Movie Business Quotes

I consider anybody who has been able to make a living in this business [movie business] without having to do something else for a living for any period of time let alone 43 years would be a miracle.

Life in the movie business is like the beginning of a new love affair: it's full of surprises, and you're constantly getting f***ed.

I don't really know anything about the movie business, even though I've lived in Los Angeles my whole life - somehow I've never bumped into it.

We live in the moment now where this whole movie business is crazy.

You can tell when someone likes you just because you're in a movie, because all they talk about is the movie, and all they talk about is the movie business.

In terms of the movie business, being in a 'Lord of the Rings' has given me more interesting options as work.

I've been around the movie business, so I can play it cool and all that, but when people are different they have that off thing about them. Their whole presence is just a little innocent, I think.

Horror found me. I got into the movie business to make westerns.

The other thing being at UCLA was just being in California and around the movie business. Which I honestly believe, and I've told this to screenwriters, you have to do. You have to be there in order to write or direct movies.

I left Mexico for artistic survival. If I had stayed, I would have been forced by the government, who control the movie business, to direct TV shows or commercials or infomercials for the government.

Sometimes you think the movie is good and BOOM! Sometimes you think it's no good. BAAM! The movie business is a big gamble. You never know.

I was always a singer. But I was always focused on being an actor as my trade. Music I do just for me. The movie business is very difficult but the music business is just impossible.

When the first movie to show the anger people have about the war is a grade Z zombie movie, that tells you all you need to know about how afraid of ruffling anyone's feathers people in the movie business are today.

I think the movie business is in trouble. It's all movies that you've seen before. Everything's a remake; they want things that are familiar rather than things that surprise you.

You know, I never expected to enter the movie business.

The '90s were a time when not just the movie business, but every aspect of American life, became a lot more corporate. There's a line in Jonathan Franzen's essay "Perchance to Dream" about how "the rich lateral dramas of local manners have been replaced by a single vertical drama, that of commercial generality." I wanted to examine that great homogenizing force that came in during the '90s, since Hollywood seemed a place where it was particularly active.

We don't make movies to make money, we make money to make more movies.

Ego problems are endemic in every walk of life, but in the movie business egomaniacs are megalomaniacs.

The movie business is not about the money. Of course, you need money to make the movie. If you have a small budget, adapt yourself. Having $200 million dollars doesn't ensure that you're definitely going to make a good movie. There's so many examples that prove that.

The left-leaning thinking that dominates the movie business follows a common liberal instinct to deny the spiritual dimension to every problem, thereby profoundly compounding the difficulties.

Rome is magic, it's like being in Hollywood. But the difference between Hollywood and Rome is that here you don't have just the movie business. The movie business is so little, so you also have the choice to hang out with people who do different kinds of business.

It's a roll of the dice in the movie business. I mean, every single movie is a roll of the dice. Any movie on paper could look like it's going to be fantastic. You know what I mean?

I'm no longer dependent on the movie business to make a living. So if I want to make movies as other old guys would play golf, I can.

Rob [Reiner] is a teddy bear. He's hell delicious. He's a really good director. He's a great soul. In the movie business, I would call him a movie mom. The only person I hold in equal esteem is Clint Eastwood. Now I have worked with a lot of terrific directors, and I don't mean to be putting any of them below their own station, but these two, I relish working with them.

The movie business can be very frustrating and very circuitous; theres no straight path. You have to have tremendous perseverance, dedication and passion. You have to want it very, very badly and you have to deal with a lot of rejection.

I think it's really important to have a life and have interests outside of this [movie] business, and not rely on this business to validate you as a human being. If you do that, you're really in a dangerous spot.

The movie business is based on criminals. Some of them are in movies and some of them make movies.

There just is exponentially more money in the movie business than in the music business. As a result there are more people involved in the creative process.

People look at technology as sometimes an end to things, and it isn't an end in certain cases. In the movie business, the act of creating in the art form of movies, the craft of movies is completely technical, and that's all it is.

I think having power ingrains people with a conservatism. There's a tendency to hedge one's bets. (Which explains a lot, actually, about why the movie business is the way it is, and why the publishing industry is too.)

I think it started to feel like home when I stopped maintaining any pretense that I was ever going to be in the movie business. I went there like many writers - I had a screenplay deal and I would go to these meetings and it was the typical thing. And I hated it. I was not interested in writing screenplays, actually. But I kept feeling like that was what I was supposed to do. It was just this horrible cognitive dissonance.

My dad was born in Chicago in 1908... his parents came from Russia. They settled in Chicago, where they lived in a little tiny grocery store with eight or nine children - in the backroom all together - and my grandmother got the idea to go into the movie business.

As somebody who makes his living in the movie business and wants to contribute to it, I think that the best chance I have of doing that is just consistently working with great directors.

There is, of course, a world of difference between cricket and the movie business ... I suppose doing a love scene with Racquel Welch roughly corresponds to scoring a century be fore lunch.

The movie business is very difficult but the music business is just impossible. So I'll play in bands and record and play songs with other people, but for me it's a form of expression that all I need is me. I don't need cameras or agents, I can just have a piano and sing and feel totally verified.

The movie industry is brutal. It is dangerous. It is, for most, soul destroying. Creating art (music, books, films, etc.) can be beautiful and liberating, but trying to sell art, well, that is the movie business. There are few winners, and lots and lots of losers.

One of the things I noticed about the world was - it's funny, in the movie business, you meet a kind of guy who has a lot of money, whether they came by it as an actor or film-studio owner, and you realize these people aren't any smarter than you might be, or any more decent than you might be. It's just this weird fate of the world that it broke one way for someone.

Everyone is so preoccupied by youth. People talk about how the movie business is a microcosm of the bigger picture, or life imitating art, but the business is guilty for getting women out of the way.

You’ll find that the movie business is paid for by those mega movies. The movie business is paid for by Big Macs. By movies as product. Movie studios use that term “product” all the time. Product? You mean you have a lot of stories? No, we have a lot of product. You have stories.

I think the movie business and film crews are a little bit like the circus, in that we travel around like a pack and we're a big family for a finite period of time. We roll into someplace, cause a bunch of damage, and then roll out.

I've been in the bargain basement of the movie business.

Hollywood is the backdrop of my family, and I know that the movie business is incredibly cruel as you get older.

Creating art (music, books, films, etc.) can be beautiful and liberating, but trying to sell art, well, that is the movie business. There are few winners, and lots and lots of losers.

I think American films right now are suffering from an excess of scale. Lots of movies we're seeing now are more akin to video games than stories about human life and relationships. Twelve- to 20-year-olds are maybe the largest economic force in the US movie business. I'm not a very nostalgic person - but I enjoy a good story.

Netflix, Amazon, iTunes - whatever platforms emerge - we are looking at as having the same potential that home video had for the movie business. Which means there are entirely new opportunities to monetize our capital investment in content and do so in ways that work for distributors, for consumers and for creators.

Oh, don't let's ask for the moon. We've already got the stars.

Don't let's ask for the moon.We have the stars.

My father being in the movie business, I thought being an actor would be great. But when I started singing to people in coffeehouses, you know, singing folk music and then, later, singing songs that I started to write myself, I felt more than an affinity for it.

I think, when I started to become successful in the movie business, my mother was very, very worried. She thought no one would want to marry me and she thought that was the most important thing. And she thought that it would affect my personal relations. And she said how worried she was that people would take advantage of me or I would meet the wrong people. When I was made head of the studio, one of her first things was, "Well, now no one will marry you. I hope you'll be happy, whatever."

Frankly, my dear, I don't give a damn.