I just saw 'Tiny Furniture' and became so obsessed with it that Judd Apatow jokes that I'm the distributor of it. I was making copies and giving them out.
Because of the cumbersome nature of filmmaking, it's only recently that it has become available to the masses, with digital equipment and laptop computers. You can now actually make a pretty serviceable movie for very little money by yourself.
In lower budget filmmaking, everything is a favor. You're pushing everybody, all the time. You're trying to get the best out of it that you can, and it has to be a labor of love, or you can't get it done.
I'd been working on more traditional movie sets and TV shows at Universal. All of a sudden, here we're on location in Animal House, and it's down and dirty and quick. It was the way the new commercial world was shooting; the way the indie world was shooting. These were lighter, faster cameras. It was a generational change.
I did very much enjoy being part of an independent film. It was just the energy.
When a film like Chris Nolan's Memento cannot get picked up, to me independent film is over. It's dead.
I'm really proud of an independent movie called 'Angel's Perch' that you can get now on demand. It's a labor of love. People worked really, really hard, and it's a beautiful film.
For young filmmakers, Saw is a perfect film. It doesn't cost the GNP of almost every country of the world.
My one hope for Netflix and Amazon is to be a little more art house- and indie-friendly, pushing those just as hard as they push their originals.
I've never done a studio movie, let alone worked for a network. Every one of my films has been independently financed.
I kind of grew up in the indie world, and now that sort of writing and material is on television.
When I did 'Memento,' independent film was where all the really good stuff was.
When I was still doing indie, it was just purely art. I don't think about how much I will get paid or how much the movie will earn.
People in independent film have a passion; they're not in it for the money.
I'm not going to head off and do a Marvel film. So if I don't do a Marvel film, I don't have any other choice - I've got to go make a small New Zealand movie!
I've never done a big studio film, I've only ever done little ones.
I personally like to do independent films.
There are wonderful films that become studio films, but they're conceived independently. That's where the action is. 'Being John Malkovich' is a great example of a picture you wouldn't think the studios would want, and it turns out to be a movie that touches everybody's heart.
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.
Independent films, for the most part, to me, are not so independent. They often feel like people auditioning for a big commercial career. They often do not have independent spirit to them.
Indies are always an extra challenge. The time is shorter because you have less money to spend and fewer days to shoot.
I don't see many explosions or ten-car crashes in the course of my life, so I don't put them into my movies. I would love to live in a society where 'My Dinner with Andre' made $100,000,000. Then I would be in the mainstream. I could do that stuff easier than I could do 'Meatballs.'
Not all of our movies work, but we take shots, and we're able to do that because we really stick to low budgets.
There's a few things I learned from my experience on 'Hieroglyph.' First of all, I learned that building a world doesn't need to be as expensive as a summer blockbuster. Yeah yeah, newsflash, I know.
I'm just a simple television and film producer who started off from her garage and whose only idea was to tell a story.
