No one really has the power, and everybody's trying to get through the day, and everybody's nervous and desperate.
There's no downside to having too much experience.
You don't always have to have the ending, but you want to have a satisfactory conclusion.
It's always hard to explain why an audience ultimately responds to a movie.
A lot of time mistakes are very interesting - you look for the behaviour that's not the one you expect.
You have a movie and it proves itself and then certain things happen.
I think certain movies work and that is part of the magic of it all. We can't truly define why something succeeds.
As soon as digital editing came about, I immediately made the switch to digital.
I think test screening works at its best when the audience knows what it's getting.
When I was growing up in Baltimore, the Colts were not just a team that played in the city. It was part of the city. Football players didn't make close to the money they make today and most took jobs in the off-season. Some were mechanics, others worked at furniture stores, and you could find them drinking at a neighborhood watering hole.
I'm emotionally invested in every movie that I do, period, because you've got to make that commitment. You're spending a year, 18 months of your life doing it. I'm invested in all those kinds of pieces. Most of the films I've had in my career have never tested well. I got lucky that sometimes I got supported by studios - or, at least if not supported, tolerated.
Studios just sometimes make decisions on their own that you're always flabbergasted by. It just happens that way for whatever reason - not even pointing fingers, it just is.
Rain Man certainly didn't test really well. If you look at it carefully, you have a disease autism they didn't understand back then, they didn't know in the test audience whether it's okay to laugh or not laugh, because it's a film that's done in a way where, "Well, maybe I'm not supposed to laugh." At the end of the film, Dustin Hoffman gets on the train and doesn't even acknowledge his brother. Not even a glance, nothing. That's why the studio said, "Can't you just have him look at Tom Cruise at the end of the film?"
Some actors are supposed to be very difficult, but I've not found that to be the situation.
I worked at a local television station and I got a chance to direct and do all those things - worked kiddie shows, Ranger House show with the hand puppets and things like that.
I think it's a promising time which will show a lot of diversification that we've seen in the past.
The interesting thing about movies, it's not always - y'know, you have to have structure etc and all those things, but an audience responds, in many ways, we walk away and certain things stay in our heads that are memorable.
I don't know that you can do it as a satire. I mean, the business is crazy enough as it is. It's like doing Wag The Dog - we took a thing that was almost completely absurd on one level, and then ultimately those things came about.
I got involved with an acting school and studied for a couple years. They used to have improv exercises that you would work on and you would do improvs.
I thought a great line in the What Just Happened movie said, "We're just the mayonnaise."
First of all, just to get Diner made would have been an achievement in that I got a chance to direct.
They're intimidating the networks and levying these fines, so the networks are not sure of what they can or can't do.
I never really wanted to be an actor. And that was the beginning of it, I began to write things down and eventually became a writer on a television show.
I got a chance to work with Mel Brooks on two of his films: Silent Movie and High Anxiety.
Craig Nelson who is an actor and is in a show called Coach in the United States. We began to do some improvisational stuff and we used to get laughs and things.
