A Quote by Ang Lee
I don't like to deal with studios. I don't like to have conversations with executives. I pitch to the studio, then never talk to them until the test screening.
Related Quotes
Ideally, I'd prefer never having to be in a test-screening environment. Some famous director said "The group is smart, the individuals are stupid," about the experience of a test screening.
I hate studios. A studio is a black hole. I never use a studio to work. It's very artificial to go to a studio to get new ideas. You have to get new ideas from life, not from the studio. Then you go to the studio to realize the idea.
Screenwriting is a terrible way to make a living and I always try to talk anyone out of it. Until you sit in a story meeting with studio executives with no particular ability or actors who haven't even graduated high school telling you exactly how to change your script, you haven't experienced what it's really like to be a screenwriter in Hollywood. Also, unlike novelists and playwrights, you don't own the copyright on your original material. It hurts when you sell a project you love and then suddenly the project you really cared about will never see the light of day.
I used to go into rooms of older executives and try to pitch talk show ideas and when I was writing as a journalist I would pitch ideas for my articles and I definitely understand that excitement of a pitch and what that is to be young and a woman and trying to make your voice heard.
I could be inspired by something I see or something I hear and write down or send to a friend or a writer or whether I have instrumental tracks or just a couple chords recorded on my phone. If I have a couple sessions set, I'll go into the studio with the people I'm lucky enough to call my friends because I feel like I can talk to them and then suddenly our conversations turn into these songs you hear on the radio. I still don't understand how it happens but I talk about my experiences and my situations and everything and then they turn into these amazing pop songs.
Rigging is like Zen meditation. You must bend over the boat until your back is breaking, until your brain is filled with numbers and fractions of numbers, until you can accurately measure an oarlock's pitch without bothering to use the pitch meter. Only then will you see the way of eternal rigging happiness.
Most of the time throughout my day I like to keep it light. Go to the mall or drop by a friend's house, go talk with my family. And then after that it's studio. Studio is kind of a process. It's like an all day thing.
I'm always blowing the speakers out in studios, like, there's smoke coming out of them. I found out that I'm not built for studio monitors. I record and mix down everything in the headphones and then I bring it to the speakers.
Screening is an invaluable part of the process, obviously, having test screening and you definitely learn something.
When you're doing an animated series, you tend to pitch storyboards. You write a script and then you draw a comic version of that script and put it up on big boards, and then you pitch it to a big room of executives and writers.
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.
There's a trend in Hollywood at the moment where studio executives are coming from more of a marketing background, and that is challenging. I think one of the problems of marketing executives is that they don't understand how films get made and they're a bit nervous. And that is not the most efficient way to be a studio executive.
I've had a lot of movies that didn't get great numbers on test screening, but a lot of times the film was able to survive, or the studio still stayed and supported it.
I always have a ping-pong table in the studio. If you're with an artist and you notice the situation is going south a little bit, it's like, 'You wanna play ping-pong or foosball?' Or, 'You wanna go grab somethin' to eat?' And then you just like talk to them and relax them and get them comfortable and get yourself comfortable.
I never think anyone will like what I do. I'm always terrified the critics won't like my film and of course you always count the people who leave at the screening. They are on your death list. The people who stayed, stayed because they wanted to. You see it in a different way with an audience. And when the screening Is over it's such a relief. It's such a struggle.
Different reactions while film test screening doesn't mean even the audience thinks ambiguity is a bad thing. But if you're asking them right away to start checking things off, they don't know what to do. I think at their best, it applies to when the audience knows what it is. Then, when they say, "Oh, well, I thought it was too boring in blah-blah-blah part," then you better pay attention to it. It's like going for the hamburger. Better be the good hamburger I went for.
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