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201 Corman: Godfather of the A’s Constantine Nasr / 2008 Previously unpublished interview. © 2008 by Constantine Nasr. In November 2008, I visited the Brentwood offices of Concorde-New Horizon Pictures, the longtime production hub of Roger Corman. Nearly fifteen years had passed since I’d walked its halls and worked its floors as a development intern. The bustling nature of the office that I remembered was replaced by an unnatural silence of an enterprise in transition. However, Corman was still making pictures, and on the day I came calling , he had several meetings to attend; one film was in pre-production, another was in post. Business as usual. His presence remained just as powerful, and as purposeful, as my glorified memory. With a trademark smile that betrayed nothing but genuine courtesy, he gave me his full attention for the next ninety minutes. Seated beneath a framed poster of the Edinburgh Millenic Vision festival (perhaps to remind anyone who enters that his forty-year-old “vision” had in fact come true), the stoic Corman relaxed into our conversation, having little to prove yet much to teach. I found his every answer to be immediate, yet delivered with deliberate assurance. I discovered, as so many had before me, that Corman is not rehearsed. Where’s the fun in that? No—Roger Corman enjoys the fact that he knows exactly what he wants to say. Nasr: There’s been a lot of discussion of the word “maverick” over the last few months. What would you say defines that expression, and do you believe you are still among the mavericks of Hollywood? Corman: I’m not certain what the word “maverick” means. Obviously John McCain has made great use of it; whether he’s a maverick or not, no one knows. I think a maverick is somebody who goes against the accepted rules, who’s willing, if not eager, to do what he wants to do . . . as they say, to do his own thing. For me, it’s to make the kind of films I want 202 roger corman: inter views to make, in the way I want to make them, without any particular regard for what mainstream Hollywood is doing. Nasr: What was the last film you saw in the theater that you thought was a pretty good “bang for your buck” experience? Corman: Weirdly enough . . . Titanic. I would assume you would have expected I’d pick a low-budget picture that looked big. But Titanic, when it was made, was the biggest-budgeted film ever made, which was done by Jim Cameron, who of course started with us. And I was talking with Jim about it. I’ve forgotten the names of the two companies. Paramount had it domestically, and Fox had it foreign or something like that. It was budgeted as a very big film and they were going over-budget. And both, let us say Fox and Paramount, just thought they had total losses, and they tried to get Jim to hold back. Jim said, “The only way that this film can break even is to spend more money to do exactly what I want.” And this is an example of where the artist out-businessed the businessman. He said, “I will put up my own money to cover the overages, but I want a bigger share of the profits.” And they agreed immediately, because all they wanted to do was to get back some reasonable portion of their investment . They assumed it would be a loser. The fact of the matter is that it was the biggest-budgeted film ever made, but Jim got the biggest bang for the buck. He really put it all on the screen. So, from the standpoint of what you get for the money, Titanic was a phenomenal film, and of course tremendously successful for the money. Somebody else asked me in another interview, “What do you think of budgets like that?” I said, and I’ll say this again, that for Titanic, I think the money was well spent. What bothers me—and I forget what the budget of it was, I think it was over $150 million—nobody had ever spent that before. I said, “What bothers me is not Titanic at $150 million. You look at it and you say, well, I can understand why. It is there on the screen. What bothers me is a $70–80 million film, and it’s two stars walking around the room talking. And...

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