Debbie Allen Quotes

When you shoot a movie so quickly you can't really afford to shoot a bunch of extra footage because you don't have that luxury.

I did this film for less money than it costs to stay in this hotel. We shot it in 20 days. We couldn't screw up takes for fun because we didn't have enough film.

'Tangerine' was less than half the budget of 'Starlet,' and 'Starlet' was already a microbudget film. A director always wants more time, and we had a limited amount of resources.

It's hard to make a good movie in four weeks. It's hard. I've done it, but it's not easy.

Television moves fast, and you don't have the indulgences you have when you're shooting movies of so many takes because there are tight deadlines.

One of the things that's, I think, hard in television is that there's a certain sameness to a lot of television because you're working in a very constricted box, and the box is defined by the amount of money you have to spend and the amount of time you have to get ready.

The budget evolved from a management tool into an obstacle to management.

The fact is, you don't know what directing is until the sun is setting and you've got to get five shots and you're only going to get two.

I just want to make films that have enough of a budget to pull off high-level imagery but also have a budget that is low enough that I can do what I want.

When you're shooting super-low-budget - we had 20 days to shoot 'Diary,' and a little over $2 - time is money.

I don't choose to make movies as small as the movies I've made. The combined budget of my two films is far under $5 million, but it's just by necessity that it ends up being that way.

You can't compromise to keep the film in budget.

We may not have a sample size larger than one, or we may not have unlimited resources - it's a TV show, and we generally turn these things around in about a week or so.

In television you don't have a lot of time to spend with the role or the script. Typically you get a script a week prior to shooting. Sometimes it's even less time, not enough time to dream about the role.

'The Squid and the Whale' I shot in 23 days. I would have loved more time for it at the time, but in some ways that kind of kamikaze way of shooting was right for that movie.

All of the stuff I can't afford to do on a TV budget, I just put into the comic book because you're really only limited in a comic by your artist's imagination.

Usually, I make such small-budget films that I can't afford to buy weather.

On 'B&B,' we shoot so fast and eight episodes a week, so we have to always be on our A-game. There's really no time to make certain adjustments. We usually shoot a scene in one take, maybe two or three only if needed.

The movies I usually do are maybe three or four weeks because they don't have a lot of money.

I had three weeks of prep on 'Wolfman,' a ridiculously inadequate amount of time to try to bring together the fractured and scattered pieces of the production. I had taken the job mostly because I had a cash flow problem, the only time in my career I've ever let finances enter into the decision process.

Even on a $100 million film, people will complain that they haven't got enough money and enough time, so that's always going to be an element in filmmaking.

When you're working with a smaller budget I suppose one of the things that has to be in your mind when you are writing is that you have to keep the characters down to a minimum.

I've always worked very efficiently on small budgets, both in documentaries and in features.

When you do a low budget movie, you get a little over-ambitious.

Acting in TV as opposed to films is really difficult. What a film gets two months to do, we get eight days to do.