Melvin Van Peebles Quotes

A film like 'Good Night And Good Luck,' you make that for $7 million because you know it's a black-and-white film, and it's not an easy sell. If you make it for $7 million, then everybody can have a chance to make a little bit of money, and you get to make the film you want to make.

One of the reasons the producers' credit has been so weakened in recent years, and given to people who didn't deserve it, was that people didn't understand what producers did.

They say now in America that final cut doesn't mean anything. As Harvey Weinstein said to some film-maker, 'You can have final cut. I'll open your film in Arkansas.'

With the film, you have a bunch of executive producers, directors, writers, scripts. There's, management, lighting, the union and etc. There are so many components a part of that game, so naturally it isn't my world.

I very much enjoy my freedom creatively but I also would love to make one of those big Hollywood films that costs a lot of money and has a lot of people running around with cell phones and all that insanity.

A lot of people get stuck, like, "Oh, if it's made by a studio, it can't be independent." Often they link it to the source of financing, or how it's distributed, but I don't really know how you can. A filmmaker will take his money from anywhere. It doesn't matter.

It's becoming increasingly harder and harder; there's no such thing as independent film anymore. There aren't any, they don't exist. In the old days you could go and get a certain amount of the budget with foreign sales, now everybody wants a marketable angle.

It's just hard to get an independent film made.

It's nice when you're working in Hollywood and there's a movie you'd like to see that no one is making anymore. You make it yourself.

If you're clever enough and creative enough to get a good film made, then you should be clever enough and creative enough to find ways to get it out there, one being something like Jameson First Shot.

You know, the people who do indie film and decide who gets those little budgets? They're mean, man. They're cold and very cool-oriented.

Developing films with directors, developing films with actors, is a poor percentage play for a screenwriter.

You could go out with a camcorder tomorrow and make a movie with virtually no money, but promoting a tiny low-budget movie costs $20 million. And the money they spend on the big movies is astronomical.

When we did Wayne's World, it was 14 million dollars and they didn't bug us too much because they just thought it was some little movie that nobody was ever going to see. We showed them.

To have a film in America means precisely nothing if you don't have a distributor who stands behind it.

The traditional Hollywood system is pretty rigid, but the film scene in, say, South Africa is booming with a lot of possibilities. If you have the cameras and reasonable capital, you can put your film in theatres next to 'Guardians of the Galaxy.' A great example of that was Kagiso Lediga's film 'Blitz Patrole.'

When we do a movie with the studios, they wouldn't be asking us to do it, I don't think, if it was a movie they wanted to get into themselves. What you see is what you get with us, so they let us do what we want to do.

When you make a movie independently, you raise the money beforehand, and then you make the movie kind of by yourself.

If you can get your movie made the way you want to get it made, no matter what the end result is going to be, if people are going to see it, that's awesome.

It used to be the case that studio executives like Robert Evans, Darryl Zanuck, and David Selznick would put aside money for what they wanted to be great movies regardless of whether they would perform well with the box office.

I've always admired how closely someone like C.V. Kumar works with the creative team to promote a film.

I always say that I'm a filmmaker, not a factory. I don't have to churn out films every six months.

I have never had the problem of finding a producer for my films. I think I am just lucky because my first film didn't do great box office business.

It is difficult to make movies on your own terms and also to make a film and convince somebody to have faith in it.

I was in a very lucky position to be able to consider studio films and had decided to not go that route for a very long time until I read a script that I loved called 'Aeon Flux.'