Quotes

[on making Baby It's You (1983)] I got the cut I wanted, but I was thrown out of the editing room.

Oh, I've always felt like I was on the margins. Once upon a time that's what independent used to mean.

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.

I want to direct films that no one else is going to make. I know if I don't make them, I'm never going to see them. Of course, I hope some people will want to see my movies as well, but I won't pander to the public. I won't try to second guess what a Hollywood studio would like to see in a low-budget film, so that they will hire me the next time around. I know I will always do better work if I do projects in which I really believe. And if I never get to direct again, I will have made some movies I can feel proud of.

Being a screenwriter is a good job. I can make a good amount of money to put back into my own films.

The scariest movie I ever saw was John Carpenter's The Thing (1982) with special effects by Rob Bottin. The theater was full, and I had to sit in the front row.

There's a basic structure to movies. It's rigid and reductive. In a movie you only deal with core relationships: a protagonist, an antagonist. But in a novel you can do whatever you want. You can introduce characters that disappear for a hundred pages. You can have a dozen plot lines that interweave and overlap. In a novel, you get to be God. That doesn't happen in the movies.

[1983 interview] Because directing is very political and social, it takes up more of your time than writing does. It's more demanding because you have to make the movie when the money is there. A book can just sit there; it doesn't depend on anyone else. That's what's nice about it. You don't have to rely on anyone else - you either do it or you don't. Fiction writing is a break from movie-making for me.

[1983 interview] It's great not to have to go around and raise your money - a thousand here, ten thousand there. But if I can't get the same kind of control doing it through a studio - artistic control, which is always important to a project as far as I'm concerned - then I'd just as soon go back to looking for the money myself and do it independently.

[1983 interview] The things I write and direct are things I'm not going to see unless I do them.

[on The Brother from Another Planet (1984)] I couldn't afford to hire a production manager, a first assistant director, and a second assistant director. Their minimums would have been high enough to make up a third of my budget.