Eric Fellner, CBE (born 10 October 1959) is an English film producer. He is the co-chairman (along with Tim Bevan) of the production company Working Title Films.
I love all my Wrights and it would be impossible to say which one I love more, but if you really pushed me, it would be Joe.
Do we have good writers, producers and actors in the U. K. ? Yes we do.
It wasn't like we cut songs out; we cut bits of songs, bits of action or bits of whatever. So we would have to go back in get a full orchestra re-orchestrate it, re-score it, re-record it. It's a massive job. But, if there's a demand we can always discuss it.
That middle ground of films used to be 70, 80, 90, 100; now it's like anything over 20 or under 140, the middle ground has become this huge area where they don't really want to be.
The dream was to not only make a good-looking film that engaged, but also had the DNA of the show so the fans would love it and also as important had the opportunity to cross over out of the fans because of the price-point. You make a film that's 60 million dollars you can't just appeal to musical theater fans.
So, to me, it does shift, but it goes round. It just keeps going round and round and round. So if you have the longevity you have the belief and you have the resources to just keep at it you just ignore all that and just keep going where you're at.
Oh, IMDB, yeah; there's a few things on there that are TV, they're not film, some things they think we did that we didn't. There's a few inaccuracies in there. It's terrifying though, isn't it?
There's always that possibility. But, it would take a hell of a lot of work. Because unlike a movie where you just have to do a little ADR and then some mixing, we've actually got to bring the orchestra back because there is music, as you probably noticed, right the way through the film so you have to orchestrate all of that extra time.
Making movies is like herding cats.
For me, I can't tell you if the film is good or bad, all I can say is for me the film is way better than I had expectation of us being able to make. So for me that's the most important thing. Have we exceeded our dream in terms of what it could be?
Something like small English films were in vogue you had something like The Crying Game and everyone piled into London and wanted to make small English movies.
Then something fails and they're all out again, but DVD revenue is disappearing, you know, it's not disappearing but it's going off a cliff and what that's done is it's polarized the industry in a way that I've never seen before where studios are making less, they're bifurcating their choices where they're either going very, very big or they're just picking up a few rights on an acquisition basis or making really small things.
The idea that the Tony committee and the New York theater community as a whole have embraced Billy Elliot is very, very exciting.
I think everyone's going to really try to keep costs down. The more you keep costs down, the more freedom you have creatively. I can protect my filmmakers from any form of creative interference, be it from anywhere, if we're all acting in a responsible way and making the pain of a failure be as little as possible.
People are piling into England, there's lots of studio films happening there. When we budget our films we multiply it by 1. 55 it's much easier than when we multiply it by 2 so the cost looks a lot less in dollars, because everybody talks in dollars in terms of finance. And then the shift that I think is coming, I hope is coming, is movies made in a. . . "simple" is the wrong word, you visit movie sets all the time I imagine, the whole process has just got so big.
The problem with Hot Fuzz and Shaun of the Dead is that they worked brilliantly in the UK, the US, and Australia; internationally they haven't worked so well because people don't know the films as well as in the English speaking languages. So when it comes to putting the budgets together it's quite challenging. So those are the problems you have.
My theory is, I don't know how long it's going to be five or ten years, there will be only two ways to see a movie and that will either be on your computer through your TV screen or in the cinema, end of story. There will be no DVD, that's it, simple.
So that is new in terms of where I've seen the shifts. Otherwise, it's all about taste and taste just keeps going round and round and round.
For us in England, the relative value of the pound against the dollar, that has a huge impact on how easy it is to get our films made in the U. K.