Amy Pascal

May 2008

As co-chairman of Sony Pictures Entertainment (SPE), Amy Pascal not only runs the company, she is also responsible for overseeing all development and production activities at Columbia Pictures. She has overseen the hit Spider-Man franchise, the Oscar-nominated Surf’s Up and The Da Vinci Code. Pascal is known for fostering diversity in film—from attracting a wide range of male and female directors to encouraging a variety of subject matter—as seen in SPE’s upcoming slate of films, which includes the action comedy Hancock with Will Smith, the thriller disaster film Quarantine starring Jennifer Carpenter and Steve Harris, and the comedies You Don’t Mess with the Zohan starring Adam Sandler and Step Brothers with Will Ferrell and John C. Reilly. She talks to World Screen about her passion for the movie business.

WS: What’s your strategy for attracting talent and how do you get the best out of writers and producers you work with?

PASCAL: I have incredibly good executives who work here and do a lot of that hard work for me! They are really brilliant and fantastic at working with talent, so I’m really lucky that I have such a good team. We pride ourselves on being a place where we help people do their best work. We believe in directors and we believe in filmmakers and that doesn’t mean that we let them do whatever they want. It means that we believe that stories are best crafted by one person.

WS: Sony has always been very active in international production. Why has that been important?

PASCAL: We’ve been doing local-

language productions for a long time. While I have encouraged growth in this market, I can take no credit for this. It was really started by an executive named Gareth Wigan, who works here and is really smart and figured out that we need to make movies in the native countries for local audiences. So now we make movies for audiences in Russia, India, China, Latin America and other countries. And if those movies travel, great, and if they don’t travel, we believe we should still be making them. We’ve been doing that for a long time and that’s been incredibly successful. As the world becomes much more global, there are movies made for their own markets and there are movies for the whole world—some people see the U.S. as a territory at this point.

WS: Do you see international productions growing in importance in the future?

PASCAL: Absolutely.

WS: The movie business is cyclical. Do you try to predict what genres will be popular or do you let the audience guide you toward what’s coming next?

PASCAL: We all get influenced, of course, by things that are happening in the world and by what’s happening in entertainment. In our world we think in terms of seasons, we think in terms of falls and Christmases and summers. Last summer there were a lot of sequels—an unbelievable amount—and some were successful and some weren’t because they relied on the same old same old and that wasn’t good enough.

This summer you probably won’t see that. I think you’re going to see a lot of original product that you haven’t seen before—big movies that are original, and then probably next summer you’ll see sequels again!

WS: How do you find a balance between original ideas and franchises?

PASCAL: The nice thing about a franchise is that you can rely on it in your schedule. If you have something like a Spider-Man or a James Bond you can organize your release schedule around that, which is great. But the challenge is to keep each film in your franchise fresh and original and make each picture a stand-alone movie. It isn’t necessarily true that the same people who go to see the first one also see the second one. You want to activate a whole new audience. We’ve done it successfully and we’ve done it unsuccessfully, and the times that we’ve done it successfully are when we understood why the first movie worked and we tried to emulate the emotional intention of the movie and we stayed with the story and with the characters.

WS: Why are franchises becoming so important nowadays?

PASCAL: Because marketing and production costs continue to rise and there are so many movies in the marketplace and there are so many other things in the marketplace—games, television, the Internet—everything that everybody can do at every minute of every day. And people like brands. People like things that they are comfortable with. They like the comfort of a brand and they are invested in the characters and they like seeing the story taken in a new direction or being told in a fresh, new way. That’s how you keep franchises alive and get public attention.

WS: Marketing has become hugely important. Is that because people have so many different places to go for entertainment?

PASCAL: People have so many places to go and there are so many places to watch a story after you’ve seen it in the movie theater. And the windows are getting shorter, so you want to get as many people as you can to come and see your movie in the movie theater, because that is why we all got in this business—to make movies for the theatrical experience. And then you get to the ancillary markets where you can see that same movie in a lot of different ways.

WS: Speaking of that, because more and more people are watching movies on their computers, even on iPods, how do you and the screenwriters and directors you work with feel about people looking at movies on a teeny-weeny little screen?

PASCAL: There are some movies that have to be seen in a great big movie theater. That’s what movies are all about. For our generation, movies are about sitting in a theater and being moved [in a group experience]. There is a reason why cavemen told each other stories while sitting around a fire, because sharing stories is something we are never not going to do. But if those stories then get to live on in all sorts of other ways and that [ensures] they won’t disappear—I don’t think there is anything wrong with that.

WS: In the media business everything is changing so fast, and we don’t know what screen is going to come up tomorrow, what device, what business model is going to work. How does that impact your role as a manager?

PASCAL: The most important thing you learn as a manager or leader is that you can’t predict what’s going to happen next. We make movies to be experienced first in a theatrical setting, but the business is changing. While we are committed to making product that supports a community experience in a movie theater, you don’t know what kind of screens people are going to be looking at in ten years. You’ve got to make sure that your company is ready and nimble to make changes as fast as they come. And they are coming fast!

WS: What movies shaped you when you were younger and got you thinking this is the business you wanted to be in?

PASCAL: All About Eve is still my absolute very favorite movie. I also loved Shampoo, Meet Me in St. Louis and Mary Poppins.

WS: Michael Lynton is chairman and CEO of Sony Pictures Entertainment and you are co-chairman. How do you share responsibilities with him in the different areas you oversee?

PASCAL: Michael Lynton and I have the kind of working partnership where we truly collaborate on everything together. Our offices are attached. Thank God we don’t have to share a bathroom! But in every other way we [work together]. It was a shotgun marriage. I didn’t know how it would work at [the beginning], but I don’t think I would ever want to do it without him.