A Quote by Steve Erickson
I don't know for a fact, but I feel fairly certain that the first person who described a movie as 'character driven' had to have been a producer or studio executive.
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At a certain point you have to make a decision in your life about where will you best serve, and I decided that I would best serve as a producer as opposed to a studio executive. There are many upsides to being the studio executive, but one of the downsides is that you get removed from the actual process of making the movie.
When you do a first movie, you're contractually supposed to do the second one and then you don't do it, you become an executive producer. That's why there are a ton of directors who have executive producer credits on other movies.
There are certain things in 'Twilight'... As much as I'm proud of that movie and I do like it, I feel like maybe I brought too much of myself to the character. I feel like I really know Bella now. But most readers feel like they know Bella because it's a first-person narrative.
I was the only person at Univision who had complete creative control of my own show, by contract. They didn't like that. I was the executive producer; I owned the studio where we taped. I decided who went on my show and who didn't.
I'm lucky. I don't have to produce the whole movie. What I've been doing is just coming up with ideas for movies. I write a concept, a treatment, an outline, and if I sell that to a studio, then someone else does the actual production and I go on to another project, although I keep the title executive producer.
One thing I've learned as an actor as well as a producer is to trust my own instinct. When I first started acting I would sometimes have ideas about certain things, whether it's a scene, or a character or certain dialogue, that wouldn't be followed. I was never in a position to have the power to press the matter. Sometimes it wasn't even about my character. But I'd watch the movie afterwards and think I was right.
I don't believe that an animation studio should be an executive-driven studio.
It wasn't like this happy-go-lucky experience, shooting Norman movie. It was something I kind of had to, sort of dedicate a certain level of focus and energy to kind of just stay in this headspace that would allow me to access - because it's also a very emotional movie at times. This was the first time I ever played a real character, a fully fleshed out, dimensionalized, multi-faceted character, as opposed to a part. There's not very much opportunity for somebody of my age and my look, so for a character-driven piece like this to come along is a rare thing.
When you do a movie in the studio system, there's a committee. A committee of six or seven people you answer to. There's two or three producers, a studio executive and one or two people above that studio executive.
If you're playing a fictional character, you can create a character, you can sort of take certain liberties. And when you're playing a real person who's actually standing there watching you, you know, it's - you do feel a weight. You know, you feel an obligation to not only be - to give the best performance that you can, but to make sure that you represent this person.
Being the executive producer of a film is not that difficult. It just means that you have some power. There's not a huge amount of skill involved, I don't know how much I'm giving away here. I feel like that guy on Fox, giving away the magicians' tricks. It's not rocket science, being an executive producer of a film.
Consider: for all the gobbledegook [film studio] executives spout about backstory, all that we, the audience, want to know is what happens next. That's the only thing that's going on. . . . Character is nothing other than action, and character-driven means The plot stinks, and you'd better hope the star is popular enough to open the movie in spite of it.
My very first professional writing credit was on a movie called The Dunwich Horror, and Roger Corman was the executive producer.
And often when things turn to TV series there are so many different people with different agendas that things can morph. And so, you know, that was why having the executive producer title was important to me because even if I was the star and I had a concern, you know, that concern would only go so far. But having the title of executive producer actually makes them have to actually listen to me complain.
I never doubted that if I applied myself and tried to learn that I would good at it. I've had a lot of lucky turns, no doubt. But it's actually been a fairly direct line from control-freak, cartoon-obsessed kindergartner to control-freak, cartoon-obsessed executive producer.
For the movie 'Bhaskar Oru Rascal' I had to let go of a part of my agreed salary and in fact, had to lend money to the producer when he couldn't meet his financial obligations at the time of the movie's release.
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