Rob Reiner Quotes

I look back on my life and it’s 95% running around trying to raise money to make movies and 5% actually making them. It’s no way to live.

You cannot believe how hard it is to try and raise money for a film. I did it for six years and it was such a failure.

Even a low-budget film costs way more money than a high-priced record. So, it's mo' money, mo' problems. When you have more money, it just creates more people trying to get involved and you have more trouble.

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

In the course of my movies, the financing and the releasing were always the tough part. Because I loved the creative, I loved the writing, I loved the making of it. Because I guess, I never had the giant blockbuster, I never got that sort of ease for the next one. So the next one was always, "how am I going to do this?" And that thing was sort of always the thing that made me a little chickenshit to go into the next one. The writing of it was great and the making of it was great, but how am I going to release this thing and am I going to find a studio?

People say, "How do you get into the British film industry?" There is no British film industry, there are just people making films and finding their own way. It's not like in the States where there are studios and there's an actual infrastructure to it; there's just nothing here. You make it from scratch a lot of the time.

Sometimes little things can prolong an experience in a way that you run over budget. It's very scientific; a lot of people don't understand the science that goes behind making a film.

You have to take a wheelbarrow full of money and roll out and try to make a movie out of it. But you run out of money eventually, and then it becomes painful and it becomes a struggle and time will kill the enthusiasm!

I love period pieces. But it's hard to get money to make costumed dramas, so we'll see.

I think there's only one or two films where I've had all the financial support I needed. All the rest, I wish I'd had the money to shoot another ten days.

A novelty in Polish filmmaking was that it was possible to find funds for a big production. However, at the same time, the state budget committed less and less money to filmmaking.

On Lock, Stock, we didn't know where the money for shooting the next day was coming from.

Shooting films in Britain is always difficult, because we've never got enough money to make them.

Even on a $100 million film, people will complain that they haven't got enough money and enough time, so that's always going to be an element in filmmaking.

Just trying to get a film made which is always difficult no matter what kind of a budget you have. Not having a budget makes it even more difficult. Having nineteen days and no budget makes it extremely difficult.

I do not need a producer. I need only a good production manager. I need only a man who will give me money.

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

My movies don't make any money, and they don't really light the world on fire. But I'm really lucky because I've gotten them made.

I actually had less time and the exact same budget on Hairspray, which was few years ago and this is a much bigger movie [then Rock of Ages]. That's the way studios do it now.

You spend most of your time as a director trying to move forward with the movie. It happens on a daily basis, if not more than once a day, that you are struggling with budgetary constraints. Whereas when you're writing, the limitation that you have is your imagination. So it's decidedly non-pragmatic.

Invariably, what I'm trying to do is more ambitious than the budget, but we manage to do it somehow.

I have wasted the greater part of my life looking for money and trying to get along, trying to make my work from this terribly expensive paintbox, which is a movie. And I've spent too much energy on things that have nothing to do with making a movie. It's about two percent moviemaking and ninety-eight percent hustling. It's no way to spend a life.

I'm not the businessman. I don't deal with the business at all. Not anymore. Occasionally, every four years or five years, they tell me I've run out of money, I have to go and make some more.

I'm just thinking of 2001, which I think is the most expensive independent film ever made - which is great, someday I hope I will do one. But I know the parameters when I got onto this project - I have to take care of everyone, make sure that they are all on board, and this process interests me.

Money is the driving force of Hand to Mouth, the lack of money, and all those true stories about strange things in The Red Notebook, coincidences and unlikely events, surprise, the unexpected.