Film Production Costs Quotes

It was really a means-of-production problem. It costs so much to make films. With a novel, you can write the whole thing on a ream of paper from Staples for $4.

Most film productions, when they're based at a place, they get, like, a 30-mile radius or a 30-minute radius to get out of the town. And once you go past that, your day starts to become shorter, and you have to start paying your drivers more, and everybody just gets paid more, and you have less time to shoot, and everything costs more.

A movie like House of the Dead with around $7 million budget or Alone in the Dark with around $16 million budget are much easier to make profit than the typical $50 million major motion picture.

As far as expense, I think if 'Twilight' does well enough, then we should be able to do the big expensive stuff for the sequels. I mean, we have to have werewolves, there's no way around it. They have to be there.

My audience loves seeing me pump large amounts of money into action and sets. And it works. I'm not saying that films made within a budget are wrong. But when audiences come to see my film with their families, I guess they are spending at least 10 per cent of their monthly income. I don't want to cheat them.

Maybe you know it but it's not so easy to finance movies in total. And the reason I am able to do these kind of movies is I have a tax shelter fund in Germany, and if you invest in a movie in Germany you get basically fifty percent back from the government.

We took over with 'Leverage' three warehouses, and now four with 'The Librarians,' and turned them into proper sound stages with sound doors and all the lights. We now have control of four real, proper-sized sound stages. The problem is they're dark and empty half of the year because there aren't enough productions coming into Oregon.

It's kinda crazy to say, but the way Jay [Duplass] and I stay afloat, because we don't make particularly commercial fare that makes a lot of money, is that we make things cheaply and we make things small. We would kind of be afraid to go make a $100 million movie because you have to do certain things to it to have it make its money back.

The catch in the industry is that if you want to get a picture made for little money, you have to get a big star. But the two are usually mutually exclusive.

Hollywood money isn't money. It's congealed snow, melts in your hand, and there you are.

As it turns out, it's really expensive to make movies, much more than records.

Film is the cheapest part of the movie making process. The expense is the 100-man crew and the financing and everything.

If you have $300,000 to shoot a cigarette on a table, it's an enormous amount of money. Maybe that's why my movies are the way they are. But it's the only way I can make a living.

I think, on a larger note, that filmmakers and studios should start to tuck it in a little bit, because films wouldn't have the pressure they have if the word wasn't out about how expensive they were.

I know what I'm talking about and I've never been over budget, in 70 films.

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

I love the new technology in terms of giving access to doing more independent work. When I first started out, any film had to rent from Panavision and the expenses were humongous. Now, given the advances in technology, you can put out extraordinary quality filmmaking at nothing like the price it used to be.

People in Hollywood are going make pictures where ever it's the least expensive to make them.

We live in an age when it is cheaper to buy the rights to movies than to make them.

Thank God for small movies and filmmakers who can make movies for not $8 million. Thank God for $8,000 movies.

The model today is that as much as 70 percent of the financing of the picture would come from overseas. Now we're beginning to run out of suckers, because there are not that many people overseas who are willing to put up more than half the money for a movie.