Hollywood System Quotes

I yearn to make a really good, intelligent movie before I die: I don't completely rule out the possibility, but in Hollywood, I'm not bankable.

I could never work in that kind of commercial environment where the stars have a lot to say, where the producers kind of push you around and tell you who to cast and who not to cast. I'm just not interested in that at all.

When any young director gets hired by a studio to do a $125 million film based on a preexisting piece of intellectual property, they're climbing into the meat grinder. And what you're coming out with on the other side is a generic, heavily studio-controlled pile of garbage that ends up on the side of Burger King wrappers.

It's gotten out of control. It's taking bigger and bigger names to make smaller and smaller films. I worry that important films without a big name attached won't get made at all.

In any film business, if you're trying to get your next film made, you would never say, 'Oh, my last film was a cult film.' I'd say, 'Oh, great, well I hope this one isn't!' I always say to Johnny Knoxville, 'How do you do it? You sort of do the same thing we did, except you made millions, and I made hundreds.'

I hate to say it as a pejorative term, but I work for the Hollywood system for the most part.

There was an interesting article in Los Angeles Magazine about women directors. A woman director makes one bad independent film and her career is over. Guys tend to get an opportunity to learn from their mistakes.

I'm not a Hollywood basher because enough good movies come out of the Hollywood system every year to justify its existence, without any apologies.

Things have changed a great deal since the days of Mr. Mayer. The studios no longer control, as they did in those days, artists or directors or producers, as the case may be.

Anyone who thinks Peter Jackson would fall for market forces around him rather than artistic integrity doesn't know the guy or the body of his work.

My debut feature, 'The Baby-Sitters Club,' got good reviews and made good money for what it cost. But it took me six years to get to direct my second feature. I think a guy would have had another movie out the same year.

I hate how box-office failures are blamed on an actress, yet I don't see a box-office failure blamed on men.

The first time I did a big American film, I was surprised by all the different financiers who came to the set and told the director what to do.

Soderbergh is a very respectable director that manages to have an incredible amount of freedom in a system that doesn't allow anybody to be free as he is on a set. And he will jump from 'Solaris' to 'Ocean's Twelve' and 'Thirteen.'

The people who've done well within the [Hollywood] system are the people whose instincts, whose desires [are in natural alignement with those of the producers] - who want to make the kind of movies that producers want to produce. People who don't succeed - people who've had long, bad times; like [Jean] Renoir, for example, who I think was the best director, ever - are the people who didn't want to make the kind of pictures that producers want to make. Producers didn't want to make a Renoir picture, even if it was a success.

I think, honestly, that the word 'indie' is a false gimmick. 'Independent' used to mean a movie that was financed outside corporate Hollywood, but a lot of what gets called independent these days is totally produced within that system. And there's nothing wrong with that.

I think a lot of people do big movies not because they are talented artists but because they can function in the circumstances.

I'm not Tyler Perry. I'm not Dino De Laurentis. I think it's a bit much to put one's name in front of the film. It makes me uncomfortable.

There are American directors I'd really like to work with, but I don't know how much I want to be sitting in my house, doing the rounds of meetings with CEOs. You have to be really hardworking to do all that, and I'm lazy.

I love the studio system. Love that studio system and all their money. They're great; I think they're fabulous . You know, what it is right now is I feel like I'm still learning as a filmmaker, I'm still starting out.

I've always been sort of entrepreneurial. ... I felt that I needed to learn how to write and produce so I could write my own thing and not worry about Hollywood finding me.

In the beginning, it wasn't even a question of deciding I'm going to do independent film and not commercial films - I wasn't being offered any commercial films, and there wasn't an independent scene.

When you make a movie outside the system and it's successful critically or a moderate financial success, you usually have to go back into the system and make a big hit.

A director in Hollywood in my time couldn't do what he wanted to do.

There's this index that tallies up how much your movies have made, and if they haven't grossed a certain amount, then you're not bankable. I know I'm not Will Smith but, you know, my ranking's pretty low. The only studio picture I've done is 'Zodiac,' and that didn't perform that well.