Tomm Moore, the director of
Secret of Kells and this year's
Song of the Sea explains why he prefers 2D animation for his projects, the advantages of 2D animation, the future of the medium in the industry and more!
Perhaps that’s why it’s not surprising that Moore is loyal to 2D animation and says he doesn’t see himself helming a CG-animated feature any time soon. “As I get older, sometimes I wonder if I will ever get into CG animation,” he says. “I love to draw on paper — that’s always been very important to me. Another great thing about 2D animation is that it’s timeless. You can watch Totoro and Ponyo, and you won’t know that they were made 20 years apart. You don’t see the big changes that you see in CG animation. When you look at Toy Story and Toy Story 3, there’s a big difference and you can definitely notice that evolution.”
Source:
http://www.animationmagazine.net/featur ... xcellence/
Moore spoke with particular enthusiasm about hand-drawn animation, which major studios like Disney, Pixar and DreamWorks have mostly abandoned in favor of a computer animated, 3D approach. In developing the visual style of Song with his team, including art director Adrian Merigeau, Moore put a lot of thought into how to "make a virtue of the fact that we're doing 2D animation, and not pretend we're doing 3D." [...] Though an adherent of hand-drawn art for his own projects, Moore still admires and respects what mainstream animation studios are doing today. [...] "The normal way to make animation now, at least for [major studios], is CG and 3D. And I think that's OK. It's an evolution of the general aesthetic that was here in America, in particular, for a long time." [...] Where that leaves traditional animation, then, is on the doorstep for a potential rebirth. "It's hanging on by its fingernails in some ways, but in another sense it's also finding a new voice. The analogy I always make about 2D animation, what I think it needs to keep doing, is be like painters after invention of photography, [who] turned to impressionism and expressionism and cubism. All these amazing forms of painting happened because people went, 'Well, what can painting do that photography can't? Painting doesn't have to be photorealistic anymore.'" [...] Moore recalls a realization made by hand-drawn animation pioneer Richard Williams--that "animation hadn't done Rembrandt yet, but it could. He wasn't limited to film in terms of what animation could do. He was thinking about the whole history of visual arts. And that's the potential hand-drawn animation hasn't even touched yet."
Source:
http://www.filmjournal.com/filmjournal/ ... 9367546838
Q: With the advent of 3D animation, is it difficult to find the right people to work on more detailed-oriented 2D films?
Tomm Moore: There is a little team, like in stop-motion. It’s a little team of people that we’ve put together who had worked on “The Secret of Kells,” and some new people. I think it’s about finding people who are really passionate about 2-D animation and want to work at a different level on it. We are lucky in Europe, there seems to be a lot of 2D animation happening. There is still expertise and different studios are still making it.
Q: What do you love about 2D animation that 3D can’t provide? What would you say makes the medium particularly special?
Tomm Moore: I think there is a language to drawing that’s special, just like with Ghibli’s latest, “The Tale of the Princess Kaguya.” Even if you try to fake the look of a drawing by doing something like “Paperman”, is not quiet the same as feeling that somebody really drew it. Also, I think that if you watch a movie like “My Neighbor Totoro” and then you watch “Ponyo,” you wouldn’t know that they’ve been made 20 years apart. But if you watch the original “Toy Story” and then “Toy Story 3,” you can really see a big difference, you can see a big change in technology. 2-D has a certain timelessness.
[...] I think hand-drawn animation can be something really special. If the character design is quite simple it has the ability to allow people to easily relate to the characters in a special manner. A cartoon character isn’t a specific person. It isn’t Tom Cruise or George Clooney playing the part, it’s a character that could be you. It’s easier for you to get drawn into it in a special way.
Q: Would you ever work on a 3D animated film?
Tomm Moore: I wouldn’t say no, but I’d have to find a way to adapt to it and I don’t think I’d be interested in doing something like Pixar’s shiny, perfect surfaces in 3D. To be honest with you, they do it so well and they spend so much money on it, that unless you are doing it in Pixar there is no point trying to match it. It’ll just come out looking cheap, so you would have to find a clever way to dot it. I like drawing. I like to spend the day drawing, the process is important for me. Drawing is a just a pleasure and it’s nice to keep it going. I think we stand out a little bit from the crowd by being 2D. There is less and less of it that now we have like a badge or a brand that stands out by being 2D.
