Lorne Michaels' Saturday Night Live franchise has defined American humor – and made money – for more than 30 years. His enduring motto: “Whatever it is, we’re against it”

FROM HERE, Lorne Michaels looks down upon the comedy. His office is perched above the studio audience and the many stages from which Saturday Night Live is broadcast every week, his sliding glass door directly opposite the knock-off Grand Central Station façade in which the musical guests perform. Think of it as a luxury box with a commanding view of the spectator sport of comedy. A curtain can be pulled open during rehearsals so that the founder and longtime executive producer of the one-time groundbreaking – and now institutional – sketch comedy show can ruminate and consider and finally decide, yes, this is funny, or no, this isn’t. He has bulletin boards on his walls on which each show is blocked out, yellow index cards for those sketches – “Whopper Virgins,” “Rahm Emmanuel” – that have been found wanting and cut, and pink and blue for those – “Republican Congressmen,” “Alec Baldwin Jonas Bro” – that have been deemed funny. It is comedy by triage, a ruthless winnowing that keeps the writers and cast members here late every weeknight until Michaels finally decides, with a nod, a sigh, a weariness even, that, yes, it’s funny.

That’s funny. He’s funny. She’s funny. It’s funny. Michaels will preside, in imperial fashion, and give thumbs up or thumbs down.

Perhaps no American has ruled so many times on what will make us laugh and been as consistently correct as Lorne Michaels. In addition to SNL, and hit shows 30 Rock and Late Night with Conan O’Brien, he has produced films, including comedy hits Wayne’s World, Mean Girls and Baby Mama, franchises and shows worth billions – both to his corporate parent, NBC Universal, and to websites like YouTube, which built up its audience on Saturday Night Live sketches – especially the digital shorts – before NBC ordered the web upstart to cease and desist.

Michaels deciding, over and over, remorselessly, without sentiment, in new medium after old medium, that, yes, that’s funny. And in making each of those correct calls, over a career spanning five decades, he has now imposed his vision of what’s funny on the rest of us so that our collective senses of humors have come to resemble Lorne’s; what tickles Mr Michaels' pickle now tickles ours.

Consider the film and television stars he has incubated or launched: Steve Martin, Chevy Chase, John Belushi, Dan Ackroyd, Adam Sandler, Will Ferrell, Tina Fey, Chris Rock, Eddie Murphy, Gilda Radner, David Spade, Bill Murray, Mike Meyers and Andy Samberg, just to give a gilded roll call. And that’s not including the writers and producers he has launched or his patented Funny-in-a-Can that Hormel plans to distribute in 2010. (Okay, I made that last one up. But if anyone could patent funny ...)

Michaels sits in a leather armchair in his office. He is compact, almost patrician in appearance and manner, owlish. He has a high forehead, bushy eyebrows and pinkish face. His voice is surprisingly airy, gentle, almost tenor as he holds forth in unhurried sentences; he is used to being listened to. “I look for a certain sensibility,” he explains, “I don’t have set ideas about what’s funny or what I want. But if the sensibility is there then we will find an audience who gets that.” There are newspapers spread on the table in front of us, a glass jar with Tootsie Rolls next to a vase of pink roses. Michaels wears a shirt with variegated white-on-white stripes through which a tank-top undershirt is visible, blue trousers, black socks and Gucci loafers propped on the edge of the table. He wears a wedding band on his left hand – he’s on his second marriage – and a large, square, golden ring with a fat orange stone on the other. His forearms are hairy.

Michaels came to the New York in the mid-1970s to developSaturday Night Live, building the show into a powerhouse in the era when network television ruled home entertainment and a hit show could regularly draw 50 million viewers; NBC’s 30 Rock, Michaels' current sitcom, draws barely a tenth of that. Now, he believes, network television faces a digital challenge similar to that which has decimated the music industry. Digital file sharing and on-demand viewing is fragmenting the audience and driving revenue down, even as production costs rise. “We are standing in the road,” he says, “the truck is coming right at us.”

These are serious times for the television industry, he warns, uncertain times. Could they be, possibly, unfunny times?
“Never,” Michaels vows, “never.”

Okay, now I need you to enunciate very clearly and at times to speak in an exaggerated accent? Can you do that for me?
I can!

Well, my chair is kind of low. You set this up didn’t you?
Do you want to move over there?

Where are you usually most yourself, most authentic?  
I’m there either way. Yeah, sure that’s fine.

