Creative Compromises Quotes

'Tangerine' was less than half the budget of 'Starlet,' and 'Starlet' was already a microbudget film. A director always wants more time, and we had a limited amount of resources.

Whether you're making a million dollar film or a $100 million film there is never enough money, there's never enough time.

In lower budget filmmaking, everything is a favor. You're pushing everybody, all the time. You're trying to get the best out of it that you can, and it has to be a labor of love, or you can't get it done.

So anything that's not absolutely needed, we would cut it [footage] out, which would make me very insecure; everything has to work, and it's a water movie in 3D with a kid, animals. So the more I do that, the more I'm scared of "What if it doesn't go the way we want it?" But we had to do that to meet the budget, otherwise we wouldn't even have a start-date.

Any time you do a movie, there are going to be war wounds that you end up getting.

I get offered to do stuff where the money's nice but it's not something I want to do - I get offered a lot of commercials too.

We only had enough money really to cut 10 things and be in there for a month because it's expensive, you know. And, singer/songwriters, today are lucky if they can get a deal, you know. So, we actually worked so fast that we really cut 20 things.

'She's Gotta Have It' was shot in twelve days and two six-day weeks.

It's a funny line when you're walking - the creativity, the subjectivity versus the objectivity, creativity versus the business, and recognizing that you are in the music business, so there are certain things that you have to acquiesce to on the business side and certain creative decisions that you have to make for the purposes of serving the business side of it.

In terms of cinema and filmmaking, there are certainly the unexpected gifts that the actors bestow on you. Film is always a question of compromises with respect to what you originally intended.

I've always been against recreating or re-recording samples, but I managed to re-record one or two that were just too expensive and it was just ridiculous.

When you start out, you have to make compromises, which include doing films of lower quality.

In some respects, big ideas can be a bit too big for a short story - especially if you've only got a couple of thousand words to play with, and you need room for other stuff, like character, description.

Economy, speed, nervousness, and desperation produce the final wasteful, semi-incoherent movies we see.

I was actually fortunate that I never had to have any other job than being an actor. I don't have those odd stories of having to make some money here or there, but certainly there are some credits on my résumé I wish I hadn't done. It paid my health insurance, and I say that just from a creative standpoint, shows I'm not that proud of, things like that.

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.

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

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

Well, at the time, you have to remember that we were not successful. The Showtime offer, as it was presented to me, was half the money for half the show. I was not interested, at that point, in doing a smaller cast and a more simplified Arrested Development.