Francis Ford Coppola Quotes

It's hard to market a movie when you're at the mercy of critics and journalists.

The many many imponderables come together when a film opens and for all sorts of reasons it may or may not succeed.

Films that score very high with test audiences generally tend to not be so great. But, there's a lot of money involved in making movies, and it's a way for people to reassure themselves, who have spent money, and it's also a way to work out how to market a movie.

The stakes are high on every film now because there's the opening weekend. The first week is extremely crucial; increasingly, films are being judged in terms of opening day, opening weekend, then first week. People are going berserk promoting their films.

They thought in terms of: whatever you had that started you at the box office, this was it.

You want reviews to come the week the movie's opening and not a month before when they do you absolutely no good.

It didn't happen every time for every movie. Ruthless People was a good movie, but we didn't get a good release or marketing. They completely blew the opening.

The movie business is very twisted, out of site, out of mind, you know.

Every time I do a movie, I think it's going to be a huge hit.

Today it's not culture; it's box office.

There have been things over the years that didn't work. 'Body Of Lies,' directed by Ridley Scott, which I did with Russell Crowe and Leonardo DiCaprio, is a really tight action thriller, but when it opened in the U.S. it was number two to 'Beverly Hills Chihuahua.'

Stupidly, in our industry, producers pay precious money to sign stars whom they might not even use in the film. Producers believe stars make hits; actually it is the script that makes a film successful.

I hope 'Tum Mile' works in the same way as 'Jannat' or else I will be blamed if it does not do well.

I think no one really knows for sure what will work at the box office. Even big production houses don't know what will do well and what won't.

Content is now the most import factor that decides a film's success at the box office, so we as filmmakers are all trying different stories.

Really bad reviews can hurt pretty much any movie. They say that some films are review-proof, but I think that's probably big high-concept movies, comedies, and so on. But, on the whole, if a film gets dreadful reviews, it will affect its business.

At the end of it, box office result matters. And the weird thing is that we do not know the formula of that.

The film business has changed hugely. You seem to spend about 30 per cent of the time producing the films and 70 per cent talking about it.

I've made movies where people say it's their favourite, but they don't take it seriously because it just didn't seem to break through commercially.

A lot of things and a lot of money is involved in a movie. It is very upsetting when a movie doesn't fare well at the box-office.

'I Wanna Hold Your Hand' and 'Used Cars' were absolute failures at the box office. Complete disasters. I learned some sad news: it's not an automatic thing that, if you make a good movie, everyone wants to see it.

I thought 'Deliverance' was a very good film. But it didn't have the success financially that 'Smokey and the Bandit' did, although that film made more money than 'Star Wars' in the first week.

That's when it becomes a business. When you've been public a long time, when it's a career. You do certain films, you sell them.

When my second film 'Dus' released, I was still getting compliments for 'Tum Bin' because it was a hit on satellite channels.

I believe in good films and bad films. Box-office business and all is my husband's section. Sometimes I really get surprised when good films don't do well... Sometimes you are really shocked when an average film does very well.