So you’re still a newspaper man.
Yeah. I check the online homepages of the New York Times, Huffington Post, BBC and CNN, some industry things, but that’s sort of not what I’m reading a newspaper for.

What are you reading a newspaper for?  
More the attack on the thing than the raw news itself.

Do you have the feeling the news is filtered?
I have a strong bias towards the editorial side, obviously. I think it’s analogous to what I do with the show, with SNL, which is that somebody has to make a decision on what goes on the front page, what’s most important, somebody has to define what the top story of the day is.  

So that’s what you prefer in a newspaper?
Yeah, as opposed to all the information coming at me and my having to choose.
I mean I don’t have to agree with what they thought was the most important thing that happened that day, but it’s nice to know.

One of the things that’s disappointing to me about the death of print is that, as someone who works in print, I always assumed the end of something would be sort of explosive, flaming fun.
Not this quiet.

I thought it would go like the Weimar Republic.
Have you ever seen a show cancelled? Some guy from the legal department whom you’ve never really met before ...

Comes in to tell you to pack your stuff?
He doesn’t even come in. There’s the phone call and you’re like, “What?” Yeah, it’s over. I think all creative things depend on reinvention.  

TV certainly.
You can’t keep coming back with the same show. With newspapers, when I first moved to New York, and started reading the New York Times faithfully, it was just the four sections, you know. And everything got bigger.

You first came to New York in the 1970s?
1975.

When you were doing Laugh In, was that in LA?
All West Coast. Everything was done out of LA, except for this [SNL]. In the 70s when this show was sort of white hot and there was nothing else like it on television, there was always some internal pressure from the people I worked with to, like, “We had so much good  stuff tonight and we’re cutting 25 minutes of it, which is what, that’s last week’s show. Why don’t you just call the network and get another half hour?” And I’d say no you need the pressure of, this is the shape of  the show.

You need the discipline
Yeah, and when you’re throwing good stuff out, that’s a good thing. You can’t have creativity without boundaries. You know you write a sonnet and it’s 14 lines, that’s the shape. You can write one that is nine lines but you can’t really call it a sonnet.  

You are a structuralist in that way. You seem to be saying that you think form and the discipline of form makes the work better.
It’s also very liberating in terms of the content.

Which ties in with a second thought. I read somewhere, and maybe its wrong, that you frown on improvisation.
No, no, no, I love improv as a source.

But on your show?
Oh no, no, we never improv on the show.

And when actors have done it, you ...
They’ve never done it.   

[Interviewer laughs]

There are spontaneous moments; I am okay with that, completely okay with that. The problem is that every line of dialogue has a camera shot next to it. So if you are not giving the cue to either the control room or to the other actors you’re working with, and you’re going off on your own, that tends to play as selfish.

It’s unfair to the colleagues?
You know, the late Frank Zappa, when he hosted in the 1970s, would stop in the middle of something and just make a comment. It was to his advantage and it was about him. He was used to it. But when you’re playing in any team sport, there are times for individual glory but mostly you have to be aware of everybody else on the team.  

I was talking to [NBC Universal CEO] Jeff Zucker around the time he was launching Hulu [a streaming video website started by NBC and News Corp], he made a comment that they built YouTube on the back of SNL. Which made me think, “Then why does SNL have to be constrained to ...
To NBC? Fair enough, I will answer that.
I think you have, in terms of larger corporate strategies, a timid approach. The record business watched the bus coming at them at 80 miles an hour and just stood there thinking it can’t possibly be coming that fast – and they were run over. And in television, I have done everything I can to point that out.

Is it as dire?
Absolutely it’s dire, but I think it won’t happen in exactly the same way. The big thing that came out of corporate thinking in the 80s and 90s was branding. You know: bigger audience worldwide, you have to brand. Which is okay if you’re Ritz crackers, but if you’re in a thing that is constantly changing then it’s all about the sensibilities. You have to signal the audience that this is where you’ll find this and we don’t do that. So when you aggregate it and you put it all together and say we are all a part of the NBC website and just come to the corner of the space that is ours, well that’s the department store, and I’m not sure that’s the shape of things to come.

I think that we’re living in a period that the network brand has less and less meaning in that very few people have destination networks or channels. I mean Saturday Night Live is a destination show.
As I say often, I didn’t go to see The Dark Knight just because I heard it was a Warner Brother’s movie. I am glad they made it and they deserve credit for making it. But you’re going to see it for the reasons you’re going to see it.

