John Sayles Quotes

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 next time the studio comes down the pike, they can't say, 'I hear your actor took half of what your quote usually is ... and we're going to be nice to you and offer three quarters of your quote,'

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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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I remember being out here at the Sunset Marquis, and whoever knocked on the door, I would take that picture that I was writing and I would put that in the typewriter, so when I had the meeting, they would say 'Oh, you're working on it right now'

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And it was out in the theaters in two weeks. This is not, 'We're going to develop twenty-five and maybe one's going to get made,' so the first three things I wrote got up on the screen and, good, bad or indifferent, I got to see them on their feet.

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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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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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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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I always felt like, okay, I'm going to try to tell stories whatever way I can and it would be cool to make a movie, and tell a story that way.

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I never thought about being a writer as I grew up. A writer wasn't something I wanted to be. An outfielder was something to be. Most of what I know about style I learned from Roberto Clemente.

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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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You get to say, 'Here's my philosophical idea about what the costume should like,' and the costume designer comes and gives you choices and sometimes they're all good, and I say, 'What do you think' and they pick the right thing.

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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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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 always feel that there are no final victories and no final defeats. But it's true that America is in a hole right now. There are a lot of dead fish in the water.

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So when I came to making movies, that's the way I wanted to do it. I didn't kind of wanting to just do one part of the process and leave it at that.

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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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For me the writing, when I'm going to direct it myself, is really just the first draft, and I don't change it very much I only change it on average about two lines per movie.

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And is there a movie, whatever the genre here, that I would like to go see If I can see the germ of that there, I'll usually take the job.

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It reminded me how much Florida is a place of parallel communities that don't always intersect and have totally different ways of looking at the world. They might do certain things together, but they don't necessarily mix.

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The election helped me focus ideas that I had been thinking about for a long time, ... Sunshine State.

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With Roger, it would be 'On Page 67, we think this is a little quick to have another attack of Piranhas, so could you put it off until Page 69'

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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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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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