Rick Santorum Goes to Hollywood

The former Senator is now a movie-studio exec, with his first feature out this weekend

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Nicholas Kamm / AFP / Getty Images

Former US Republican Senator Rick Santorum speaks at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) in National Harbor, Md., on Mar. 15, 2013

Well, metaphorically at least — Former senator and White House aspirant Rick Santorum has gotten into the movie business, though the company for which he’s now CEO is based in Texas, not California.

“Since my time in politics I’ve noticed that entertainment has a huge impact on the country and therefore the government,” says Santorum. “I always paid fairly close attention to those things and always felt like a lot of the things that I stand for are not necessarily talked about in a lot of films.” When an opportunity came along to “stop complaining about it and actually go out there and try to do something,” Santorum jumped at the chance.

So Santorum, known nationally for his 2012 bid for the presidency, became CEO of “faith and family”-focused EchoLight Studios this summer. Santorum spoke to TIME while in transit between Fort Wayne, Ind., and Indianapolis, where he was presenting screenings of the studio’s first release under his watch, The Christmas Candle, out Nov. 22. It’s a yuletide fable set in 19th-century England and stars Susan Boyle and Les Mis‘ Samantha Barks. (EchoLight is the movie’s U.S. distributor.) Santorum, known for his conservative stance on cultural issues, says he thought the idea of a Christmas movie about Christ was “neat” and that it fit in well with his motivations for getting into the business.

But just because he has no prior filmmaking experience doesn’t mean Santorum is starting from scratch on his new gig.

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For one thing, he’s an avid movie-watcher who lists It’s A Wonderful LifeField of Dreams and Braveheart among his favorites. He says he’ll probably go see The Hunger Games: Catching Fire, even though it’s The Christmas Candle‘s big competition at the box office.

For another, his political experience has already come in handy. EchoLight’s small-ish budgets mean that the studio depends on grassroots marketing, and Santorum says his ability to rally potential fans and drive word-of-mouth has been helpful. In some ways, it’s actually proven harder on the entertainment side than the political: Santorum says that it’s more difficult to guess what moviegoers will think than what voters will think.

“I’ll tell you what, it’s a tough business. I’m not going to judge it on my first five months, but I’ve dealt with a lot of different challenges, let’s put it that way, with people in the business, that meet or exceed the challenges that you have in politics,” he says. “From what I can tell, the research about what movies will be successful and what will not, is even more problematic in its application than research that you do with respect to voters and what voters want. To me, the vagaries of entertainment seem to be a lot more real than in the political world.”

In that way, Santorum says, opening night is like Election Day, when you find out all at once if your bet was on-target. But that doesn’t mean you get to have both at once. Though Santorum has not yet decided whether to give the presidency another shot in 2016, he knows that to do so would mean cutting his new career short.

“When you run for President you run for President; you don’t run a company,” he says. “If I announce for President, I won’t be running this company any more — but I’m not going to make even internal decisions about that for at least another year. We’ll see how everything goes, see how the landscape is, see how things are personally. There’s a lot of factors for me to consider in making this decision, and that’s just one of them.”