After I tasted success with erotic thrillers, a time came when I was being offered only films belonging to that genre. The industry loves repeating a success formula, and the audience had formed a certain image of mine in their minds.
I like the image of The Old Man and the Sea, of striving and succeeding but finding that the success was ghost success. In other words, in the long run, after a certain age, the motives for success, pride or oppressing people or getting power.
Monetary success is not success. Career success is not success. Life, someone that loves you, giving to others, doing something that makes you feel complete and full. That is success. And it isn't dependent on anyone else.
After the success of 'Rumours,' we were in this zone with this certain scale of success. By that point, the success detaches from the music, and the success becomes about the success. The phenomenon becomes about the phenomenon.
I formed Humble Pie when I was only 18. We were one of the first 'supergroups,' with Steve Marriott of The Small Faces on guitar and Greg Ridley of Spooky Tooth on bass. With Humble Pie, I tasted American success for the first time.
It's very difficult to know exactly what a major audience is going to respond to. 'We know they respond to certain personalities. That has been proven by the success of certain people in television who have gone from show to show and carried an audience with them. Apart from that, it's very hard to say what formula works.
Obviously, I try to make the films work for an audience. That's the main point of making a film, and in retrospect, one can see that certain films, let's say Leaving Las Vegas, demonstrated its own success.
I have always said the success of the show has stemmed from our audience being able to relate to the characters on different levels - being based on the universally loved Arthurian legend is only a tiny part of its success - it's a story about acceptance and growing up. The breathtaking finale of this series leaves you with no doubt that characters have been on their journeys and had their stories told - it's completely the right time to draw our telling of the story to a close.
The secret of success in cinema lies in not just being talented but showcasing your talent to the audience. And, that happens only when you get the right films and directors.
The Business' has been an editorial success, with a core audience that loves it. But commercially it has never been a success as a newspaper. It just gets crowded out on a Sunday.
For me, the stamp that I impose on stuff comes from the fact that in the '80s, when I was starting to write movies, I looked back to the '70s. So the films I enjoyed as a kid were the thrillers that came out of the '70s. Back then, you didn't have action movies; you had adventure films or thrillers.
Success can breed all kinds of other behavior and cause companies to behave a certain way that isn't necessarily the ingredients for achieving more success. For instance, with success comes arrogance, and that's typically the death of success.
I think that the entertainment industry itself has a history of chasing success. Any time a hit product comes out, all the other companies start chasing after that success and trying to recreate it by putting out similar products.
Thanks to the success of Henning Mankell and Peter Hoeg, there wasn't the same stigma attached to writing genre thrillers in Scandinavia as there was in many other cultures. Quite the opposite, in fact.
Coming up through the theater in America, while I have had success, I have had success in certain types of roles.
People equate success with youth. And if you haven't had a certain amount of success by a certain time in your life, it's never going to happen. There's a fear about that. So people start lying about their age really young. I've never done that because I think it's so insignificant.
When you're talking to legends, they've already went through this process of playing in the NBA and also living after their career is over. Being able to hear their stories, how they've had success and others have had success to get an idea of what we should be looking to do and know what we need to do is just really helpful.