Source:
http://blogs.indiewire.com/sydneylevine ... a-20141218
Q: Why in 2D and not 3D?
Tomm Moore: I prefer that, I like to draw. One of the reasons why we didn't make the movie in the US was also because we didn't want CGI (Computer-Generated Imagery). What's good about 2D is that when you watch My neighbour Totoro and Ponyo on the cliff by the sea, it's really the same thing despite the 20 years that have passed between the two. Whereas, if you watch Toy Story 1 and Toy Story 2, technologies have changed so much that it's totally different. Personally, I enjoy the timeless side of animation.
Source:
http://www.cineuropa.org/ff.aspx?t=ffoc ... did=282393
Q: Do you feel animation has an ability to express these complicated themes more capably than live-action, especially if you’re trying to reach all ages?
Tomm Moore: Yeah, definitely. I don’t think it works as well with realistic live-action or CG. Realistic CG for me gets into the territory of live-action; it uses the same language and characters are specifically somebody. If I watch a movie with Tom Cruise, I’m very aware it is Tom Cruise. But when I watch animated films—particularly Japanese films, where characters are simple and environments are lush—the characters are avatars you can project yourself into. They’re so simplified that they are not specific; they represent swaths of humanity. That is what’s special about animation: It can tell stories in ways that allow kids to project themselves into them in a more visceral way than a live-action movie. Live-action films can be oddly over there, whereas animated films, at least for me, can be immersive.
Q: Does that make hand-drawn, 2D style more powerful and risky, given so much is riding on its mode of expression?
Tomm Moore: Scott McCloud talks about this a bit in Understanding Comics, and it made an impression on me when I was a student. You can mask yourself in simple character design, really immerse yourself in the world. Think of a film like Grave of the Fireflies, which would be practically intolerable in live-action. It would be so dark, but through animation [Isao] Takahata was able to bring us through that experience in a way we could handle.
[...] But I think today 2D animation has a responsibility, much like painters had after photography was invented, to reinvent what it is. It can’t go after realism, because there is no point; it has to do something only 2D can do. In painting, we got Expressionism, Impressionism, Cubism and other modern movements because of photography. The Tale of the Princess Kaguya and other Ghibli films point the way that 2D has to keep going to reinvent itself. In the whole history of visual arts, there is still so much that we can explore.
[...] I’ve got a lot of love for computer animation, but I think it’s also important to have an alternative. It would be a pity for the tradition of hand-drawn animation to die out. Yet with technology, we’re offered the opportunity to make hand-drawn animation in a way that we weren't even fifteen years ago. With today’s computers, we can make hand-drawn animation on a feature scale with much smaller teams and lower budgets, and still make it more personal than high-level CG, which still requires a lot of money, a lot of technology and a lot of people. Through technology, hand-drawn animation has actually become more accessible.
Source:
http://www.cartoonbrew.com/award-season ... 07389.html
"I wanted to be a hand-drawn animator or a comic book artist, but when 'Toy Story' came out, I was like, 'OK this changes everything,'" Moore said. "I felt that, since CG came in, 2-D had to redefine itself, like when photography came in and painting had to redefine itself. It had to use the language of drawing, to be expressive."
Source:
http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/mo ... story.html
Tomm Moore wrote:2D for me is a language; it's a way to express and to draw and to think. We've evolved that style over so long, that's become natural. Each movie is an evolution. The story and the style go hand-in-hand. We come up with stories that suit that style. If a script came in and someone asked us to produce it and it didn't make sense in 2D, we wouldn't insist "Oh, do it in 2D" just for the sake of 2D but I think there are certain stories that make sense. With Miyazaki's work, for example, if you watch Totoro and Ponyo in the same day, you wouldn't realize that they were made 20 years apart. And that's a great thing about 2D; it's got a feel that's timeless. [...] 2D has become a little bit like stop-motion. There are stories that make a lot of sense and there's something beautiful about [doing them in] stop-motion. You can tell any story in stop-motion, you can tell any story in 2D or CG. But there are certain stories that really feel right [for the medium]. 2D has to find its own place, now that CGI, at least in features, has become the dominant medium.
