Mainstream Filmmaking Quotes

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.

My knock with filmmaking is the whole bureaucracy around it, so in some ways, staying outside of it is easier for me.

Growing up, I wanted to make the kind of movies that would play in a multiplex, and those were the kinds of movies I ended up making.

All I ever hoped for was freedom of choice and to not have to just do work because I needed to pay the bills. If you can, weave your way into a studio in a situation where it's supportive of the other work you wanna do. Also, there is caliber and weight in studio films, and I think the ideal is to get that balance right: Do a studio film, go away and do something that is smaller.

I don't want to become an ivory tower filmmaker. That sounds peculiar, but I want to be a mainstream filmmaker. I want the largest possible audience that I can find - but, of course, on my terms.

If you have a career like mine, which is so identified with Hollywood, with big studios and stars, you wonder if maybe you shouldn't go off and do what the world thinks of as more personal films with lesser-known people. But I think I've fooled everybody. I've made personal films all along. I just made them in another form.

If you look at most mainstream filmmaking, to be honest, some of these films aren't even asking questions anymore at all.

I didn't grow up like Quentin Tarantino, watching esoteric art films at the video store. I'd go to the multiplex and see big, mainstream movies, and I'd go, 'I want to make one of those one day.'