Carter Burwell Quotes

There's a few movies I wanted to do, and I didn't get to do them partly because they wanted me to be part of the horse and pony show, getting the money, and I'm just not doing that. There's a few movies that people wanted me to do, but they were too safe.

I've talked about this a lot, but 'The Witch' took four years to finance because there were certain compromises I wouldn't make.

Hollywood is a double feeling. Love and hate. With a talented film director, I cannot resist. They are such charming and intelligent people. But each time, it is very difficult to deal with other people. I have to satisfy other people. The director or the producer. Not me. I have to satisfy myself. But then I have to deliver my music.

I'm not saying I wasn't flawed or amateurish. But you can never say I did anything to appease the music business.

I'm just not interested in selling out to get on the charts and make people happy.

Writers sometimes give up what is most strange and wonderful about their writing - soften their roughest edges - to accommodate themselves toward a group response.

In film producing, there is an inherent tension between the director, the money and the producer, and that's what keeps it flowing and honest and accountable.

You can't be trying to make a film that pleases all people, you know, so it's not a concern of mine.

If you start to just aim for what the audience wants to hear, you're already hamstrung because you don't have any freedom.

The biggest thing I have realized was that you have to choose your collaborators very carefully, and that not everybody can like you. The process of filmmaking is so difficult, there's no point in doing it unless you can do it the way you want.

I feel that recording a song already compromises the magical music one can create in the mind, so the fewer people watering down this process the better.

I think that where I've watched a movie go wrong, it's usually because the dread committee has been interfering with it.

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

The studio is spending great amounts of money, and they want some insurance they will get money back. They go for the middle of the road, broad in appeal. It's restrictive. It's a constant struggle, but if you give in, you're just making cottage cheese, and that's the end of it.

The struggle of making a film for any studio is the fact that the producers and the studio have an idea of what the movie should be, but that is especially the case when the director is being replaced three weeks before principal photography. The challenge for me was to make sure that was my version of 'The Wolfman.' And I've done that. I think.

If you want to capitulate to what commercial needs are, you can always be commercially valuable, but I'm not interested in being that.

And I maintain good relationships with all the studios so I've never been bullied into any cut, frankly.

The trick of making movies in this culture is how to not give up everything that makes them worthwhile in order to get them made - and that's a tricky balance.

When I did 'Stardust,' I was fighting the studio for things I believed were right.

Since childhood, I'd dreamed of making a film, but producers in France and Germany wanted to make commercial films with chinoiserie. I refused.

In my opinion, some of the hip-hop records that come out, people are willing to compromise. I'm not.

With an independent film, you have a little more freedom, and you also have less money, so you're sort of struggling to get it done, to get something that works. With a big studio, everything is there for you, and it's easier.

If you start adapting to audiences, you're really second-guessing the situation, and it becomes a bit more like cabaret.

Rules limit you, and once you start thinking about what the audience wants or expects, it becomes a trap that a lot of artists fall into.

As a writer, it's very difficult to just hand your script over to someone else, especially if you have to watch them hurt it, and that's when I decided I would direct my own work.