By Sugandha Rawal
New Delhi, Oct 26 (IANS) Ari Sandel has realised that navigating the world of Hollywood is a long and complex journey, and winning an Oscar doesn’t make it any easy.
The American director says it takes a lot of “work, patience and perseverance” to make a mark in the industry.
“How to make movies is different than how to make them in Hollywood. To make it in Hollywood, it takes a long time, a lot of work and a lot of patience and a lot of perseverance. You have to be willing to be told ‘no’ a lot,” Sandel told IANS on a candid note during a conversation over the phone from Los Angeles.
Sandel won an Oscar for his first film — “West Bank Story” — a short film exploring the Israeli-Palestinian conflict with comedy and music. He picked an Academy Award for it in the Best Short Film (Live Action) category in 2006.
He went on to use his creative instincts to make films like “The Duff”, “When We First Met” and “Goosebumps 2: Haunted Halloween”. Sony Pictures India released the film in the country on Friday.
“My first film was a short film. It was a comedy about Israeli-Palestinian and it won an Academy Award. I was lucky and honoured to win that, but it took a long time to go from that to getting my next movie even after winning an Academy award,” said Sandel, whose father comes from Israel and mother from the US.
“Even when you get the next movie, it takes a lot of time to get the next one after that and next one after that. It is a lot of work,” he added.
The director, who feels he has learnt great skills related to filmmaking while studying in University of Southern California, compared his job as a director with that of actors.
“As an actor, you can go from movie to movie or maybe do two or three movies in a year. But the director has to be with the movie from start to finish. And sometimes it can take one or two years just to make one movie.
“It is like raising a child. You are very proud (of the project) and you get to see it go off to the world and become its own thing.”
At the moment, his focus is to ensure his film “Goosebumps 2: Haunted Halloween”, in which monsters come to life, reaches a wide audience around the globe.
“My focus right now is making sure that my film is seen by as many people as possible and it has an impact. I hope people — who don’t live in the US or maybe don’t know or haven’t celebrated Halloween — can see a bit of American culture through the film,” he said.
The sequel to R.L. Stine’s 2015 hit follows the Quinn family — high school senior Sarah (Madison Iseman), her middle school brother Sonny (Jeremy Ray Taylor), and their mother Kathy (Wendi McLendon-Covey) — into an entirely new set of spooky and funny events.
It is based on “The Goosebumps Books” written by R.L. Stine.
(Sugandha Rawal can be contacted at [email protected])
–IANS
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