Source:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tPTLwwW51V0
Tomm Moore wrote:I think sometimes the CG animation is perfect for a story about robots or superheroes or whatever but I think for this type of timeless fairy tale, the feeling that you get from 2D animation can't be matched. You can watch a 2D animated film from 20-30-40 years ago and it feels as relevant and as modern today. Hopefully, 2D animation has that timeless feel that's right for certain stories.
Source:
http://www.nbc.com/last-call-with-carso ... re/2846757
Q: Is there something hand-drawn 2D art brings to the table that you prefer computer animation?
Tomm Moore: I think hand-drawn has a lot still to do. I think it’s a medium that hasn’t really been fully used because for a long time, people working in hand-drawn were so influenced by Disney [that] they just copied Disney. And Disney’s look was limited by the technology of the time where they had to paint cels and layer the backgrounds and shoot them with a camera. You can only put so many cels underneath. You could only paint the characters flat. Now we’ve got this wealth of opportunity because we can use the computer to really make a hybrid style where we hand draw, hand animate, use all the language of painting and art history. And at the same time we can do loads more techniques…
You can make films with much smaller teams, much more specialized rather than having this huge factory of two hundred people painting cels. We can focus on the organic side of it and then move to the computer to help us with stuff like coloring the characters and things like that. I think that hand-drawn animation has an opportunity to reinvent itself and do whatever computer animation doesn’t really do well. And that’s basically did when photography came in. I think hand-drawn animation has huge potential that way.
But just for me personally, I enjoy drawing. It’s the language that we’ve developed here in the studio – a certain visual language, a certain way of thinking. When we develop stories and films, especially the ones I’m going to direct, I think of something that’s going to take advantage of hand-drawn animation. Not to say that we wouldn’t try computer animation if it was the right story. I was hanging out with the guys who did Big Hero 6 the other night, and you know – that’s a movie that makes sense in CG. (Laughs.) Superheroes and sci-fi tech. It doesn’t need to be hand-drawn watercolor painted; it doesn’t make sense. Different stories for different mediums.
Q: You think these forms can coexist?
Tomm Moore: Yeah. I hope – artistically, yes. What does the audience respond to, that’s another question. Will they respond to hand-drawn animation? I really hope they will. It’s tough. A few years ago, John Lasseter was talking about bringing back hand-drawn animation. He said that people were blaming hand-drawn animation for the movies not being good and said that was like saying the cameras were the problem rather than the people, or the story, or the actors. I thought that was a really good analogy. But at the same time, there really hasn’t been a successful blockbuster in 2D animation in a long time. I wonder if it’s the case that hand-drawn animation is going to end up being a specialized artistic process and never really be a mainstream form again. I’m ambivalent about whether that’s good or bad (Laughs.)
It kind of leaves us that are still practicing it very free, without a huge expectation on us to make super blockbusters. Maybe that’s better – I’m not sure. Maybe we’re going to be relegated to the kind of area that stop-motion, or maybe sand animation are. (Laughs.) And maybe that’s not such a bad thing.
[In reference to The Tale of Princess Kaguya]
Tomm Moore: For me, that’s really showing the potential of hand-drawn animation. It’s going much further than our films, even. It’s expressive. I’d love to go that way. I’d love to go further in that direction. Using the expressiveness of lines, you know? It’s the animators hand and if the character’s feeling stressed, the lines become stressed. And if the character is relaxed, the lines can become relaxed. That’s really something that hand-drawn animation can do and any other technique trying to emulate it would just be kind of faking it.
Q: It’s interesting that you feel like these techniques can co-exist. I think one of the worries is about kids, and that they’re so used to CGI that it’s hard for them to enjoy and respond to traditional animation.
Tomm Moore: Yeah, I think so. I think 2D films have to reinvent – they can’t look like they always did. They have to keep on reinventing themselves and be visually novel. Kids will always end up – no matter how tech-savvy they are – they’ll always be that magic of having a blank sheet of paper and a pen and making a mark. It’s really primal. It goes back to cavemen. So when you see drawings that are alive and moving, I think there’s something mesmerizing… If you expose kids to 2D animation before they’ve had a chance to get cynical, you know?
Source:
http://moviefail.com/tomm-moore-writerd ... ret-kells/
Q: What advantages do you feel 2D has over CG and what advantages animation has over live-action?
