Quotes About Control

Saddam Hussein admired, studied, and copied Stalin, the paragon of modern dictators.

I think especially in a world where you have so little say about what goes on in your life, or in the politics of the world around you, it is wonderful to go into that studio, and tell yourself what to do.

Could I have worked under a system where there were Draconian controls on my creativity, meaning budget, time, script choices, etc.? Definitely not. I would have fared poorly under the old studio system that guys like Howard Hawks did so well in. I cannot.

All the movies that I have done I have not been in control of. Sometimes there is a contractual situation where you go to the studio, and they kind of tell you which ones they want you to do.

We were all ruled by the studio system. I signed a contract for seven years.

I'm a big micro manager; I'm a stickler about organisation; everything needs a place, a purpose, and micro managing myself even when I'm in the studio.

I was sitting in the looping studio late one night, and I had this epiphany that they weren't paying me for my acting, for God's sake, but to own me. And from then on, it became clear and an awful lot easier to deal with.

I've had the luxury of owning my own studio, 24 analogue, 48 digital, endless effects, endless hardcore gear, that I don't have to rent, I don't get stuck with the bills, it's all mine.

But in marketing, the familiar is everything, and that is controlled by the studio. That is reaching its apogee now.

I prefer playing in the studio because you have much more control over things.

In the studio the director controls the actor's every move, every inflection, every expression.

That's why I'm really trying to produce my own stuff. This film was so good, because I produced it myself, and developed it, and made it with New Line, which is a smaller studio, so I was in control of a lot of stuff that I wasn't in control of for my other films.

I'm not interested in making a $60-million studio film with a bunch of 24-year-olds telling me what to do.

The business side of film has goofed up so many things, but even that's changing. It happened to the music industry and now it's happening to the film studios. It's crazy what's going on. But artists should have control of their work; especially if, as I always say, you never turn down a good idea and never take a bad idea.

My movies are not messed with by the studios.

There's no doubt that the patriarchy that we live in also controls the movie industry. The heads of the studios are men, and it's reflected in the scripts they buy and the work that gets made.

The actors are in control, getting outrageous amounts of money. The reason they're getting this kind of money is because the studios don't know what else to do. They don't have a clue about what to do except to pay an actor a lot of money.

Things have changed a great deal since the days of Mr. Mayer. The studios no longer control, as they did in those days, artists or directors or producers, as the case may be.

The studios have been taken over by marketing people and accountants.

I don't like to deal with studios.

In my day, the only people who achieved real independence were my father, Mary Pickford and Charles Chaplin, who, with D. W. Griffith, formed United Artists. Other than that, everybody belonged to the big studios. They had no say in their own careers.

If you look at successful studios, they're the ones with stabilized management.

I think the big studios shaped and formed the artists that they put under contract.

When you're not in studios, you don't have any luxuries; you can't control the elements, so you have to put up with those extremes.