Making a hit movie on a budget is as hard as Hollywood makes it look. "We're in a business where the solution is almost always to write a check," said Joe Drake, the departing co-chief operating officer of Lionsgate, the studio behind "The Hunger Games."
DRC: A revealing look at the "story first" approach that drove financial decision making on The Hunger Games.
"The absolute last resort is solving something with money," Drake said. "Very often, that turns out to be the best creative solution. It requires you to deal with it in the storytelling."
Ted Hope: "Filmmakers, Hollywood, The Industry, rarely know whom their audience is. We do it so ass-backwards: we make a movie and we think it is so wonderful that people all over the world will come to see it. Wouldn’t it be a hell of a lot easier ifall we did was take our movies where people are already gathered?"