Tomm Moore: I don’t have a huge amount of experience in CG or live-action but I’m very inspired by live-action films even old ones like German expressionism and stuff. […] I can’t say definitively that live-action is a different language than animation but I think 2D animation is more directly related to the history of visual art. You can do an animated feature in the style of cave paintings in 2D animation; you can do an animated feature in the style of Picasso’s whatever period. Dick Williams used to say that animation hasn't done Rembrandt yet but it could. To me, it feels that 2D has something on its side, that there’s the whole history of visual art, apart from sculpture, that was generally 2D drawings and 2D representation. So, all language that evolved of visual art is available to a 2D animator, and moreso now with technology. But that’s not to say CG animation and live-action couldn't do that; it’s just more of a leap for them. They have to make more jumps away from what they do. So, I find it interesting to see something like Paperman which I thought looked great, and it’s unique, it couldn't be done in 2D because it would flicker or whatever, but it was something interesting to me because they were making the computer do something that it doesn't naturally want to do. Whereas you watch something like Princess Kaguya which is just drawings and which is a language of line of itself and it’s not superimposed or traced over. I think Paperman looked cool, I’m just saying when you’re working with computers to get a look that looks like 2D, it’s more of an effort, more of a journey and it takes more people and it’s still in its infancy on how to do that whereas 2D animation still has a lot to say just with the language of visual art.
Source:
http://www.toontalkspodcast.com/?p=381
Q. Why do you think traditional animation has stayed strong in Europe and not so much in America?
Tomm Moore: It’s not super strong in Europe but there are at least a few directors and producers continuing to choose it. I guess it’s because we make films mainly more from an artistic starting point rather than a commercial one and the visual arts are so strong in Europe. There’s a long culture in France, Belgium and other European countries of comics and animation that I think has really kept an interest in hand-drawn work and the stop motion industry is similarly based on a long history. That said I feel European audiences, like audiences everywhere are mainly drawn to mainstream CGI animation and it’s a constant struggle to justify continuing to make these types of films….I hope we can continue!
Q. Lastly, what about traditional animation is special to you?
Tomm Moore: Two things mainly -
1. The process that is always evolving but still holds drawing at the core. I like that I spend at least some of my time every day drawing and I understand and enjoy working with other people who draw – it’s very inspiring.
2. There is a timelessness to hand-drawn animation. If we watch Ponyo and Totoro back to back we don't see the changes in technology – the look is timeless. However CGI films are constantly being “upgraded” with the latest software improvements which means that the visuals date more quickly than a traditional style film.
Source:
http://www.traditionalanimation.com/201 ... omm-moore/
Q: You use hand-drawn animation; can this method compete with CGI?
Tomm Moore: Different stories suit different mediums. I started college in 1995, the year Toy Story came out. The hand-drawn course was becoming more antiquated because people were looking to get into computer-generated imaging more and more. But while Toy Story was incredible back then, it now looks quite dated. The problem is the software keeps improving all the time – whereas you look at Bambi which was made in the 1940s and to me it looks as fresh as if it were made this year. Hand-drawn animation has a depth and timelessness to it you can't create with a computer.
Source:
http://www.irishnews.com/lifestyle/2015 ... ld-151712/
[Tomm Moore] describes the animation industry’s fixation on CGI as “freeing”, allowing practitioners of hand-drawn animation to venture further into the fringes of the art. “You watch a series like Adventure Time, where the characters stretch like Twenties cartoons, and it’s kind of cool,” he says. “Or [Studio Ghibli’s] The Tale of Princess Kaguya, with those wild, expressive lines. We’re the lucky ones, you know? We’ve got thousands of years of human drawing as inspiration.”
Source:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/film/song-of ... interview/
But far from being a dwindling artform, Moore believes that hand-drawn animation can still thrive in the 21st century. "The mainstream has definitely gone CGI," Moore tells us. "It's not going to change back, and wishing it won't make it so. And I don't wish it anymore. I've realised that it's been a liberation for traditional animation, to be marginalised, as it were... All the potential that traditional animation always had is back in the hands of artists rather than corporations. People don't have Disney to look to now to copy, so now they have to reinvent themselves. When photography came in, painters had to reinvent themselves. They invented expressionism, impressionism and cubism and everything else."
Source:
http://www.denofgeek.us/movies/song-of- ... t-was-made
Q: Were there any challenges in using that 2D style?
