Neill Blomkamp Quotes

As you know, in America there's no rights for the artist, so whatever films I've made kind of belong to the studio, so if they want to remake it they can.

And usually the studios they don't want you to have credit for your movies because they want to take credit for the movies because if you get credit for your movies they've got to pay you more.

In America there's no rights for the artist, so whatever films I've made kind of belong to the studio.

I hate to say it as a pejorative term, but I work for the Hollywood system for the most part.

If you work in the studio system in America, they've almost got to the point where a computer programme could write scripts. Effectively, they hire and fire enough writers until they get something generic.

Having been subjected to the pigeonholing of Hollywood myself, I realized that once you become a studio-approved director, your chances of ever making your own film again are zero. You make the films that the studio wants you to make.

What people who don't create don't understand, is that once you take money from the machine, the machine [movie industry] owns you.

I think, honestly, that the word 'indie' is a false gimmick. 'Independent' used to mean a movie that was financed outside corporate Hollywood, but a lot of what gets called independent these days is totally produced within that system. And there's nothing wrong with that.

Nowadays you really have to pump out that blockbuster in order to have the luxury of getting a body of work, and that's sad because the work suffers. Today everything is based on money. The older actors, they inspire me.

There's been a slow death in a way. On the positive side, there are films getting into the Academy Awards that wouldn't have, but on the negative side, financiers are now dominant and making all the decisions. I can't count the ways a director's vision is compromised.

The studio system reminds me of the stock market.

Once you work with a studio on a film, the studio is sort of like this enormous clam that just opens, takes everything and then closes, and no one enters again. They own it all.

But I'm aware of the fact that I'm working in a commercial venue where I'm producing something that I wouldn't normally be approaching the way I'm doing it.

In my day, the only people who achieved real independence were my father, Mary Pickford and Charles Chaplin, who, with D. W. Griffith, formed United Artists. Other than that, everybody belonged to the big studios. They had no say in their own careers.

It's difficult to find a movie that feels true to itself. You feel the hand of Hollywood, the moviemaking by committee, on everything.

I'm not interested in making a $60-million studio film with a bunch of 24-year-olds telling me what to do.

Sometimes when you do big movies, you can lose sometimes a little bit of soul.

What makes a movie now is a package, a brand, a remake or some preexisting material.

I haven't thought about writing so much as potentially producing and finding my own projects to get into production. I want to be able to buy the rights to a story that I have read or a book that I have read.

There are really only a handful of directors who have a final cut clause in Hollywood. You only get that power if you've made a couple of hundred-million-dollar successes.

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.

The business side of film has goofed up so many things, but even that's changing. It happened to the music industry and now it's happening to the film studios. It's crazy what's going on. But artists should have control of their work; especially if, as I always say, you never turn down a good idea and never take a bad idea.

I'll still make movies for studios, but my editing process will be much further removed from the studio system. Because I don't understand it. I don't understand the whole testing-numbers thing. It is not how I want to make movies. So if that's how they do it, then I don't think I want to do it.

I've rewritten other films and watched my writing be mutilated, but luckily, it's been mutilated anonymously.