Mike Flanagan Quotes

Well, we had more money and more time the first season than we did at TV 23.

Compared to TV, 'Palookaville' was restriction-free, except we had no money and no time.

TV is all about schedule and budget, and you're always fighting that.

It's not that much of a difference. Basically, your job is the same as a film director. It's a triangle between creativity, money, and time. But they don't really change. You're ultimately trying to get the most creativity and time with the money that you have.

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.

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.'

It's happened time and time again, but the committee has always decided against it-the work was too conservative or didn't fit within the budget; there are millions of different reasons.

One of the things that's, I think, hard in television is that there's a certain sameness to a lot of television because you're working in a very constricted box, and the box is defined by the amount of money you have to spend and the amount of time you have to get ready.

I understand all the problems for the Ministry of Defence, of course I do; working within a budget and trying to do so many things is not easy.

No movie has ever got enough time. It doesn't matter how much money you've got, and it doesn't matter how much money you've not got. You never finish on time. You're always up against it and you're always working up until the end.

There's no way you can shoot low-budget stuff on lots of locations. It's just a practicality thing because every time you move, it costs time and money.

A challenge always is good. Normal design does not come under the constraints of a small budget and time frame. But it has helped me to make quick and knowledgeable decisions.

The size of the budget doesn't make that much of a difference because the kind of issues I have on a low budget film I I have on a big budget film as well, but they're just much bigger.

It doesn't matter how big or small your film is: you still don't have enough money. You don't have enough time to shoot it.

In management terms, directing opera certainly prepares you for a film set: the magnitude of it, the experts in other fields that you have to call on. Both are massive ensemble jobs in which there's incredible pressure to get things done on time and on budget - so much so that making the wrong decision may be better than making no decision at all.

Sometimes you shoot for 40 or 50 hours for a one-hour show, and you have to make some very hard choices.

Invariably, what I'm trying to do is more ambitious than the budget, but we manage to do it somehow.

The Cable Guy was underbudgeted, so it was always a debate about whether we could have more days or certain things that we needed, because the budget was determined before the script was written. So that made it a hard production on everybody. But it's also a funny thing, because it's one of those movies that cost $40 million to make and made $100 million around the world, but at the time, it seemed like a disaster that it didn't make hundreds of millions of dollars, because Jim was on such a tear. But it was actually a successful movie.

There were obvious budgetary and time constraint differences. With Jamie Marks is Dead, we were operating on a pretty small finance level. So it was definitely run-and-gun, 16-hour days, every day. I would come back, and I was so exhausted I would fall asleep in my clothes. Obviously, with The Giver we had a little bit more time to take the full three months. So that was different, but in both there was still a creative environment, and by that I mean that it was still collaborative, performance was still valued, and it wasn't lost in the money.

It's always a challenge to make an independent film. It's always a challenge to make a low budget film.

Everything that I've done so far has had a bigger budget than the last, but I've never ever felt the benefit of the bigger budget because the ideas always exceed the budget.

We get a successful television series or something, and next season they give you less time and less money, which is something I've never really understood. That doesn't happen with Game of Thrones.

At the end of the day, you're trying to make a certain film within a certain budget. Those rules never change.

I think there's only one or two films where I've had all the financial support I needed. All the rest, I wish I'd had the money to shoot another ten days.

But I'm very happy to work within tight parameters, and when you know you have an actor for two days, and you have to get that work done in two days, that focuses the mind wonderfully.