Callie Khouri Quotes

I don’t think that they would have allowed me to make The Best Years of Our Lives just a few years after I made it [in 1946].

Just because you've made a couple movies, you've done some good movies, you've been nominated for some Academy Awards, whatever, nobody's entitled. It's a business. If they don't see it, I can think they're wrong, but I'm not entitled to a $15 million budget to make a film.

Hollywood is a town; it's not a medium. And cinema is a medium you can practice anywhere.

Hollywood is still the mecca for good or bad, but it isn't the beginning or end for filmmaking.

When I came out to Hollywood, I discovered the perfect place for my creative madness - Cannon Pictures.

I thought that making movies was drab. I'd lived through that. And I didn't want to use my parents, ever... They didn't want to push me into this business.

A director in Hollywood in my time couldn't do what he wanted to do.

If there's specific resistance to women making movies, I just choose to ignore that as an obstacle for two reasons: I can't change my gender, and I refuse to stop making movies.

Woody Allen would go for seven years without a movie and then make one that makes no money.

As an actress, to get to work on a project where the main focus is the female voice is rare!

When I first came to Hollywood to make 'Mortal Kombat' back in the day, there was this rule that female-led action movies don't work and American studios didn't want to make them.

I was fortunate to write pretty much a year out of film school and start making movies in the Hollywood studio system. But with each progressive film it became more frustrating not being able to speak and say things I wanted to say.

I wish that there were more female driven films, female-centric films being made.

When I did 'Ferris Bueller's Day Off', I had the idea on Monday and the following Tuesday it was in budget at Paramount. I couldn't walk.

What I can't figure out is why we're not making more R-rated movies, actually.

I will not cut my film because, because, because, because of the Wonderful Wizard of Oz.

Making movies was a real weird kind of adult experience. In a way it was like MIT, in that it was a great education. The big lesson is, people are people. They're smart, funny, creative people, but they're people.

Basically, I just want to do a movie where I'm surrounded by women.

I think the roles in television are better for women right now. At this point, I don't want to continue doing the same things I've been doing in film because it's very limited.

I've been called the Women's Auxiliary of the Brat Pack.

Blockbusters run the mainstream industry. We may never again have a decade like the 1970s, when directors were able to find such freedom.

I don't think an NC-17 rating is the kiss of death. Nor do I think that, in the hands of the right filmmakers, studios have a preconceived notion to pass on NC-17 material.

I must say, to my great surprise and pleasure, I deeply loved making movies in the United States because of all the opportunities it gave me to work with people that I admire as artists.

Storytelling is the only studio movie where the censorship is perfectly clear, the only studio movie with a big red box covering up a shot. I take pride in that - and, of course, in having avoided the fate of Eyes Wide Shut.

In America, they shoot budgets and schedules, and they don't shoot films any more. There's more opportunity in Europe to make films that at least have a purity of intent.