So says Andrew Stanton (writer/director of Finding Nemo and WALL-E), anyway—and if you’re any kind of Pixar fan, you know Stanton’s one of the best things the American movie industry has going for it. During the course of a wide-ranging (and fascinating) interview with Dominic von Riedemann, he made this comment:
I don’t mean this in a negative way, but I don’t think of the audience at all, because I don’t go to see a movie hoping the filmmaker’s second-guessed what I want. I go to see what he wants, because I like his taste and style, and I want to see what he’s going to do next.The day we start thinking about what the audience wants, we’re going to make bad choices. We’ve always holed ourselves up in a building for 4 years and ignored the rest of the world, because nobody are bigger movie geeks than we are, so we know exactly what we are dying to see with our family and kids. We don’t need other people to tell us that. We trust the audience member in ourselves.
From a different corner of the entertainment industry, Ragnar Tørnquist (the driving creative force behind the adventure games The Longest Journey and Dreamfall) agrees:
You can worry yourself green about what players will and won’t like, you can do focus testing on concepts and characters, you can survey the market and conduct polls, you can identify and follow every new trend, but in the end the only opinion you can truly trust is your own and the opinions of those around you—the people who will spend three, four, five years of their lives working on a project. We’re all gamers, we all want to make—and play—the best game possible, and that’s what directs our decisions every single day.
I’m hard pressed to think of an instance in which anyone—writer, composer, preacher, politician, whatever—achieved greatness by giving people what they already know they want. You might get rich and famous that way, you might achieve some definition of success that way, but you aren’t going to make the world a better place that way.