Lee Rich Quotes

Sundance is incredible and has been very important for my career as a filmmaker, but it's also not the only route to success. There are a ton of great movies that don't get in and go on and do wonderfully.

The movie business is not about the money. Of course, you need money to make the movie. If you have a small budget, adapt yourself. Having $200 million dollars doesn't ensure that you're definitely going to make a good movie. There's so many examples that prove that.

When I did 'Shaft', I was so happy to be working and to have been a star of a major motion picture, I had no idea or concept of where it was going to go, and it turned out to be this huge film. That was the icing on the cake.

Above all, film is a business... Independence is a really cool thing as you can be a bit more bold, and take a few more chances with what you do.

I like men who are very cool but who are also so brilliant that they are almost insane. Sean Penn, Gary Oldman, Bob Dylan, Tom Waits - men who would be flipping burgers if they hadn't found an outlet for their brilliant mind-sets.

There were six kids in our family, and I grew up fast. I had to do a lot of things on my own. I was a rebellious teenager. That's why coming into the film business was good for me because it gave me some discipline. Once I became an actor, I had to grow up a little more.

Part of the film business is, if you want an apple, you buy an apple.

After we shot the first 'Twilight,' we organized our own wrap party. We really didn't know what this was going to be. Something like that can come at you unexpectedly, and you just have to try your best to deal with it.

I started missing acting when I was in school, and I realized after being in the business after however many years that I was really interested in film.

'Argo' was a great script from day one. I don't think we knew that it was going to be such a success.

They put all this money into these huge films and then no one goes to see them. That sort of shows they're out of touch. Then everyone in town passes on my little movie and it does really well.

I still enjoy acting. I love the moment in front of the camera, but it's all the other moments that I don't enjoy. The 'business' aspect of it, the gossip. I really dislike about 99% of what I do, but I like that 1% when I'm on camera.

As somebody who makes his living in the movie business and wants to contribute to it, I think that the best chance I have of doing that is just consistently working with great directors.

I genuinely believe that if you want to get in the film business, get in the film business.

That's the way this business works: if your movies do well at the box office, you will be offered more movies. It doesn't matter if you're a nice guy or you're a prick. If your movies do well, there's a job waiting for you in Hollywood. It's not any more complicated than that.

I would definitely stay in the business, be behind the camera maybe.

The film business creates a large amount of waste, and I'm not immune to waste in the business.

I've made movies that I thought were good. I've made movies that I thought were okay, but then I was very good. And sometimes you're in a movie and you think, I wish more people saw that - because you're good. And it just works out that the movie gets lost. But that's show business.

But my sense in talking to people when I travel is that the film business is not that dissimilar from a lot of other businesses.

Everyone in my family is in the film business; I knew I wanted to be creative and it was important in my family to be artistic.

I never thought I'd make any money at all doing this business. Film was never even on the cards.

In the film business, when you're young, you just want to work. But when you're older, it has more to do with who's involved with the project - who you're going to get in the boat with.

This film business, perhaps more so in America than in Europe, has always been about young sexuality. It's not true of theatre, but in America, film audiences are young. It's not an intellectual cinema in America.

All of us have read the stories about young people in Hollywood and all the challenges they have to confront there, and I think that artistically, I really didn't understand the commercial side of the film business, so I went back to a purely artistic setting.

Movies like 'Chef' are not really box-office monsters in the summertime and don't really fit into Hollywood's business model any longer. Even if 'Chef' is successful, it will be successful in the context of what it is. There's a limited upside to a film that's so small, but there's also limited exposure for the people who backed me.