Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
People ask how I can be a conservative and still want higher taxes. It makes my head spin, and I guess it shows how old I am. But I thought that conservatives were supposed to like balanced budgets. I thought it was the conservative position to not leave heavy indebtedness to our grandchildren.
There are so many screenwriters with incredible stories to tell, so I hope there will be some kind of shift in the business where very few types of movies are now made by the studios. There needs to be different budgets for different audiences; not everything having to be a huge opening weekend.
I look at my annual budgets for everything and anything, and I look to see where I can save the most money on those items. Saving 30% to 50% buying in bulk - replenishable items from toothpaste to soup, or whatever I use a lot of - is the best guaranteed return on investment you can get anywhere.
When you are working with low budgets and you have a gunshot with a squib and it goes wrong - the gun flash does not synchronize with the squib or whatever - it takes half an hour or 40 minutes to clean it all up and reset it. It's much easier to use a computer to paint in the flash and splatter.
I've worked on films where the budgets are almost limitless and you're in trailers that are bigger than a hotel room. You're taken care of and the food is amazing, the quality of the job is amazing and then you work on smaller things but it never dictates my happiness or my willingness to go to work.
When you do movies on low budgets, you don't want to have a location that requires a very big light right outside the window when you're 10 stories up. You have to find a location where you have a terrace outside, or you can light from a second floor, or you can light through the windows for daylight.
The majority of people are straight, and movies, with their bigger budgets and burdensome marketing costs, will try to appeal to as many people as they can. As the means of production and distribution become more democratized with advances in technology, more gay stories will make their way to the mainstream.
Conversations about money certainly are not sexy, but they should give each of you some clarity and enable you to enter into your marriage with a better understanding of each other and what is important. Work and home responsibilities, joint or separate accounts, budgets, etc. are all subjects which should be discussed.
With so much money invested in their most promising projects, Hollywood executives will understandably do everything in their power to make their products a success in the marketplace. Therefore, the most expensive films often also get the highest marketing budgets, and are slotted into the most favorable opening weekends.
New platforms are emerging: Netflix, Amazon, Hulu and Xbox. And film actors are gravitating towards television, because there are basically better roles there. Television is making the kind of epics and genres that the movie studios used to make, and often doing it better with more complex narratives and corresponding budgets.
Mum and dad would drive me to the ACT Academy of Sport gym at 5 A.M., sit in the car and read a book, and then drive me to school. I appreciated it when I was younger, but I didn't really understand how much they were putting into it. Now I look at budgets of $70,000 to compete, and I think, 'Wow, they've put so much into this.'
I think the one thing that I've experienced with American films is just that the size tends to be so much bigger, the budgets have been bigger, the size of the sets have been bigger, the number of people working on them is bigger, but that's not to say that I haven't been able to get close to people or develop good relationships.
Cost overruns are not uncommon in architecture, particularly for designs that depart from structural or technological norms, or demand a finer quality of execution than commercial schemes - conditions typical of buildings for cultural institutions. Budgets are exceeded for many reasons, not all of them within an architect's control.
The most disappointing thing this week is that Mitt Romney picked Paul Ryan, because he was the intellectual leader of the Republican Party. Because Paul Ryan decided to join Mitt Romney's ticket, he is completely reversed himself on some of the issues he has been very strong on, like the $716 billion in savings that are in two of his budgets.
