NYT Interview part 5-How would he change Hollywood

Q. If it were up to you to restructure the business, the studios, what would you do? How would you fix the studios?

I don’t think that the studios need fixing, as long as [they] keep their specialty divisions active and alert to what’s on the market and to what young filmmakers are ready to be given that big break. My only advice — and I don’t have a studio, I have a very small company — is that there needs to be a good balance of crowd-pleasers and movies that are good for the soul, that get us to dwell in the aftertaste of an experience that is so far-fetched or out of the box, but three days later we realize that we saw something that might change our lives.

The other thing that I’m a huge advocate of — and that I have practiced in my own television and movie business — is diversification behind the camera. We have a lot of diversification in front of the lens, but we don’t have diversification behind the camera. We don’t have women directors. We have more women directors in television — they’re doing great work — than we have on soundstages or on location making movies. That needs to change. And I don’t believe in the quota system, either. That’s tokenism.

True talent is what we need to judge from, and there is tremendous talent in all those fields of diversity, from gender to race to religion. And a lot of this good work is being done in television. So how do we build a bridge from TV to the movies? And how do we build a bridge from those who haven’t been given a break yet? Casting directors go out into the hinterlands and find actors who had no desire to act but are plucked out of school, like Ruby Barnhill, and put in “The BFG.” Why can’t there be the same effort to find filmmakers?