John Sayles Quotes
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But compared to writing a novel, where you can be God, I did the Bay of Pigs invasion in six pages once, and there were 50,000 guys with boots that I didn't have to pay, and all those extras; we didn't have to pay them.
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The less money and time you have, the more you haveto plan ahead and be careful about your coverage. It's like a gas:it expands or contracts depending on the size of the container.
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When I read a story or see something play out in front of me I say, how come nobody's made a movie or a television show out of this? This is something that belongs in the conversation. Certainly that's what interests me about a project.
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Well, acting is cheap; I knew all these actors who weren't in the Screen Actors Guild yet, and it happened that they were all just about thirty years old.
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The hardest thing about movies is doing take 12, 13, and 14, and finding new ways to do the same lines. So the early takes are actually easier and I think there's more surprises in them.
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Basically, if you could get a good trailer out of the script, Roger had no objection to you making a really good movie. He liked it if you did. He liked the more cleverness and ingenuity you could bring to it. He just wasn't going to give you any more money.
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We just said, 'Okay, you're in the movie. Bring what you would bring for a three-day weekend and I hope you like the way you look in it because once you're on camera, that's your wardrobe.' But it worked; it worked and we were very surprised.
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I think I got spoiled and that writing a short story and getting it published, or writing a novel and getting it published, you pretty much get to do the first, second and third draft yourself without a whole lot of interference.
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I've always got five or six things that would either make a good feature or TV show. And you just never know. You go and you pitch and it may be exactly what they're looking for, or they may stop you after two sentences and say, "Oh, we've already done something just like that."
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I've always felt like I was on the margins. Once upon a time that's what independent used to mean.
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America is a very divided country now. Not only are there red states and blue states, there are now red facts and blue facts. The right-wing believe in creationism. The left in evolution.
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When I was really young I didn't know that there was such a thing as a screenwriter. I wrote stories.
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There are very few distributors left to do off-Hollywood movies, and those distributors generally have got thousands of movies to choose from. So you're pretty lucky if you get one to even take your movie and it's pretty rare that they pay anything upfront.
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There are genres I don't care for, and I've never worked in those genres, and then sometimes there are people that I haven't liked and I haven't worked for those people. But if I feel like there's a movie that I would like to go see, I'll jump into it.
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I figured somebody wrote a story who had a typewriter and I thought that movies were made by the cowboys and that they just said, 'Okay, you fall off the horse this time.
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I figured, 'When is that ever going to happen again?'. So I basically set out the opposite way movies are made; I set out with a budget first. I said, 'What can I do well for $40,000?'.
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The media in America has become so cowed and compromised.
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My argument has always been that this is not an anti-Bush film, it's a pro-democracy film. And if George W.Bush comes out on the wrong side of democracy, that's his problem.
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There was a widespread indignation in the American media. They were saying, How can you make a movie during an election that's about politics? What are you doing? Are you trying to influence people's lives? To which my response was, Well, I hope so.
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If you write a movie for Roger Corman, it's going to get made. You saw it almost the next day.
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The hardest thing about movie acting is that if you're playing a character who changes within the movie, you've got to do that, but you've got to do it out of sequence, because we never have gotten to shoot in sequence, and that's really, really tough.
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There were not fifteen people in the story department and twenty-five producers and stuff. And Roger had produced 1,000 movies and directed a couple of hundred, and their comments were always very, very specific.
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I certainly grew up seeing more movies and television than I read books, but when it came time to do the thing itself you don't have to hire a lot of people to sit down and write a book, so that was the story-telling medium that was available to me.
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I see very small movies being financed by crowdfunding. If you're a well-known actor or celebrity of some sort, you can probably raise between one and two million. I don't have that kind of cult [following].
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To this day, I get rewrite offers where they say: 'We feel this script needs work with character, dialogue, plot and tone,' and when you ask what's left, they say: 'Well, the typing is very good.'
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I made it about a three-day weekend so people wouldn't have to change their clothes a lot. We didn't have an art department; we didn't have a make-up department.
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Assumptions allow the best in life to pass you by.
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Sometimes people can't afford to work for you, or they're not interested or available, and you hate to have written the whole movie with somebody in mind and not get them.
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I don't have a social agenda. I just don't choose to ignore what's in front of me.
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I take more jobs when I need more money, if I'm investing in films. I take fewer when I don't. Or if something really good comes along, I usually find a way to do a good job on it in the time that I've got.
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