Paul Haggis Quotes

It's not about 'NBC is evil.' It's about that media structure - CBS, ABC, CNN, even some of the smaller operations are now multinationals, with these extraordinarily diverse holdings.

The main trouble with Hollywood is that the guys you have to pitch to, the guys who run the studios, are all business school grads.

Writers never get a very good deal in Hollywood.

For the most part, Hollywood is very transactional. People want to make movies and television shows.

I don't want to be in the film business. I'm not even sure it's a business.

When you do a film, you know you're shooting for 6 or 9 weeks, you've got your cast and crew. Overall, no one can just pull the plug and say, 'This isn't working.' There's just no security on television, especially for African Americans. It's a tough market.

People in England talk about stupid Hollywood idiots, but the industry attracts some of the cleverest people in the world.

The corporation and the hedge funds have a hold on Hollywood, and they all want to make money on anything that signifies cinema.

We were all ruled by the studio system. I signed a contract for seven years.

The studios don't seem to foster good writing. They're not so interested in that, but they're more interested in what worked most recently. They're definitely very serious about making money, and that's not a wrong thing, but you don't have to make money the same way all the time.

Certainly for my father, there were great times, good times, not-so-good times. He might be shooting a Fellini film for six months, then not working for two months. I'm used to that dynamic.

It's only in relatively recent years that Hollywood became the playground of multinational corporations which regard movies and TV shows as a minor irritant to their overall activity.

Things have changed a great deal since the days of Mr. Mayer. The studios no longer control, as they did in those days, artists or directors or producers, as the case may be.

I've literally pitched to every studio and network trying to get directing work. It's really hard.

After making a lot more films, I realized that the movie and TV business is, for all its inefficiencies, one of the best-run big businesses we have.

I've pitched movies to all of the major studio heads in my time.

We're in the entertainment business.

Your agents and your managers will always say stuff to you like, "It's really important to make a good first impression on a casting director. And even though you didn't get that job, because you did well that means they'll keep bringing you back in." But when you really just need a job to pay your rent, that stops being very consoling.

Everyone gets laid off and everyone in Hollywood gets unemployment for six months while they're looking for a new job. So I would just do stand-up for six months and think I was really making it, and when my unemployment ran out, I had to get another job immediately.

The Creative Revolution is over. Everybody is justholding onto their jobs and no one is ever going to say toa client... ‘Buy this or I’ll resign your account.’ You don’tdo it anymore. It’s now, the majority of the time... ‘How do you like it? When can I change it for you?’

Studios are used to have an investment in you, an actual, literal investment in an actor. You paid them some money, you had a contract with them and you were almost like a commodity.

I try to balance independent films with commercial films, and I've done a pretty good job of it over the years.

Hollywood changed to become a more marketing-driven Hollywood, where people who are running the studios are more like marketing people, and they need titles.

Usually, I only get to work a few weeks on a movie, or I often don't make it to the end of the movie because I'm disposed of.

Joe Schenck, a top 20th Century-Fox executive, once said to me that he really believed I had a future, and that was because I was the only girl who could survive so many bad pictures.