Small Budget Films Quotes

Hollywood is no longer the top. I love going to the cinema. I've always adored the idea of being in great, epic films. But they just don't really exist anymore. It's a real shame. There's great auteurs that create small movies, but it's really hard for anyone to see them, and for them to make any sort of money, or for them even to be made in the first place.

Just because you're big doesn't mean you're going to be successful. The beauty of the motion picture business is that you can make a little movie like 'Driving Miss Daisy' or 'Rain Man' and go right through the roof. This business is still about creative juices, and size is no guarantee of that.

A lot of times, mainstream critics are much tougher on small, independent movies because they can be.

Early on it was much easier to play leads, but now independent movies are being co-opted by the studio system, and they want bigger names to guarantee more audience and more numbers.

I believe I'm doing the right thing in trying to step away from that and to take chances and work on little independent films and do stuff like that wild dance scene.

But, it's much easier to do that than produce the movies from scratch. It excites the same thing in me, whether we build it from the ground up, or whether we come on when the movie is done or almost done. The idea of supporting the underdog and getting a smaller movie out there in a big way is equally exciting.

One of the more noble things the Oscars can do is pay attention to movies no one knows about. Blockbusters don't need much help.

I've always freelanced as an actor, and you always have to worry about the next paycheck. When I booked 'True Blood,' I promised myself I would take advantage of the fact that for the first time in my career, I could afford to turn down big money to go and do small, character-driven indies.

The real difficulty for smaller films, when they're made independently and it's time to go for a distributor, sometimes if it's a tough film and the people who financed it need their money back right away, it's much easier and lucrative to take a DVD deal.