You think there are people out there watching Saturday Night Live and wondering, “When is NBC going to take this off?”
No.

“Because I love NBC but this show is killing me.”
No one loves NBC more than I do. I’ve spent almost my entire working career here. I want to see it go forward and I think that Jeff Zucker obviously does too. And I think it’s all about reinvention.

Everyone in television seems to be in this state where they just throw stuff out there. And nobody knows what’s going to stick.
It depends on whether it’s coming from fear. Or whether it’s coming from some thought or point of view. In our case we go through ...

Our being SNL?
Yeah, SNL. I mean it’s true on Late Night with Conan O’Brien, now Late Night with Jimmy Fallon, it’s true on 30 Rock, most of the shows I do. You have to find your sensibility and if you’re lucky and there are a lot of like-minded people out there, then they become your audience and they come to you. When I go to an Italian restaurant I’m actually looking forward to having Italian food. Serving hamburgers is great, but it’s not what I’m coming here for. And since everything in my lifetime has been about things going faster, whenever you make something more complicated than it has to be, the audience avoids you. And you know, when you see kids – or when you see everyone – texting, they’re reinventing the language in the most abbreviated way. So why would you want to set up a system where you’re going to go through four steps to get to the thing you want? Because everyone is going to try and figure out how they can get to it in the most direct way possible. So the nature of the big tent strategy, of going to a big corporate website to find something, just seems counterintuitive. I think Hulu is a breathtaking thing, because it’s easy to navigate and it seems to have a sensibility.

What is the difference between sensibility and brand?
Sensibility is when you believe there are like-minded people. Brand is something you can spot on a shelf and go, “That’s the one, their product is always good, they taste the same every time.” It’s that thinking, you know? So if you don’t have another idea, you can go to littler Ritz crackers or Ritz crackers with jalapeno and take out more and more shelf space and crowd out anybody else who was thinking of getting into the cracker business. I understand that corporate strategy. In terms of creative strategies you can’t demand, you can’t tell an audience what to do. You can tell them your show is the greatest thing ever and they’ll go, “Yeah, yeah, everybody says that.”

That’s why spin offs seldom perform as well as the mother show?
Yeah. American kids grew up on television, they know good from bad, they feel about television the way French kids allegedly feel about wine. They know the good from the bad, and so it’s two episodes.

I don’t know whether to be depressed or “a-ha!”
When I was first working and doing shows out on the West Coast, people would constantly say, “That’ll play in New York and LA, but people in Iowa won’t understand it.” And I’d go, “I grew up in Canada, we understood it, and we were closer to Iowa then we were to New York or LA.” There are smart people everywhere and if you’re playing as I try to, to the top of the class, there are lots of them everywhere. I think music knew it instantly: heavy metal fans are heavy metal fans all over the world. You can generally tell by the look of a restaurant or a store whether it’s a place you want to go into or not. If it’s a commodity and you absolutely need it, well Costco is great. But you can’t do that with the notion of demographics or an audience.

Have you ever cared about your demos? Because that’s all I hear about now when I talk to TV and music people.
There is a quote by the sculptor George Segal about an artist who talks to himself out loud, and if anyone wants to tune into the dialogue, that’s great (if I’m getting that quote right). When I began the show, it was I who went around and I hired 40 or 50 people who I thought I could drive cross-country with, or at least I wouldn’t want to duck down the hall if I saw them coming at me at two o’clock in the morning.

Is that still how you hire?
Yeah, pretty much. The two rules I used to have were: “Don’t do a show you wouldn’t watch,” and “Don’t work with people you wouldn’t have dinner with.” Because you’re going to end up having lots of dinners with them and if you don’t want to be there you know it right away and it just makes the work much harder. When I began, it was only people like myself that we were trying to reach because [the market] was so clearly above 30 or below 30. I think we are as good as the talent we have both writing and performing and when we have great writing and great performing, well, I think we’re unbeatable. It doesn’t happen that often, but yeah, most of the time we’re rebuilding.

You’re an executive producer of one of the most successful sitcoms [30 Rock], right?
Well, successful in artistic terms.

A sort of an adult sitcom.  
Right.

Do you think the multi-camera sitcom as a mass appeal format is over?
I don’t think anything is over, ever. When everyone was doing a sitcom and there were 400 of them on, the writing quality went down like expansion baseball. And then somebody comes along like [Seinfeld co-creator] Larry David. They’ll say that a certain type of music is dead, and then someone will come along and redefine it. Right now the conventional wisdom I supposed is that the western is dead ...

