[The business is] more corporate and more formulaic and less experiential.
It sounds formulaic now, but at the time, I was interested in the difference between the thing and the representation of the idea of the thing - the space between the two.
I certainly don't want to be formulaic. I want to be honest and authentic and everything else.
The American independent cinema is as formulaic as Hollywood and one genre is what you might call the 'inaction movie'. The setting is invariably a decaying town in a regional backwater where a catalytic stranger or returning native meets up with a group of sad, eccentric outsiders.
Ideologically, I have a lot of problems with that, especially when people toss around that form of story as realism. What's called "realism" is actually highly formulaic.
The reasons I never set out to do a talk show is they're formulaic. People come out, tell jokes and read questions. But that's not what I do, and we built the show around my skill set.
I do not use a formulaic approach to valuing a company or stock like future cash flow etc. If the gap between value and price do not look attractive, I go to something else.
The danger, I find, is that you can become too formulaic, like some commissioned portrait painters who develop a methodology.
At a certain point, I started playing improvised music. After a couple of years of this, I did a little bit of analysis and found most improvised music the kind I was listening to at least, which was mainly European to be as, if not more, formulaic than any other kind of music. For example, improvised pieces would often begin and end in the same way.
I stray away from formulaic, the formatted.
There's still formulaic stuff on network television, but there's also more of an opportunity to have your way with storytelling, especially in sitcoms. That's what the difference is.