Tomm Moore: Not once we committed, but at the start there were discussions with different bigger entities that would have wanted it CG or whatever, but that wouldn’t have been the main problem for me. Going that route would also have meant that not only would you have to go CG but you would also have to make the story much more commercial, more like in the general style of modern CG animated films. I think 2D animation has a timelessness. I really was interested in making a stereoscopic 3D and we did a test with 2D illustrations but with stereoscopic 3D that looked really cool, like a pop-up or something, but in fact the co-producers pushed back against that. It would have been so much more expensive. They were probably right!
Source:
http://www.skwigly.co.uk/tomm-moore/
Tomm Moore wrote:When I saw Takahata’s Princess Kaguya, I realized that while we’d said we were really pushing hand drawn animation, there was a whole other are we weren’t using at all. The language of the line, in how the characters are drawn, can express so much about how they’re feeling. Instead of using an absolutely pure, clean, mechanical line I’d like to loosen it up and use an evolution of the line to show what’s going inside the characters. That would again show how hand-drawn animation has distinct language, completely separate from what you can do with a computer alone.
Source:
http://www.filmdivider.com/10705/a-song ... omm-moore/
Q: So are you positive about the way things are with animation? Because on the flip side, we're also at the end of an era as well.
Tomm Moore: I get the feeling as well that it's not over in the sense that people aren't doing it, but it has changed. I definitely think that 2D animation is in the space that stop-motion animation is in. It's a specialist technique, and it's used for certain stories. The mainstream has definitely gone CGI. It's not going to change back, and wishing it won't make it so. And I don't wish it anymore. I've realized that it's been a liberation for traditional animation, to be marginalized, as it were. Because it frees us up to experiment and do stuff that you wouldn't be able to do in the mainstream. Let CGI take the blockbusters, and then hope that traditional animation will be free. Some of the stuff we would have only seen in short films is starting to be seen in feature films, some of the experimentation. All the potential that traditional animation always had is back in the hands of artists rather than corporations.
I'm delighted. People don't have Disney to look to now to copy, so now they have to reinvent themselves. When photography came in, painters had to reinvent themselves. They invented expressionism, impressionism and cubism and everything else. CGI is here now, so there's no point in doing Disney-style animation. You have to find another way to do traditional animation.
[...] The thing about hand-drawn and traditional animation is, there is a timelessness to it. You see the software improving over successive sequels - Toy Story or Madagascar, you know, but The Iron Giant still holds up. Totoro still holds up beside Ponyo. Bambi can sit side by side with anything.
Q: It's that magical thing of seeing a still drawing come to life. You find it exciting when you're a child, and it stays with you.
Tomm Moore: You definitely relate to the characters in a different way. You map yourself into them more, because they're so simple. They're little symbols that become an avatar that you can see the world through. The closer you go to realism, the more they become somebody else. Pixar have been amazing with their human character design. They were going in the direction where they were getting creepily real, then they did The Incredibles, and they started to use the language of 2D animation. They simplified their characters and made them cartoon characters. They went away from that very creepy, very real thing.
Q: That glassy-eyed look.
Tomm Moore: Yeah, and all that weird mo-cap stuff. It's interesting to see that even CG animation is retreating to some of the language of 2D to make their characters relatable. I thought that was very interesting.
Source:
http://www.denofgeek.com/movies/song-of ... -animation
Q: Has this always been your preferred medium or do you have ambitions to one day try stop-motion or CG?
Tomm Moore: Yeah, we try everything and it's just that the final look is more timeless. I moved from paper to TV Paint on Song Of the Sea- a little bit reluctantly, I was one of the last people to move over to TV Paint. But once I moved over I was a convert, 'cause I could still do the type of full-animation I love and I didn’t have scanning to do! I still paint the backgrounds on paper but you do a lot of work on Photoshop afterwards.
That hand-drawn look I think it suits the type of stories we're telling, and it kind of sets the studio's work apart. It probably limits our commercial appeal a bit, I think a lot of people go to CG-animated movies because there's so many good ones from people like Pixar, that you're able to make a lesser one and people will still trust it because it looks a bit like Pixar. Whereas I suppose our stuff, it's both good and bad that it sets it apart. But for me that hand-drawn looks is so timeless, and I see the old Toy Stories and I love them as stories and films, but they.. age. The software has improved so much, and it's hard to imagine that it will improve much more, but as long as they're chasing that realistic look, they'll always keep dating, last year’s or two or three years ago's films. Hand-drawn animation doesn't date, I mean you watch Bambi now and it still looks as fresh and unique as in 1940s.
