Burnie Burns Quotes

It costs a lot of money to release a movie. What you'd call art-house movies - movies that don't have big stars or big budgets - they're very hard for distributors to get behind 'em and take chances.

Let's face it, making movies is all risk. Most of the time, batting average-wise, the reward does not outweigh the risk.

Movies are an expensive business.

When a movie is about to come out on its initial debut, there are a lot of people involved - the financiers, the studio and the producers and also, many times, the foreign distributors. So it is a time of tremendous pressure and uncertainty.

The difficulty of getting a movie made through a major studio is so extreme that when a movie comes out, everyone should give it four stars because it was accomplished.

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.

When you do bigger films, the financiers take more risks.

I certainly wouldn't mind if 'Jurassic Park' turns out to be commercially successful, and somebody says, 'Hey, you were in a box-office hit, and if you want to do another movie, we'll give you five million dollars to make it.'

There's a long history of people who spent that $300,000 on their first film and weren't quite ready, and then they never did it again 'cause they were out of synch with where they were, and they would never raise that money again.

I won't claim that I know it all, but I do know how much money is involved in making a Kannada movie. I've done my homework.

What I learned from my go-round with 'In the Heights' is that it's tough to make a movie. In Hollywood, even the people in charge have people in charge.

The movie industry used to be completely accessible. We all knew people in it, and nobody made a big fuss.

Scripts don't get movies made.

The thing about movies these days is that the commerce end of it is so inflated and financiers are just expecting this enormous return on their investment.

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.

With movies, it always feels like such a long shot getting it made.

I learned some big lessons on my first film, a horror film which was never released in the U.S., even though we sold it to Harvey Weinstein for a lot of money.

'Private Benjamin' was the first movie I produced, and I produced it for practical reasons.

Making movies seemed so impossible as far as getting my ideas funded.

I think people really don't understand what a producer does versus what a director does. I mean, the producer is often the person that is on the movie the longest - it's their material that they are then bringing the director onto to bring it to the screen. Are we overlooked? Absolutely.

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

Movies are not an art form where you get to kind of sit in your art gallery and paint, you know? You don't do that. You're spending a lot of somebody else's money.

As long as your movies don't lose money, you'll always be able to make them.

In making a movie, you're part of a big machine. Even in a small movie there are still so many people involved in the process, and it costs so much money to make. There is so much more invested in it for a lot of different people, so much money is sunk into it that they usually want some guarantee or promise that it's going to be able to do something on a financial level. There's just a lot more messing with you in film. I love movies and I love to watch movies and being a part of the whole film experience.

If someone puts up $100 million on a movie, they're gonna be concerned about whether they'll get it back. So they're not gonna make a movie about three girls, you know?