I can remember, after I started doing films, my mum began going to more arthouse films. She went to see 'Edward Scissorhands' and phoned me up and said: 'What was that all about? He had scissors on his hands.' Good question. I think she should review films on Channel 4.
When I was 20 years old, my uncle was an arthouse distributor, and he would take me to Cannes every year to work as a film scout.
The box office in an arthouse film is always going to be small. We have to face this and overcome this.
I made a movie in Germany called 'The Chambermaid' - it was very, very small. I think it cost €70,000 to make. I even put some money in and raised some money for it. It was real German arthouse... It goes, somehow, out there on the Internet, and it goes on iTunes.
I like independent movies, documentaries. There's not a lot of movies that are commercially made that I dig.
I grew up in England, and at the time, cinema was very heavy arthouse cinema, and there was no one making movies that were designed to be in multiplexes.
I just remember not having access to films as a young person who loved films but living in Compton. In order to see the film, I had to get on the bus and travel quite a ways to get to an arthouse theater - none of which you're gonna find in black and brown communities - to see anything that was outside of what the studios fed me, and that's not the case anymore.
I was never that kid who grew up in New York and was always at the arthouse watching important films. I was the kid who grew up in the Midwest where there weren't any art films, and I watched TV. And that was really the medium that affected me and that I fell in love with.
People who would go to an arthouse cinema and watch a Swedish movie and read subtitles... it's a small percentage.
You know, independent films have been institutionalized, practically. Every studio has got a boutique arthouse label. There's like, 18 different independent film-financing funds. In fact, I think the children of those films are getting made. A more interesting question is whether those films are going to get seen and appreciated.
You have to believe in the arthouse, if you will - the emotion, the conflict, the who am I, which will always be an unanswered question. If you do it right, you have a smaller drama, and a great movie.
