Barry Levinson Quotes

In Korea, the director has the final word. If the director makes a decision, that decision is final. In Hollywood, every decision needs to go through the producer, the studio, and sometimes even the main actor. There is a certain procedure that needs to be followed.

As far as producing, once we started shooting, I soon realized where the critical decisions about the movies were really being made, and it wasn't on the set. They were being made in the production meetings. That's where producing a movie happens. And that's where I wanted to be. I didn't just want to be a piece, a pawn being played. I wanted to take part in the creative process, and that's how I sort of got introduced to the idea.

Sometimes I watch films that I can't believe got made. Especially because I read scripts that are truly incredible, that will never get made. I don't know who is behind those decisions. It's like you just have to doodle something on a page about the underdog who finally gets the girl and the film gets made.

To be honest, we have no control over what's going on with a movie, much less what people are going to think of it. Your whole life is wound up in it but you don't have control and you have to get used to being on that turbulent plane without trying to fly it. The less you think about all that the better.

You always worry about films when you hear about them making decisions after announcements are made.

Eventually, everyone said, Why don't you direct? It would save time. And that's how it started.

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.

The problem with making movies is that you have to devote so much of your life to fawning and flattering the men in suits, whereas that doesn't happen in books. You just go and write, and then the book comes out.

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

Writing is getting killed by too many chefs. Back in the Bogart days, it started with great scripts. You had a writer, and he wrote a script, and that was your movie. I think that's been watered down a bit lately.

I find it quite difficult on studio films because there are so many different executives and things like that that you have to go through, so very often getting that definitive opinion is actually quite difficult.

It's weird writing for a documentary because I have all these ideas for what I want to happen, but what actually happens is obviously completely different.

The more I see of the movie business, the less I understand about it. I have no idea what goes on with that stuff.

Simply making decisions, one after another, can be a form of art.

Most people in Hollywood are making about 10 percent of all the things they're considering; I am making 95 percent.

There's a kind of unwritten rule: Don't say anything at all, and everything will be fine. It's a producer's medium. The directors aren't there to make any decisions. They're not going to change anything.

Truly, that reason upon which we plume ourselves, though it may answer for little things, yet for great decisions is hardly surer than a toss up.

The millions or billions of micro decisions that you're going to make, that's what will determine who you are as a writer, not you deciding in advance.

Decisions are the endless uncertainties of life that we'll not know if they're right until the very end, so do the best you can and hope its right.

Hollywood is just so strange. It's like, everyone has a whole bunch of stuff boiling away and whichever one happens first, happens. That one, we're still in the process of, you know, trying to write the script. So, it's still very early stages at this point. Yeah.

I do believe in us as actors and directors and writers and producers and also as movie-goers. We have much more power than we believe we have. Without our ticket, studios can't make traditional decisions.

The size of budgets does not alter my decision if I should do it. If there's a movie with a budget of only $1 million that I find interesting, then I'll sign up, but it has to be in the hands of a director who can do something with it. Ultimately, it's a director's medium.

You learn that Hollywood has its own rules, sometimes. And it's tricky, and sometimes you can't see what's coming around the corner.

I think quite often when you have a hell of a lot more money and time, as you very much do on a big studio film, you don't necessarily have to make the decisions right there. You can always goback and reshoot it.

Fate is strange, and our destinies can be shaped by very small decisions.