A sentence from an interview with Harold Ramis has been getting passed around since he died on Monday, and while it’s a nice sentiment, the entire quote (and in fact the entire interview) is truthful and worth reading. This is regarding his decision to make a sequel to Analyze This.
The interviewer asked “What challenges did you encounter when trying to keep it true to the first one but also make it different and stand out in some way?”
The audience will always say that they want something new, but then if it’s too different, they don’t feel they got the experience they came back for. There was always that tension – how to keep it fresh and familiar at the same time.
For me, I can assure you that no one did it just for the money. I wanted to say something thematically and creatively that was worth saying. I feel a big obligation to the audience, almost in a moral sense, to say something useful. In this case, it took me a while to find what statement I could get behind that would not be too weighty or that would overwhelm the comedy but that would be worth talking about. If I’m going to spend a year of my life on these things, I want something that – you know, I realize the movie was about change and can people change and crime in our society and can people be redeemed. That’s what keeps me going in the big picture.
First, I updated my home page, namely doing away with the image slider. This should make the homepage in particular and all of my images in general load faster and look better if you’re reading on a phone or tablet.
Also, if you care, I created a disclosure policy and updated my FAQs.
