Jeff Nichols Quotes

The corporate system dictates what gets made, and the movies are so bad because of the economic structure of Hollywood. The big business takeover of Hollywood is at fault rather than American storytellers - it's what keeps textured movies from getting made.

I would never make a film because I think it's going to be a box-office success.

We're going to see a very, very commercial kind of picture-making.

I'm not trying to be self-serving, but you know, you get to Hollywood, and if you want to make something big and loud and dumb, it's pretty easy. It's very hard to go down there and make a film like 'Sideways,' which I thought was a great film. They don't want to make films like that anymore, even though that film was very successful.

In film producing, there is an inherent tension between the director, the money and the producer, and that's what keeps it flowing and honest and accountable.

We don't make movies for critics. I've done four movies; there's millions upon millions upon millions of people who've paid to see them. Somebody likes them. My greatest joy is to sit anonymously in a dark theater and watch it with an audience, a paying audience.

If your movies don't perform, they just stop calling you.

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.

I don't make movies because I think audiences will want to go see them.

I'm always looking for a reason to say no when I'm approached about a big studio tentpole because your fear is will you be consumed into the anonymous machine, and it will suck out any specificity and point of view that you might hope to express.

The way Hollywood works, you're never sure if their first thought is to make a great film and honor the material or just another business property.

I did get offers from Hollywood, but they were all scripts with monsters in them. If I had done them, I would have disappeared. I would have come back to France anyway, and I would have had to start all over again and lost a lot of time.

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

When we did Wayne's World, it was 14 million dollars and they didn't bug us too much because they just thought it was some little movie that nobody was ever going to see. We showed them.

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

They all want you to make a movie for under a million dollars, which I don't want to. I don't want to be a faux radical film-maker at 70. I did that. I don't need to do it again.

Indie movies got co-opted by the studio system. The studios insisted that only stars could make movies successful.

It kind of irks me that the studio films still have to be so safe even though they don't really cost as much to make.

I am not against doing commercial cinema at all.

I am glad that we can make bold films, different films within the commercial market and still do well.

I don't believe in making those high-brow films that the audience does not understand.

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.

It's not that I don't want to do different films. The non-mainstream stuff that I did started to get successful... But for an industry which runs essentially on money, they do put you in a box.

There are lots of parts of filmmaking that I don't like. At the end of the day, especially on features, the film turns into a commodity. You have to play this entirely new game I'm very uncomfortable with.

The only chance for a guy like me is to make a decent picture for a reasonable budget. If it brings in a profit for investors, maybe I'll have the opportunity to make something else.