Dean Devlin Quotes

It's just hard to get an independent film made.

A novelty in Polish filmmaking was that it was possible to find funds for a big production. However, at the same time, the state budget committed less and less money to filmmaking.

It's very difficult to raise money, especially in the United States, for independent movies.

I've never done a studio movie, let alone worked for a network. Every one of my films has been independently financed.

It's nice when you're working in Hollywood and there's a movie you'd like to see that no one is making anymore. You make it yourself.

Obviously, 'Twilight' had its own alchemy that was amazing, just phenomenal. Nobody thought it was going to make any money. Paramount wouldn't make the movie. Fox wouldn't make it. Nobody wanted to do it.

I think, honestly, that the word 'indie' is a false gimmick. 'Independent' used to mean a movie that was financed outside corporate Hollywood, but a lot of what gets called independent these days is totally produced within that system. And there's nothing wrong with that.

When you're making under-million-dollar films, it becomes so much about actors' availability. When you're using big actors for small films, you're in second or third position to the big monoliths.

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

The success of 'The Fighter' made it a lot easier to get 'Broken City' green-lit. And the buzz about 'The Fighter' also made it a lot easier to get 'Contraband' green-lit.

Now while the German money is over for Hollywood, I still have $80 million to make movies, and we will have two things coming up: less major movies and the price for actors will go down.

I'm excited that 'The Good Guy' is getting distribution because indie movies they're not - people ran out of money and they're not making these movies anymore. It's all superhero movies or real obvious tent pole studio films.

I love making independent movies, and that's pretty much what I'm going to be doing for the rest of my years.

If you really spend time with movies, it's three years of your life from beginning to end. I started out planting the seed with 'Monster's Ball' about independent cinema and raising money and that whole thing as a producer, and then it becomes easier for me.

Definition of an independent film is torture with less money and time.

You could go out with a camcorder tomorrow and make a movie with virtually no money, but promoting a tiny low-budget movie costs $20 million. And the money they spend on the big movies is astronomical.

It would be nice to make a movie that other people want to make, because every one of these movies, I basically have to find the only company in the world that's willing to make it, and it's always a big challenge. I end up spending a tremendous amount of energy and time trying to get money to make these movies and it's exhausting.

When we did Wayne's World, it was 14 million dollars and they didn't bug us too much because they just thought it was some little movie that nobody was ever going to see. We showed them.

The traditional Hollywood system is pretty rigid, but the film scene in, say, South Africa is booming with a lot of possibilities. If you have the cameras and reasonable capital, you can put your film in theatres next to 'Guardians of the Galaxy.' A great example of that was Kagiso Lediga's film 'Blitz Patrole.'

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.'

I can make a movie for $5M, which used to be a routinely low, independent movie, but there's no such thing as that any more.

When you make a movie independently, you raise the money beforehand, and then you make the movie kind of by yourself.

I think I should have made 'Dead Silence' as an independent movie.

The good thing about feature films is that the budgets tend to scale.

When you're making an independent feature, there are so many difficult stages. One, just writing the script is difficult on its own. Then, when you get it to a place where you're happy with it, great - but then you need to find persons who are willing to produce it, who like the script.