Since Stacey Snider took the reins as chairman of Universal Pictures in 1999, she has weathered three changes in corporate management and proved her ability to ride the roller coaster of running a motion picture studio during these challenging times. The Hollywood Reporter deputy film editor Anne Thompson talked with Snider, 44, about how she juggles big-budget studio crowd-pleasers like Peter Jackson's "King Kong" along with such controversial smart movies like Steven Spielberg's "Munich" and Ang Lee's "Brokeback Mountain."

The Hollywood Reporter: What do you count on as you steer your course through this crazy marketplace?

Stacey Snider: Quality. Good taste is something I've always relied on. You have to trust your unfiltered reaction to what's going on around you, to feel what you believe and believe what you feel.

THR: What are the hazards of your job?

Snider: It's a hard gig. In order to justify the expense of running a studio, you have to release a full slate of movies, and in that full program there will hopefully be no more than a few that you make because they seem right from the outside in. It's turned out for me that those are the ones I fall on my face with. The ones that I never thought were risky, that you feel in your gut you want to make, have turned out the best. It's hard -- we're making 16-28 Universal films and 10-12 from Rogue and Focus Features a year.

THR: What's your approach to supervising your specialty film division?

Snider: The guiding principles were for it to be filmmaker-driven, maverick in spirit, independent and not just a cheaper little sister adjunct to the studio. I didn't want executives, but filmmakers to run it. I talk to James Schamus and David Linde every day. We're all one company. We should all leverage our expertise and skills to their best advantage, unlike what happened at Disney and Miramax. "Pride & Prejudice" was financed through Universal, but we thought it was better for it to be released through Focus. We're expecting Joe Wright's next project for Working Title, an adaptation of Ian McEwen's "Atonement," at any minute.

THR: How do you determine the budget of a movie, whether it's "King Kong," at $207 million, or "Brokeback Mountain," at $14 million?

Snider: It starts from a completely subjective gut check: What do we think this movie can do? Then you go to the research to see if that first gut reaction is supported by the historicals. Then you ask if there's a reason for this movie to exceed the historicals or is there something about the project that would lead it to underperform? We talk with each other, so it's not just one's person's enthusiasm.

THR: How do you decide if a smart movie like Sam Mendes' "Jarhead" is for the studio or Focus?

Snider: It's not just a matter of getting the talent to make the deals. There's a scope that is prohibitive at a certain number. You cannot capture the experience of the Gulf War on a Focus budget. Part of the reason you do a war drama is to give the audience a scope and a visual terrain that they can't get anywhere else. We all have to consider which stories merit that kind of investment. That's the key question: to apply discipline, discretion, taste and reasoning and with the ones that deserve it -- go for it. On "Jarhead," the production value was the thing to get people in, married to that Kanye West song. But if you just had a bunch of soldiers talking about their angst, you've got nothing to sell.

THR: You seem to be placing your bets on A-list directors like Mendes.

Snider: This last year our directors include Peter Jackson, Steven Spielberg, Ron Howard, Sydney Pollack, Fernando Meirelles, Ang Lee and coming up next year we have Michael Mann with "Miami Vice."

THR: Why didn't you ask Peter Jackson for a more perfect, shorter version of "King Kong"?

Snider: The perfect version of the movie really is Peter's vision for it. With "King Kong" we signed up to support Peter. I do think he's a genius. If there had been something that felt like such a bump that it prevented the movie from being satisfying, we'd have said something. We're not shy. This was the deal: it was understood that we were helping Peter to realize his dream. We had some narrative issues about the sequencing on the boat where we lost focus on some of the characters. Those were expressed to Peter, and he addressed them.

THR: When Jackson threw out Howard Shore's score at the last minute, that must have given you cold sweats.

Snider (laughs): Yes, it did. You just think, how did this happen? It's how you get through it. You take a breath and rely on your colleagues and put one foot ahead of the other. You must act, and respond thoughtfully, and financially responsibly. And you can't have a movie like "King Kong" that doesn't have a score that supports it. You cannot. It's not an incidental. Peter actually said, "Do you want to listen to it?" and I said I didn't want to. In that situation, what would it matter? Especially when you're trying to crack an adventure story and a love story.

THR: Will you send "King Kong" out in 3-D?

Snider: That is still being discussed. The technology isn't proven and the theaters aren't transferred for the experience. We don't know if we're this side of too early.

THR: Are you nervous about the tracking numbers showing that interest in "King Kong" from women is soft?

Snider: The tracking is coming up significantly. We've got great spots out there that are doing the job. Women journalists who have seen the movie are writing about it. People were overwhelmed at the love story and the emotion if it.

THR: Are media projections about "King Kong" reaching "Titanic" numbers good or bad for your movie?

Snider: It's just one more drag to have to deal with either well-meaning -- or not so well-meaning -- third parties that create expectations about your performance for which they are in the dark about what's really required. They only know the thumbnail sketch of the financial profile. They don't know the nuances of what kind of financing deals we've arranged or whether or not we have equity invested in the movie. So those kinds of third-party predictions are never sought and never welcome. Having said that, it's not a big surprise that "King Kong" is high-profile and has to perform to a big number. It's not a little sleeper. But I don't think we've oversaturated the market with "King Kong" mania.

THR: You're taking the opposite route with "Munich," where you are also letting the filmmaker call the shots.

Snider: This is a really personal film for Steven Spielberg. To wrestle back and forth over scenes and ideas with Steven and (producer) Kathy Kennedy and (screenwriter) Tony Kushner was a privilege. The script process was rigorous and thoughtful. Then they went off to make the movie. Steven finished it the last week of November after starting it the last week in June. And we've taken his lead and his guiding principle on this movie is for the film to speak for itself. We're not hiding it.

THR: Why are you mounting such a concerted Oscar campaign after the disappointing summer performance of Ron Howard's "Cinderella Man?"

Snider: We blew that. Perhaps because of "Seabiscuit," we were overly optimistic about "Cinderella Man's" ability to compete and get noticed at that time of year. I do think that a big transportive entertainment has a place. I'd make that movie again. Our support of the movie is not frivolous, and it's not about the DVD campaign. We think the movie is genuinely deserving of awards recognition.

THR: You seem to be keeping your budgets reasonable going forward into 2006.

Snider: "Miami Vice" is the biggest budget movie we have next year, and that's $120 million. It's got everything: Jamie Foxx, Colin Farrell, rap music, boats, trains, cars, babes. It's Michael Mann -- commercial. Next year we have comedies: "Evan Almighty," a sequel to "Bruce Almighty," with Tom Shadyac and Steve Carell. "The Break-Up" with Vince Vaughn and Jennifer Aniston. We have "Me, You and Dupris" with Owen Wilson and "American Dreams," the Weitz brothers' movie. That posse of funny people are comfortable here. They feel like we get them, and we're great at selling their material.

THR: What's your solution to narrowing the theatrical/DVD window?

Snider: We have to be somehow protective of the theatrical window and in touch with our consumer. At the Quandrangle media conference there was one panel which represented the sentimentalist point of view, the nervous hand-wringer who says the sky is falling, and one guy in the middle who spoke about the future in an excited way: There will be wonderful big fancy theatrical experiences where everybody laughs and cries together. A guy who's afraid of technology should not be guiding a company today, because there's something fantastic about what's going on now. I love my PSP player. I have always felt, bring it on. The hand-wringers frustrate me: We should be excited. There are big issues of copyright protection, new business models and pricing for our product. But we can't put our head in the sand.