Peter Bart Quotes

Ideally, I want my films to work because I want the people who have invested their money to get back their investment and make profits too.

At the end of the day, there is a lot of money that gets put into films.

Many films you see in theaters are financed through outside sources. With big films, the studio will pay, hoping to reap the reward of their big bet. But with medium and small-sized films, outside production companies and financiers often foot the bill.

Movies are an expensive business.

If you want your film to be instantly green-lit, your first approach is not to go to a relatively unknown English actor. They're not going to throw millions of dollars at you for that.

I resisted the film business as long as I could, because of the big circus act and the amount of money that it costs to make films - I saw my father suffer through that.

The studios don't finance anymore, they get outside funds.

I don't want to be in the film business. I'm not even sure it's a business.

Market forces impose certain rules before a film can actually get made.

If you look at film, distribution is pre-bought. If you've paid for the distribution, you say, 'I have to make sure it's a film that gets enough butts in the seats.' I think that's the problem: It becomes prohibitively expensive, and you can't develop films for a smaller amount of money.

And in movies you must be a gambler. To produce films is to gamble.

On the movie side of things, the difficulties come with so few movies being made, and when they are, it seems that it's a marketing game. Story sometimes takes a backseat to that one grand marketing idea.

Nowadays, to get a movie greenlit, you have to make an incredible effort.

We need to work out who is paying for film; in the U.K., it is increasingly difficult to get production funds - and pre-sales demand more and more shot/cut material.

When you do bigger films, the financiers take more risks.

Hollywood executives believe that money is both the be-all and end-all to the moviemaking process.

I think producers are more interested in backing concepts than directors and writers. I don't think that's the right way of making a decision about whether you're going to back a film or not.

I learned some big lessons on my first film, a horror film which was never released in the U.S., even though we sold it to Harvey Weinstein for a lot of money.

'Private Benjamin' was the first movie I produced, and I produced it for practical reasons.

I have been working on one film at a time. One film recovers a little cost and that helps me move on to the next one.

Film-making, in itself, is such a risky, costly-yet-uncertain business that despite being wealthy, 90 percent of people don't become producers.

Content financing is a difficult beast no matter what era of Hollywood we're talking about.

The good thing about feature films is that the budgets tend to scale.

Films are a business. They take who's working.

I think the movie industry is a hard industry, but it is not that hard to be allowed to do what you want if you work hard.