You don't have to spend $200 million or $100 million to make a great movie.
Film is a very expensive medium.
I've made movies that cost less than one car chase.
Once a film costs a certain amount of money, things have to round off.
To me, the box-office is basically the cost of film. If your film costs so much and your box-office is so much and a bit more, you are okay.
It kind of irks me that the studio films still have to be so safe even though they don't really cost as much to make.
'Radio' was made at a budget of Rs 6 crore. Thankfully, the money invested in making the film was recovered through music.
It's impossible to make a movie out of 'Naked Lunch.' A literal translation just wouldn't work. It would cost $400 million to make and would be banned in every country of the world.
For context, the budget of Don Jon is about half the budget of (500) Days of Summer. And (500) Days of Summer is about a third of the budget of the lowest-budget movies produced at a major studio.
As soon as you start making a film that's expensive then the studio wants total control over all elements of it because they want to get all their money back. If you make a smaller film you can try a lot more things because you can have control over it and not just be a hired director. The lower the budget the more freedom you have.
It costs so much to make films. With a novel, you can write the whole thing on a ream of paper from Staples for $4.
Movies are very expensive endeavors, and my first film was not particularly a money-maker. Quite the opposite.
'Housefull' is just a 40-45 crores film. It was never an expensive film to begin with.
Budget grows out of the story. If you're writing a story with people caught in an elevator for most of the film, you're pretty sure it won't be a $200 million movie.
I would love to shoot on film, but you can't really shoot a lot of footage on film, and you can't print a lot of it.
It's sad when you say a $30 million film is an inexpensive film, but it is.
Still, the film nearly didn't happen a number of times. There were great arguments with United Artists about how to reduce the cost because they were nothing if not conscious of the price of the film.
If one makes a short film with reasonable technical finesse, it will cost between Rs. 50,000 and Rs. one lakh. That's a lot of money for someone starting off.
I did this film for less money than it costs to stay in this hotel. We shot it in 20 days. We couldn't screw up takes for fun because we didn't have enough film.
The French have got to understand that a film is so expensive that it can no longer afford to be regional or even national in scope.
And that's another reason to make this movie: We can put plays on film now, at a relatively small cost, and they will reach an audience they would never have reached otherwise.
An appreciable number of directors have shifted to lower-cost films, allowing them to be satisfied with a more modest return.
I think, on a larger note, that filmmakers and studios should start to tuck it in a little bit, because films wouldn't have the pressure they have if the word wasn't out about how expensive they were.
What do you spend $200 million on, with a film? I can't wrap my brain around that one.
The digital revolution has changed the way we do things because you're not under that pressure that film is precious and film is expensive.
