Project Development Quotes

When you start a show, the plans are not set in stone. They're really mutable, cocktail napkin sketches.

Sometimes you get involved in a film because you just love making movies and you want to keep working. Sometimes you're lucky enough to find something that you really care about. Therefore, now I'm emphasizing developing my own projects and writing my own screenplays, so that I can do exactly what I like to do.

I have a company where I'm trying to get projects off the ground. Me and my partner Madeleine Sackler, we just shot our first feature in a maximum security prison where about 95% of the cast were incarcerated men. We're editing that and there's a doc going with it.

In the earliest days, this was a project I worked on with great passion because I wanted to solve the Defense Department's problem: it did not want proprietary networking and it didn't want to be confined to a single network technology.

Nurturing a project from the ground floor is something I've been wanting to do.

It's not easy putting creative projects together. In my case, it might take a long time and you try to do the best.

I'd love to work on a script in collaboration.

My dad always produces, and I would always sit in producers' meetings with him. I like the whole thing of putting a movie together. I think that's very exciting.

I don't read that many books - I tend to read scripts for projects.

The idea of 'Roja' was with me for seven years before I made it.

I'm working on a number of different things. I'm working on a couple of TV things and I'm working on a couple of film things too, and they're all very early stages. One of them I'm writing myself, one of them I'm writing with somebody else, and one of them I'm supervising a writer, and they're all sort of coming up at the same time and it'll be interesting to see which one kind of reveals itself first and jumps ahead.

I enjoy creating new ideas, working on new creative projects.

I'm kind of getting more excited about developing my own stuff, or getting involved early in projects and doing my best to make things that I care about happen.

When you are developing something, you have to look at it individually. You can't compare and contrast it to the projects around it, because that way madness lies.

Everyone wants to know what you want to work on and everyone wants to pitch you what they're working on. And that's just part of the process. And hopefully, at some point you find someone of like minds and you make a film.

Eventually, it came to this place like, 'I'd like to direct, but I need to find the story to tell.' 'Man of Tai Chi' became the story to tell.

I haven't thought about writing so much as potentially producing and finding my own projects to get into production. I want to be able to buy the rights to a story that I have read or a book that I have read.

When I get a beautifully written piece of material, I immediately start imagining how I would interpret it. I love just daydreaming about it for months, breaking it down, seeing where I can spin something. How I can turn this into the most fun ride for the audience that I can make it? That's my job.

If I'm producing, I'm not acting, and it's such a long road to get anything off the ground.

The great thing about being a producer on a project is that you get to see the ins and outs of every piece of the puzzle. There are so many elements involved in every aspect of a film's development that I don't think the average person is aware of, which is, I guess, why the whole process is referred to as movie magic.

I like the creative aspect of developing a project.

I have a freedom that's incredibly valuable. Obviously my freedom is far smaller in scale than people like Zemeckis and Spielberg have here. But it's comparable. I can dream up a project, develop it, make it, control it, release it.

I don't like talking about any projects till they solidify and take off.

The film project has been “twenty years of constipation,” and he likens the Hollywood process to “trying to grill a steak by having a succession of people coming into the room and breathing on it.”

Hands down, the hardest part for me is coming up with an idea. I spend about 14 months writing a book, and that's a lot of hours spent thinking about a single project. I simply have to love the idea. I'll go through dozens of workable ideas until I find the one that lights my fire.