John Requa Quotes

If you want to make movies you need to think on a micro-micro level and figure out how to make them for nothing with people who really care about your movie and really want to make it.

When you make a movie independently, you raise the money beforehand, and then you make the movie kind of by yourself.

I want to make my own movie.

My dream is just to make zero-budget movies for the rest of my life, because I love that environment.

I like to produce my own movies.

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

On the last couple of movies I made - big-budget Hollywood movies - I really missed being able to create my own material.

I wanted to just be a filmmaker, and I thought I wanted to do all the aspects, and it seemed like as a producer was the best way to do it, because I could have... You never have control on a movie, but you have as much control as you can.

I would like to have a movie under my own control sometime, and see what could be done with it. Who knows? Maybe Hollywood will make an improvisational movie someday.

I didn't have a lot of independent film connections. It really took until the digital film revolution came along that I realized that I could do it myself.

I tell my students based on my experiences in Hollywood, sure, you can always move to L.A. and try to work with the system, and people do that, but chances are if you want your story in film with characters of color, you will have to make that movie yourself. Find a way to make it yourself. Not just screenwriters, but also producers.

I'm a filmmaker; I want to make films. I don't want to sit in a hotel room waiting to make films, and I can control my thing in Denmark; I can make the film I want to make... of course, I have to write a good script, all that, but if I do my job, it will happen.

It's hard to get personal films off the ground, and it's hard developing them.

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.

People have a different idea of how movies are made than they really are.

I don't make movies because I think audiences will want to go see them.

I love making independent movies, and that's pretty much what I'm going to be doing for the rest of my years.

I grew up on film sets but more around the process of making films. I saw a lot of the editing process and the writing process, which takes years. That really affected me growing up, that side of it.

It's very eclectic, the way one chooses subjects in the movie business, especially in the commercial movie business. You need to develop material yourself or material is presented to you as an assignment to direct.

I've never done a studio movie, let alone worked for a network. Every one of my films has been independently financed.

In 1962, we created the Filmmakers' Co-Op because nobody wanted to distribute our films. If we had the Internet in those days, we wouldn't have needed the Co-Op.

I have no interest whatsoever in pursuing acting or becoming a mogul. I love writing and directing; I see those two jobs as the most critical in the making of a film.

When we did Wayne's World, it was 14 million dollars and they didn't bug us too much because they just thought it was some little movie that nobody was ever going to see. We showed them.

I want to get into producing and writing more for myself - setting up my own films and seeing what kind of personal touch I can put on movies, as opposed to just being in them.

I see myself starring in and producing major feature films.