Thomas Ian Nicholas Quotes

I do a film only when I feel I will be comfortable with the set-up and other members of the team.

On a team, trust is all about vulnerability, which is difficult for most people.

There's something I really love about independent filmmaking. Everyone is a little bit more close-knit, and you rely on people a little bit more. The bigger the budget gets, the more everyone toes the line in their department.

No two people who make a movie on a certain budget scale are going to achieve the same thing because it just depends on what sort of favors you can call, and what sort of dynamics you can pull in the play.

A lot of making a movie is the comfort level of the people. It's just feeling open. We need to get along. We have to know something about each other.

It was a pleasure to have somebody else be the boss. It wouldn't have been nearly as much fun any other way. He's been around and made a lot of movies and he's a great straightforward person to work for. And it was a pleasure to see other people to pick up characters that you've sketched out loosely on paper and make them into something fascinating.

I get off on the interaction with people, and I love the chess of a movie and particularly - not only in preproduction or in production or postproduction - the behavioral chess. That is, learning and being humbled by and also teaching certain people certain things. I love that. As a producer, you have an opportunity to see the whole and bring people together.

That's important to remember: it's not just a collection of great individuals but a group of people who enjoy playing in the sandbox, thoroughly enjoying collaborative problem solving.

Absolutely, you rise and fall based on your creative team. I have continuity across different films that I've done. I was even fortunate enough to reach back and include people that had worked on Horton with me, as well.

I felt like people really do their best work when they're having a really good time and feel safe to push the envelope and make a jackass out of themselves.

You're not on your own. You're doing things with other people. This is very important for me.

Here is the basic rule for winning success. Let's mark it in the mind and remember it. The rule is: Success depends on the support of other people. The only hurdle between you and what you want to be in is the support of other people.

The work that we do is so tricky because it rests on our shoulders, but it's also collaborative and part of it is trusting the people that you're working with.

A director on a film really sets the tone of how people go about things, so everybody is happy to be at work and everybody does their best.

The real truth of that is that much as you want to believe that it's you being on top of everything, you're actually relying massively on the people around you.

The bigger the budget, the more people that you have to coordinate and it's not easy to do that always because, not only do people have trouble communicating in that way, but often there are internal disagreements and everybody is not necessarily on the same page. Even in a big-budget movie with famous actors and directors, everybody could be on a completely different page. The director has to figure out a way of getting everybody on the same page, more or less, and keeping them there.

A group of amazingly high achievers can be brought together and play together, and all believe that they are competing for something bigger than themselves. Those players are so used to being patted on the back and told how good they are. Frankly, those are usually the hardest people to remind that they are aspiring to achieve something bigger than themselves.

One of the greatest joys of leadership is assembling and knitting together teams of fantastic people.

You're going to have injuries, danger and glory in every sport. What makes football unique is that every person on that team needs to count on everybody else. It's the ultimate team game and you have to depend on your coaches, you have to depend on your support staff, you have to depend on your teammates.

Movies principally require the best of everybody, all at the same time, being the best they can be. Not just like five people being the best they've ever been, and 10 people not being the best they could be. It's like if everybody is either doing their greatest work, or the whole house of cards falls apart.

It's rare in life to look at all the people around you and realize that they're all invested in what you're doing.

Regardless of the project, whenever you're working on something, the best you can hope for is to be around good people.

My model for business is The Beatles. They were four guys who kept each other kind of negative tendencies in check. They balanced each other and the total was greater than the sum of the parts. That's how I see business: great things in business are never done by one person, they're done by a team of people.

The problem with film is you never know when you're going to be able to make a film so you can't have people waiting around for you. Sometimes it's fun to work with the same people and work with new people and mix it up.

When you work on a movie or a TV show, you're a family, so if something that's a two-minute thing in the movie is causing a rift in the family, you also have to think about at what point do you fight this, and at what point is this rift worth having in this very small, very tight group of people who are just there to make something great and funny.