Kenneth Branagh Quotes

The only reason why I would like to be accepted? Because if your movies don't do well, after a while you don't get to make any more movies.

Hollywood expects you to experiment but on a film that makes money and if you don't make money, you're to blame. Your job is to make money.

There are things that are happening way earlier than that when it comes to someone deciding whether they're going to spend x amount of millions of dollars on a movie. I want $100 million success. The moviegoer is the person I'm more interested in than the Academy.

If someone puts up $100 million on a movie, they're gonna be concerned about whether they'll get it back. So they're not gonna make a movie about three girls, you know?

I'm always so amazed by which performances work really, really well and which ones don't. But I think it's just mostly, 'She's Out Of My League,' so many people saw that movie on DVD and on the plane. Just millions of people saw that movie. That's the reason I'm somewhat famous.

It's a sin to have your films not to make money.

Films must all have the same structure. All of this to guarantee box office bonanza, which of course it never does, but that's another discussion entirely.

I've been told my movies are difficult to market.

I guess, you make a big studio film, you spend a lot of money on it and you hope people go see it. It's really risky.

There is no sense in making a film that no-one will go and see, just to create a perfect, but useless, work of art.

You want to know if anyone's going to go see your film. You shouldn't worry about it or get hung up on it. So yea, you kind of monitor it.

The only way you can continue to make artistic films is to make an occasional one of those. They kind of keep your marketability going to the extent that people will employ you.

When we'd suggested doing it, the Theatre Royal management had said, 'Nobody wants to see Waiting for Godot.' As it happened, every single ticket was booked for every single performance, and this confirmation that our judgment was right was sweet. Audiences came to us from all over the world. It was amazing.

Some of the roles that are challenging are more in theater and TV. In movies, there's a tendency to cast actors in roles that have been successful for them. It has to pay for itself.

With feature films, it's a one-time judgment once your film is premiered. Reviews, box office, and then you move on to the next project. With TV, you are being rated and judged weekly for an eight-month stretch.

I care about the box office, so that's why I go from town to town: because I want people to see it. I would give it for free; I just want those houses full of people watching it.

You become judged entirely on your ability to bring in the dollars, and the fact that none of the films I did was a huge hit became significant.

I wonder if people who see 'Blade' will have even seen my other movies. But I don't want all my movies to be in a vacuum. I need a balance because one pays, and the other doesn't.

Your film really needs to call audiences to theatres.

When classical singers or dancers look at cinema with derision, I have half a heart to tell them that they're wrong. They're losing a platform.

When you tell a film financier that you want to do a Shakespeare film, their face drops. Shakespeare films don't have a very wonderful history at the box office.

There was a lot of pressure on me when I signed 'Dilwale,' and though it did not do as well in India, overseas the business was crazy despite competition from another film.

I would really want all my films to make money. But this weekend calculation is the most dangerous thing because, based on the amount collected in the first weekend, they start declaring the film a hit or a flop. It can't be.

A movie needs to have a must-see quality among the people you are targeting. Also, make movies at a responsible budget so that if you attract your core audience, and they show up in the first few weekends, the economics will work.

I did two movies that were arthouse movies; they were critically successful but made no money at all... but after making those movies, I thought, 'I wouldn't watch my own movies when I was 16, and my buddies where I came from wouldn't watch my movies, because they were boring.'