Independent Filmmaker Quotes

I really missed what I'd done on Rogers Cable, which was shooting and editing all my own stuff.

I have been working on one film at a time. One film recovers a little cost and that helps me move on to the next one.

Robert Rodriguez, makes a feature film in 35mm celluloid one and a half hours long, and nobody believed him, I think he wrote a book about it and gave all the details of how he spent the money, even making a 35mm celluloid feature film was possible, at least for Rodriguez.

The lifeblood of my career has been independent film.

I like to produce my own movies.

People either know Alan Rudolph and love every single one of his films or they don't know him at all.

I waited for each film to become important for me. If I had no ideas for a film, I didn't do a film. So I made not that many films for fifty-four years of working.

I don't find myself lobbying for projects. Filmmakers almost always come to me.

One of the things you have to understand with The Room, I never approached a studio to produce, because I know no one in Hollywood will produce this. I came to Hollywood and I said "I will produce this movie the way I want it."

I've worked really hard to build up a career on my own. I turned 30 recently and it took me a long time to get the chance to make a feature film and do it on my own terms.

My music will mean something. I'll have my own production company. I'm doing my own movies. I have my own restaurant. I just wanna expand.

I pick my feature film battles very carefully. They're going to be personal and they're going to take a lot of my energy. I'm not going to be some big production company and be Jerry Bruckheimer or something like that. It doesn't interest me.

To make personal movies that you are the author of, is quite a difficult thing. It takes a lot of stamina.

Martin Scorsese was one of the few who had not been an assistant. Most of the guys had been an assistant and worked their way up. But I had seen an underground picture he had made in New York, a black-and-white film. I had done a picture for American International, about a Southern woman bandit, the Ma Barker story, and it was very successful, and I had left to start my own company, and they wanted me to make another one.

I want to do my own thing, and I'm trying to get closer to realizing that as a filmmaker.

Brit Marling smartest girl I've ever met. Hands down. Brilliant. Her story? She had a graduate degree from a top tier school and turned down a job with some big company. She went to LA, said she was going to be an actress. She wasn't getting auditions, so she started writing her own films.

I learned that you have to say that you're a filmmaker. You're not a screenwriter; you're not a director for hire. You've got to take charge. You're a filmmaker, and you're going to make a film.

You can take your life into your own hands in terms of directing. There are ways for you to finance yourself and to write and make a film.

Box office success has never meant anything. I couldn't get a film made if I paid for it myself. So I'm not 'box office' and never have been, and that's never entered into my kind of mind set.

John is a cottage industry in Baltimore and the city opens its doors for him whenever he is making a new film.

I started out as an actor but now I act to fund my own productions. I've managed to separate my mindset.

From a completely financial standpoint, digital is starting to crack as far as an independent filmmaker's access to getting your story out there - Amazon, iTunes, all of those. It makes the prospect of doing it yourself - not easy by any means - but possible, maybe for the first time.

When I have a new idea, I'm charged up and want to start the film immediately, but I simply don't have the patience to wait for stars.

I like the direct contact. I want a lot of people that only know me through the mass media to learn more about what I'm doing, and to know that I'm an independent filmmaker and I'm not part of the Hollywood system. I'm coming from where they started. I'm not coming from a family with a lot of money.

I wanna produce, write, and direct my own projects, and eventually fund them. I wanna be a mogul.