Hollywood has not changed since ‘Coda’

Marlee Matlin is an Oscar winner for her work in “Children of a Lesser God” and played in the film “Coda” 2021, who won the Oscar for the best picture, but she has the feeling that Hollywood is so rigid that It is not necessarily given your advantage when it comes to pitching projects.

“I am not satisfied with the way things are,” she says. “It’s just because I don’t know how this industry still works. You know you win an Oscar, everyone is so excited. ‘Oh, that’s great. Things will change. It’s fantastic. You will work, offers will come in and they didn’t. Yes, you will be at the peak, it may take a short little time, and then a little later comes up. So I have to do it myself. I create my own projects. I still have many projects on my plate and still knock on the doors and says: “Hey, look, here is this project, here is this project, this project is.” And studios, we set meetings and you will say: “Yes, we have a character that is deaf in this a small project that is animated, and we have switched off this box, maybe another time.” And then we get the same answer from a different studio or this studio head leaves, and then this project holds on the wayside. ”

Matlin was just a creative press to change in Hollywood during the diversity & Vibe Neuinterpreting creativity from Google TV & YouTube Panel. The discussion included Matlin (“no longer alone”); Actor and comedian Roy Wood Jr. (“Love, Brooklyn”); The Oscar-nominated filmmaker Amy Berg (“It’s never over, Jeff Buckley”, “The case against Adnan Syed”, “delivers us from evil”); Actor Harry Hamlin (“Anne Rices Mayfair witches”); and Tom Quinn, CEO from Neon. The panel was moderated by diversity Senior Entertainment author Angelique Jackson.

The creative discussed how important it is to take risks in Hollywood. For example, “Love, Brooklyn” is a romantic film and not necessarily the equipment that Wood Jr. is used to. But he enjoyed trying something new.

“It is a love story, but it is not in the sense of” will or not you “. There is no villain, it is only people who are in love and the complicated bags of it,” he says. “And (producer and Star) André (Holland) gave me the opportunity to be the comedic film in a way in his character, but not in the traditional sense. Anderson in the “Black -ISH” situation. . And the fact that Rachael Holder, our director and André Holland, trusted me. A chance used for me. Then it is up to me to take the risk, actually nail the performance and the subtleties to find more individual humor bags, exactly when they don’t speak, and if they are actually. And it was fun. ”

For Hamlin, playing a role from his steering house ended as his favorite performances.

“I was able to look back on my career and every time I made a leap of trust and risked something big, it has an enormous impact on my career and got a different level,” he says. “In 1981 I made a film called ‘Make Love’ that was the first studio picture with a gay love story. All of my friends told me: “You can’t. It will ruin your career if you do that. ‘They offered it to every other actor in Hollywood before they came to me, but I saw it as a amazing opportunity to actually make a film about something that really happened in the world, but nobody wanted to speak. It was a topic that was swept into the carpet in the early 1980s that had to come out in the sunshine. I took this risk and it completely changed my career, but it changed it in a really good way. To this day, no week passes when someone does not come to me on a market or a cinema or somewhere and says: “Thank you for making this film.” So to make a film that changes people’s lives, give them hope, give them a ticket to drive if they will. … it is an amazing experience. So I would say that the more we innovate as an actor, the more risks we go, the better we will be, and that is better for the entire industry. “

Quinn says that Neon is a company that is based on taking brave creative risks.

“In order to have a vision and a belief in a number of films and to have a point of view and feel attracted to other filmmakers who also have a very clear, strong point of view, you have to take risks,” he says. “You know, we have a very expensive musical that we produced, which was a tribute to Rodgers and Hammerstein musicals over a billionaire -hemal oil manager who bent into a potential future armaged don. That doesn’t sound very commercial and I will tell you that the film was well received by half of the critics and was not well received by the other half of the critics because it made an extraordinarily courageous statement. (Note from the publisher: The film in question was 2024s “The End”.) I think if we believe in something and believe that we also have a canvas as a distributor as a studio, I think that, if you are important, our film plate will address the audience and that we will be successful. Eklecticism in our board includes films such as ‘Longlegs’, which comes from an incredible director and sits right next to ‘seeds of the holy figs’ by Mohammad Rasoulof, who has made the film in Iran, while threatening persecution and threats was shot and the film escaped from the country. Ultimately, I think that you will persevere here if you really believe in the power of cinema and have a vision about what you can stand for. ”

Berg, who spent five years to do “Jeff Buckley”, said that she asked people why she wanted to make the film at this specific moment. Nevertheless, she says that the finished product and its reception have proven that art that take the risks can always win.

“If you bring your film to the finish line and present it somewhere, you have the opportunity to achieve the audience and buyer in a unique way where you don’t just set it up,” she says. “This was a blessing for me that themed studios and strangers came in and financed my film. I didn’t do that for a while where I am for sale here with a film. It is so invigorating, it is as if we have done it ourselves. I had to make the film I wanted to make, and last night was our premiere and it was just incredible. The reaction … people cried in the bathroom and it was just wonderful to feel that the real art spoke to our audience. “

Take a look at the complete conversation on the top of the page.