Lloyd Kaufman Quotes

You definitely want to do the little films. They're always going to be harder, but you don't do them to make money. You do them so you can see what you can make with the research that you have.

And I like being able to go back and forth, and I don't really care if it's a small budget or big budget or studio or independent, as long as it's got a story that's compelling and there's enough money to make the picture.

Basically, if you could get a good trailer out of the script, Roger had no objection to you making a really good movie. He liked it if you did. He liked the more cleverness and ingenuity you could bring to it. He just wasn't going to give you any more money.

I think that there's a lot more freedom in the low budget, the independent films where, unfortunately, you don't have the money, necessarily, to get the orchestras in there to play a lot of stuff. But, you have a lot more freedom, very often.

I'm willing to give up a little control but not a lot. So I say I want the money, but when push comes to shove, I'm not sure I'll be able to compromise in order to make the big studio movie. Maybe something in between would be okay, like a low-budget studio film.

I like the intimacy of independent films and I like the idea that people aren't being paid necessarily as much money as some one on a studio film.

A film like 'Good Night And Good Luck,' you make that for $7 million because you know it's a black-and-white film, and it's not an easy sell. If you make it for $7 million, then everybody can have a chance to make a little bit of money, and you get to make the film you want to make.

I believe in making movies very inexpensively; I think that way too much money is spent on making movies. Enough movies are being made, but not enough experimental ones.

Many people came out and said, 'Boy I'd love to make a film that way.' Well, borrow some money, get some people together - you can get people to work for nothing, just treat them right, treat them as human beings, not stars, give them all an equal share, make them feel a part of what they're doing. There's no big secret to it.

You just never know when movies are going to take off or not. The lucky thing about this was that it didn't cost a lot of money, and therefore there wasn't loads of pressure on me.

If you want to make movies you need to think on a micro-micro level and figure out how to make them for nothing with people who really care about your movie and really want to make it.

I shot 'Blue Valentine' on 16mm for the past, and for the present on the Red Camera. I feel that both formats are valid. The stories should dictate the format we shoot on. Filmmakers should have a choice.

We are not documentarians, we are filmmakers.

If it was up to the studio, everything would be shot with a camcorder.

I have dreams of being a producer, being behind a camera, eating seven tacos for every meal, and making movies that affect people the way they affect me. I don't even need to be in them.

Independent films now, they want to give you $2 million to make it, 21 days to shoot it and they want 10 movie stars in it.

I'm not an activist at all. I'm a filmmaker, and I wanted the people involved to tell their own story.

Generally speaking I would say I enjoy the smaller films more because there's a less sense of pressure and often the material is more unusual. But in "Iron Man" it was kind of like both worlds colliding because there was a lot of improvisation, not that we improv-ed in the scenes but to discover the actual scenes themselves.

When I first started, I saw myself shooting documentaries or making documentaries, which is what I did, mostly, for a number of years. So it was quite a surprise how I found myself shooting features. It was like my wildest dreams as a kid collided.

The whole visual language of the movie is developed way before we get to set. Especially when you're doing visual effects and you don't have a lot of money to mess around, which we didn't, you have to really preplan everything. Pretty much every shot in the film was figured out months before we got to set.

I've always felt that an independent film is a film that almost doesn't get made.

The major difference frequently is in time. The motion picture, for example, gives you considerably more freedom of expression than does the confined thirty-minute television show. But in essence, they're not that dissimilar.

From film to film, even documentaries, I was learning the medium and learning how to bring form into some kind of relationship with the content, how to work it, and above all, how to create some kind of order out of chaos.

That shot in "Into the Inferno" somehow popped up while my editor and I were viewing the footage. I immediately said, "That looks like the opening shot because the camera approaches the action very slowly and we have enough time to insert some of the main credits into it." So it was a practical choice. At the same time, you see these tiny figures standing at the rim of something, and all of a sudden, the camera rises further and you find yourself looking straight down into an inferno.

Movies are not scripts - movies are films; they're not books, they're not the theatre. It's a completely different discipline, it exists on its own. I would say that the beauty of it is it's not the theatre, it's not done over again. It's done in bits and pieces. Things are happening which you can't get again. I forbid anyone to say "Cut", the soundman, the operator, or whatever.