Source:
http://www.animationforadults.com/2015/ ... art-2.html
Tomm Moore wrote:The medium of hand-drawn animation is really special. It has a timelessness and it has a certain magic to it that I think appeals to young audiences.
Source:
http://seligfilmnews.com/song-of-the-se ... omm-moore/
Q: Why do you draw your films by hand?
Tomm Moore: With CGI animations you really see changes in films with the changes in the software, whereas with hand-drawn, there’s this really timeless feel. Some films look great with CGI but for stories such as Song of the Sea, it just feels like a classic fairy tale. Our studio [Cartoon Saloon] has become known as a hand-drawing studio and it sets our work apart. But we’re not anti-technology, we use computers a lot. We wouldn’t be able to make movies such as The Prophet without the internet and technology.
Source:
http://www.thenational.ae/arts-lifestyl ... traditions
Tomm Moore wrote:When Toy Story came out the whole industry moved towards CGI and everyone was talking about hand-drawn animation being dead. By the time I graduated in 1999, the hand-drawn studios in Ireland were closed. But we’ve managed to buck the trend and I think it’s been to our advantage, because there are so few hand-drawn films on the market and our films really stand out. Pixar have millions and millions to play with, so if you try and copy them it’ll just look like a cheap copy. We have our own identity.
Source:
http://www.irishnews.com/arts/2015/12/2 ... 16-362539/
The Cartoon Saloon style, he says, stands apart from big budget 3D animation movies from Disney or Pixar. Instead he describes their style as coming from “an illustration tradition”, with an “organic, handmade, hand-drawn look”. “I think it's more timeless. I saw Toy Story 2 the other day and it looks so old, the software has come on so much since then, but if you look at Bambi it still looks timeless.”
Source:
http://irishpost.co.uk/meet-the-artists ... on-saloon/
Tomm Moore wrote:For me the look of hand-drawn animation has a lot to do with illustration and all the history of 2D artwork that can still be explored and I think is big part on what we can offer as a smaller studio There’s no point in trying to do shiny CG like the bigger studios because we can’t afford to do stuff that looks like that and we wouldn’t be as good it as them. We feel like our culture and our background in the studio here is very much hand-drawn/illustrative techniques. I always say that painting reinvented itself in the face of photography and you got all these interesting stuff like cubism, impressionism, and expressionism and I think that’s what hand-drawn animation can continue to explore.
Source:
http://taughtbyapro.com/animation-podca ... omm-moore/
Q: What made you stick with 2D and eventually make movies with 2D animation instead of going with 3D like everybody else?
Tomm Moore: I honestly do just love it as an art form. I love drawing. I think that there is something timeless about 2D animation. It holds its own longer than CG, in my opinion.
Source:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B0k-YNr-NI8
Tomm Moore wrote:For me, there's something about hand-drawn animation that's timeless. If you look at Bambi and then you look at a modern hand-drawn film, they don't seem…. It's a medium that still has a timelessness. Whereas if you look at Toy Story 1 and Toy Story 3, you can see that the technology has moved on so much. CG dates so quickly. I do think there's something very evergreen about hand-drawn animation. There's a very ancient language of painting and drawing that hand-drawn animation taps into that's timeless.
Source:
http://geekdad.com/2016/03/gbbp-56-tomm-moore/
Paul Young, the producer of Song of the sea, explains that as a studio they went with 2D animation not only because of their love for the medium but also out of inability to compete with high-budgeted CG-animated fare.
Although it uses state-of-the-art equipment, Cartoon Saloon deliberately works in 2D animation, with hand-painted backgrounds. “Studios like Pixar and DreamWorks have the budgets for CGI, so why copy them?” says Young. “Also, we love to draw.”
Source:
http://www.irishtimes.com/culture/art-a ... -1.2347122
“There are many studios around the world making high-budget CGI animated feature films. A lot of them are trying to imitate the American studios who do this very, very well like Disney, Pixar or Dreamworks, but this does not help you stand out from them,” he explained. “I think we have made a space in the market for our much lower budget films by being highly original in how our films look and with the stories we choose to tell,” he said.
Source:
http://www.u.tv/News/2015/09/25/Oscar-n ... ists-45682