Richard D. Zanuck Quotes

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

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

Ultimately, making movies, if you don't have a big star, it's hard to do. Or if it's not a star director.

It's gotten out of control. It's taking bigger and bigger names to make smaller and smaller films. I worry that important films without a big name attached won't get made at all.

Often, in the movie business, they need somebody who will garner box office because they need to pay for the movie. So the people who are in movies that make a lot of money are the people who most often get cast in studio pictures. In my career, I've never been a box office name.

Stupidly, in our industry, producers pay precious money to sign stars whom they might not even use in the film. Producers believe stars make hits; actually it is the script that makes a film successful.

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

You put a movie star or a bunch of movie stars in a movie, it doesn't mean people are gonna go see it. It's been proven time and time again.

I don't really have much to prove. I can easily go in a comfort zone, make two films a year, hype them because I've signed them as a star, make them cheap and they will be big hits.

The difference between a beautifully made failure and a beautifully made hit is who you've got playing the leads.

Most people don't really understand what it takes to get a film made, and the struggles .I think anyone who makes a film goes through their own set of struggles.

Each one of my movies becomes easier to get off the ground.

If you're in a hit movie, it's good to be in another hit movie straight away.

The film business has so many twists and turns that it's a miracle any film gets made.

'Shadows' wasn't so difficult to get made.

It's incredibly, incredibly difficult to get a movie made.

I didn't know box office was a thing you could possess but I don't have it. I go up for lovely roles and people with this nebulous thing called box office get them so there isn't much I can do about that unless you know where I can get some box-office myself!

I certainly wouldn't mind if 'Jurassic Park' turns out to be commercially successful, and somebody says, 'Hey, you were in a box-office hit, and if you want to do another movie, we'll give you five million dollars to make it.'

With 'The Last Picture Show,' Peter Bogdanovich brought the script to the company that made it. They liked it, and they gave him the money he needed to make the film. He cast it with the actors that he thought were right for the parts. Now, it's the reverse.

It's hard. It's hard to get a film made properly.

In any film business, if you're trying to get your next film made, you would never say, 'Oh, my last film was a cult film.' I'd say, 'Oh, great, well I hope this one isn't!' I always say to Johnny Knoxville, 'How do you do it? You sort of do the same thing we did, except you made millions, and I made hundreds.'

If the film is good, it will work whether it has a star or no star.

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

The catch in the industry is that if you want to get a picture made for little money, you have to get a big star. But the two are usually mutually exclusive.

As a producer, I wanted to make medium-budget films, and I did.