Success is always a matter of some luck and timing.
Kathleen Kennedy
Sports teaches you to understand the meaning of a team. You need to be able to work with everybody; you don't have to be their best friend. You can experience the fun of competition and driving toward a common goal without pushing to bond in some major way with each individual on a project.
My life is organized chaos.
It's not just about casting female protagonists. It's gotta be across the board throughout the industry.
Having a female point of view in the room - when you get into a discussion about behavior - who would say what and how they would interact with one another. In certain situations, women are going to have a different opinion on that than men. It made for a really balanced conversation in the room.
When you're relegated to go from movie to movie, so much of what you're doing is out of your control beyond creating the product.
I think most fans of movies that have withstood the test of time don't like for them to be tinkered with. I think that's a pretty general consensus. You like to remember what you started with.
Lucasfilm looks out for 'Star Wars.' What are the values inherent in 'Star Wars' that we want to protect? It's fragile to a certain extent in that it's a single IP.
Creating authentic emotional experiences, whether it's 'Star Wars' or 'Spotlight,' are driven by characters and stories that are engaging.
When I joined Lucasfilm, I immediately saw the true passion shared by 'Star Wars' fans around the world.
From a producing standpoint, I think prep is everything.
I'm just a member of the audience with each project I work on, and I hope to never lose that. It's my touchstone. It's the thing I never want to overanalyze.
I always feel that the best kind of producing - and frankly, it has to do with what I like to do - is you're the big-picture person.
I don't analyze things all the time, I just do them.
A successful film begins by choosing a director whose creative vision will define the choices made by everyone involved in the film.
I think it's always wise to be concerned about any of the characters in 'Star Wars,' right?
There's nothing I like more than to have one of our movies run, and then I go to the ladies' room and listen to everybody talk about it. No one has any idea who I am.
If we do want to bring a woman in to direct a 'Star Wars'... we don't want to talk somebody into it.
I've always said that I don't want to be in front of the camera.
I find that a lot of directors are attracted to the dark side.
I'm not great at talking about myself.
People want to make a distinction between what's commercial and what's art.
There's no way a director can communicate with every single person on the set and yet they need to motivate and instill an ambition to want to do their best work.
Many great stories are father issues, mother issues or death.
You know, I've always been very open to any project.
A lot of these big movies are just a collection or a montage of big set pieces.
If it's a huge tentpole movie, for instance with a movie like 'Tintin,' a year and a half, almost two years in advance, we were developing a videogame campaign and massive consumer products campaign.
It's an interesting thing when you're casting a film - especially when you're trying to discover someone - you're waiting for someone to step into the room in an audition process and claim the role.
The 'Star Wars' universe is full of technological and cutting-edge effects, which Base FX will be a wonderful partner to create with.
A lot of directors will do a certain amount of storyboarding and pre-vis, and yet when they get on the set, everything starts to change, and they have new ideas.
If all you're doing is playing it safe - trying to make the same movie over and over again - that's when the audiences say, 'Oh, this is just a moneymaking machine.' But if it's genuinely in service to the art form, then the franchise concept is being used in a way that's exciting.
It's not fun to lose.
I would hate to be in a situation where my entire focus was obsessing around the issue of whether we're going to win best picture.
I have a very fun husband. He's managed to hang on to every person he's known since grammar school.
When we built Amblin, we even put Murphy beds in there because we thought that was so practical. Why would anybody, if you were working on something, need to go home at night? You'd just stay there, wake up in the morning, and carry on.
We are going to hire a woman who's going to direct a 'Star Wars' movie. I have no doubt.
The 'Star Wars' saga is about a series of seemingly chance encounters. They impact the destiny of everyone involved.
Probably the biggest contribution that Disney has made to the Lucasfilm franchise management was their international component. That was something Lucasfilm hadn't made significant inroads with.
I've had filmmakers, I even had Bono come and talk to me about having a sequel to 'E.T.' help with an environmental message - I listened. I can certainly understand. I mean, the great thing about Bono is that everything he does is in service to a greater cause.
I think 'E.T.' came along at a time when it was probably meant to be.
Nobody understands what a producer does.
The problem with some truth-tellers is that they don't do it in a way that makes people want to listen.
I suppose I was always attracted to the producing function - trying to put things together and make things happen.
We don't have any intention of beginning a trend of re-creating actors who are gone.
I don't usually do remakes.
Everybody always asks us how we choose the movies we have going right now, and it's hard to explain sometimes. There's a randomness to the way things kind of happen and get done. And sometimes you have this perfect storm, and you have to accept that and do the best you can.
Not every script that rolls in is ready to shoot. Few are, actually. So you go back and work on the thing.
In the creative community, there's no excuse for not making a more equitable environment.
Audiences still crave storytelling.
We look at Marvel, but we're not trying to emulate that in any way. In fact, we talked often about how distinctive what we're trying to do with 'Star Wars' is from Marvel. They've been extremely successful in exploiting the characters in that universe, and we have a place. We have the galaxy.