Cheops' Law: Nothing ever gets built on schedule or within budget.
Historically, the British have always been rather wary of grand engineering projects - perhaps understandably, given that many of them have been delivered late and over budget.
Somebody once told me - and I could be wrong about this - that The West Wing was, on any given episode, $300,000 over, on average. Now today, if you were $10,000 over budget, they would cancel you. For sure.
They said, "You get $2 million to make the film, if you're not in it. If you are in it, you get $5 million to make the film." There was no way to make the thing for $2 million, so I made it for $5 million. And then, it turned out there was no way to make the thing for $5 million. That's when it got weird.
You dread that there will be real problems during filming.
It almost seems an institutional phenomenon that [military weapons] projects start with gross underestimates by both Government and the contractor.
I think the situation in Toronto is such that there are funding organizations which make it easy for a film to raise more money than it needs and very often that works against a film.
History has repeatedly shown that the costs of many government healthcare programs far exceed early projections.
With 'Agent Vinod', there was a lot of chaos with schedules and the film took a year and a half to shoot.
There is, apparently, some law of nature decreeing that all home construction must double in its projected cost and take four times longer than originally anticipated.