Then it takes one hit to change it all.
Well, I love westerns. It’s as a friend used to say, that everyone gets to run a studio and starts making the pictures they liked as a kid, and I think there’s some validity to that. I think most people in America have two jobs: their real job and the entertainment industry. People say, “I know a good movie when I see it,” “I know a good television show when I see it,” and everyone has really strong opinions.

When I was a kid nobody cared about what the opening weekend gross was for a movie, it wasn’t in the newspaper ...
Well, they’ve turned it into a sport and everything became like that. What happened was that television people, who were used to daily numbers, started taking over the movie industry.

Do you have kids?
Yeah, three of them. 16 and 14 and 11.

I was thinking that the demographic that is still being hit very hard with sitcoms is the Nickelodeon/Disney/Hannah Montana audience. They get sitcoms all day. When those kids grow up and start managing the TV industry, they’ll bring the sitcom back.
We all like the good ones.

Why do you think Barack Obama is a harder president to ...
I got to get my kid to a basketball game.

I know you’re looking at the clock. Is Barack Obama a harder president to parody then any you’ve had?
No I don’t think so. It’s just the beginning. I think the hardest was Reagan because there was nothing the audience didn’t know. You could point out, as people feebly did, that he was an actor ...

I don’t remember who ninja-ed Reagan.
Phil Hartman did it. I was gone then.

That’s right. That was your hiatus. [Michaels left SNL after the 1979-80 season, producing TV specials for Steve Martin and Simon and Garfunkel. In 1985, he was asked to come back because the show had poor ratings and was about to be cancelled.]
But when I came back the only successful piece we did on him was Reagan as a mastermind ...

That the rest of it was all an act ...
Normally there’s some way in which an authority figure presents his or herself that’s meant to hide something that the audience senses is there. And when you start to reveal that slight arrogance, the slight condescension, the ripe dishonesty, that’s where we go.

Do you worry with Obama that you run the risk of going into racial or other stereotypes? It seems more sensitive ground.
You would think it would be, but it isn’t.  

It won’t be in the end?
Yeah, because in the end no one can withstand overexposure.

But at this stage in Bush 1 you had your guy down.
Pre-9/11 we had him down.

I meant the first Bush.
Oh yeah, Bush 1.

And you had Clinton and Bush 2 very early also.
Yeah, very early also.

So this is a little bit later
He’s only just beginning to reveal himself. We did a piece a couple of weeks ago that Seth [Meyers] wrote about him being the cool president, it kind of hit instantly. I could have done this or that but I did this because it was cool and we kind of used Miles Davis graphics, it made perfect sense ...

So you’re still feeling your way?
I talked to Paul Simon earlier today who was down at the White House yesterday for Stevie Wonder ...

The tribute.
Yeah the tribute. And he said it just couldn’t be more different. You forget how fast this country changes. I remember going into the Carter White House, because we’d been doing Ford and Ford had been incredibly gracious to us and supportive, even though Chevy [Chase] played him in a less than flattering way. None of that seemed threatening to him. But I remember going down to the Carter White House four or five months after they took over and the guy I was talking to had cowboy boots on and they were on the desk. And I thought, “Well there’s a big change there.” And I think that a crowd comes in and they have style, the Reagan people, say. And Obama is defining himself.

And you will define yourself in opposition, in parody to that.
Whatever it is, we’re against it.

How has your style changed as a manager?
I think that when I was younger I was just worried all the time. It took me a long time in the 1970s to realize that the job was never done. There was point at which you were no longer being effective because you were tired. But there was a rhythm to the week. I leave here Tuesday nights at around three in the morning, which is our writing night, and I never leave feeling, “Wow this is going to be a great week.” I always go, “Umm ...” And then Wednesday, when we have too much show, because we’ve chosen all this material and everything is going through, you start thinking what the holes are, what don’t we have? And dress rehearsal is always the hardest.

Do you do this democratically or do you take dictatorial control over what’s in and what’s out?
This office fills up with everybody who works on the show, about 40 to 50 people, and then I just say, “In this piece we gotta do that, pick up the cue there, do that, it’s not going to be on camera two, you are out of that piece, you are going into that piece.” In the last show, Alec [Baldwin] did the Republican opening, he did John Boehner [Republican congressman from Ohio] at dress, but it was hurting the monologue so I asked Dan Aykroyd if he could go into it, he’d never rehearsed it ...

