Albert Brooks Quotes

I've always worked very efficiently on small budgets, both in documentaries and in features.

No movie has ever got enough time. It doesn't matter how much money you've got, and it doesn't matter how much money you've not got. You never finish on time. You're always up against it and you're always working up until the end.

When you keep things responsible and manageable, you can make some interesting movies that you maybe couldn't make otherwise.

The first thing I control is the cost by not shooting for many days. It is not control, but somebody has to drive the whole thing. If I shoot unnecessary things, it will raise cost.

The economy of film forces you to make choices.

Even on a $100 million film, people will complain that they haven't got enough money and enough time, so that's always going to be an element in filmmaking.

Even when you have a big budget, you can't just shoot everything.

I always think of my films within the context of where aesthetics meet economics. That's the nature of making art - not being naive about what is possible and getting what you need to tell the story you want to tell.

I never go overbudget on my movies.

There are so little outtakes from the Joy Division era. We didn't have much money. You couldn't be very generous in recording, so we were very thrifty in how we recorded. Everything was very, very well looked after financially because we just couldn't afford it.

Not all of our movies work, but we take shots, and we're able to do that because we really stick to low budgets.

I don't spend unnecessarily. The problem with the industry is we don't budget our films. Plus, we spend bizarre amounts on marketing. If you have a good film and a good trailer, you don't need to spend so much.

I try not to shoot unnecessarily or spend on extra expenses that normally happen on a film set - like actors' fees.

With good content, a solid director can make a film without a superstar.

You can't compromise to keep the film in budget.

Budget grows out of the story. If you're writing a story with people caught in an elevator for most of the film, you're pretty sure it won't be a $200 million movie.

I'm always trying to work on scripts. I'm pretty selective. Sometimes maybe too much because I'm broke .

Sometimes little things can prolong an experience in a way that you run over budget. It's very scientific; a lot of people don't understand the science that goes behind making a film.

Certainly, for me, and it's gone this way on every project I've worked on, the "writing" never ends until you're done with the movie.

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.

It was really a means-of-production problem. It costs so much to make films. With a novel, you can write the whole thing on a ream of paper from Staples for $4.

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

In writing scripts now, having made a film, I'm much more conscious of what it means to shoot and edit a movie, and that affects the writing.

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 enjoy writing scripts. I can find out what happens. With an outline, I feel like I'm doing an architectural diagram of something.