Noah Baumbach Quotes

My partner, Beth Alexander, and I want to produce smaller films, but commercially viable films that will enable me to make the kinds of movies I want to make.

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

You don't always just have to do an indie movie to feel like you're controlling it with a few people that you really have connected with, creatively. You can do it on a bigger scale.

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.

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

I have kept a part of Catalina Productions going, through which I develop a few projects just for me.

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.

I just want to make good films on my own wherever I can.

I'm so not interested in producing, other than doing my own work, producing my own films. I only do it as favors, for other people to get their films made.

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.

One thing I know is that I don't want to be a director for hire, making genre films.

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.

Movies are a team sport now, and I want to play singles.

I'll still make movies for studios, but my editing process will be much further removed from the studio system. Because I don't understand it. I don't understand the whole testing-numbers thing. It is not how I want to make movies. So if that's how they do it, then I don't think I want to do it.

When we do a movie with the studios, they wouldn't be asking us to do it, I don't think, if it was a movie they wanted to get into themselves. What you see is what you get with us, so they let us do what we want to do.

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

If I start a film of my own, then what I eliminate is acting in other people's movies. Because once I start, and I go raise the money, it's about two and a half or three years, and I can't stop. I have people hired. I can't say, 'Ooh there's a good part called 'Drive'; I'll see you in three months.'

My dream is just to make zero-budget movies for the rest of my life, because I love that environment.

I'll put it this way: with the kind of films that I do - creatively driven, with interesting directors and writers - I don't feel the need to work with the super established, top-tier directors that are out there.

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

In America, I don't think you have the creative freedom that I'm used to. Traditionally, it's a producer's cinema here.

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.

I always say that I'm a filmmaker, not a factory. I don't have to churn out films every six months.