I think I'm probably the only person that, when the parents lent me money to make the movie, they wished I had not paid them back. They could have said 'No,' and it would have ended, and I would have gotten a real job.
There are days when either filmmaking feels like an insurmountable practice - here's a lot of obstacles in the way to make it happen - or you think, "What does this all add up to?" You don't know what to do with the footage, and you've asked a lot of people for their time and a lot of people to be patient with you. And then you lose faith that you can actually make a worthwhile story out of this.
When I begin a film, I want to make a great film. Halfway through, I just hope to finish the film.
Movies are - all I've found is that they're just tougher and tougher to make.
I don't think anyone ever sets out to make a crappy movie, but there are a lot of forces working against those people who are trying to make something decent. There are a lot of fine lines to walk and small battles to fight.
It's sweet to hear, but anyone who says that they want to be the next John Cassavetes is crazy. He had it so tough. No one would want to walk a step in his shoes. Believe me - I wouldn't.
'American Graffiti' was unpleasant because of the fact that there was no money, no time, and I was compromising myself to death.
Directing is a terrible, anxious process. It's all collaboration, and if you have a dream, it's diluted very quickly by the slightest ineptness in any of your collaborators. They're supposed to help you, but too often they help you into your grave.
The worst thing about movie-making is that it's like life: nobody can go back to correct the mistakes.
Most people don't really understand what it takes to get a film made, and the struggles .I think anyone who makes a film goes through their own set of struggles.
It would be nice to make a movie that other people want to make, because every one of these movies, I basically have to find the only company in the world that's willing to make it, and it's always a big challenge. I end up spending a tremendous amount of energy and time trying to get money to make these movies and it's exhausting.
The physical stuff of a movie is difficult. It's one of those things where it's just harder than it looks.
In chatting to directors over the years, including James Wan, they always tell you the war stories. No one ever says, 'Oh, I had a great time on that film.' It's always this went wrong, that went wrong.
Every day I would come to set [of Swiss Army Man] going like, "How are we going to do this?".
After 'Grahan,' you'd be nuts to think I'd try producing again!
Even a fiction film is hard to end. You can going on shooting and editing a documentary forever.
I think since I did Monster I really started understanding how hard it is for first time directors. I think there's a lot of great stories out there, but it's high risk.
It's a funny thing because you look at the careers of other filmmakers, and you see them sort of slow down, and you realize, maybe this becomes harder to do as you get older. That's sort of a cautionary thing. I hope it doesn't happen to me.
After 'Bhaji On The Beach', I didn't make a movie for six years. I couldn't get a movie off the ground for love nor money. It was a very tough time and I almost gave up. If I had been an Oxbridge bloke after 'Bhaji', my career would have been very different
We were just trying to make the films that we could get made, and to push the envelope. We didn't realize how far we had pushed the envelope. That all came later. That all came from books and articles about the golden age of the '70s. Believe me, to a lot of us, it was no golden age. The studio heads were very powerful then. They would fire guys right and left. They would look at your dailies and tell you what was wrong with them... a lot of stuff that doesn't go on today. Young filmmakers who are successful today, they don't often have that to put up with.
You spend most of your time as a director trying to move forward with the movie. It happens on a daily basis, if not more than once a day, that you are struggling with budgetary constraints. Whereas when you're writing, the limitation that you have is your imagination. So it's decidedly non-pragmatic.
The making of the movie and the routine of making the movie is a lot like being in a Spanish prison for five years on a marijuana breakdown.
I didn't fill it up with movies every time because I was trying to just film one damn movie, but that's the heartache of independent films.
When you're young, you sort of have an idea that this is how it's always gonna be as a filmmaker. And then you have the ups and downs of trying to get your art created in an industry that doesn't traditionally make films with you and people that look like you behind the camera.
Comedy is so fun. I don't know how these people can make movies and work on them for four months and they're these sob stories. I don't know how emotionally you get through that.
