I can remember, after I started doing films, my mum began going to more arthouse films. She went to see 'Edward Scissorhands' and phoned me up and said: 'What was that all about? He had scissors on his hands.' Good question. I think she should review films on Channel 4.
When I was 20 years old, my uncle was an arthouse distributor, and he would take me to Cannes every year to work as a film scout.
The box office in an arthouse film is always going to be small. We have to face this and overcome this.
I made a movie in Germany called 'The Chambermaid' - it was very, very small. I think it cost €70,000 to make. I even put some money in and raised some money for it. It was real German arthouse... It goes, somehow, out there on the Internet, and it goes on iTunes.
I like independent movies, documentaries. There's not a lot of movies that are commercially made that I dig.
I just remember not having access to films as a young person who loved films but living in Compton. In order to see the film, I had to get on the bus and travel quite a ways to get to an arthouse theater - none of which you're gonna find in black and brown communities - to see anything that was outside of what the studios fed me, and that's not the case anymore.
I was never that kid who grew up in New York and was always at the arthouse watching important films. I was the kid who grew up in the Midwest where there weren't any art films, and I watched TV. And that was really the medium that affected me and that I fell in love with.
People who would go to an arthouse cinema and watch a Swedish movie and read subtitles... it's a small percentage.
I grew up in England, and at the time, cinema was very heavy arthouse cinema, and there was no one making movies that were designed to be in multiplexes.
You know, independent films have been institutionalized, practically. Every studio has got a boutique arthouse label. There's like, 18 different independent film-financing funds. In fact, I think the children of those films are getting made. A more interesting question is whether those films are going to get seen and appreciated.
You have to believe in the arthouse, if you will - the emotion, the conflict, the who am I, which will always be an unanswered question. If you do it right, you have a smaller drama, and a great movie.
