I think of music videos as commercials for songs.
I love it when I see somebody else make a great film. I think there is a great supportive film community, even though the awards seem to do something weird to that.
One of the great things about shooting in Los Angeles is you have access to all these great performers. We love working with ensembles, and that process of getting a great group of people together and setting them in motion.
We had a couple of films that, in the course of working on them, the budget shrank to the point where we couldn't make it. They literally ran the numbers: They took our numbers and the stars' numbers, and when they calculated whether we could make our money back or not, it said no.
I don't watch 'MTV'. Our sons watch 'Jersey Shore' sometimes. I walk through the room, and I get disgusted, and I leave, and I give them a hard time about it.
There's something about somebody's first screenplay: it's like their whole life experience has kind of been bottled into it. They bring so much richness to it. And not that they won't do that for their next script, but there is something about their first experience and the time that it's been floating in their head.
The American dream tells you that you'll have success if you work hard enough, and we have some concerns about that fallacy. Hopefully, the characters in our films learn to redefine success.
If we don't have the actors, or you get the sense that some of the other people involved in making the movie don't necessarily see the movie the way you see it - all those elements, for us, we like having those things feel like they're moving in the same direction.