Film Industry Challenges Quotes

I had the experience last year of directing my first feature while I had a 1-year-old son and while I was also pregnant, so I am now well aware of the difficulties women who are rearing children face when they're also trying to make headway in mainstream of film.

The so-called film star's lot is an infantile and precarious one.

It was really a means-of-production problem. 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.

I had a tough time 12 years ago getting 'Driving Miss Daisy' off the ground. Today, it would be impossible.

As a filmmaker, I've had films that over-achieved and I've had films that under-achieved. You always go in trying to do your very best.

I made two movies very young, and then I had trouble getting a movie made, and so - which was both, I think, a plus and a minus. It was a minus because it made me unhappy.

It's very, very technical, what we do in film. While all of the lights are there and all of the crew members and directors are staring right at you, you have to be honest. It's a very difficult, but technical medium.

It's not ideal to have three films coming out at once.

I was going to be credited as Wray Nerely, my role in Con Man. It got cut in the reshoots. I was like, "Wait a second. I'm cut." It's a better telling of the story, but unfortunately, Wray Nerely gets cut, which is actually exactly right because if Wray Nerely was ever in Star Wars, he wouldn't make it to the final edit.

But the truth is, at some point, our films - almost every single one of them - are really bad. And it's largely hats off to John Lasseter and Ed Catmull who have set up a system whereby they're expecting it.

For a woman to direct a movie in Hollywood, she has to go through so many layers of rejection by the powers that be - I suppose including myself - that it is harder to get to that point. So you can't just create something. And I think there is a whole unconscious mountain.

When I came off the Halloween movies, they were very stressful movies to make. That had been four very stressful years. I'm happy with how they turned out, but getting the end results took so much fighting with people and so much craziness, that at the end of it I was so burnt out.

When we shot "Stargate," he [ Jaye Davidson] came up to me at one point and said, "I don't like shooting movies," and I said, "Why?" "Too many people stare at me." I said, "Then you're totally in the wrong business."

I think everybody's contemplating TV now, because mid-level and high-budget independent films are not being made now.

One of the advantages of shooting digitally was that we had a lot of time. When you shoot, even if you do a good performance, it may get lost in the editing room. It's just one more way that a potentially good film might go astray.

I work almost completely year-round, since I was 18 or 19. It's nine months a year, and then you're out of town, (there are) crazy hours and all of the things that go with filmmaking, which is a pretty all-consuming business, although I'm very blessed to be a part of it.

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.

Ultimately, if you want to make movies, you've got to want to make movies every day, when people are paying you to make movies and when they're not, because you're going to get a lot more no's on this business, no matter what it is, than you are going to get yeses.

There are obviously issues in our industry. That starts at the top with studio execs who - not just men - don't believe a woman could handle a huge franchise or big action movie.

It's difficult to keep anything fresh for an audience these days. With technology being what it is people seem to know everything there is to know about a film before you've even made it.

When you're a failure in Hollywood, that's like starving to death outside a banquet hall, with smells of filet mignon driving you crazy.

In England when you make a movie even the weather is against you. In Hollywood the weatherman gets a shooting schedule from all the major studios and then figures out where he can fit in a little rain without upsetting Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer too much.

It's so tough to get movies made in Ireland anymore. A whole generation of Irish filmmakers doesn't have the resources to get a movie made.

Making a movie in Hollywood is a bit like playing a board game, where you have to throw a six to start.

What I saw over all that time were so many deals disappearing and producers disappearing, fewer movies getting made, and it just being a bit more difficult. Working with Joel, we were in a bit of a bubble because he was always making things that were working for the studio and that kind of thing. We were always in production on something.