Zal Batmanglij Quotes

Basically, movies come down to economics, and they're always too expensive. From a producer's point of view, an actor is either going to make him money or save him money.

I tend to make low-budget movies but, yeah, I make more money than I ever thought I would make.

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.

Nobody's ever made a film in the history of cinema where they weren't expecting some return on their dough.

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

One of the benefits of doing low-budget movies is you don't have to release them wide to recoup. You can release it in a smaller way, make your money back, and keep going.

We have so many films that we can fit into the slate a year, and we spend $100 million on those films in order to make $400 million dollars. We don't spend $20 million in hopes of eking out $40 million.

I'm not looking to double my money with one golden opportunity.

At the end of the day, there is a lot of money that gets put into films.

I did the thing with bonds, which was about 30 million dollars, and didn't get none of the money on them.

We have no obligation to make history. We have no obligation to make art. We have no obligation to make a statement. Our obligation is to make money.

It's a sin to have your films not to make money.

You have to spend a lot to make a lot. It's not like I'm sitting on top of a pile of money.

In any business opportunity, you'd be looking, probably, primarily at the risk and return. Some business can be very risky with a low return; what you want is the lowest risk with the biggest return.

For the most part, studio movies have huge budgets. They don't do anything under 30 to 40 million. When you have that much money at stake, you have so many people breathing down your neck.

The problem with big films is they snowball very rapidly and you can never pull back. It's a pipeline that needs to be fed.

When you do bigger films, the financiers take more risks.

I've never made a film that lost money.

I've turned down shows offering large amounts of money.

I put £150,000 into the stage production of Grease and have got back £1.5 million so far. It has been a fantastic success.

Producers are not gamblers. They want a good return on their investment.

Generally speaking, the more money that's involved in anything, the more people are expecting and hoping that it's not going to fail.

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

You come out of drama school and do theatre and are interested in creative endeavour, then you drift into TV and movies and realise that artistic endeavour needs to balance with financial success. There's no point spending millions on a movie that doesn't make any money, because the people producing it won't make another one.

Nobody loses money on my movies. I make them cheap.