Lynda Obst Quotes

I'm a filmmaker; I want to make films. I don't want to sit in a hotel room waiting to make films, and I can control my thing in Denmark; I can make the film I want to make... of course, I have to write a good script, all that, but if I do my job, it will happen.

Making an independent film is so different.

It is difficult to make movies on your own terms and also to make a film and convince somebody to have faith in it.

With a film, you try to keep your vision in it. I think with 'The American' and 'Control' I managed to do that.

It will never be Hollywood, the same way people think it should be. I think it will grow and it will be healthy and it will expand into more than one production house.

When you're actually making the film, you're constantly battling to maintain its integrity.

Well, I think every film student goes into film school thinking they want to write and direct their own movies, and they don't realize how much goes into it, and what a process it is.

There's like a shift in the paradigm about every 15 years in movies because one would slip through the cracks. I think if they were more inexpensive you would see many more eclectic comedies being made.

I'm not mad about movies, there are too many people involved in the making of them, and they lack a definitive creative focus.

I don't make deals, I make pictures.

As a director, my job is to spend money, and the producer's is to save money. Masoom, Bandit Queen and the first Queen Elizabeth have been my most uncompromised films.

A film goes through so many hands, that by the time it's done, it might not resemble what you thought you were making.

No, United Artists was a very extraordinary organization, because once they had agreed on the director, they believed in letting him have his way. They trusted me, and that doesn't often happen.

I think people think filmmaking is fun, but I've never thought that. For me it's always been a lot of work and pain and stress.

It's gotten out of control. It's taking bigger and bigger names to make smaller and smaller films. I worry that important films without a big name attached won't get made at all.

I really think of myself just as a filmmaker.

A movie is never any better than the stupidest man connected with it.

If you can get your movie made the way you want to get it made, no matter what the end result is going to be, if people are going to see it, that's awesome.

I grew up in the indie world, and that's what I'm used to, but there's something really incredible about having money behind a film and having the time to do as many takes as you want.

Making movies is what I'm good at. Cinema is the means through which I can best express myself.

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 hope, every now and then, the studios still slip one of my movies in.

Every filmmaker has this short book of films that don't get made - for a whole host of reasons.

It's not easy to make films that one wants to because it is not easy to find a producer that fast for the subjects I want to make. They are not hot cakes in the market.

We always set out to just make a great movie.