Howard Keel Quotes

One of the worst things you can do is have a limited budget and try to do some big looking film. That's when you end up with very bad work.

That's why my attitude, even on my larger-scale movies, is to make them cheap. The less these things cost, the better for everybody.

I did this film for less money than it costs to stay in this hotel. We shot it in 20 days. We couldn't screw up takes for fun because we didn't have enough film.

Sometimes, and I hate to say it, you do feel things are asked for in the most ludicrously unrealistic fashion. The time you are expected to make things in, and the money you are expected to make them for - that is the death of creativity. Just because some things can be made very cheaply does not mean everything can be.

My feeling about the movies is that most of them are terrible. If you don't have a decent script and a decent director, forget it.

I've had some of the best craft services on independent movies, actually, because they get more creative, generally, with a smaller budget. The work is still the same. I didn't really notice the difference other than I was getting dressed behind a curtain, basically.

Whether you're making a million dollar film or a $100 million film there is never enough money, there's never enough time.

You know, because of the lack of budget, we had to find neighborhoods where time had stopped - kind of stuck in the '50s. And no place had that better than Staten Island.

Sometimes I don't know whether a movie has been shot on film or in digital when I watch it in the theatres.

I was able to lean on people for favors and things to help out because their budget was so low. It was half of what John Travolta's perk package is on a film. Our whole budget was half of what his staff makes on a film.

We shot 'Party Girl' on film, and I remember being told, 'We need to get this in two takes because we don't have a lot of film in the mag right now!'

I was not into B-movies. A lot of it is sloppy.

A lot of low-budget genre films you see are horror movies, because horror is the friendliest movie to lack of money.

It's a struggle. It's really, really hard. I'm already nervous for my next one. You have to put more and more movie stars in movies these days. And of course, I would like to have more than $3million to make it. But, again, if that's what I was offered I wouldn't turn it down. I guess studios know that. But I'm one of the lucky ones, I guess.

The whole visual language of the movie is developed way before we get to set. Especially when you're doing visual effects and you don't have a lot of money to mess around, which we didn't, you have to really preplan everything. Pretty much every shot in the film was figured out months before we got to set.

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

The biggest problem with the independent film sector in Toronto is that they find themselves having to make that budget show on screen.

Economy, speed, nervousness, and desperation produce the final wasteful, semi-incoherent movies we see.

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

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.

The truth is lots of films are made, the majority of which are terrible.

Because of the cumbersome nature of filmmaking, it's only recently that it has become available to the masses, with digital equipment and laptop computers. You can now actually make a pretty serviceable movie for very little money by yourself.

I really enjoyed being on movie sets, and I had fun with the people, but I didn't really think about acting or care, or I didn't think I cared about acting.

You can't print everything and that's not good for filmmaking, because you wanna have as many options as possible and print as much as you can, but if you're going to shoot a film - an independent movie on film, the only way to really do it is to print your selects.

There are enough bad films coming out of this town already without the process being more democratized. I'm a guy who loves democracy. I'm all for democratizing any process, but I think there is a price to pay for that.