Nina Jacobson Quotes

I spent all my time on my movies worried that people were eating and that the schedule was being kept, so to have experts in those areas giving me the brain space as a writer and director is huge.

We've always been the development project that lived in a time pressured setting and always where commercial entities were relying heavily on releases in a certain time frame.

The effort invested in 'getting it right' should be commensurate with the importance of the decision.

As a producer you have creative control, and that's what is so exciting about it. At the end of the day, if you have made a film it's totally your responsibility, and if it works it's your responsibility and if it doesn't it's also your responsibility.

The biggest fragility in a project is often just the inability to be able to explain to people why you are doing it, and when you're going to do it, and what's going to happen.

In management terms, directing opera certainly prepares you for a film set: the magnitude of it, the experts in other fields that you have to call on. Both are massive ensemble jobs in which there's incredible pressure to get things done on time and on budget - so much so that making the wrong decision may be better than making no decision at all.

As a scientist in charge of space sensors and entire space missions before I was at NASA, I myself was involved in projects that overran. But that's no excuse for remaining silent about this growing problem or failing to champion reform.

And I think that still is true of this business - which is basically research and development - that you probably spend more time in planning and training and designing for things to go wrong, and how you cope with them, than you do for things to go right.

I am not the kind of designer who is racing to the finish line, so while collaborations are important for our growth, each and every one has to be strategic and well-timed with what we have going on internally.

At the end of the day, though, there are a huge number of considerations that our management team go through before accepting any project - checking out the license is just one of them.

You need to carry out very careful pre-feasibility and feasibility studies before you enter any crisis situation.

We worked with the engineers in the design and construction and testing phases in those various areas, then we would get back together at the end of the week and brief each other as to what had gone on.

When you take on a project, you have to be certain that you can make the best version of whatever it is you're given.

I can see myself doing production work and handling projects behind the scenes.

You will launch many projects, but have time to finish only a few. So think, plan, develop, launch and tap good people to be responsible. Give them authority and hold them accountable. Trying to do too much yourself creates a bottleneck.

Everybody in the real world will agree - the moment a project is behind deadline, quality assurance tends to go out the window.

Your goal is to achieve the best results by following their wishes. If they want you to build a house upside down standing on its chimney, it's up to you to do it.

Currently, I am overseeing the construction of the new Trump Tower in Chicago. I am involved in meeting with the construction crews, architects and sales teams. I am learning a lot and working with some of the best in the business.

I was not a project manager who was managing and executing the day-to-day operational work of building HealthCare.gov. I didn't have the kind of comprehensive, detailed, deep knowledge of that project that a manager would have.

One of the tasks that any artistic director has is, you're trying to bring elements together that will work. The truth is that you could bring all the best talents in the world together and produce a big turkey.

The only way anyone's going to succeed is to build the product.

Shooting 'Adam & Paul' was very tough. There was barely enough time, and the budget was tiny. On top of that, we shot in dangerous locations where we had little or no control or security.

Successful organizations, including the Military, have learned that the higher the risk, the more necessary it is to engage everyone's commitment and intelligence.

Once you become a producer, you're really selling something. It is a control issue, because you don't really know how it's going to pan out, but the creative control makes it work it.

Four years after 9/11 it is scandalous that police and firefighters in large cities still cannot communicate reliably in a major crisis. It is scandalous that airline passengers are still not screened against all names on a terrorist watch list. It is scandalous that we still allocate scarce homeland security dollars on the basis of pork barrel spending, not risk.