Top 55 Movie Business Quotes

It’s actually shocking to me how hard it’s been to get back into the movie business.

Often, in the movie business, they need somebody who will garner box office because they need to pay for the movie. So the people who are in movies that make a lot of money are the people who most often get cast in studio pictures. In my career, I’ve never been a box office name.

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.

I think the movie business, you meet people, and you work intensely with them, and you have these relationships – there’s an intimacy to it and a familiarity to the relationship because you’re having to let go of all your barriers so you can let people in and work with them.

Certainly in the movie business there are bullies all over – bullies in the distribution business, exhibition business, production. Fine-tuning adult bullying is different. When a bully is an adult, it’s a whole different set of colors.

My career in the movie business began in Hong Kong, my heart has always been tied to Asia, and it is immensely gratifying to see international recognition for Asian cinema as a whole.

See, I’m fortunate that I get around a lot because of my movie business.

Hits and flops are part and parcel of movie business.

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

When I started Participant, I felt that the movie business was ripe for a company that dealt with big issues in a systemic way. I was a little surprised that nobody had done it before. But to most people, entertainment is escapism.

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

In a business like the movie business, you’re going to have a lot of people competing. Somebody is always coming behind them who wants their job. Being an actor is like being in quicksand: whatever you do, it disappears very quickly. You have to keep reminding people.

It’s very eclectic, the way one chooses subjects in the movie business, especially in the commercial movie business. You need to develop material yourself or material is presented to you as an assignment to direct.

I grew up in a small town where I went to the movies a lot and fell in love with all these people. I also fell in love with the movie business. So all I saw were actors on the screen so I thought, well, that’s what I have to be if I want to be a part of the movie business.

A lot of people in the movie business don’t have a point of reference for me; nobody really knows who I am.

The core of the movie business remains intact and it’s not descending in scope. Studios want movies that are bigger than ever.

Gavin Lambert was the first person in the movie business my wife and I met when we moved to Los Angeles in 1964.

If your family was part of the movie business, then watching ‘Moguls & Movie Stars’ is like looking at the family photo album: hilarious to members of the family, numbingly boring to those outside the family circle.

I stuck around in Hollywood for too long. I was there a long time, and when I left, I was smart enough to realise that what I was leaving was not just the movie business. I wanted to get rid of the whole atmosphere.

The Hollywood image of the movie business is all about ambition and high achievers like James Cameron. But the British film industry is much more about men who wear cravats and work with model trains and hope another series of ‘Thomas the Tank Engine’ will be commissioned.

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.

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.

I got into the movie business because of ‘Days of Heaven.’

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?

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

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.

People are goofy about the movie business, so you end up counting on friends you knew before you were successful. It is harder to make new friends because you are a little more cautious.

I’ve gone far in the movie business, but no matter how far I go, every time I pick up the phone to call Tom Hanks or Robin Williams, I wonder if they’ll call me back. And you know what? Sometimes they do, and sometimes they don’t.

We manufacture a culture in the movie business, and whatever we put out creates a dark side and a bright side, too.

I wish I had been born 20 years earlier, so I could have been in the movie business in the 1970s.

Rotten Tomatoes is the best thing that happened to the movie business because it means you have to make good movies.

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

In this day and age, you need a lot of patience if you are in the movie business.

Because of who I am, when I sit at a poker table, I meet people who engage me in conversation, not only about poker, but also about the movie business and about the world of celebrities.

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.

I’d like to start trying different fields of work. I don’t want to be stuck in just comedy, and I’d be interested to try to break into the movie business because it’s so much different than television.

The movie business is not something that can come from the brain. It really comes from the soul and the heart.

Simultaneously, the movie business now experiments with a colorblind approach to casting.

First of all, just knowing people who grew up in the movie business at that time, no one had Mexican maids.

I’m not in the movie business anymore, and hardly any 70 year olds are. I always ask the producers: ‘Are there no 70-year old vampires?’ Apparently there are not – or even zombies for that matter. I guess they all get eaten.

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.

I’m probably the only person who goes to work and says ‘Wow, it’s really nice here and sweet,’ even in the competitive movie business.

I heard about the movie business before I even knew what it was. So I surround myself now with people who are like, ‘Can we not talk about movies for an hour?’

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.

Financiers don’t support their directors to cast properly. They don’t have the vision of an artist. They’re casting to spreadsheets, and it’s making movies very mediocre. The movie business used to just be called the movies. Now it should be the business movies.

For me, I try as much as possible to just think about being in the movie theatre, having the lights dim, and what would I want to see on the screen. That puts me in the frame of mind that made me want to be in the movie business to begin with.

New York just feels real to me, and not everyone is in the movie business.

Now with all this movie business, everybody’s coming around wanting to know everything that’s happened since I was four. It’s like going to an analyst.

I’ve been the movie business for over 50 years, and I’ve done everything imaginable that could be done or ever was done by anybody.

Growing up in the ’70s and ’80s when my dad had an art gallery, one of the things that frustrated me was the world seemed so tiny, and to appreciate contemporary art, you needed a history of art, a formal education. I was more interested in the people, and that’s why I went into the movie business in the first place.

I’ve never written a movie, I’m not in the movie business. I go out to L.A. and I’m like everyone else wandering around in a daze hoping I see movie stars. I write the novels that the movies are based on, and that feels like enough of a job for me.

The movie business is very much like that: people in authority making purely emotional decisions instead of interesting rational ones.

I think in some ways I’m quite lucky to be living in London, there’s this certain separation from the movie business. In that way, it’s been quite easy to separate acting and going back to a normal life.

I was 15 when I read the script for ‘Earth to Echo.’ I thought it was amazing, and I couldn’t think of turning it down. It’s awesome for a kid from Brooklyn to have an opportunity to be on the big screen. And I had a great experience learning what the movie business is like. So, I’m glad I did it.