Keenen Ivory Wayans Quotes

You just can't make any movie and it will be good now. This is a really a difficult time to be in films.

What I learned from my go-round with 'In the Heights' is that it's tough to make a movie. In Hollywood, even the people in charge have people in charge.

Hollywood is still the mecca for good or bad, but it isn't the beginning or end for filmmaking.

Big feature films are another world.

It's a good time to be making movies, despite the cynicism people have about Hollywood.

I think the movie industry is a hard industry, but it is not that hard to be allowed to do what you want if you work hard.

My passion is doing movies, so as long as I keep doing that I will be happy.

I have a really good relationship with Focus Features; we had a wonderful time working together on 'Sin Nombre.'

I've always loved movies, since I was a little kid, but I never wanted to be part of that industry. It always seemed horrifying, the way films were made.

The fact is that Hollywood, from as early as the sixties to the present time, has ghettoized cinema into the big industry, a marketing industry. In doing this, the audiences have lost touch with the aspects of film which were to be informative and educational and even spiritual.

I felt privileged to be a facet of such a jewel in the crown of American cinema.

The Hollywood structure was monopolistic, run by four or five big studios.

Producing is the hardest of the three because there is almost no closure. Every time you solve a problem, another one pops up. Directing is second, and acting is the most fun.

It's almost an impossible thing to get a movie made that is written by two actors who want to star in it, when no one knows who they are. The only time it happened that I know of was when Sylvester Stallone did it in 'Rocky.'

It's a real privilege to make movies.

I love filmmakers.

'Red Planet' was a tough movie to make, and I learned a lot about myself. To me, that's a lot more interesting than how a movie does.

I think the movie business, you meet people, and you work intensely with them, and you have these relationships - there's an intimacy to it and a familiarity to the relationship because you're having to let go of all your barriers so you can let people in and work with them.

Financiers don't support their directors to cast properly. They don't have the vision of an artist. They're casting to spreadsheets, and it's making movies very mediocre. The movie business used to just be called the movies. Now it should be the business movies.

Hollywood, for me, is the studios. It's a way to produce. It's a different way to make movies, and I never took part in that.

Often, in the movie business, they need somebody who will garner box office because they need to pay for the movie. So the people who are in movies that make a lot of money are the people who most often get cast in studio pictures. In my career, I've never been a box office name.

The film division at Amazon is made up of true cineastes who love movies and really want to try and provide opportunity for independent film visions to find their footing in a vastly shifting market. They love cinema.

Having done both commercial and hard-hitting cinema, I can say none of them are easy.

A long and productive career in the world of films is bound to be checkered with success and failures. You cannot have one without the other; the only way not to make a flop is not to make a film.

For every film that I have believed in - from 'Tanu Weds Manu' to 'Rehna Hai Tere Dil Mein' - it was very difficult to find producers.