Paul Mazursky Quotes

I am not ready to fit into the mould of commercial cinema.

I don't like directing that much to want a career as a director for hire. I like to have as much creative control as possible.

My goal was, and still is, to write first, direct my own stuff whenever possible and control my own creative destiny.

'Independent' means one thing to me: It means that regardless of the source of financing, the director's voice is extremely present. It's such a pretentious term, but it's auteurist cinema. Director-driven, personal, auteurist... Whatever word you want.

I am an independent film-maker first and foremost. I have always cut my own cloth.

As a filmmaker, one tends to want to evolve evermore towards a place of independence.

When I get to make a movie, I really try to make it on my own terms.

I could never work in that kind of commercial environment where the stars have a lot to say, where the producers kind of push you around and tell you who to cast and who not to cast. I'm just not interested in that at all.

It is easier to make a film but difficult to make it on your own terms. In that sense 'Madras Cafe' was a very satisfying experience.

I love to work. It's the idea of having someone else tell you how to make your film or how to sell it - that's the part I can't really deal with. I would rather do 1,000 things that are work than deal with one thing that's a political problem.

Independent films, for the most part, to me, are not so independent. They often feel like people auditioning for a big commercial career. They often do not have independent spirit to them.

I gladly, I voluntarily gave up the kind of commercial film career I had going as soon as I had enough money to finance my own films.

The dean of the American Film Institute has written that I'm one of the very few auteurs in America. I've had freedom for 40 years to create art that is totally personal and is what I believe in.

Other people have worked with big studios and maintained control over their movies. I see no reason why it wouldn't work for me.

I have a freedom that's incredibly valuable. Obviously my freedom is far smaller in scale than people like Zemeckis and Spielberg have here. But it's comparable. I can dream up a project, develop it, make it, control it, release it.

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

I always say that AMC hires filmmakers, and they let them be filmmakers.

That's why I'm really trying to produce my own stuff. This film was so good, because I produced it myself, and developed it, and made it with New Line, which is a smaller studio, so I was in control of a lot of stuff that I wasn't in control of for my other films.

I don't think Hollywood makes many good films anymore. How many directors can you really trust to have an artistic vision, not a corporate vision or a watered-down communal one?

Studios never put pressure. They know the kind of films I want to make.

The only folk I can judge are people like Woody Allen who I think is a genius, largely because I think he has beaten the system. He has his own company, and his films are all his own ideas. It's his direction, and so it comes out the way he imagined it.

Working with David Cronenberg or Darren Aronofsky or even Steven Soderbergh isn't really like a typical Hollywood movie. These are true artists, and have a certain amount of freedom when they work, and they're more like independent filmmakers making their way through big studios.

I just make the movies I want to see. I've always been that way.

No one's telling Tarantino what to do. You might like it or you might not like it, but the reality is he's getting his own vision out there.

I don't want to make films that are constantly pleasing the audience, it is not my tradition.