Alex Garland Quotes

When you make a film you make a film. You don't think about how it will be marketed.

Producing is making films without having to work sometimes. It's still making films, but it's a different job. When you're the director, you kinda do all the work. I'm actually going tonight to check the prints of my movie even though the premiere's tomorrow night.

When you make a movie, you can only make the movie that you would want to see.

As a director, my job is to spend money, and the producer's is to save money. Masoom, Bandit Queen and the first Queen Elizabeth have been my most uncompromised films.

If you can get your movie made the way you want to get it made, no matter what the end result is going to be, if people are going to see it, that's awesome.

The timing for directing is usually because it takes that long to develop a piece and then do pre-production and then post-production. It takes at least a couple of years. I prefer directing to doing other things. Directing and writing seem to be infinitely more creative

Film is a collaborative process, absolutely, but I am a control freak.

Producing is making films without having to work sometimes. It's still making films, but it's a different job.

If you're directing, it doesn't really matter any more if it's going straight to TV - what matters is whether you have the resources to make a story that moves you.

The reason I wanted to start directing is that as an actor I felt I came into a job late. There's a whole team of people who have been working on it for months before you start. You have this really intense period of filming and then you leave it, knowing that the director will work on it for another few months.

I've been told my movies are difficult to market.

As far as I'm concerned, I make movies.

Movie making is really, it's a director's medium, it's not even so much an actor's medium.

The filmmakers always have a great level of control.

My partner, Beth Alexander, and I want to produce smaller films, but commercially viable films that will enable me to make the kinds of movies I want to make.

Now it really is, believe it or not, 90% of the films are green lit, not by the studio heads, but by the marketing department.

I'm so not interested in producing, other than doing my own work, producing my own films. I only do it as favors, for other people to get their films made.

As far as writing or directing a film, I've worked with enough people who have done that that I know it's just a whole other level of responsibility and chaos and murder that I could not see happening. For now, I'm just going to see what comes. I know what I like and what direction I have.

For me, the movies I like are all independent. And getting an independent feature made, it's like you get down to the selling organs part, and it just loses some of its luster.

You seldom get that in film where you're lucky if you get any say at all in the final cut.

Making a movie and not directing the little moments is like drinking a soda and leaving the little slurp puddle for someone else.

When you're making a film, you don't really have time to consider what the whole of your film is. And then, when you're releasing your film and promoting your film, you're looking at it in a different way. Then, as you move away from it, you start to look at it objectively and think, 'What could I have done better?'

I don't make movies because I think audiences will want to go see them.

Making movies is eating candy. It's a very expensive candy, so you value when you can do it. So when you can do it twice at once, it's like, you know, a kid in a candy store!

Director of any film is very important, and an actor has to leave himself in his hands to mould.