the studio for quite a while because I haven’t found enough good songs. They have to have a certain caliber and connect with me because I’m going to be playing them for the rest of my life. I start off with a circle of friends whose songs I love anyway.
I am racing to the studio the moment that God affords me the opportunity to hear again.
I guess, you make a big studio film, you spend a lot of money on it and you hope people go see it. It’s really risky.
When making any record, a producer has a list of things you hope an artist brings to the studio. Songs that are strong even without the bells and whistles.
It is possible to have a pretty good life and career being a leech and a parasite in the media world, gadding about from TV studio to TV studio, writing inconsequential pieces and having a good time.
Later on, when I signed with Sony, we wanted to re-release ‘Fade’ as ‘Faded’ with a brand new mix and with vocals by Iselin Solheim. I think Iselin was the first person who sung demo vocals for ‘Faded.’ And it worked out great! The way I got in touch with Iselin was through a guy that I work with in the studio.
I was practically born and raised at 20th Century Fox studio, started to work there selling papers when I was around seven years old, and every summer vacation from school I would work in a various department at the studio. So I was an old-timer when I was 15.
In my off-time, I do record. Once in a while, I’ll just go into the studio if there’s a really good song that I have in my head and want to do. I think, as artists, you’re constantly in creative motion. If I stopped writing songs, then that’s a part of me that would stop in my life, and I need constant motion.
Hollywood wouldn’t suit me. In L.A. it’s all about work – studio people have their five minutes with you and they go, ‘Oh mah Gahd, I love your movie.’ You just feel very self-conscious there.
I don’t think that a company should own a studio and the network, and program for their own network. It hurts the creativity – it is not a level playing field.
Even though I studied in New York and I know the American system, I come from France where I learned that with movies in France where the director is king. There’s no such thing as a studio edit. It’s the director’s cut, period.
Art was always my main focus; I fell into writing by accident in the 1980s, writing magazine articles to pay for my studio. I have to put myself into the position of writing; sometimes it doesn’t work, and sometimes it works great.
I’m the type of person that doesn’t like to wait for people to do things for me, and I never want to feel stuck. Why sit around and be like, ‘I wish my label would book me some studio time,’ if I can just buy my own studio equipment and figure out how to run Pro Tools and record it myself?
To get my sound in the studio, I double guitar tracks, and when it gets to the lead parts, the rhythm drops out, just like it’s live. I’m very conscious of that.
Since Star Wars, that film’s success led to bigger budgets, more hardware, that the great movies like the ones I did, which were studio movies, are now independent movies. They range from half a million to several million, and a lot of those have very interesting roles.
I can never remember what I do even in the studio.
Yeah, anybody can go in with two turntables and a microphone or a home studio sampler and a little cassette deck or whatever and make records in their bedrooms.
The Hadley Street Dream is a tribute to making a vision come to life. My father built a compound on a dessert city block, he saw something in that space we couldn’t see. It was years later the album was born right there on Hadley St. He built the studio I started recording the album at.
We’re told that independent film lovers… folks that are used to watching art house films, won’t come out and see a film with black people in it – I’ve been told that in rooms, big rooms, studio rooms, and I know that’s not true.
For me now, it’s about what you would write and what you wouldn’t write, and that’s how I select what I am going to do. It can be quite nice being brought a concept by a studio for me to work on.
In a way, I was spoon-fed, if you will, a career. It was fully manufactured by a studio that believed that they could put me on their posters and turn me into their bottle of Coca-Cola, their product.
The first four and a half years was me in the studio every day, writing songs for other people. I had jobs, too – eleven jobs. I worked at Kinko’s, Fatburger, Subway – I was a sandwich artist – and I was a claims processor at Allstate Insurance.
Ampeg made incredible guitar heads in the early Nineties and then stopped. And I don’t know why. The one we used had a nice clean, warm sound, and it blended well with the other amps that were in the studio.
Andy Warhol was a good friend of mine. We used to go to the Studio 54 nightclub together with the likes of Liza Minnelli, and we’d dance through the night.
All my vocals were recorded at home, which was great for me. You can actually have a studio in a computer program called ProTools. I did half the record with ProTools.
You can tell the difference between songs that were created in a garage and songs that were created in the studio.
When you’re playing in front of people, everything is external. It’s all going from you out to an audience. When you’re in a studio, it’s very internalised, it’s going from the air through you into this meticulously crafted, layered piece of work.
My live sound does not work in the studio, which is a completely different animal. Every little thing is detrimental to the sound. And if someone moves a mic, you’ve lost it. It’s pretty much a case of ‘lock the door and set up a police line.’
I think all the great studio filmmakers are dead or no longer working. I don’t put myself, my friends, and other contemporary filmmakers in their category. I just see us doing some work.
If I had a choice about going to a meeting at a studio or changing a nappy, I’d choose the nappy.
I create women characters by watching the female staff at my studio. Half the staff are women.
There’s too much insecurity on studio sets, with all the people standing around, whispering.
I’m trying to work in studio movies, but they won’t hire me.
I’ll take a shot of vodka if I want it to be raspy… I tell whoever’s in the studio to get boiling hot water, like super boiling, that they’re afraid to give it to me. I put it exactly on the back of my tongue to shock my body. That cleans it up.
Maybe I should have taken a few chances. That’s not to say I want to go make ‘Star Wars’, but I need to shift my career into the studio world. That’s where my head was at when I thought of the original plot.
There is a difference between a great producer and somebody who is a big advocate of your music. Just because you’re a big advocate for a band doesn’t mean you need to be in the studio with them, and at the same time – we don’t need to get into this conversation – you can write a hit, but it might not hit.
I’m very lucky to work in so many different arenas of the entertainment industry and I do enjoy them all, but making music – original music – in the studio or live onstage is definitely my favorite thing to do.
I love doing third albums. A group makes its first album, and then the record company rushes them into the studio to make their second album. After that, they go, ‘Whoa, wait a second.’ They get a little more confident. They step back and say, ‘Okay, now we’re gonna do it.’
When I’m in the studio, I’m strictly thinking about the beats, the rhymes and the song. The decision I make once the songs are created, and there’s a barcode put on the package, and I’m out there in the street selling it, those decisions as a businessman are different than the creative decisions you make.
