Alejandro Jodorowsky Quotes

With 'The Crazies,' we had a lot of room to play and manipulate and change things. When you get something bigger, you have less control in that sense unless you're one of the three stars.

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.

If Barbra Steisand wants to make a picture called 'My Pink Fingernail,' the studios will go, 'Gee, Barbra, what a wonderful idea! Money is no object! Take two years in preproduction and write the music, and you'll direct.'

High-level actors can be all about their close-ups and the size of their trailers. I'd heard these horror stories of how a really powerful actor can come in and change your script.

Trying to convince Warner Bros. to make a $30 million 'Veronica Mars' movie just wasn't going to happen, for understandable reasons.

I never wanted to be an actor. Because when you're an actor, you depend on other people to come to you with scripts. You can't create your own. Unless you are a Raj Kapoor, who was a producer-director.

Developing films with directors, developing films with actors, is a poor percentage play for a screenwriter.

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.

I have come close to producing films. But generally by the time they hit the screen, there's about 50 people with producer credits, so what's the point. I usually find scripts I like with no money attached and take them to producers that I know and try to raise finance.

We've turned down multi million dollar films, simply because we liked the film better. We have the luxury to do so - we have projects that make the money, and others that we do for love.

Actors have given up their clout. Now decision making is in the hands of lighting men, designers, bankers, special-effects people. We need to cut that out and just go with the most able trained actors in the business.

It would have been impossible to get 'The Verdict' off the ground without Paul Newman obviously, but today without any star, kind of a dramatic piece would be very tough.

Unless you're the director on the movie, or putting up the money for the movie, you really don't have a lot of control.

With 'House Party 4,' I did it with my own money, and I sold it to New Line.

It's so hard to raise money for independent films and the fact of the matter is that the bigger my star or whatever is, as a result of doing bigger pictures, the easier it is for me to get money for my own projects.

When you're actually making the film, you're constantly battling to maintain its integrity.

I'm not someone who puts their money in a fund that earns 2 to 5 percent a year. I'm a man who tries to change things, move something with my money, to create jobs and, of course, at the same time earn more money with it.

I was supposed to do a film with Bill Shatner called 'Free Enterprise 2.' They were calling me into wardrobe, and they said they are holding off for a while. Then the next thing I knew... either the money dropped out, or the producer ran off with the money. I think it's the second story that's true.

Money should not, and must not, change our commitment to solving problems and building this state.

If I thought there was any hope of turning 'World War Z' into a movie, I wouldn't have written it as a giant, epic, global story, because that requires a giant, epic, global budget.

You end up giving up half your salary every time you make a movie because you need the money to make the movie you have in your head.

And now it looks like I'm probably going to shoot a movie that I wrote. I got the money to do it, and I would star and all, because of being on Howard.

As a director, my job is to spend money, and the producer's is to save money. Masoom, Bandit Queen and the first Queen Elizabeth have been my most uncompromised films.

Look, I've done some low-budget movies and I've done some big-budget movies, and the big-budget movies were always kind of disorganized.

There's one great script that hit my desk that I didn't change at all, and that was True Romance.