Dr. Dre is the most influential artist and producer in hip-hop history.
I’d had colleagues tell me, ‘You should be calling games.’ But to actually have a producer call me and say, ‘We want you in the booth,’ I was like, What?
My work ethic is crazy. I’m a producer, an artist, and a video director.
J Dilla is the top producer of all time, in my book, alongside Timbaland and Pharrell. Then DJ Mustard.
I’m a human entropy producer.
In ‘Maaya,’ I’m going shirtless for the first time in my career. My producer requested me to take off my shirt in one of the scenes. I have been working extremely hard to flaunt a perfect body for the scene.
I like making sounds and putting it together, I’m not just a singer or a producer.
Before I became an actor, I was a producer and a visual effects supervisor. Our industry wasn’t making the kind of films I was interested in.
I’ve been in various roles in TV – writer, producer, associate director.
I think the rise of China is inevitable, because China has moved from a low-cost producer, at low levels of technology, to higher levels of technology, and because it’s very competitive, even in some high-tech products they offer at very competitive rates – much lower than their competitors.
I’ve never been bored in my life, man. I’ve never been bored or lonely. Are you kidding? No way! I’m an orchestrator, a musician, a producer. I love everything. I’ve studied languages from Farsi to Greek to French, Swedish, Russian… How can you get bored?
No producer should revive a play unless they have a very good reason for it. I think there’s quite enough about a good play to make it available to new audiences.
Once I finish something, if I don’t feel that it’s absolutely fabulous, there’s no way I would ever let it be recorded, I wouldn’t even present it to a producer.
I never had any plans to become a producer when I was a kid. I wanted to be a DJ, like most other kids at the time. Then my mum bought me a Casio keyboard and I started to sample sounds that I liked.
The people on ‘Quintuplets’ were great, but I wasn’t a producer on that show, and it wasn’t exactly my taste.
Even though I’ve been making electronic music since I was 14, it’s hard for people to see you as a producer with a musical identity when you’re contextualized in a band that performs on a stage.
I would love to do a track with Will.I.Am. He’s always creating amazing songs. I mean, to be honest, Chris Brown has always been amazing, so I would hop on there and let him do his thing and create some magic there. As for a producer, I would love to work with J.R. Rotem. He’s my favorite producer out there.
I was the youngest producer of a national television show when I was twenty-five. I took it to 182 markets. Tremendous success.
Our producer Jon Davison thought it would be a good idea to put in additional TV scenes. So, they sent me a tape of these additional TV scenes, and I watched them, and I didn’t think they were that great. I didn’t think it was worth putting them in.
The only place where any artist feels liberated is doing independent music. I have had great experience making music for The Dewarists and Coke Studio. No actor, producer or label is telling me what to do with my music. I’m the boss. It is my life, my expression.
I have all the tools and gadgets. I tell my son, who’s a producer, ‘You never work for the machine; the machine works for you.’
I would like to do all kind of movies, but it all depends on the producer. The director, the actor, and the producer must like it, and they must be clear about it.
I can only go with my gut and say what I would like to do, and then my producer comes in and makes it happen.
I bought a year’s production of flax from a single field owned by a Dutch producer. That’s 10,000 kilograms of flax, enough to enable industrial level production. Now, I’m weaving it into tablecloths, tea towels, and other items at the Textile Museum in Tilburg. I’m producing hundreds of grown-up products!
I mean, my dad’s a television producer, and I knew I could get a job as an assistant or a reader with one of his friends, but it wasn’t exactly what I wanted to do.
Everybody in L.A. is a songwriter, producer, actor, creative. For some reason, you’re supposed to go to a bar and all hang out and act like you like each other. There is a lot of fake stuff that goes on.
It was not easy to convince someone to put their hard-earned money into my work. But if we have the talent and confidence and if the producers are confident of your work, it is not difficult to get a producer.