But he was great.
He was great, and he just came in and nailed it. And the young ones looked and went, “He’d never done it before!” So I’m saying there is an element of risk. I say every week: “We don’t go on because we’re ready, we go one because its 11:30.” In the same way that the front page has to shut down at a certain point ...

You’re locked at a certain point, because you’re on TV.
It concentrates your mind. We would discuss endlessly about what to put in the show if we had six months to do it. And we would still be arguing about ...

And would it be any better in the end?
No.

To go back to YouTube, did it help you or hurt you?
We did Lazy Sunday [a video short with Chris Parnell and Andy Samberg] ...

That was the first one that went, like, crazy ...
And Akiva Shaffer’s [an actor on SNL] brother worked at YouTube so he sent him a copy and it became sort of a phenomenon. NBC tried to shut it down and then it became a business section story, then it became famous, the more millions of hits it got the clumsier the attempt to shut it down. But that was the warning shot across the bow. I mean, NBC had to react: it was their property rights and there’s a time (as with Napster) when it seemed a cool idea: why should anybody have to ever pay for music?

And you realize that’s the end of entertainment music.
Exactly.

But initially did you look at it and say, “This is a fantastic ad”?
To me you’re dealing with the shrinking attention span, you’re dealing with how you’re going to hold an audience for 90 minutes, so it’s a big part of the after-market, do you know what I mean? In the sense that people say, “Did you see the show last night?” and by that they mean the four things they saw on Hulu or NBC.com. My two oldest children are both boys, they watch football, but they watch it with they’re computers open, you know? Because they have fantasy [football] and so there’s almost no things left with undivided attention. For me, because I grew up more in the 19th century than the 20th century ...

Like horse and buggy?
Not quite. I studied literature at university and that mostly involved reading old books so I’m very comfortable in that kind of experience. I think of it as the height of luxury to be able to sit in a chair and read a book. But most of the time I’m in action, and in that you want as much data coming at you as possible and you want to know that’s the kind of the excitement of it.  

You are in a strange position in that your sketch comedy is particularly suited to the Internet, and it can be an advertisement without giving away the product. I find the NBC position sort of shortsighted.
I think when some startling changes happen people get rigid. If you had a dollar for every digital strategy that’s been announced in the last five years, you’d have over $100.

Ha ha.
I think it’s inane because it’s always “over,” just like the banking industry is over, like the automobile business is over, and it is, and then it isn’t.

How does TV avoid ending up like the music industry?
Well, there’s a great quote, Nick Schenck, who ran MGM for like 40 years, when they came to him in the 1950s and said the movie business is over, why would people go to a movie when they could do TV. They were closing theaters left and right. Nick said, “There’s nothing wrong with the movie business that a few good pictures won’t cure.” And I really believe the same in television.

You’ve produced how many films?
Twenty.

Twenty?
All successful.

Every single one!
Yeah, yeah, it’s an unbelievable track record.

You’ve seen that business change as well.
When we did Wayne’s World in 1991, I wanted to make a kind of Marx Brothers film. I told Frank Mancuso, who was running Paramount, that I wanted to make a movie as good as Duck Soup. It’s funny and I’m not sure anybody really remembers whether Freedonia won the war or not ...

What was the other country? Freedonia and ...
I can’t remember. What I mean is that it’s not plot driven, it’s just funny for as long as it can be funny and then it says good night. And he said, “If you can do it for $12 million I’ll leave you alone.” And even though he wasn’t there when the movie came out, we were pretty much left alone. It caught a moment in time, but you couldn’t go back there now and make that movie again, you know what I mean? But you can still have that spirit in making movies. [Producer and director] Judd Apatow makes a certain kind of movie and the problem with success in America is that once something is wildly popular everyone does it. There’s the Beatles and then there’s the Dave Clark Five and there’s every other band out of England and it turns out that not every band coming out of England was as good as the Beatles, and not every band coming out of Seattle was as good as Nirvana.

But how has that process changed for you? I’m trying to relate it to the Internet issue.
It’s all talent for me. When Tina [Fey] decided she wanted to do Mean Girls, it wasn’t that hard getting Sherry Lansing at Paramount to support it, but you still had to cast it right, you had to write it right, you had to shoot it right, you have to release it right, all of those things. And later on, people say, “Yeah, well that was a natural.” In the 1970s, people used to come up to me and say, “Uh, I had the same idea as SNL: music and comedy and politics and film,” and I never knew how to respond, and so finally I started saying, “You should have done it. What a drag. I can’t believe you had that idea.” There’s no such thing as “the idea.”

