Albert Brooks Quotes

In any film business, if you're trying to get your next film made, you would never say, 'Oh, my last film was a cult film.' I'd say, 'Oh, great, well I hope this one isn't!' I always say to Johnny Knoxville, 'How do you do it? You sort of do the same thing we did, except you made millions, and I made hundreds.'

All I want to do is to make movies that are appealing to people.

The really courageous and bold thing is to make movies about human behaviour.

When you're working on a movie you always hope that people will go for it and enjoy what you're doing.

You don't make a movie, the movie makes you.

When a film like Chris Nolan's Memento cannot get picked up, to me independent film is over. It's dead.

I've made movies where people say it's their favourite, but they don't take it seriously because it just didn't seem to break through commercially.

The film-school mantra is that if you don't tell your own stories, nobody will.

Nobody cares for the product I, and a host of other horror directors, make.

Movies are not an art form where you get to kind of sit in your art gallery and paint, you know? You don't do that. You're spending a lot of somebody else's money.

Feature filmmaking is a very powerful medium. It has a hold on me now.

I don't make films for critics, and I'm not particularly interested in what they have to say, and they don't have a bearing on my audiences.

No studio picks up the phone after seeing 'Dogtooth' and goes, like, 'We have the next superhero movie.' Though if one did, that would be an interesting studio to work with.

My last film as director, the National Award winning 'Zakhm,' barely managed to break even. So why should I listen to so-called sensibilities of a handful of critics?

I'm not a movie person. They're collaborations of the worst kind. You must compromise yourself to many interests that are venal and crass and do not have your best interests at heart.

I don't care about the size of the roles, or how they're marketed or billed or anything like that. I would love to be a part of stories that tell us about where we've come from, where we are, where we're going - with great directors.

It is really cool to have created a movie that has turned out to become the biggest movie of the year.

Movie making is not like other art forms, like painting, or writing a novel, because that can be digested or interpreted... It takes two years to make each one of these, and it's always judged on money.

If I'm going to do a big film, I'm very choosy about what I do, because I think I want to continue - in fact I'm sure I want to continue - to stay in the realm of independent films with directors and writers who are just emerging with new ideas and a different vision that hasn't really been expressed yet.

I wanted to just be a filmmaker, and I thought I wanted to do all the aspects, and it seemed like as a producer was the best way to do it, because I could have... You never have control on a movie, but you have as much control as you can.

I make movies based on gut.

The independent-minded movies - it's always an uphill battle to get them made and seen. You do what you can, and go out there after and try to tell people about it, but at the end of the day, that's all you can do.

There are so many factors that go into having a successful movie.. too many that you can't control.

In a movie, you're raw material, just a hue of some color and the director makes the painting.

I watch 'Goodfellas,' and suddenly it frees me up entirely; it reminds me of what great film directing is all about.