John Boorman Quotes

The only time I have a good hunch the audience is going to be there is when I make the sequel to 'Jurassic Park' or I make another Indiana Jones movie. I know I've got a good shot at getting an audience on opening night. Everything else that is striking out into new territory is a crap shoot.

I don't think any studio - it was a long shot at the time - but I don't think any studio in a million years would make 'Thelma and Louise' right now. But there's so many other kinds of movies they won't make right now.

At Pixar, we believe strongly that filmmakers should develop ideas they are passionate about. This may sound like a no-brainer, but in fact in Hollywood, the big movie studios have whole departments devoted to acquiring and developing projects that will only later be paired with a director-for-hire.

Hollywood is a world where the only thing that gets green-lit is something that made money the last year.

As bad as some movies can be, good movies are also possible, sometimes through the very heinous corporations we love to trash.

I was lucky enough to come in at the beginning of the independent film movement, and it's really shaped my life and my career.

People always ask why I don't make independent movies. I do make independent movies - I just make them at Sony and Paramount.

I very much enjoy my freedom creatively but I also would love to make one of those big Hollywood films that costs a lot of money and has a lot of people running around with cell phones and all that insanity.

I'm lucky. I don't have to produce the whole movie. What I've been doing is just coming up with ideas for movies. I write a concept, a treatment, an outline, and if I sell that to a studio, then someone else does the actual production and I go on to another project, although I keep the title executive producer.

Hollywood is a cottage industry involving a very small number of people, and around the edges are enormous numbers of people trying to get into it and work.

The cool thing about making a Western is that people want to be in them. You rarely get the opportunity. With horror movies you are always trying to convince them. People in horror are always worried it's going to be this schlocky thing, and you're always trying to convince them that it's not. With Westerns, people immediately react with, "Oh, I've always wanted to do one."

Independent film is taking risks in all areas. It's not just about complicated women.

Everybody has noticed the way cats stop and loiter in a half-open door. Hasn't everyone said to a cat: For heavens sake why don't you come in? With opportunity half-open in front of them, there are men who have a similar tendency to remain undecided between two solutions, at the risk of being crushed by fate abruptly closing the opportunity. The overprudent, cats as they are, and because they are cats, sometimes run more danger than the bold

One of the big problems entrepreneurs run into is they get too comfortable.

The studios still had development programs for young people. Because you weren't talking about the budgets of small nations the way you are now when you make a movie. There was a lot more freedom to fail.

I try to approach making movies in a way that it's about the making of them and not the result of them, if that makes sense.

If you're producing a movie you're involved in every aspect of the movie and that can be daunting and then going and doing a movie where you're just an actor for hire, and you can kind of sit back and giggle where you can see somebody sitting over there wasting time and wasting money.

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'm from that world where I feel so comfortable making small independent movies.

If you try to measure the future, you will never risk the present. Playing it safe. A ghastly game.

If I work on a movie for two months, I should be able to dance on as many tables as I want to.

Movies are grander, with (in my experience) more heavy weight chefs in the kitchen: the studio, the producers, the writers. All of them get to weigh in and you have to listen to all of them because they hired you. With TV, it's a way smaller scale, with only a few people weighing in.

Film sets are great fun. Film people are great people to hang around with. I don't want to run off and be distracted by other things.

I didn't fill it up with movies every time because I was trying to just film one damn movie, but that's the heartache of independent films.

It's obviously a lot more of a political undertaking making a movie in Hollywood and it's a business there. In Australia, they don't expect films to make money; whereas in America they're counting on it.