Vince Gilligan Quotes

What happened on 'Mr. & Mrs. Smith,' I was given a big budget and given too many choices, and I made a lot of mistakes and missteps early on until I squandered all that extra money. But then, once my back was up against the wall, I made what I consider a really good movie.

If we do another 'Deadpool,' we'd love to have more money for visual effects. But I don't think anybody does good with an excess of time or money.

I am a filmmaker. My job is to make films. When something excites you - a story or characterisation - you immediately forget about everything else. You only think how to make a movie out of it. The economics come only later. You shouldn't let money dictate the kind of films you should make.

I don't really think in terms of genre, I think in terms of story and character.

I think making small movies reminds you of the effort. When you make big movies, the effort is to fight for freedom. When you make small movies, the effort is making the day, making the budget, and it's great, too.

You spend most of your time as a director trying to move forward with the movie. It happens on a daily basis, if not more than once a day, that you are struggling with budgetary constraints. Whereas when you're writing, the limitation that you have is your imagination. So it's decidedly non-pragmatic.

I think about the period of, like, the '70s and early '80s where nobody had money to make big movies and there was no CGI or anything like that and people had to get super creative. And then, you know, when you've got somebody who can paint you any picture on a computer and you get hundreds of millions of dollars to make a movie, its almost like the creativity diminishes somewhat.

It's always a challenge to make an independent film. It's always a challenge to make a low budget film.

I think part of making movies is dealing with restrictions of freedom and budget. I'd rather deal with restrictions of budget. It's better to feel free within any budget.

I want to be able to create characters for as long as I can and I want to tell stories for as long as I can but unfortunately I'm not given those opportunities because I'm often boxed into the former category...

At the end of the day, you're trying to make a certain film within a certain budget. Those rules never change.

I prefer to think of film making - you know, um, the sweat is supposed to be invisible. But a lot of sweat can go into making a film. But of course, if you enjoy doing it, you enjoy doing it.

I think everybody's contemplating TV now, because mid-level and high-budget independent films are not being made now.

What is useful about when there is a sort of pull-out to reveal moment going on is that it actually focuses the mind when you're writing the earlier scenes because you're thinking 'right, how do I? I can only show this amount of the room... I can only show these characters from the waist up because they've all got robot legs!' it's a challenge so it keeps you engaged on some level.

I want the look of a movie to be secondary. I really want people to be engaged in the story and the characters and not think about a style or think about me or think about the director of photography and what a great job he's doing. I never feel like that should be there.

To be honest, I don't think of any of my characters as minor characters - they're all the main characters in a story that I don't necessarily get to tell.

I'm a director. My job is to think how I want to present it. If I want to say [lines] eight times or 10 times, a hundred, it's my choice. I have a certain vision. If you don't have the vision, you don't have the story, you can't be interviewed.

I hope I'm always lucky enough to be able to work in theater, TV, and big films and small films. I think there's advantages and disadvantages to all of them. The fact that this was a small film without much money and without much time made it rich in energy and momentum and drive when we were actually making it 'cause that's all you've got. You've just got the story and the people.

I think coughing up slugs was quite hard. Ron has a scene where he has to cough up these giant slugs. I had this giant slug in my mouth loaded with slime and I spat them out. I think it was plastic. I hope it was plastic.

I think David Yates was just like, "You've got on with it for a few years, I'm gonna let you off the hook." And also, I think it's because the action side of stuff that we were doing, it was going to be very difficult to do all that with all the prosthetics on. It was gonna be hard work, and I think they just said, "You know what?" I think they put a level of trust in me, as well. They said, "You know, we're gonna let Neville Longbottom lose the fat suit, lose the teeth, lose the Adolf Hitler hair."

I think there were moments on Snow White where I wished there was a little bit more of a sick humor toward Ravenna. But maybe the tone of the movie couldn't really support that. So you always have to kind of figure out where you are and adapt to it.

The difference with a major label and independent is mainly resources. That's the difference that I feel sometimes where I as an artist would have to be more creative and more patient.

I don't think that there has been a film that I've done that hasn't been influenced by libraries and archives.

I think one of the good things about writing novels is that you always start from scratch.

Film and television are very different. On the TV show, we do seven or eight scenes a day, so time and money are of the essence, and we have zero room for creativity because you've got to do each scene in only five takes. Whereas, on a film, you have an entire day to film one scene, so you have so much time to choose how you want to fill in a scene.