Sean Penn Quotes

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.

If studios don't get their money back, we don't have any movies. So it is important that films are successful, and I am fully supportive of that because I'm not just a director, I'm also not stupid. I've been in this business long enough and, to a certain extent, I'm a businessman; I know the importance of that.

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

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

It's just hard to get an independent film made.

If I give five flops, I won't get a job. You have to perform at the box office when you are at the top. No one is running a charity here. People are putting huge amounts of money to make movies, and they want the films to be successful. They have invested money in you, so it is your duty to make sure the film does well.

The film is not a success until it makes money. It's only good when there's a dollar figure attached to the box office.

I think, honestly, that the word 'indie' is a false gimmick. 'Independent' used to mean a movie that was financed outside corporate Hollywood, but a lot of what gets called independent these days is totally produced within that system. And there's nothing wrong with that.

Pre-preproduction is the tenuous time before a project is greenlit; before the studio commits to spending real money. This is the most vulnerable period for any film because it's the time when your project is most likely to be put into turnaround. That's film-speak for killed off.

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

Unless a Western's made money - doesn't matter who made the money, doesn't matter what the subject is - if the last one didn't make any money, you can't make another one for a four-year period. Westerns more than any genre.

For the most part, studio movies have huge budgets. They don't do anything under 30 to 40 million. When you have that much money at stake, you have so many people breathing down your neck.

I would love it if my films made a lot of money, and may I say that 'The Yards' is the only one that's lost money.

Unless you're the director on the movie, or putting up the money for the movie, you really don't have a lot of control.

I've never made a film that lost money.

If you do a film with a studio, agents step in, they start saying, 'My actor has to get this amount of money', and it becomes about deals.

Actors dread working with studios because they dictate what you do in a way that independent movies can't.

The major studios don't differ very much from one another as they all operate under essentially the same principles and pressure.

In big movies, interests are not aligned between those above the line and the financier, because above the line gets paid whether the movie works or not. The financier only makes money if the movie works, and that fundamentally sets up a contentious relationship.

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.

You come out of drama school and do theatre and are interested in creative endeavour, then you drift into TV and movies and realise that artistic endeavour needs to balance with financial success. There's no point spending millions on a movie that doesn't make any money, because the people producing it won't make another one.

I think I should have made 'Dead Silence' as an independent movie.

I became a producer because nobody was ready to finance my films.

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 film business seems to attract rules more than any other business. I don't know why it does. I think it's because there's so much money at stake.