Ted Demme Quotes

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

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

I never think about the budget of the film.

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.

What do you spend $200 million on, with a film? I can't wrap my brain around that one.

As soon as you're at the higher levels of budgeting, you've got to get the film made, and the only way to support the film is to have actors who can support the budget.

People in Hollywood are going make pictures where ever it's the least expensive to make them.

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.

Nowadays the big Hollywood studios only make about three movies a year, and they cost about $200 million each. There's no room for error in that, and not a lot of room, I would think, for free expression.

I've never been that much of a money guy. I'm more of a film guy, and most of the money I've made is in defense of trying to keep creative control of my movies.

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

I'm really tired of making these huge, over-$100 million movies where they literally mean life and death for a studio. It's really rough making these expensive movies. Everyone is hysterical.

In big movies, interests are not aligned between those above the line and the financier, because above the line gets paid whether the movie works or not. The financier only makes money if the movie works, and that fundamentally sets up a contentious relationship.

It used to be the case that studio executives like Robert Evans, Darryl Zanuck, and David Selznick would put aside money for what they wanted to be great movies regardless of whether they would perform well with the box office.

History is rife with stories of directors who got so obsessed that their films went massively over budget - out of control.

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

With major films costing hundreds of millions of dollars to make, Hollywood is an industry that tends to repeat patterns when they make money.

The biggest thing I learned is directors don't make a lot of money on a movie.

'Housefull' is just a 40-45 crores film. It was never an expensive film to begin with.

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

Film-making, in itself, is such a risky, costly-yet-uncertain business that despite being wealthy, 90 percent of people don't become producers.

The economics of setting up a new restaurant are scary in good times and terrifying in bad ones.

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

It's great to make strong, powerful films, but in terms of people wanting to finance them, it's also very difficult.

The catch in the industry is that if you want to get a picture made for little money, you have to get a big star. But the two are usually mutually exclusive.