Anthony Minghella Quotes

I tried to film 'Leaves of Grass' in Oklahoma, but it was literally about a million dollars less to shoot in Louisiana.

Anyone who has an imagination can write a book - it's cheap to do - but movies are big money.

Because television doesn't offer the kind of budget that a movie offers, you've got to be a little more careful where you spend the money to put the fiction in science.

You know, I feel like my job is to write a book. Then filmmakers come and they make a movie. And they're two really different art forms.

I would love it if anyone gave me the job of adapting 'The Great Gatsby,' but nobody ever does.

I already have a production company called J Squared and we're working on two projects.

Right now a lot of people are still choosing to go to Toronto instead of shooting in New York City, something I haven't done and something I hope I'll never have to do.

Traditionally, people have been adapting novels and short stories forever. Now, they're doing it simultaneously, with an eye towards writing the movie before the novel has even come out or been finished. It's a function of this hyper-accelerated society we live in, where everyone is trying to short circuit the process.

I have a producing partner named Stephen Hamel, and we've been trying to generate material.

It costs so much to make films. With a novel, you can write the whole thing on a ream of paper from Staples for $4.

There's something really nice about writing something on Wednesday and watching it being performed live for a studio audience on Tuesday. You never really get that with novels.

I do not need a producer. I need only a good production manager. I need only a man who will give me money.

In order to have the success with 'Empire,' you have to have Fox; you have to have huge P&A. You have to have huge budgets for the show. I'm pretty confident that the budget of 'Empire' is six times what I'm spending on 'Have And Have Nots.'

You can sit around and complain that Hollywood doesn't make any good movies. But you can generate your own material. So I read books. I come up with ideas. I was the producer on 'The Woodsman' to help get that off the ground. Sometimes that extends itself to directing.

One of the things I'm real proud of is I just made a deal with 20th Century Fox, and I've got my own production company now. I'm developing some television and movies for other people because I have a lot of fresh new ideas. To write is what I love the most.

The novel is final form; it's the ultimate individual final form. Television and motion pictures never get there. You'd be fabulous to think that something you write is even going to be filmed. I give it the best shot of which I'm capable. But it's more a payday for me. And if I didn't have alimony and the full-time assistant.

Whether I'm in front of the camera, behind the camera, at my computer writing a novel or a screenplay, as long as I get to entertain someone out there, I'm happy.

We mapped out the whole movie, and then worked backwards from that to do these shows. It might not be a movie. It might be something else.

I do media work but I don't do broadcast on TV. I'm a content producer and creator, so I just go out there and produce awesome content.

Shooting on location and dressing locations in Los Angeles is shockingly expensive, especially when you're talking about webseries-level budgets, so the opportunity to build our sets in YouTube's space gives us a lot more room in our budget in being able to create the world of 'VGHS' properly.

When you're a filmmaker or a scriptwriter, you face a lot of challenges while making a film. And when you produce it, you have to put in an extra effort.

Anybody with a good smart phone can shoot and edit a film. Distributing it is the hard part.

I wrote my first play because I wanted to try directing something, and I couldn't afford the rights - it was an adaptation of a book called 'The Wave' by Morton Rhue.

I didn't understand that TV writing wasn't writing; it was pitching.

We're always on the search for a novel or a source or an existing screenplay, or writing something ourselves that turns us on. But because films cost a lot of money to make and a huge amount of effort to get the people to rally, you have to really like it; you can't just semi-like it. Getting to 'really like' is the part that takes the minute.