Ridley Scott Quotes

I never think about the budget of the film.

When you're having conversations about actors, you realize these same conversations have happened about you. If you want to make a film for $5m, then you cast A, B and C, but if you want $20m, you won't be able to cast them, you need X, Y and Z.

Mid-range to low-budget movies have to have a name in the lead to get financing for it.

If you want your film to be instantly green-lit, your first approach is not to go to a relatively unknown English actor. They're not going to throw millions of dollars at you for that.

Market forces impose certain rules before a film can actually get made.

If you look at film, distribution is pre-bought. If you've paid for the distribution, you say, 'I have to make sure it's a film that gets enough butts in the seats.' I think that's the problem: It becomes prohibitively expensive, and you can't develop films for a smaller amount of money.

On Lock, Stock, we didn't know where the money for shooting the next day was coming from.

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.

The catch in the industry is that if you want to get a picture made for little money, you have to get a big star. But the two are usually mutually exclusive.

The bagel budget for 'Sex and the City 2' could pay for 'Ghosted.'

If one makes a short film with reasonable technical finesse, it will cost between Rs. 50,000 and Rs. one lakh. That's a lot of money for someone starting off.

The biggest thing I learned is directors don't make a lot of money on a movie.

If studios don't get their money back, we don't have any movies. So it is important that films are successful, and I am fully supportive of that because I'm not just a director, I'm also not stupid. I've been in this business long enough and, to a certain extent, I'm a businessman; I know the importance of that.

I think, on a larger note, that filmmakers and studios should start to tuck it in a little bit, because films wouldn't have the pressure they have if the word wasn't out about how expensive they were.

You only have so much money to shoot a movie with.

If you're a producer, you always spend too much money because you want that shot - and you're willing to spend a bundle to get it.

Usually, I make such small-budget films that I can't afford to buy weather.

That's a very odd notion because it involves seeing money up there on the screen - if something cost $5 million to make, they want to see that $5 million up there.

Because television doesn't offer the kind of budget that a movie offers, you've got to be a little more careful where you spend the money to put the fiction in science.

I'm not tied to budgets. I'm tied to the story that I want to tell, and how much it's going to cost is up to whatever the economic situation of the studio is.

It is not like casting me in your movie is going to help you get financing.

The only difference between working on a huge-budget film and a lesser-budget film, is the quality of lunch and dinner.

Trying to convince Warner Bros. to make a $30 million 'Veronica Mars' movie just wasn't going to happen, for understandable reasons.

We shot ten minutes of the movie, and now we're looking for completion funds.

When you are making an independent film, money is never an issue.