Project Uncertainty Quotes

At the beginning of the project, I wasn't certain that I could come up with an engaging storyline and cast of characters in this world, so I had a strong bias toward actually writing, and worrying about research later. In other words, I was afraid that I'd devote a year or two of my life to grinding through Kant and Husserl, then discover that there simply was no novel to be written here.

'Banshee' was kind of a lark. I was getting paid pretty well to write movies no one was making - and so I decided to try my hand at TV and get paid much less to actually get something produced.

Well, we are not doing that film actually. At least I am not at the moment, but we are making an effort to get it done; I don't know whether we'll get the financing for it. The old story we had it, it fell out of place and this and that.

Cabin Fever was murder. There was a lot of psychological stress, like not knowing if we were going to finish the movie. The day we arrived to start rehearsals, our main investors pulled out.

It would drive me crazy if I picked roles with the goal of being a leading man. You never know what you're getting into when you sign onto a project, and more times than not, the characters that are close to the leading man are more interesting and more fun to play.

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.

The good thing from my perspective is that nobody puts any pressure on me to say what it's going to be. The backers accept that they don't know what they are going to get.

Being an actor is hard. It's so true... auditioning is literally our full-time job, and then, if we are so lucky to book the project were auditioning for, then that project is our play.

You know, it's going to be a really long tour, and well, I guess I'll see what happens with A Perfect Circle, 'cause they do other projects too, and I don't know. I hope I can always do a lot of different things, do 'em well.

When you hear that you're going to be working with a first-time director, sometimes that can be a concern to people.

At the end of the day on 'Pete's Dragon,' if we didn't nail something, we could come back and pick it up later. I always knew there was a safety net built in that Disney would not let the movie fail. But in this case, with 'A Ghost Story,' it was all on the line.

So anything that's not absolutely needed, we would cut it [footage] out, which would make me very insecure; everything has to work, and it's a water movie in 3D with a kid, animals. So the more I do that, the more I'm scared of "What if it doesn't go the way we want it?" But we had to do that to meet the budget, otherwise we wouldn't even have a start-date.

The biggest fragility in a project is often just the inability to be able to explain to people why you are doing it, and when you're going to do it, and what's going to happen.

I knew that there was an upcoming screening where not only were we going to show it to everybody else at the studio, we also needed to move into production... And yet I was sitting there in editorial going this is not working. I'm a failure.

When you start a new project and they say, "Your director is going to be Joe Blo," you're hoping that Joe Blo will be the next Martin Scorsese, but it doesn't always work out that way.

When you sign on to say, "Okay, yeah, let's develop this," usually that turns into, "Oh, he's doing it." But there's no script for some of these things.

I've had projects before where everyone says 'This is going to be the big thing,' and it doesn't really turn out to be. Then there is a little project you do and forget about, and then it comes out, and it's huge.

As the original 'Mary Poppins' budget of five million dollars continued to grow, I never saw a sad face around the entire Studio. And this made me nervous. I knew the picture would have to gross 10 million dollars for us to break even. But still there was no negative head-shaking. No prophets of doom. Even Roy was happy. He didn't even ask me to show the unfinished picture to a banker. The horrible thought struck me - suppose the staff had finally conceded that I knew what I was doing.

I was hired to do this one great script called 'Cap'n Ricky' and that project is up in the air at the moment.

If I had a project that I had auditioned for and I was getting close to getting it, I didn't want to tell anybody because I thought then I wouldn't get it, but in reality that really had no bearing on whether or not I got a part.

Establishing what the vision is and being able to stick to it is the job, and everyone should be on the same page, going in. With that said, first-time director or not, you never know what you're going to get.

We never work on only one project because we never know if we will get permission for a project. So, for 'Over the River,' we started in 1992. I was just finishing 'The Umbrellas' in Japan and California, and I was also working on getting permission to wrap the Reichstag.

When you're struggling to get a feature film off the ground, there's no big overarching tenure plan or anything like that.

They're talking about a movie I don't want to hold to that because in this business you can talk about things for years before they get done - god knows if the financing would happen.

When you're pitching movies, sometimes you know what the idea is, but you fully don't know the dimensions of it.