George A. Romero Quotes

Coming from the industry and maintaining contacts with producers and directors, I am very well aware that costs associated with movie production are a major factor in determining where films get made.

I do believe that there are some films that cannot be made without stars.

Mid-range to low-budget movies have to have a name in the lead to get financing for it.

The issue often with films is how it works with money and trying to get a visible movie star presence in the film.

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.

The movies I usually do are maybe three or four weeks because they don't have a lot of money.

Now while the German money is over for Hollywood, I still have $80 million to make movies, and we will have two things coming up: less major movies and the price for actors will go down.

We need to work out who is paying for film; in the U.K., it is increasingly difficult to get production funds - and pre-sales demand more and more shot/cut material.

To go back, the mistake that Universal Studios made with 'Dawn of the Dead' was that they didn't have enough money or cared enough to make a soundtrack.

The good thing about feature films is that the budgets tend to scale.

OK, the director makes the movie. But some movies can't get made without someone like me in them.

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

I tried to film 'Leaves of Grass' in Oklahoma, but it was literally about a million dollars less to shoot in Louisiana.

The studios don't finance anymore, they get outside funds.

The long and short of it is that I am now in a position in England to green light movies, and that's really excellent - not high-budget movies, but movies none the less.

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.

When you're having conversations about actors, you realize these same conversations have happened about you. If you want to make a film for $5m, then you cast A, B and C, but if you want $20m, you won't be able to cast them, you need X, Y and Z.

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

But what's interesting is now - and not only in horror, but across the board - the studios basically only make B pictures with A budgets. That's the biggest difference.

Getting movies made is not as difficult as people think. Making movies is easy. You get a script, you get a director, you raise the money, you make the movie.

Isn't that the definition of a star? Someone who can get a film made?

Unfortunately my career began in Hollywood, doing a negative pickup for Universal pictures.

The only difference between working on a huge-budget film and a lesser-budget film, is the quality of lunch and dinner.

Nowadays, to get a movie greenlit, you have to make an incredible effort.

It would have been impossible to get 'The Verdict' off the ground without Paul Newman obviously, but today without any star, kind of a dramatic piece would be very tough.