It’s execution.
It’s all about doing it. And it’s about the millions of decisions you make on the way. And so, I know from Monday to Saturday [on SNL] that they’re really into it and it can be four o’clock in the morning and I can see two writers in the hall as I’m trying to sneak out (because they’ll be staying later), and they’re going to tell me an idea, an idea that I wrote eight times, maybe edited another 12 times, and it hasn’t worked once. If I say, “I don’t think so,” or worse, “I don’t think it would work,” they think (because they’re at a different stage in the idea) that he just doesn’t get it. And I think, “No, trust me.”

Why do you think there’s no Pepsi to SNL’s Coke?
I’d love to take credit for SNL being full-blown from Zeus’ thigh, but it didn’t happen that way. It happened when then-NBC president Herb Schlosser said, “I’d like to do a show in New York live.” I was presenting a show, this kind of comedy at NBC. Dick Ebersol [director of Weekend Late Night Programming at NBC at the time], who was new to it, was going to make a lot of different pilots. Schlosser said, “I don’t want a lot of pilots, I just want one, choose one,” so he chose me.

It all got invented on the way. And then you do the first show, and you’re aghast at what it looks like, so you change it all for the second show, and then you go, “No, that isn’t working,” and then you do the third show, and then somewhere along the line the momentum slows down and you realize that’s what you’re doing.

You realize, “Okay, this is it.”
I’m having to live through Jimmy Fallon’s first show on Monday ...

Is it still hard?
Yes it’s hard, because it isn’t about the first show but everything seems to be about the first show. Conan [O’Brien], you know ...

Very uncomfortable at the beginning. It was so uncomfortable that were you at times saying ...
I wasn’t, but there were a lot of them, a lot of others that were, yes ...

When you began SNL, you had this amazing cast and all this stuff came together. Did you ever think: “If this is a product of the people here, once they all go” – and they did go – “this isn’t going to work anymore?"
That was what I thought, pretty much.

Is that why you ...?
It’s a sad fact of life because everyone one I chose, I chose because I believed in them. Some people are more talented then others and the really talented ones have an obligation to their talent to keep pushing it, so at a certain point they move on. And the less talented quite often are the most loyal, so they say, “Don’t worry, I’m never leaving,” and you go, “Oh.” ... Okay I’m going to have to wrap it up.

If you had to praise yourself and identify your own greatest talent, is it an eye for talent?
Hard to know. You can identify potential but then it’s bringing it and letting it grow, and there are a lot of steps in that process. You know I used to say glibly that all babies are ugly, and then one day you say, “What a beautiful baby.” It just takes time. Conan is the perfect example: if there hadn’t been a kind of absolute faith on my part that it was going to turn out alright, he would have seen it in my eyes. And I think he would have known, but it was like, “No, we’re doing this, you’ve got to do it.” And I believe the same thing with Jimmy Fallon. Now occasionally I’m wrong and that makes you second-guess everything you do.

Can you give examples?
Oh, there have been lots of people who I thought would be ...

On SNL?
I’ll stick with my batting average, no one is infallible. When I came back in 1985 I had in my cast Robert Downey Jr, Anthony Michael Hall, Joan Cusack, Randy Quaid, and then the ones who stayed, Jon Lovitz, and Dennis Miller and Nora Dunn, etc. I was right about Robert Downey Jr at age 20 being really talented. It was just the wrong time. He wasn’t very good on the show. It wasn’t what I saw that I was mistaken about, I was fighting on too many fronts in that particular year and so there wasn’t a way to make it work. But you know talent, potential or talent that isn’t actualized, doesn’t mean it wasn’t real, it just means it doesn’t get actualized.

What are you actually terrible at?  
I’m not good at confrontation. I don’t know if it’s a character flaw or that I’m more cerebral. So much of what I do is just about moving forward, so I can sometimes be insensitive. Which is why I like the deadline, which is why I like knowing it has to go on.

Because?
Because I’d just be fixing it endlessly. I don’t see a movie after the last preview. It’s like you’ve done everything you can and now its like ...

You’re starting to let go.
And I tend to only see the mistakes anyway.

Are you a perfectionist?
I have aspirations to be a perfectionist but I’ve never pulled it off.