"I don't make movies to make money, I make money to make movies."
"Adam Driver, Star Wars pays for his mansion and Marriage Story pays for his coffee."
— Mike Stoklasa, Half in the Bag
"I just sincerely hope that those three take the money that they're gonna make from Transformers and go off to make the best arthouse independent movie of all time to purge their souls for having been in Transformers''".
"I'm always being told that I have to do these movies I don't want to do, so that I get to do the movies I do want to do. When Dead Poets Society was done shooting, I was only eighteen years old and I was at Disney for a meeting. I was taking a leak next to [Touchstone head] David Hoberman and he said, "Well, the real question is whether you got the guts to be a movie star, the guts to want it". "Guts" meaning player. Because there's another kind of guts, the guts to try to do it without playing by his definitions. People try to make you feel bad, say, "So you're happy being a fringe artist?" "Yes! Yes I am. What kind of a real artist isn't a fringe artist?" So I don't buy it. I don't see that many people who become giant international movie stars that then go off and make all kinds of sophisticated, subversive, challenging adult films. Tom Cruise is in Magnolia. I admired that he did it, but I don't know that could bear to make the other eighteen movies he had to make to get there. I have some of that romantic '70s thing going, a very anti-corporate attitude. I feel this generation plays too much ball. I see young actors right now, making so much money, getting sucked up into so many movies, it just scares me. If actors and directors have a corporate mentality, then who in the world doesn't have a corporate mentality?"
"What've I been telling you? You gotta do the safe picture. Then you can do the art picture. But then sometimes you gotta do the payback picture because your friend says you owe him. [Aside Glance]"
