Atom Egoyan Quotes

Now while the German money is over for Hollywood, I still have $80 million to make movies, and we will have two things coming up: less major movies and the price for actors will go down.

As soon as you're at the higher levels of budgeting, you've got to get the film made, and the only way to support the film is to have actors who can support the budget.

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

We can still do a stop motion feature for about one-third of what it costs Pixar or DreamWorks or Blue Sky to make a feature. But nobody is interested in a film that cost $50 to 60 million with the potential to do $120 million. They want to risk big money to make huge money.

Every product demands a certain budget and with the kind of setup that we have brought together for 'Housefull 2,' there has to be certain expenditure involved.

When you're spending $200 million on a movie, you need to make $400 million to break even. It's a spectacle.

Movies are an expensive business.

Basically, movies come down to economics, and they're always too expensive. From a producer's point of view, an actor is either going to make him money or save him money.

You only have so much money to shoot a movie with.

Jokes apart, people are constantly asking me, 'What are you doing for the industry?' When one makes a blockbuster, you plough back money into the industry. If my film makes 100 crore, I'm not taking the entire sum home! It gets distributed between the exhibitors, distributors, producers and actors.

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.

The marketing costs are insane now. So even if you've got a picture like 'Flipped' which cost under $14 million, or $13.5 million, you're still going to spend on an national basis, if you release with a good national release, you're still going to spend, you know, $30-$40 million.

It costs a lot of money to release a movie. What you'd call art-house movies - movies that don't have big stars or big budgets - they're very hard for distributors to get behind 'em and take chances.

In the U.K., there's absolutely no money for television. So you can do pretty much whatever you want. They're not losing money on any of the shows, so they'll give you a lot of creative freedom. In the United States, there are millions and millions of dollars at stake, so they need a sure formula.

It's too expensive, that's the thing nobody wants to talk about. It is too expensive to make movies. That's not true, it is too expensive to market movies. Making movies is not.

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

It seems there's a sliding scale between the money they spend on a movie and its creativity.

I've never made a film that lost money.

I think it's really odd, too, that the public is so privy to how much money the actors make and what movies cost. It seems to me to be beside the point. When I go to a movie I really don't want to think about the money. I want to see the story.

I take the fact that films cost a lot of money very seriously, but once in a while to have somebody say, This is a big scene, take your time with it, is important. That's John Sayles.

We have so many films that we can fit into the slate a year, and we spend $100 million on those films in order to make $400 million dollars. We don't spend $20 million in hopes of eking out $40 million.

The bagel budget for 'Sex and the City 2' could pay for 'Ghosted.'

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

The budget of 'Vada Chennai' is nearly Rs 60 crores.

The biggest thing I learned is directors don't make a lot of money on a movie.