Robert Rodriguez Quotes

I was bargaining for time away from Hollywood, and Columbia was bargaining for money. I got what I wanted and they got what they wanted. They knew I was so anxious to do Born Yesterday that I'd have done it for a dollar. They gave me the next best thing.

Movies in Hollywood now, for the past 20 or 30 years, are made mainly by lawyers or agents.

Well, you don't make any demands to Steven Spielberg.

The bottom line of Hollywood is money.

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.

The corporation and the hedge funds have a hold on Hollywood, and they all want to make money on anything that signifies cinema.

Hollywood is a place where they place you under contract instead of under observation.

When you make people a lot of money, it gives you leverage in Hollywood.

If someone offers you a three picture deal at 20 you'd take it. I would have killed for it.

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.

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.

I think a lot of Hollywood is in retreat right now trying to figure out how to make money and make the safest bets.

I've got a huge, gigantic deal. We're talking about huge deals.

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.

One quality that a director needs to acquire in Hollywood is to understand the system and figure out how to work within the system to express one's own ideas.

They give me the money, I give them the book. Having input into the adaptation would be kind of like selling a house and coming back three years later and saying, 'Paint it this color!'

I turn up in Los Angeles every now and then, so I can get some big money films in order to finance my smaller money films.

Most of Hollywood is about making money - and I love money, but I don't make the films thinking about money.

Hollywood executives believe that money is both the be-all and end-all to the moviemaking process.

Stars make money on real movies. They make big money on real movies. To come into my world, I've got some M&Ms and some potato chips, and I'm asking you to move furniture.

I don't make deals, I make pictures.

Actors dread working with studios because they dictate what you do in a way that independent movies can't.

Woody Allen would go for seven years without a movie and then make one that makes no money.

My debut feature, 'The Baby-Sitters Club,' got good reviews and made good money for what it cost. But it took me six years to get to direct my second feature. I think a guy would have had another movie out the same year.

I began to think, now is the time. I found quite a lot of opposition in Hollywood about the idea of doing a film musical and we ended up having to buy the rights back. I'm glad we did because it meant John and I were able to make exactly the movie we wanted.