Richard Flanagan Quotes

I think the sheer hell of trying to get a film made; I don't know if it would ultimately be worth it. The sort of format that I have, these TV things, sit somewhere between documentaries and reality shows and entertainment shows and dramas.

It's nice when you're working in Hollywood and there's a movie you'd like to see that no one is making anymore. You make it yourself.

Over the years, many producers have come and gone, and screenplays were written and abandoned. It's the Hollywood process. It's hard to get things done.

In Hollywood, a lot of times when something is in development, it just takes a lot of time.

Having gotten TV shows on the air, that's so much less work that trying to get the 'Veronica Mars' movie made.

I thought that making movies was drab. I'd lived through that. And I didn't want to use my parents, ever... They didn't want to push me into this business.

I think writing is the most underrated thing in Hollywood.

In my first film, we always tried to have a script and work in a normal way, but I was constantly changing things during shooting. Because I worked as a scriptwriter for 10 years, I understood that directors always wanted to change what was originally written, to improve on it.

For me, the movies I like are all independent. And getting an independent feature made, it's like you get down to the selling organs part, and it just loses some of its luster.

Getting movies made is not as difficult as people think. Making movies is easy. You get a script, you get a director, you raise the money, you make the movie.

Writing is getting killed by too many chefs. Back in the Bogart days, it started with great scripts. You had a writer, and he wrote a script, and that was your movie. I think that's been watered down a bit lately.

One quality that a director needs to acquire in Hollywood is to understand the system and figure out how to work within the system to express one's own ideas.

We've played producers almost our entire lives in everything else we've created. But when working on a feature and even dealing with something like Warner Bros. or another production company, or other details that you can worry about - we definitely learned a lot.

'Shadows' wasn't so difficult to get made.

It's incredibly, incredibly difficult to get a movie made.

As a screenwriter, there's so many layers you have to go through in order to tell your story. You have to write the script, get money for the script, shoot it, find distributors, make it into film festivals, all of that just to get to your audience.

There are so many people in film and television that get between a performer and the audience, and that's frustrating.

Just getting movies made is difficult because it takes a lot of money; I mean, it costs more money to make one movie than most bands will spend on every single record of their entire career; it's a huge undertaking.

You can have 10 bucks to 10 million bucks and if you got a crew, imagination and a lot of people willing to turn in some work next to nothing, you going to have a feature. But you can't get beyond how expensive marketing the movie is, it's so crushing.

If you think of movie studio executives, say, as society, then I root for the independent producers.

As a director or writer, you have to be so controlling.

Since I began making movies, I've always looked for screenwriters instead of going through the long and painful process of writing.

Let me tell you one thing: there is no more cutthroat place to be than an independent film. Disney is a cakewalk after that - that is no lie.

I just love being on a movie set. I like making movies.

Film isn't a meritocracy; there's no system ensuring the best screenplays get produced. It's a hustle.