Tananarive Due Quotes

It's nice when you're working in Hollywood and there's a movie you'd like to see that no one is making anymore. You make it yourself.

The black community in Hollywood is very small and close-knit. Everyone has a common goal: to make a two-hour movie in 30 days.

I could never work in that kind of commercial environment where the stars have a lot to say, where the producers kind of push you around and tell you who to cast and who not to cast. I'm just not interested in that at all.

It's just hard to get an independent film made.

I think, honestly, that the word 'indie' is a false gimmick. 'Independent' used to mean a movie that was financed outside corporate Hollywood, but a lot of what gets called independent these days is totally produced within that system. And there's nothing wrong with that.

We need more filmmakers of color telling the story. I'd like to see more filmmakers take their products out independently, put together a good commercial film and distribute it online.

I'm a filmmaker; I want to make films. I don't want to sit in a hotel room waiting to make films, and I can control my thing in Denmark; I can make the film I want to make... of course, I have to write a good script, all that, but if I do my job, it will happen.

It's hard to get personal films off the ground, and it's hard developing them.

Writing is getting killed by too many chefs. Back in the Bogart days, it started with great scripts. You had a writer, and he wrote a script, and that was your movie. I think that's been watered down a bit lately.

The first time I did a big American film, I was surprised by all the different financiers who came to the set and told the director what to do.

I put more emphasis on filmmakers than maybe Hollywood does.

Since childhood, I'd dreamed of making a film, but producers in France and Germany wanted to make commercial films with chinoiserie. I refused.

You're taught - consciously or sub-consciously - to make an indie so you can get through that terrible process and get to Hollywood. I realized when I got there, 'Oh, no; I think I'm better over here.'

If you can get your movie made the way you want to get it made, no matter what the end result is going to be, if people are going to see it, that's awesome.

The truth is, we were sick of, every time we finished a movie, having to start all over again from nothing, going to a studio, pitching an idea, setting up a new office.

The studios are nervous on every movie. It never ends, because Marty's movies are so unusual. He doesn't repeat himself, so they don't know what to expect. We have to fight hard to keep them from being ruined. Film students can't believe that when I tell them, because they think, 'Well, it's Martin Scorsese.'

I became a producer because nobody was ready to finance my films.

Let film-makers take a call about what films they want to do.

As a filmmaker whose first film was made with the DIY tools of digital cinema, I love how the democratization of the filmmaking process and platforms like YouTube enables people to tell stories that in previous generations simply could not be told.

I like to say, in Hollywood, you can't make a redneck movie without me. That doesn't happen. You better not do it.

I know the pleasure you get from making your films. The intense involvement in every aspect: the acting, the camera, the colors, the costumes, even the hair and makeup. Editing is thrilling. Everything to do with films is absorbing - everything but the money part, the business. But I'm deeply glad I've had that experience.

Sometimes I watch films that I can't believe got made. Especially because I read scripts that are truly incredible, that will never get made. I don't know who is behind those decisions. It's like you just have to doodle something on a page about the underdog who finally gets the girl and the film gets made.

Hollywood is a showman's paradise. But showmen make nothing; they exploit what someone else has made. The publisher and the play producer are showmen too; but they exploit what is already made. The showmen of Hollywood control the making - and thereby degrade it. For the basic art of motion pictures is the screenplay; it is fundamental, without it there is nothing. Everything derives from the screenplay, and most of that which derives is an applied skill which, however adept, is artistically not in the same class with the creation of a screenplay.

If you sell the film rights to your book, it doesn't mean there will be a film. I have sold the rights to five books and had zero films made. Take the money and be thankful.

Well, this movie I've been working on for a while. I had the idea for the movie like twenty years ago when I was doing 'Empire of the Sun' in 1987 because at that time that's when all these Vietnam movies were being made and my friends and I were going on auditions for these Vietnam movies and my friends were getting them and going away to fake boot camps.