Ian Mckellen Quotes

You can make films, and often, they get released on four screens in the U.K. Although it's been interesting and good for you, if no one's seen it, what's the point?

I want people to see my name on a movie, pay money and know they're going to be entertained for 90 minutes.

I don't really have much to prove. I can easily go in a comfort zone, make two films a year, hype them because I've signed them as a star, make them cheap and they will be big hits.

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

I think, it's important to understand how to release a film.

All I want to do is to make movies that are appealing to people.

Sometimes people are surprised to learn that most of the films I've made don't work. They've been released but nobody has ever seen them. Maybe 40 percent of them are very successful. That's a very high percentage; most people have maybe 10 or 15 percent of their films work.

Make movies you love because it's miserable. Every movie I've worked on at one point or another is exhausting, and you feel like you're making a bad movie.

When you make movies, you've picked the most expensive art form, and somebody has to pay for it. You kind of owe it to them to at least let them know how you expect to make it as accessible to as many people as you can, given the story you're telling.

Fundamentally, the most important thing is to get the film made for me and to get as many people to see it as possible. And if I help that, then - I know I help that, let's put it that way. I do know that I help that. It is called show business.

I'm really interested in making movies that people see: I've made a lot of independent films and it's really depressing when no one sees them.

I would say the three stages of making a film are the initial 'are we gonna do this,' 'how much will I be paid,' is there a lot of nights, who's it going to be with? The second stage of doing a film is how much fun your going to have doing it. The third stage is was the film a hit?

Obviously, I try to make the films work for an audience. That's the main point of making a film, and in retrospect, one can see that certain films, let's say Leaving Las Vegas, demonstrated its own success.

As long as somebody finances you, can make a film and get it seen any place and in any language; then, hopefully, it's a success.

The movies I made early on may not have been great, but they were all commercially successful.

When you're working on a movie you always hope that people will go for it and enjoy what you're doing.

They say now in America that final cut doesn't mean anything. As Harvey Weinstein said to some film-maker, 'You can have final cut. I'll open your film in Arkansas.'

I think the British industry is set up to support British film, if we make films that enable them to support it. If you don't make a commercial film, distributors can't get behind it. If they don't get behind it, the film doesn't do well.

I think they quite like me when I work because I'm one of the safer directors to back, because even if my films don't bring their costs in back home, once they're shown outside of India they manage to cover the costs.

I've been doing independent films for 10 years, but one out of five didn't see the light of day.

I don't make movies because I think audiences will want to go see them.

While more great films are being made every year, it is increasingly difficult to get indies into theaters or on TV.

Big studio comedies are such a headache.

To have a film in America means precisely nothing if you don't have a distributor who stands behind it.

I certainly wouldn't mind if 'Jurassic Park' turns out to be commercially successful, and somebody says, 'Hey, you were in a box-office hit, and if you want to do another movie, we'll give you five million dollars to make it.'