Colin Firth Quotes

I did this little movie I really love called 'Experimenter,' but that took six years to get made and no money.

How can you compare 'Hollywood Shuffle,' financed through the director's credit cards, and 'Apocalypse Now?' You have to take into consideration the conditions under which it was made.

You definitely want to do the little films. They're always going to be harder, but you don't do them to make money. You do them so you can see what you can make with the research that you have.

When you're making under-million-dollar films, it becomes so much about actors' availability. When you're using big actors for small films, you're in second or third position to the big monoliths.

A lot of times passion projects or films are difficult to make because they don't have proven directors attached to them.

Who says that big-budget films are safer than mid-range films? In terms of return on investment, I'd rather have 'Sling Blade' and 'Shine' than 'Volcano.'

With 'Sweetback,' I just put it together a little bit at a time. I didn't do it on anybody's grant. I did it like any other young executive - by cheating and stealing!

The only chance for a guy like me is to make a decent picture for a reasonable budget. If it brings in a profit for investors, maybe I'll have the opportunity to make something else.

I've always felt that an independent film is a film that almost doesn't get made.

When we did Wayne's World, it was 14 million dollars and they didn't bug us too much because they just thought it was some little movie that nobody was ever going to see. We showed them.

We were doing press for this movie that my friends and I made for $5,000 called 'Brothers Justice,' that I also wrote and directed. And during the press of that, people kept saying, 'What's next, what's next?' And my best friend Nate and I - Nate produced it - we kept saying, 'Oh, we're gonna do a car-chase movie next.'

Three years after starting, by physically doing everything from raising the finance to special effects, we'd finally cobbled together our low budget film.

The lifeblood of my career has been independent film.

I don't think people understand when you say you are making a micro-budget film that you are getting paid no money.

Most of my comedies were low on budgets - certainly by American standards.

It's almost an impossible thing to get a movie made that is written by two actors who want to star in it, when no one knows who they are. The only time it happened that I know of was when Sylvester Stallone did it in 'Rocky.'

I never have written a movie, but there are some bad movies out there. I can make one. I definitely want to get into that because that's how you, at my level, would get a lead in a movie - by writing a low budget thing for myself. So I gotta get to it.

The cool thing about those small-budget movies is that there's a tremendous amount of freedom the filmmakers have since there's less money at stake.

When you make a movie independently, you raise the money beforehand, and then you make the movie kind of by yourself.

The kind of films I want to make are struggling to get made. And if they are getting made, they're getting made on shoestring budgets with not enough time.

At the end of the day, the less money you have, the easier it is to make a movie.

'Saw' really came from that want, the aspiration to make a feature film on our own.

I've done movies where they didn't have enough money to have trailers.

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.

Whether it's a movie I'm in or not, if there's a good movie, and it's low budget, and you know everyone's done it just because they were passionate about it and they cared for it, if it has any kind of audience, it's just a wonderful outcome.