Margot Kidder Quotes

Not all of our movies work, but we take shots, and we're able to do that because we really stick to low budgets.

They're making so few movies that you really just have to make it. It's going to be the only way you end up getting work. I don't believe anyone's going to really go out on a limb and just throw millions of dollars on someone that's not been proven. They're going to have to show somebody something at some point.

It used to be the case that studio executives like Robert Evans, Darryl Zanuck, and David Selznick would put aside money for what they wanted to be great movies regardless of whether they would perform well with the box office.

I think one of my favorite things about making low budget movies is that when you get into expensive moviemaking territory, it's almost impossible not to reverse engineer the movies. It's irresponsible not to think about the result and the financial result. But when you make low budget movies, you can put that out of your head.

You read a lot about movies with budgets of $25 to 30 million. Hell, if a studio can piss away that kind of money, why not let 'em piss on me?

I'd just as soon do a big-budget movie as an independent one.

Basically, if you could get a good trailer out of the script, Roger had no objection to you making a really good movie. He liked it if you did. He liked the more cleverness and ingenuity you could bring to it. He just wasn't going to give you any more money.

It costs a lot of money to release a movie. What you'd call art-house movies - movies that don't have big stars or big budgets - they're very hard for distributors to get behind 'em and take chances.

It seems there's a sliding scale between the money they spend on a movie and its creativity.

In an ideal world, I'd bounce between big projects and no-budget TV dramas with fantastic scripts.

We need less perfect but more free films.

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

It's gotten out of control. It's taking bigger and bigger names to make smaller and smaller films. I worry that important films without a big name attached won't get made at all.

I have a real kind of fundamental philosophical belief that movies are better if everyone gets paid when they work, and if they don't work, the people who worked on them make a little bit of money, and the people who finance them, they lose, but they don't lose too much. I believe that that creates better work.

There are an enormous amount of techniques I wanted to beta test in television. You can't take those risks on a $100 million movie.

Legendary is in the unique position in that they have the resources to take risks, which I think has really benefitted 'Pacific Rim.'

I became a producer because nobody was ready to finance my films.

I want to highlight this, that to make meaningful cinema, we really need an enabling environment and freedom to express.

I would never make a film because I think it's going to be a box-office success.

I feel that if you want to make films, you have to be willing to make it without a fee. You get a deferment, I guess.

I don't choose to make low-budget films. But that is the reality of surviving in the Japanese film industry. However, the trade off is, since we're working on small budgets, we have freedom. You can't buy this freedom with money. With this freedom, I think there are an infinite number of possibilities.

Making independent films is liberating. It eliminates self-censorship, which mainstream films are infected with due to commercial priorities.

I think making small movies reminds you of the effort. When you make big movies, the effort is to fight for freedom. When you make small movies, the effort is making the day, making the budget, and it's great, too.

I think about the period of, like, the '70s and early '80s where nobody had money to make big movies and there was no CGI or anything like that and people had to get super creative. And then, you know, when you've got somebody who can paint you any picture on a computer and you get hundreds of millions of dollars to make a movie, its almost like the creativity diminishes somewhat.

There's something about the sci-fi genre that gets an audience interested in it, so maybe you can take some risks that you couldn't, if you were just doing a drama. It lets you maybe reach a little further and surprise people a little bit more because there's still that little safety base of working on that genre that everybody loves.