Gael Garcia Bernal Quotes

You can spend an extraordinary amount of time raising independent money to do a movie for very little means. I've done it with 'Pawn Sacrifice.'

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

I turn up in Los Angeles every now and then, so I can get some big money films in order to finance my smaller money films.

I used the principles of Kickstarter to make 'She's Gotta Have It.' We filmed that in 1985 to 1986. The final cost was $175,000. I didn't have that money. It was friends, grants, donations. We saved our bottles for the nickel deposit.

It costs a lot of money to release a movie. What you'd call art-house movies - movies that don't have big stars or big budgets - they're very hard for distributors to get behind 'em and take chances.

Shooting films in Britain is always difficult, because we've never got enough money to make them.

When you're making an independent film, it's like this actor plus this actor equals this funding, this financing. Pull this actor out, this actor is still here but this money's gone. It's this frightening puzzle mosaic that is the world of independent film.

The model today is that as much as 70 percent of the financing of the picture would come from overseas. Now we're beginning to run out of suckers, because there are not that many people overseas who are willing to put up more than half the money for a movie.

It proved to be pretty impossible to get funds for a feature film in Finland. It's still small, but the film industry was miniscule at that point in the early '80s.

The long and short of it is that I am now in a position in England to green light movies, and that's really excellent - not high-budget movies, but movies none the less.

When I tried to get 'Stargate' made, I took it to every studio in Hollywood and every studio said, 'Sci-fi is dead. It's a dead genre. No one wants to see science fiction anymore.' And I had to go and raise the money independently to make that movie.

We need to work out who is paying for film; in the U.K., it is increasingly difficult to get production funds - and pre-sales demand more and more shot/cut material.

My name can raise money on a small-budget film.

You could go out with a camcorder tomorrow and make a movie with virtually no money, but promoting a tiny low-budget movie costs $20 million. And the money they spend on the big movies is astronomical.

Every film is hard to fund.

The financing of my films has always been international.

We shot ten minutes of the movie, and now we're looking for completion funds.

When you are making an independent film, money is never an issue.

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

For 'Filth,' we had about 12 producers on the thing. The opening credits go on for months. Most of them are actually financers rather than producers. And the only way that we could raise the budget without interference from a studio was to have a lot of different financers on board.

To find money to make a film, you have to write maybe 50 pages to explain what you'd like to do, what the film will be, but everybody lies. Because he doesn't know what the film will be. Everybody writes 50 pages and sends it to a TV channel, a producer, to get money, but everybody lies. Or else your film is not interesting.

Like all independent movies, the first thing you're looking for is a name actor who will justify your financing.

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

You read a lot about movies with budgets of $25 to 30 million. Hell, if a studio can piss away that kind of money, why not let 'em piss on me?

A government institution called the Finnish Film Foundation funds filmmaking there, and I wrote several screenplays but never got any money. They were sent back to me, and they said that they were too commercial for them.