Alexandra Cassavetes Quotes

Let's face it, making movies is all risk. Most of the time, batting average-wise, the reward does not outweigh the risk.

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?

Making movies is just like betting on horses at the racetrack.

I admire James Franco. I admire somebody like Jack Nicholson. Anyone who just does movies for the sake of making movies and takes big risks.

When you first start out, you want to be Fellini, or you want to be Bergman.

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 can't make a film for your personal satisfaction. That is why I detest the cinema of people like Mani Kaul.

I'm always making movies for my audiences, but I'm not trying to meet their expectations.

You don't pick black actors or black directors because they are black. You pick them because they are good. If you lend somebody 50 million dollars you want you're money back. You don't care if they are oppressed. You just want you're money back.

Hollywood is a roulette wheel. Each project dictates what's going to happen for you next, and it doesn't really matter that your project is critically acclaimed or won awards or has fans worldwide. It's a matter of how many movie tickets and DVDs and on-demand movies that you sell.

The trick of making movies in this culture is how to not give up everything that makes them worthwhile in order to get them made - and that's a tricky balance.

It's gotten out of control. It's taking bigger and bigger names to make smaller and smaller films. I worry that important films without a big name attached won't get made at all.

Show me a Scorsese film, and I'll show you a movie where he's taken risks. It's just his nature. He's an artist, and artists take risks. He always does what he believes in.

The lifeblood of my career has been independent film.

Directors only have instinct to work out of, because there is no formula. Formulas don't work. Actually, if you follow a formula, you will probably end up with a bad movie.

I just wanted to work with David Lynch.

I don't see many explosions or ten-car crashes in the course of my life, so I don't put them into my movies. I would love to live in a society where 'My Dinner with Andre' made $100,000,000. Then I would be in the mainstream. I could do that stuff easier than I could do 'Meatballs.'

Arcadia was a typical venture capital deal, but I'm the adventurer and the capitalist.

I really love making movies. I just have this yearning in my stomach to go back and somehow subversively screw up television a little bit again.

Our audience for SCTV was older than today's moviegoers, and with the cost of making movies being what it is today, it's hard for the studios to take the kind of risks we took.

I just want to go on making movies, and some of them will be completely meaningless, except, of course, to me.

Making movies is what I'm good at. Cinema is the means through which I can best express myself.

Not all of our movies work, but we take shots, and we're able to do that because we really stick to low budgets.

John Boorman was the best director I've ever had.

I think filmmaking is a gamble anyway, right? You never know the results from the start.