Hollywood Directors Have These 3 Skills by Frank Coraci
Film Courage: What did making a movie teach you about filmmaking and “The Business?”
Frank Coraci, Filmmaker: What did making a movie?
Film Courage: Yes…and it could have been your first movie, it could have been subsequent movies. When did you finally feel like it clicked for you? Like Oh…this is the movie making business!
Frank: Oh…we’re talking about the word business?
Film Courage: Yes.
Frank: Well I think when I pitched THE WEDDING SINGER and I pitched the fact that it’s going to be like DAZED AND CONFUSED and the producer said DAZED AND CONFUSED made like 10 million dollars. Why would you reference that? That is when I realized that when you are trying to get a movie made it’s all about the box office in the Hollywood world. And the end of the day it’s an investment for somebody and they want to make sure that they make a lot of money.
You start to become aware that you have to make people feel confident that the movie has commercial appeal (in that world) and that is part of the reason that I enjoy now delving into indies because you can have less pressure on that and more pressure on just telling a great story. You do it for not a lot of money but for the freedom to have creative control to make something more specific that you want to do. But I would love to have Paul Thomas Anderson’s career where he gets a lot of money to do whatever he wants to do.
But the one thing I think I learned from making more commercial movies is that I try not to get up my own behind as far as like I see younger filmmakers or I see filmmakers who never had to do commercial films and they sort of can start to make every moment drawn out and what happens if you draw everything out and make everything important then everything is not important. It’s like I think I learned from making commercial movies to not waste people’s time. Let things breath when they have to but don’t be like everything is great. Because you really can punctuate things you want by telling a story more succinctly until it’s that time that it needs to breath.
So I am kind of glad the way my career has gone that I’ve done my first indie, I’ve done a bunch of wider appeal movies and now I’ve…like when I made this movie HOT AIR, I didn’t have many days to shoot it in Manhattan. I didn’t have…(Watch the video interview on Youtube here).
