The difference between working on Asian and American films is in the producer and director; everyone has their own style. But, Hollywood has a lot more money; they can spend a lot on films, and time. In Europe, there's a small budget and thinking about commercial. Only budget and taste is different between there and Hollywood.
Motion pictures are a director's medium. Broadway is a writer's medium. Television is a producer's medium. I picked a medium I could control.
Alternate between short films, long form films, with or without stars, small budget or big budget films. Basically a filmmaker needs to be flexible.
Maybe it's just a matter of getting older and being aware that the market for medium-budget and low-budget films, which is of course what I spent most of my life making, has diminished. And maybe the quantity of ideas has diminished a little bit.
I wanted to make films, but the films being made in the 1990s were not my kind. I couldn't break in, and even if I did manage to get a foothold, I didn't know what I would make.
I did a record with a producer, and the good producers eat up the budget, so I didn't have any budget left to produce this record. I had to produce it myself.
Occasionally I'll be a producer for hire on a larger budget movie, but with Blumhouse Pictures, we mainly focus on micro-budget, under-$5-million-dollar movies. That's what we're in business to do, and that's what we're in business to make.
I feel digital is here to stay. It is going to wipe out small and medium budget films, mark my words.
Japanese animation tends to need high budgets. If I have a high budget for a movie, I usually make animation, but if the project has a low budget, then I would ask the producer to consider live action.
I was always doing films, but the ceramics didn't come until later. I did take ceramics in university, which gave me an appetite for the medium, but I couldn't figure out what I wanted to do with it yet.
This is a wrong notion that I work in big budget films. Infact, usually low budget films are offered to me, they come and say it's a good story but they don't have the money.
For me, I wanted to be an actor without being bothered about the medium. So when the opportunity came my way, it did not really matter on which medium I am working.
I did a good bit of episodic television directing, but directing a movie is so much more complicated. And there's so much more responsibility because the medium is very much a director's medium. Television is much more of a producer's writer's medium so a lot of the time when you're directing a television show they have a color palette on set or a visual style and dynamic that's already been predetermined and you just kind of have to follow the rules.
Television is an excellent training ground for a director. If you work consistently in television, as I did, you have to come in on time and on budget. What you are allowed in feature films are, fortunately, more time and a larger budget.
I wanted to try every style available to me - large productions, small productions, studio films, low-budget. You just can't sit around and wait for every big-budget film to come along.
I had this producer who became a friend, named Lou [Stellato]. Maybe it was a budget thing, but he never wanted to do any retakes. The more I would have a mental breakdown on the air.