Ridley Scott Quotes

The major studios are by and large banks, and they give you what is by and large a loan to make a movie. Like banks, they want their money back plus.

Pre-preproduction is the tenuous time before a project is greenlit; before the studio commits to spending real money. This is the most vulnerable period for any film because it's the time when your project is most likely to be put into turnaround. That's film-speak for killed off.

Many businesses fail because the owner wasn't willing to invest and wasn't educated on the difference between spending money frivolously and investing money into the business for growth, and the risks and rewards of that cash infusion.

Market forces impose certain rules before a film can actually get made.

Unless a Western's made money - doesn't matter who made the money, doesn't matter what the subject is - if the last one didn't make any money, you can't make another one for a four-year period. Westerns more than any genre.

A film like 'Good Night And Good Luck,' you make that for $7 million because you know it's a black-and-white film, and it's not an easy sell. If you make it for $7 million, then everybody can have a chance to make a little bit of money, and you get to make the film you want to make.

There's still a lot of investors wondering what to invest in. And, of course, I think entertainment looks attractive when you read the few films that make these insane amounts of money. What they don't know is they don't always do that.

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.

Content financing is a difficult beast no matter what era of Hollywood we're talking about.

There is no money in films, till the time you make it to a certain bracket.

Hollywood, at the bottom of it, is about money.

I would like to do more feature work. I intend to do that. To be really honest, it's an economic thing because when you make a film that doesn't make what it cost back, it's very difficult to get back in the ring.

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.

The film is not a success until it makes money. It's only good when there's a dollar figure attached to the box office.

My taste in films doesn't lead financers to think they are going to make a zillion dollars.

Never take advice from anyone in a tie. They'll bankrupt you. Don't ask a general for advice on war, and don't ask a broker for advice on money.

If you want your film to be instantly green-lit, your first approach is not to go to a relatively unknown English actor. They're not going to throw millions of dollars at you for that.

We love making movies. We got into the business to make movies. At the end of the day, whether you're doing a low budget film or a big budget film, you want it to do well and you want people to see it. That's the whole point. You want to put some kind of message in it.

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

When Silence of the Lambs did well commercially it was more than anything. My partner Ed Saxon and I were just so relieved that finally we had made a movie that had made some money!

My partner, Beth Alexander, and I want to produce smaller films, but commercially viable films that will enable me to make the kinds of movies I want to make.

If you look at film, distribution is pre-bought. If you've paid for the distribution, you say, 'I have to make sure it's a film that gets enough butts in the seats.' I think that's the problem: It becomes prohibitively expensive, and you can't develop films for a smaller amount of money.

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.

I always thought the real violence in Hollywood isn't what's on the screen. It's what you have to do to raise the money.

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.