Eriq La Salle Quotes

The studio is spending great amounts of money, and they want some insurance they will get money back. They go for the middle of the road, broad in appeal. It's restrictive. It's a constant struggle, but if you give in, you're just making cottage cheese, and that's the end of it.

Hollywood executives believe that money is both the be-all and end-all to the moviemaking process.

The more money you spend, the more you need to make back, and the more pressure there is to appeal to everyone - which to the studio means that the specificity and uniqueness must be watered down. But I think mass audiences like things that are more specific and tend to have a voice, like 'Napoleon Dynamite' or 'Superbad.'

If someone puts up $100 million on a movie, they're gonna be concerned about whether they'll get it back. So they're not gonna make a movie about three girls, you know?

If I give five flops, I won't get a job. You have to perform at the box office when you are at the top. No one is running a charity here. People are putting huge amounts of money to make movies, and they want the films to be successful. They have invested money in you, so it is your duty to make sure the film does well.

The kind of acting I used to enjoy no longer exists because your prime consideration is the budget, running time, the cost - and whether they'll understand it in Milwaukee.

In the U.K., there's absolutely no money for television. So you can do pretty much whatever you want. They're not losing money on any of the shows, so they'll give you a lot of creative freedom. In the United States, there are millions and millions of dollars at stake, so they need a sure formula.

There is no sense in making a film that no-one will go and see, just to create a perfect, but useless, work of art.

I want to make something commercial that people can pick up on.

You just never know when movies are going to take off or not. The lucky thing about this was that it didn't cost a lot of money, and therefore there wasn't loads of pressure on me.

It seems there's a sliding scale between the money they spend on a movie and its creativity.

You know, social issue movies don't make a lot of money.

It's sad when you say a $30 million film is an inexpensive film, but it is.

There is no free lunch, so if you're playing with the big train set - on big movies - it's a lot of money they're entrusting you with, and you have to get that money back for them. I don't take that responsibility lightly.

We can still do a stop motion feature for about one-third of what it costs Pixar or DreamWorks or Blue Sky to make a feature. But nobody is interested in a film that cost $50 to 60 million with the potential to do $120 million. They want to risk big money to make huge money.

I want my films to get audiences. I am not interested in making them just for myself.

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.

It's hard to make a movie that's very expensive and not be thinking of the results all the time.

You do sequels because they are tent poles. They open well, and they hold the tent up. But in between, you make a movie you respect.

I want my films to make money first. Awards and all can come later.

Hollywood is a world where the only thing that gets green-lit is something that made money the last year.

A movie studio has to answer to a marketing department, and to shareholders, to ensure the broadest audience possible for its product; it tends to err on the side of caution as a result.

Mainstream success is important - that's probably anathema to an indie publication like Pitchfork, but it's what I believe having experienced it personally.

The film studios learned to our dismay but to their pleasure that if they spent $200 million making a film they could make half a billion on it. So they were not interested anymore in quality films... They can't afford to be that risky at those prices. Consequently you're getting a lot of remakes, sequels, dopey comedies full of toilet jokes...

A lot of people ask me, 'Are you going to do a sequel to 'The Guest' or 'You're Next?' - those movies weren't financially viable, so even though there are a lot of fans of it, it'd be a pretty small market we'd be appealing to. It's got to be a big hit for you to really justify that.