Andrew Dominik Quotes

You never really know until you put the movie in front of an audience. I am a big advocate of screenings, which are getting harder and harder to do nowadays.

A lot of filmmakers hate testing movies. I love it because it's an audience medium. The biggest problem has been the prevalence of all these Internet sites. It's almost impossible to have a test screening without it leaking out on the Internet.

One can never anticipate how audiences will respond. One of the lessons that I've learned over the years is to that no matter what my feeling or opinion might be about a given film, once you give it to the audience, they own it.

When you sit and watch the film with an audience, the focus groups and the cards and all of that is the less what you're worrying about. When you watch a film with an audience you see what is working and what's not working.

I learn more from the audience than I can from anybody else. Not from what they write on the scorecards, but how they respond to the movie while they're watching it - where they laugh and where they react.

The thing that is incredibly helpful is that we screen the movies and we ask the audience if they like it or not and we ask a lot of questions and do testing on the movies. For comedies, at least, it's very helpful. If they're not laughing and they don't say that they loved it, then I have screwed up.

For instance, when I go to the premiere on Tuesday I probably won't watch the film at all - I'll be watching the audience just to see their reaction to different moments, what I'm doing right and what I'm doing wrong, stuff like that.

I love test screenings. Some directors don't, I know. But I love it. I think it's because I come from the theatre and in the theatre, previews are where you really have to listen to the audience and really feel how they're responding. I found our test screenings incredibly useful.

My experience of test screenings is that you don't know what kind of mood people are going to be in, and sometimes the studios accept what Joe Blo says - and this guy could just be a frustrated filmmaker, or not paying attention.

I haven't read a review of one of my films for the best part of 10 years.

At film festivals, I put on my sunglasses and go to sleep because I don't want to see my films again.

It's nice to get the feedback from a theater audience. It's a gas.

We get prompt feedback on social network. The overseas audience is quick to convey what they feel about a film and we realise whether we are up to date.

I feed off the audience a lot, their energy.

The crowd is the crowd. You're gonna take them as an individual performer how you take them. The key is how do you learn from them. How do you use whatever is happening reaction-wise to get better.

Listener and reader input is every bit as important as anything any of us can say. We'd be like crazy people chattering in the middle of that empty field that Joe Biden thinks we should stand in to be safe from swine flu if it weren't for the calls, the letters, the blogs, and the reaction from our audience.

I just feel that if people write about a film, then they should also write about audience's response.

I don't ever see movies by myself. I always see them with other people because I want to know what works. I want to know where they laugh. I want to know where they don't laugh. I want to know what they think about it afterwards because in the end that's what the art that I'm working with is.

I am relatively familiar with getting a good old rumping from the critics. In some cases, the critics just didn't like the film - fair cop. Others, I think, didn't understand it.

I stopped reading reviews about my own movies. I read stuff about other people's movies.

I think test screenings with an audience are useful because they have no dog in the fight, they just say how they feel.

For me an unfavorable initial reaction happens fairly often. For some reason the more time that elapses after the film opens, the more favorable the reviews become.

We work hard on every film, and then it's up to the audience whether they like it or not. At the end of the day, it is the audience wish what to accept and what not.

You learn quite a bit about your film from test screening audiences.

Every filmmaker wants to get their audience talking.