A lot of nepotism that exists, actually, exists outside this industry because in this industry, behind the camera a director’s son becomes a director and a producer’s son becomes a producer and that is still understandable that they are carrying their legacy but for actors, it is very very different.
I’d like to make movies as a producer and a director.
It’s always been a dream of mine to be Ginger Rogers or Cyd Charisse, and here I am performing alongside Robert Lindsay and being directed by a major Broadway producer. Who said dreams don’t come true?
There is a difference between a great producer and somebody who is a big advocate of your music. Just because you’re a big advocate for a band doesn’t mean you need to be in the studio with them, and at the same time – we don’t need to get into this conversation – you can write a hit, but it might not hit.
My sisters are amazing. My sister is my business partner, my twin. She’s an amazing producer, writer. You know, we’re just grinding and trying to make my mother proud as well as God.
As a producer putting up music, I wasn’t dropping a project to do this much numbers or make this amount of money, I really just dropped a project for the streets and the culture of music.
Everything I make as a producer, I visualize it as a DJ first. And all those beats, I test them as a DJ.
At a party in L.A., I met this middle-aged gentleman who I was talking to for ages when I asked, ‘So, what do you do?’ Turns out I was speaking to legendary music producer Quincy Jones, who worked on Michael Jackson’s hits. And there was little old me rattling on – I was so embarrassed.
I am no expert on tax; I’m a film producer. I read books and think about which ones would make good movies, and then I work with directors in order to make them.
I don’t think you can mix classical music and reggae. It’s not possible. But some producer in, like, Norway is going to put it together.
My siblings are so talented. My sister’s a producer, and my brothers and I all write.
My mother stayed at home and raised me and my closest sister, and that meant that the American Dream and what he was doing on television as a character and behind the scenes as a producer was producing for us at home, so it is your life.
It’s funny, because ‘1600 Penn’ was the first time I really started to read the reviews, because I am an executive producer and I wanted to see what people were enjoying and not enjoying as a means to an end, right?
You see, it took me so long, it was such a struggle, to move myself out of musicals – because I had had a success, nobody wanted to allow me to direct a non-musical picture. It was so hard. And the only way I could get it going was to become a producer myself.
Being an executive producer allows me the opportunity to create original content, and I can’t wait to show my fans what we have in store on ‘Kocktails with Khloe.’
One thing I’ve learned is that the best thing a producer can do is help you be you.
I was in the National Academy of Fine Arts and Design, on a scholarship. I was – still am – an artist. They were looking for an actor for ‘Take a Giant Step,’ and a producer liked my look and asked if I could act. I said, ‘Yep!’ Then I got into acting more or less just to make money for paints and canvases.
What you learn when you direct a film, even more so than as a producer, it’s a marriage. It’s like a relationship with that film so you’ve got to make sure that it’s really something that you want to live with for three years or however long it is. So I haven’t found the right thing to marry yet.
A lot of people want to blow up as a producer, but what helps you blow up as a producer is an artist that matches well with your music. When that artist gets popular and blowing up, and people start knowing them, that’s when they start knowing you.
I love writing plays because they are living, fluid things that are energised by the producer, designers, musicians, actors and audience.
When my film flops, I believe it is my mistake. There have been times when I didn’t come out of my house because my films didn’t do well. I lock myself in for months. I don’t talk to people. I feel bad for producer, director, for those who lost money. It’s never about myself or my career alone.
I landed a job at HBO, working for two years on the ‘The Alzheimer’s Project,’ which aired in May 2009. I was fortunate to work with a great mentor, producer John Hoffman, and the amazing doc filmmaker Susan Froemke.
People looked at me – people still look at me – as ‘this is Gucci Mane’s producer.’ But the music that me and Future put together was so different than what me and Gucci do, it just made people look at the music like, ‘Hold on – Zaytoven is the real deal.’
As a television producer, you do a lot of writing – drafting proposals for pilot shows and other things, so yes, a good deal of writing was involved.
