Doug Liman Quotes

Now there's always exceptions to that and the reason is if the film doesn't really work, whereas before you could rely on a decent amount of DVD sales to prop up the revenue to ensure that you got out in a decent manner, now if the film doesn't work, the film doesn't work and there's none of that DVD revenue to fall back on and you can lose a huge, huge sum of money on a big budget movie.

The major studios are by and large banks, and they give you what is by and large a loan to make a movie. Like banks, they want their money back plus.

I formed my own studio, carried my own deficits, owned one-hundred percent of my negatives, and made a lot of mistakes, but we ended up being the third largest TV studio in Hollywood.

As the bull market goes on, people who take great risks achieve great rewards, seemingly without punishment. It's like crime without punishment or sex without sin.

I like to think of the world as a sort of a casino, except the house doesn't have the advantage. If you're smart, you have an advantage. It behooves you to place a lot of bets.

We should willingly take risks in supporting new projects. The tendency is to play it safe when funding is low, but we need to remember that the greatest risks have the greatest payoffs.

It's a harder time to make original, less conventional movies. But God, we need them!

It's always this grand search in the industry to find good material. Whenever there is good material, they all jump on it, and it's like a food fight to get it made. That's why so many things take years and years to develop because it all shows up on screen.

We need to make more original movies, and audiences would do well to support original movies for the future of the medium.

We all get into business, and we take a risk in terms of putting capital.

In some industries, we refer to risk taking as 'research and development.' At financial institutions, we often take risk by investing in securities.

It used to be the case that studio executives like Robert Evans, Darryl Zanuck, and David Selznick would put aside money for what they wanted to be great movies regardless of whether they would perform well with the box office.

I just feel like TV takes more risks than film. Film has gotten very safe: it's very compartmentalized about what type of things will be successful. And whereas in TV, since all these new platforms opened, they're saying to writers, go out there, write the most different show that you can write. Write something that's really original and different.

I write all of my material. It's all me.

You come out of drama school and do theatre and are interested in creative endeavour, then you drift into TV and movies and realise that artistic endeavour needs to balance with financial success. There's no point spending millions on a movie that doesn't make any money, because the people producing it won't make another one.

Not all of our movies work, but we take shots, and we're able to do that because we really stick to low budgets.

Film-making, in itself, is such a risky, costly-yet-uncertain business that despite being wealthy, 90 percent of people don't become producers.

I've found that a lot of successful poker players grew up poor. And I'm convinced that poor people have a risk tolerance that rich people don't have because poor people fundamentally don't value money that much because they're used to not having it.

Being an entrepreneur is all about risk. Being an entrepreneur is like going to Vegas every day and shoving all of your chips into the middle of the table every single day.

Usually, you measure appetite of investors by their ability or willingness to take a bit of leverage on their positions.

I have been making films for 25 years now and I am not mad to invest in something from where recovery becomes an issue.

I mean, the title of my show is my name. That's not because I was an established voice. It's because of a rising number of outlets, and an increased willingness to take risks. All the sudden, people like me are finding themselves in the position to make things.

When you tell a film financier that you want to do a Shakespeare film, their face drops. Shakespeare films don't have a very wonderful history at the box office.

I feel that if you want to make films, you have to be willing to make it without a fee. You get a deferment, I guess.

I would love to have more original material developed. 'Pacific Rim' has made that slightly more possible.