I think we spent 60-something million on 'Hateful Eight,' which is actually more than I wanted to spend, but we had weather problems. And I wanted to make it good.
I certainly wouldn't mind if 'Jurassic Park' turns out to be commercially successful, and somebody says, 'Hey, you were in a box-office hit, and if you want to do another movie, we'll give you five million dollars to make it.'
I don't see a big difference between the job of directing a low-budget movie and the job of directing a big-budget movie.
I want to make a movie with Al Pacino someday.
I was always proud of the score to 'Newsies.' The movie is good, but it was under-budgeted.
It's too expensive, that's the thing nobody wants to talk about. It is too expensive to make movies. That's not true, it is too expensive to market movies. Making movies is not.
That's the way this business works: if your movies do well at the box office, you will be offered more movies. It doesn't matter if you're a nice guy or you're a prick. If your movies do well, there's a job waiting for you in Hollywood. It's not any more complicated than that.
The transition from tiny movies to less tiny movies to really big movies has been actually quite seamless in a lot of ways as far as my experience of acting in them.
You never know what movie I will be in next, but let's just hope it's sells (for my sake at least)!
You don't have to spend $200 million or $100 million to make a great movie.
For 'Filth,' we had about 12 producers on the thing. The opening credits go on for months. Most of them are actually financers rather than producers. And the only way that we could raise the budget without interference from a studio was to have a lot of different financers on board.
If you look at 'Avatar,' could you imagine if you did 'Avatar' for 50 million dollars? It would be ridiculous! You would almost be getting laughs from the audience, unless you got a real indie director to do something incredibly stylised.
This film cost $31 million. With that kind of money I could have invaded some country.
When you walk onto a Peter Jackson set, you can see straightaway that money isn't an issue.
It is not like casting me in your movie is going to help you get financing.
Only one time in my career I had that feeling [that this is not gonna get made], it was for this movie [Life of Pi]. It was right before we started the physical pre-production. I pre-visualized the whole ocean part before we made the movie, I was that prepared. At one point they seemed to want to drop it because it was really risky. The budget we proposed was a lot higher than they expected, they wanted to [drop it]. After all, it's a philosophical book and a literature property, it's not Batman.
I have respect for anyone who's going to go out and make a movie for a small budget and turn it into a phenomenon. God bless you. Please keep making movies. That's great. But it's not what entertains me.
God help me if I ever do another movie with an explosion in it. If you see me in a movie where stuff is exploding you'll know I've lost all my money.
You don't pay the same price for a Ferrari as you do for a Honda Accord. But for some reason, for movie tickets, you're asked to pay the same price for 'Avatar' as you are for some $2 million movie, which is kind of a weird thing when you think about it.
I think the audience know which films are aimed at their pocket, and which films are aimed at their soul. There are a lot of films out there made by people who are genuinely trying to make a change.
I never thought 'The Glass Castle' would be a movie. It's just too complicated.
It's a dream for a director, at least to try a studio movie.
I think that, oftentimes, what people say is, 'We need an actress who'll be able to greenlight a movie,' and my counterargument to that is always that, when it comes to a teen movie, you have very few people who can greenlight a movie.
I don't believe in the 100 crore club.
Once you make a studio 700 million dollars or so, or whatever the insane number is, then they finally seem to trust you, no matter how off-the-wall your project is.
