Nicole Holofcener Quotes

I don't choose to make low-budget films. But that is the reality of surviving in the Japanese film industry. However, the trade off is, since we're working on small budgets, we have freedom. You can't buy this freedom with money. With this freedom, I think there are an infinite number of possibilities.

You can't do anything yourself on TV... unless you have a LOT of money, but you can do an independent movie.

Movies are - all I've found is that they're just tougher and tougher to make.

I think every time a movie gets made, it's a miracle. I would love to get to a point where it became easier and it wasn't so much of a struggle to get it done or finished.

I think that when you're doing an under-four-million-dollar movie, you just can't throw money at the problems.

I'm very excited about is that my son Scott is a director and he just finished his first picture. It's called "Lucky 13", it's a low budget picture, it stars Jeremy Dillon, Daryl Hannah and Jami Gertz.

It's always a challenge to make an independent film. It's always a challenge to make a low budget 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 think in general with micro-budget films right now, it's rough. The economy is rough. I think that affects everyone from big filmmakers to tiny filmmakers.

Why don't they make more science fiction movies? The answer to any question starting, Why don't they- is almost always, Money.

With an inexperienced director, a lot of times the days go on to 14, 15, 16 hours. It goes horrendously overtime. And because of the lack of money, they just keep you there, regardless of the hours.

On movies like Star Trek and Star Wars, you have so much that will be created or extended digitally, and it's a slippery slope where you can get lost in a world of synthetic.

Let's keep making inexpensive movies.

Independent films now, they want to give you $2 million to make it, 21 days to shoot it and they want 10 movie stars in it.

Let's be realistic about that. I think Mercedes when it started the engine [development] didn't have a budget. It spent. And then lots of teams don't and can't. I mean Red Bull, for example, that won four world championships, didn't know the word "budget", and it's a case that it hadn't got the ability to have the engine that it should have had. Because somebody else [Mercedes] had the engine, wouldn't let them have it, because they didn't want competition.

To be honest, you have to do a big Hollywood film to get enough money to do a good independent film!

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 don't know how many days I worked there [on Star Wars]. The thing I do remember was I somehow got a parking space next to Kermit the Frog. It was Jim Henson's space, with this Kermit the Frog sign. I took a photo of it and sent it to my mom with a caption that read, "Look, Mom. I made it. I got a parking space next to Kermit the Frog." I was always fascinated by the film-set infrastructures.

Everything that I've done so far has had a bigger budget than the last, but I've never ever felt the benefit of the bigger budget because the ideas always exceed the budget.

I thought that if no one was going to give me a great part - and it was very difficult to break into film, obviously - then I'd write one myself.

If you look at the actual movies that I've done, the whole struggle is to get to that point, so it's not something that you just have so easy . . . But it's okay. It doesn't bother me. I've done okay so far.

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.

My films always leave me unsatisfied, since I've always worked under fairly disastrous conditions economically.

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.