Oh, I don't think the problem is only the artists. I've got to be honest with you; I don't want to point fingers, but when I see Telefilm Canada telling the world at large that they will now re-evaluate how they determine a success story of a movie, and that it will no longer be the holy grail of the box office number but it will be various points for this and various points for that, it reminds me of that old attitude where, when the whole class fails an exam, we just change the criteria so that everybody seems to pass. Nobody's learned anything—everybody's failed the exam—but we just make it look different. We bell-curve it all, and all of a sudden everything looks great.
I think that's the key problem, that there are people at the level of Telefilm or SODEC who've gotten used to enjoying that kind of approach. They believe in that artistic philosophy. They are the first ones who should be sitting down with the artists, one to one, and saying, “Guys, we can't continue doing it like this. There has to be a return on our investment, even if that means shrinking the loss or the spoilage.”
When a movie does become a commercial success, I think that's what we should be promoting, as well as maybe the movies that won some festivals. But all we're talking about is the movies that won the festivals. We're never talking about the movies that did the big box office numbers and got a million or two million Canadians to go to the theatres.