Amy Heckerling Quotes

It costs a lot of money to release a movie. What you'd call art-house movies - movies that don't have big stars or big budgets - they're very hard for distributors to get behind 'em and take chances.

Quite honestly, it's too tough to get your movies made and then also to get out there and sell them.

I very much enjoy my freedom creatively but I also would love to make one of those big Hollywood films that costs a lot of money and has a lot of people running around with cell phones and all that insanity.

I'm always slightly worried if I do a film and we're filming it in Luxembourg. I know it's going to go straight DVD.

What do you spend $200 million on, with a film? I can't wrap my brain around that one.

I would love to do a big studio movie, just because they're going to put the money into distributing it. A lot of times you do these little movies, you love them and they never get seen by anyone.

To go back, the mistake that Universal Studios made with 'Dawn of the Dead' was that they didn't have enough money or cared enough to make a soundtrack.

If you really spend time with movies, it's three years of your life from beginning to end. I started out planting the seed with 'Monster's Ball' about independent cinema and raising money and that whole thing as a producer, and then it becomes easier for me.

It's very difficult to raise money, especially in the United States, for independent movies.

When you work in film, you learn to appreciate a distributor. You can have this great little film, but if you don't have a distributor, you are sitting in your living room with a great little film.

I turn up in Los Angeles every now and then, so I can get some big money films in order to finance my smaller money films.

Ironically, it's easier to raise the money to make the film than it is to have the film find wide distribution.

We make a lot of movies that I don't think merit a wide release. We have this label called Tilt, and we have the movies come out on that, and that's fine. But it shocks me when, having done this a few times, when I really believe a movie should get a wide release, and I struggle to get it released. That does surprise me.

I think that, oftentimes, what people say is, 'We need an actress who'll be able to greenlight a movie,' and my counterargument to that is always that, when it comes to a teen movie, you have very few people who can greenlight a movie.

Before I made 'Sweetback,' I had a three-picture deal with Columbia and enough juice, if I was real clever with it, to proclaim that I wanted to do an independent film.

I used to run with Chris Nolan before he was 'Chris Nolan.' I remember when he was trying to sell 'Memento,' and he just couldn't.

To be honest, you have to do a big Hollywood film to get enough money to do a good independent film!

The two Hindi movies that I did were not marketed well, and so not many people came to watch the film, hence the audience doesn't know much about me. I am a newcomer, and I cannot sell a film on my own. There has to be a backing in terms of producers.

It's just hard to get an independent film made.

To make a film and to sell it to the distributors you need a name.

When you're making under-million-dollar films, it becomes so much about actors' availability. When you're using big actors for small films, you're in second or third position to the big monoliths.

Doing anything on a movie at Sundance is great.

I'd just as soon do a big-budget movie as an independent one.

If you're clever enough and creative enough to get a good film made, then you should be clever enough and creative enough to find ways to get it out there, one being something like Jameson First Shot.

The movies I usually do are maybe three or four weeks because they don't have a lot of money.