Tucker Max Quotes

To make a low-budget independent is not easy work.

Any asshole can make a good movie for $100 million. I think it's way harder to make a movie with no money, and to start with no contacts and work your way up to international productions.

Independent films now, they want to give you $2 million to make it, 21 days to shoot it and they want 10 movie stars in it.

To be honest, you have to do a big Hollywood film to get enough money to do a good independent film!

I didn't fill it up with movies every time because I was trying to just film one damn movie, but that's the heartache of independent films.

I've done a couple of movies for scale, and it's the only way to get a lot of these independent movies made. The actors negotiate deals where they're given just enough money to live on during the filming, but then they participate in the back-end. If the movie suddenly makes a gazillion dollars, we'll participate in that profit.

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

When you're starting out, you know, you have to do something on a very limited budget. You're not going to be able to have great actors, and you're most likely not going to have a great script.

Mid-range to low-budget movies have to have a name in the lead to get financing for it.

The more unique your film is and unusual it is and difficult it is, the harder it is to get it financed. That's why a lot of good filmmakers are doing television. They do HBO movies.

When American producers see my film, they think that I had a big budget to do it, like 23 million. But in fact I had 10 percent of that budget. I did 'Mars et Avril' for only 2.3 million.

Often, people who want to make interesting films simply don't have the money to do it.

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

Filmmakers, they tell me they want to make movies. I say, 'Good, go out, buy a $500 camera, get some friends and make a movie. Don't go to Hollywood. Stay wherever you are.'

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.

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.

I feel like I don't have much of a preference. With TV, it's just a longer process, so you need to be more sure that you really want to be involved in it for a longer time than you would be with film.

Making an independent film is so different.

Somebody once told me - and I could be wrong about this - that The West Wing was, on any given episode, $300,000 over, on average. Now today, if you were $10,000 over budget, they would cancel you. For sure.

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 make independent movies. I don't know how to do anything else. I don't know any other job that I could really get.

It's very hard to get a movie made. You could spend your life reading scripts that never got made.

I was still making movies so it wasn't as if I were working in a bar, but they were independent films that couldn't find distributors.