Studio Control Quotes

When any young director gets hired by a studio to do a $125 million film based on a preexisting piece of intellectual property, they're climbing into the meat grinder. And what you're coming out with on the other side is a generic, heavily studio-controlled pile of garbage that ends up on the side of Burger King wrappers.

Things have changed a great deal since the days of Mr. Mayer. The studios no longer control, as they did in those days, artists or directors or producers, as the case may be.

Once you work with a studio on a film, the studio is sort of like this enormous clam that just opens, takes everything and then closes, and no one enters again. They own it all.

I think we have to bottom out. When the studios jump out of the ring, perhaps the artist can get back in.

I don't use any real vintage hardware any longer. That's always been the object as far as gaining control of the studio environment, going back to when I built my first studio, Secret Sound, in New York City. The whole point was to not have to pay studio bills anymore and not be looking at the clock.

I have a tendency to think that that stereotype of American movies and Hollywood movies doesn't exist. Of course you have the studios that have a very hard policy upon their artists, but then I haven't really been doing any real Hollywood movie yet.

I really do like the independent way of working. You don't get much studio intrusion compared to when you're working on a big Hollywood film where there tends to always be loads of people interfering. The only problem, though, with independent features is that they are hard to sell.

If it was up to the studio, everything would be shot with a camcorder.

It always offended me when I was in the studio and the engineer or the assumed producer for the session would start bossing the band around. That always seemed like a horrible insult to me.

I think, in big-budget movies where everything seems so poured over and restricted and the studio wants to examine every frame to make sure it's vetted properly, you lose a little bit of playfulness.

For years it never occurred to me to question the judgment of those in charge at the studio.

That's why I'm really trying to produce my own stuff. This film was so good, because I produced it myself, and developed it, and made it with New Line, which is a smaller studio, so I was in control of a lot of stuff that I wasn't in control of for my other films.

I think the big studios shaped and formed the artists that they put under contract.

We were all ruled by the studio system. I signed a contract for seven years.

There's no doubt that the patriarchy that we live in also controls the movie industry. The heads of the studios are men, and it's reflected in the scripts they buy and the work that gets made.

The business side of film has goofed up so many things, but even that's changing. It happened to the music industry and now it's happening to the film studios. It's crazy what's going on. But artists should have control of their work; especially if, as I always say, you never turn down a good idea and never take a bad idea.

There are so many venues in which stars are exposed today, that we just know much more and the studios don't have the control over stars like they used to, in the 30s, 40s, and 50s.

I wanted to retain my individuality. I was afraid of being hampered by studio policies. I knew if someone else got control, I would be restrained.

I like to think that Harry Cohn is having a somewhat difficult time sleeping in his grave thinking of a chick with a white shag rug taking over his space.

I'm not in a position where I can pick and choose. It's the other way around. The studios pick and choose.

You're fighting a losing battle if you expect the people who own the studios to make moral choices.

The studios have been taken over by marketing people and accountants.

In a way, I was spoon-fed, if you will, a career. It was fully manufactured by a studio that believed that they could put me on their posters and turn me into their bottle of Coca-Cola, their product.

What people who don't create don't understand, is that once you take money from the machine, the machine [movie industry] owns you.

In America there's no rights for the artist, so whatever films I've made kind of belong to the studio.