Richard Greenberg Quotes

Finding one good script is a huge challenge. So I do a film whose script comes and grabs me. Once I finish that, I look forward to the next movie.

I've been so involved with TV shows, I've been unavailable for films, which is my dream.

Hollywood's all about, 'Let's make this easy: This is what you do, so you go over here in this group, and we're not gonna call you.'

Movies are very hard to make, to get it all to come together. So many people have their say in what the end product of films are.

Growing up, I wasn't sure about acting, but I knew I wanted to be part of the movie industry.

Nowadays, to get a movie greenlit, you have to make an incredible effort.

It's a roll of the dice in the movie business. I mean, every single movie is a roll of the dice. Any movie on paper could look like it's going to be fantastic. You know what I mean?

I've been in the game long enough to know what elements you have to package together to get a movie into production.

My dad couldn't connect to my wanting to be a filmmaker. He was very connected in entertainment, and through him I met Steven Spielberg and got rides on his private plane to California. I'd see Spielberg's people reading scripts. I was like, 'That's what I want to be when I grow up.'

Both TV and movies seem to be produced in a more similar way as time goes on. It used to be that movies were much bigger productions on every level and took much longer to shoot. I liked that. But with the advent of digital, everything can be done much quicker and cheaper, and that seems to be the goal of most movies and TV these days.

Hollywood is just a bunch of people going around in Learjets to other people asking them if they've got any money? Well, they might have if they didn't spend it all on jets.

It's just so hard to get movies made, especially comedies.

My dad's got a brilliant eye for scripts 'cos he's a literary agent. He and my agent read a load of scripts and filter them.

'Unforgiven' is probably an example of a script that I liked right away but thought, 'This is great, but I'd like to do this when I'm older.' So I stuck it in the drawer for ten years and then took it out.

But it's true, it's nothing new that decisions about what movies are to be made, and how they're to be made, and who's to be hired to do what, and whether you hire somebody to do their job, or whether you hire somebody to fill a position and you tell them what to do.

It's possible for me to make a bad movie out of a good script, but I can't make a good movie from a bad script.

When people slave over those scripts and pay hundreds of thousands of dollars for them, they don't usually want you to add farts.

When you write and direct your own film, you basically know exactly what you want. Or you hope to. For the studio, it actually can make life a little easier, because if you have a bunch of questions, they only need to call one person.

In Hollywood, a lot of times when something is in development, it just takes a lot of time.

With movies, it always feels like such a long shot getting it made.

I'm not put off so much by first-time directors if the script is great. If the script isn't there, I'm not there.

In the life of a director - these days in particular - when it really does take so long to do a movie, with a few exceptions, actors may never work with a director again, even if they're great friends.

There are many great writers out there and, actually, great scripts. The problem is - and this is what I've always felt, even when I got out of school and started reading scripts - the really smart, character-driven stuff tends to be smaller films, and they just don't get made.

What a cool job to be part of - whether it's doing lighting or acting or serving food on set. You're part of telling a story that hopefully has an essential component, and that's super exciting to me.

Behind the ambitious, creative talent that is Hollywood lies a darker side of the entertainment industry little appreciated by the ordinary moviegoer. It's an opaque world of film financing, revenue accretion, and minimal profit share.