Atom Egoyan Quotes

When you're shooting a movie that's not necessarily a huge budget, you have to think about what you can leave out and still make it interesting.

Even on a $100 million film, people will complain that they haven't got enough money and enough time, so that's always going to be an element in filmmaking.

I just want to make films that have enough of a budget to pull off high-level imagery but also have a budget that is low enough that I can do what I want.

As long as you keep your budgets small, there's a way of making films.

If you have to make a story in 10 rupees or you know that at this stage you can get only 10 rupees then you cut down on your expenses. But when one has made four-five films one likes to broaden the horizons.

When you're starting out, you know, you have to do something on a very limited budget. You're not going to be able to have great actors, and you're most likely not going to have a great script.

Usually, I make such small-budget films that I can't afford to buy weather.

I did this film for less money than it costs to stay in this hotel. We shot it in 20 days. We couldn't screw up takes for fun because we didn't have enough film.

I've always worked very efficiently on small budgets, both in documentaries and in features.

When you do a low budget movie, you get a little over-ambitious.

'Generation Kill' was not a very glamorous shoot. For all intents and purposes, it was low budget, and all the money they had went to what you see on the screen.

For me, the scale of the budget is part of the creative process. 'Swingers' is the movie it is because we made it for exactly the right budget. Had it been made for a higher number, it would not have been as imaginative as we had to make it, given the budget constraints we had.

Just like American families, government agencies need to start doing more with less, and the Internal Revenue Service is no exception.

The biggest problem with the independent film sector in Toronto is that they find themselves having to make that budget show on screen.

They didn't have the money to keep Christopher Lee long enough to play his scenes with me.

Well, you can't improvise story, which is a fact. If you could, the budget would be insane.

Scheduling is always tough, no matter what the budget size is, and we had our own run-ins with that on 'Fading of the Cries.'

I'm not tied to budgets. I'm tied to the story that I want to tell, and how much it's going to cost is up to whatever the economic situation of the studio is.

On Lock, Stock, we didn't know where the money for shooting the next day was coming from.

I don't go on set with an army of people because the most expensive elements of a movie production are the plane tickets, the hotel rooms, food and gasoline. If you're willing to discover new colleagues in the place that you are, you can save a ton of money.

We had a tiny budget for 'The Greatest,' which was the opposite of 'Wall Street.' We just kind of went in and did it. You've got four or five takes and then you've got to move on. We didn't even have trailers to stay in or anything.

The biggest challenge was that we had to shoot so quickly and with such a limited budget.

If I thought there was any hope of turning 'World War Z' into a movie, I wouldn't have written it as a giant, epic, global story, because that requires a giant, epic, global budget.

Still, the film nearly didn't happen a number of times. There were great arguments with United Artists about how to reduce the cost because they were nothing if not conscious of the price of the film.

I'm a big believer in creating parameters for creativity. I think parameters make people more creative. So that starts with my budgets. I only do low budget movies, and I think that makes the movies better.