M. Night Shyamalan Quotes

They seem much rarer now, those auteur films that come out of a director's imagination and are elliptical and hermetic. All those films that got me into independent cinema when I was watching it seem thin on the ground.

I didn't have any ambition to produce big mainstream popcorn movies.

I'm not an especially highbrow person, but I have always loved small, quirky, edgy movies.

You gotta understand, 'Swingers' was a resume film for me. I never thought anybody would see the movie who I wasn't in the room with showing it to them.

My good films were independent and my bad films were not.

It just seems like that because I do a lot of independent films that don't get to the mainstream.

It'll be the Internet and piracy that will kill film. There's a philosophy that the Internet should be free, but the reality is that piracy will destroy the film industry and film as an art form because it's expensive to make a movie. Maybe you'll have funky little independent movies, and it'll go back and then start up again some other way.

I've never much been interested in doing films that no one gets to see.

Going forward, I would love to work with directors like Rian Johnson and Joss Whedon; people like that who are doing big films but do have really independent voices. That's kind of what I want to focus on, is always working with people with at least an independent point of view, even if it's not an independent film.

I've made a lot of very small movies that may not have had a large initial audience. Then it shows up on cable.

I sort of straddle the line... between personal movies and mainstream Hollywood.

I want to shoot some indies, some independent features that give me some space to play a little bit.

The films that are coming out of SXSW are incredible, and they should get the same bids that films at Sundance are getting.

Some critic complained about how many small films are released in New York... it annoyed me. Those small films that are lucky to get two weeks are often my favorite films of the year.

I love indie movies - I feel they can really allow you to develop a character.

Film festivals give less of a platform to mainstream films because they already have a market.

Even with a big budget, you can make a niche film.

I think most of the time with independent films, you don't know where it's gonna end up. I've done a number of films that may never see the light of day, so it ends up being exclusively about the content, material, the characters and the story. Things that you maybe wouldn't get an opportunity to do otherwise. So, as an actor, obviously it's so different.

Sometimes you make very interesting movies that aren't meant for everybody. But this is a capitalist society, so everything conspires to put value on whether it sells or not.

I've been fortunate to work with some amazing Asian filmmakers in independent film.

I love independent film so much, and that's kind of where I made my mark.

I definitely think independent film is very exciting, and you get to sometimes take bigger risks. So that's always a challenge and something that I look forward to.

Independent films have a certain freedom about them - there isn't so much at stake in terms of money. I think they're more interesting because they're not watered down to appeal to the masses. They tend to have a unique voice.

Jacques Audiard has always been an outlier in a French film industry that is starkly bifurcated between high and low.

I went to film school, and I came in when video art was king, weird stuff was king, and there, you don't have a script as your bible.