Mindy Kaling Quotes

I enjoy doing independent films more, only because there's more freedom. There's not as many cooks tampering with what you are trying to do.

I feel like everyone wants to make a movie that they feel passionate about watching.

Good is the director who lets you do what you have to do.

The ultimate thing is creating your own stuff and making projects for yourself. That's what Seth Rogen does. He's writing and producing a lot of the movies that he's the lead in.

I have a freedom that's incredibly valuable. Obviously my freedom is far smaller in scale than people like Zemeckis and Spielberg have here. But it's comparable. I can dream up a project, develop it, make it, control it, release it.

Directors tend to kind of let me do what I want to do.

There's no point in me meeting with a bunch of producers or studios, because I'll write my own scripts in my own time.

In Bollywood, we are told exactly what to do and how to do it and not to counter things by saying there's a better way. We make our actors feel important by paying them more. But the real deal is when you let the actors take some decisions on the sets.

I think it's the same thing for a country. We are lucky then that we can get some financing from the government, because it means when I get the money, when I get the grant to do the film, of course it's based on the script, but I have total artistic control and I can do personal stuff.

The amazing fact that one person can make his own film - I think animation is somewhat unique in that respect. I don't need to deal with lawyers. I don't need to deal with corporations. I don't need to deal with executives or agents or any of that. I can just sit at home and make a feature film. That's a wonderful experience. Each film I make gets more popular, more press and makes more money. So it's amazing that I've survived and actually prospered doing that sort of homegrown, cottage-industry filmmaking.

We try to make films for people [that are] the films that we'd like to see. They're not easy to get made. They're hard to get made. You have to keep the budget low to get them made. But at the end of the day, I don't really worry about competition, because I don't really think of it that way. I don't feel like I'm in a race with anybody.

I don't really enjoy working in TV, to be completely honest, even though it's incredibly lucrative, I'm just terrified of not being satiated in a myriad of different ways. It's amazing that I get to create every day, as an actor, or a director, or a writer, and I get to do it in a variety of different genres and worlds and characterizations. I think that's the great privilege of what we do, we get to make believe. I get to go to so many different places, try on different occupations, take on different points of view. That's what's always been sort of alluring.

One of the reasons I really love low budget filmmaking is you don't have to think about that as much. You can have more fun and be more playful and be freer creatively.

It's really liberating and fun to be writing stuff for myself, and really have the freedom to say what I want to say and not really have to think about what somebody else is going to say or have to edit myself to speak from someone else's vision.

I think the tools were always available, for decades and decades, to make your own film and be creative. I don't think people had to wait for YouTube to do this type of small project. YouTube, I think it's great. I have this idiotic satisfaction. And I think there's a bit of that in YouTube. You share, true, but it's centralized, and it's already sort of controlled. I'm more for something that's not a centralized medium. Like doing your own film and screening it yourself. You cannot control people doing that.

You are relying on a waiting on other people in acting and films, so to be able to have something that I have full creative control over is really very therapeutic.

The irony is I did an intimate film in France with no stars and that got me to Hollywood. It got me to the Oscars. If I had tried to imitate the Americans or the Hollywood movies with a commercial recipe, I'd never have gotten to Hollywood. Although, it was not my goal in any way, and I never thought there was any connection between Monsieur Lazhar and the Oscars.

I retired from acting the same time they stopped hiring me. But following my own thing of making these small indie movies has been the happiest I've ever been.

It's a joy to actually be able to control your own music.

I like directing much better. It's more fun, that's all there is to it. It's essentially the same job, which is storytelling, but you have more control over the way you want to tell the story. It's a high. I love it.

I think my home is in that sort of the part of cinema that's disappeared is where I lived, that sort of mid-budget you know, drama. I suppose that's what I am known for.

Musically, between me and my fans and also me and my team, who between management and record label have always just let me be me, it's fun to pave a path. It's fun to feel like you're doing things your own way. So in that regard I haven't had to worry about any bar but my own.

That was cool, getting to work with Ryan Gosling. I knew he was going to be a huge star after I saw him in that Showtime thing that he did when he was really young [The Believer]. I think the most fun thing about that was I'd never seen somebody that had so many questions about the specifics of everything: where you ate, how much you ate, how much you drank. He's very special.

I had a really small role (playing goddess Aphrodite), and I was only working for just over a week with Ralph Fiennes and Liam Neeson. I'd done a few short films before and thought acting was really creative, but when I worked with those guys, I was just like: "Wow!" They had such fun and freedom. They were trying things and stretching themselves. It was so inspiring that I was like: "I definitely want to do this!"

People start realising that I'm a responsible filmmaker and I'm not going to run away with the budget or do anything stupid. I think it probably depends on the subject matter and it depends on who's producing and all those things. My hope is that I'll be allowed to carry on making films.