I met up with writer-director Richard Shepard
at a hotel bar maybe six weeks back to talk about the spry, post-war, investigatory
caper flick The Hunting Party — currently getting a half-hearted release shaft job from the Weinstein Company — and
while he touched on the phenomenon of test screenings in this separate tidbit, he also talked more directly about their merit, even
to filmmakers who trade in varying tonalities. To wit:

“Test screenings can go horribly wrong. If the studio
listens to every inane comment then you’re screwed,” Shepard relates. “If
you’re spending $100 million and making an action movie, then you want to reach
the biggest possible audience you can. But if you’re making an under-$20
million movie that mixes… this and that, it’s a particular type of movie, and
if you try to steer it to everyone, it’s going to fail. There’s a
nerve-wracking element if the studio is listening to the notes in a manifestly
different way than the filmmaker is, but as a filmmaker if you listen to what
real people have to say about your movie, it can be really helpful. It can help
clear up confusion, you can tighten the movie. You can see a scene hundreds of
times in an editing room and think that it’s fine, and then you see it in front
of an audience and you can just feel that people are a little bored. …Sometimes
you have to say, ‘I have to be bored there, because I can’t cut anything out of
it.’ At a certain point, especially if you’re making a movie that mixes tones,
you’re never going to please everyone — the best thing that you could hope for
in those test screenings is to please yourself by making the best movie that
you can.”