On ‚Mystic River,‘ I had to cut my salary and everyone else’s to get it made.

Where I think the most work needs to be done is behind the camera, not in front of it.

Learning to make films is very easy. Learning what to make films about is very hard.

The secret to the movie business, or any business, is to get a good education in a subject besides film – whether it’s history, psychology, economics, or architecture – so you have something to make a movie about. All the skill in the world isn’t going to help you unless you have something to say.

Watch your finances like a hawk.

Every movie I make teaches me something. That’s why I keep making them.

I’ve done everything I wanted to do, even if I have had to pay a very high price – which has been the case most of the time.

When grand plans for scientific and defence technologies are made, do the people in power think about the sacrifices the people in the laboratories and fields have to make?

When I’m making an American film, it’s more safe because there are so many people on the set to watch me. Whatever I do, they say, ‚What are you doing!? Tell me first!‘ There are so many restrictions.

Balanced budget requirements seem more likely to produce accounting ingenuity than genuinely balanced budgets.

I’ve done films where we don’t rehearse, and I’ve done films where we heavily rehearse. I like rehearsals.

Give me five minutes with a person’s checkbook, and I will tell you where their heart is.

I’ve had the opportunity to work with so many great directors. Different styles, as well, like Gus Van Sant. He just does the casting and the milieu and let’s you do your thing, quietly. Bertolucci, who can talk to you about your internal world in quite a creative way or just say, ‚Well, put your hand over here.‘

Never spend your money before you have earned it.

I want to make a good, solid kung fu movie.

Money is like an arm or leg – use it or lose it.

It is totally different making films in the East than in the West. In the East, I make my own Jackie Chan films, and it’s like my family. Sometimes I pick up the camera because I choreograph all the fighting scenes, even when I’m not fighting. I don’t have my own chair. I just sit on the set with everybody.

You just don’t know when you get in the editing room what you will need as a link or a tool for a transition. If you’re in a room, and there’s a kettle boiling, get a shot of it. Don’t worry if people think you’re nuts.

If you know how to spend less than you get, you have the philosopher’s stone.

Every time I make American film I just trust American directors and American writers.

When I was a kid, there were no credit cards. Instead, retailers offered layaway plans. My mom would go to a store, such as a furniture outlet, choose the sofa she wanted, and put it on layaway. That meant she put a little money down to hold the sofa, and every payday she’d pay a little toward the purchase.

I was going to go to a four-year college and be an anthropologist or to an art school and be an illustrator when a friend convinced me to learn photography at the University of Southern California. Little did I know it was a school that taught you how to make movies! It had never occurred to me that I’d ever have any interest in filmmaking.

Too many people spend money they haven’t earned to buy things they don’t want to impress people they don’t like.

In 3-D filmmaking, I can take images and manipulate them infinitely, as opposed to taking still photographs and laying them one after the other. I move things in all directions. It’s such a liberating experience.

Many people take no care of their money till they come nearly to the end of it, and others do just the same with their time.

Humility must always be the portion of any man who receives acclaim earned in the blood of his followers and the sacrifices of his friends.

I will make action movies, I think, for a few more years, another five years.

Rather go to bed without dinner than to rise in debt.

I think if you make a good movie, people walk away arguing.

I have been trying to retire to the back of the camera for quite a few years, and in 1970, when I first started directing, I said, ‚If I could pull this off, I can some day move to the back of the camera and stay there.‘

You want to be a writer? Start writing. You want to be a filmmaker? Start shooting stuff on your phone right now.

A penny saved is two pence clear.

The movie business is a big gamble.

It’s clearly a budget. It’s got a lot of numbers in it.

The time to save is now. When a dog gets a bone, he doesn’t go out and make a down payment on a bigger bone. He buries the one he’s got.

Eventually, it came to this place like, ‚I’d like to direct, but I need to find the story to tell.‘ ‚Man of Tai Chi‘ became the story to tell.

The fashion of the world is to avoid cost, and you encounter it.

When we talk about how movies used to be made, it was over 100 years of film, literal, physical film, with emulsion, that we would expose to light and we would get pictures.

First grade is very cheap. It’s the later grades where you have to spend a lot of money if you don’t do it right.

Well, I think that California has had a history of always spending more money than it takes in.

In America there’s no way I can make the kind of movie I like to make.

I think that I know the value of a dollar.

In a budget, how important is art versus music versus athletics versus computer programming? At the end of the day, some of those trade-offs will be made politically.

You know people talk about federal money as if it falls from heaven. You know we thank heaven for it, but it came out of people’s pockets – and I’ve driven all over Washington, D.C., I cannot find the money tree.

There’s people constantly asking you for something on set, so the multi-tasking of motherhood transfers very well to being a director. And I think you’re compassionate.

Being a stunt coordinator, I have to take care not only of myself but I have to make sure everyone is safe.

It’s hard work making movies. It’s like being a doctor: you work long hours, very hard hours, and it’s emotional, tense work. If you don’t really love it, then it ain’t worth it.

Ethics is in origin the art of recommending to others the sacrifices required for cooperation with oneself.

We might come closer to balancing the Budget if all of us lived closer to the Commandments and the Golden Rule.

I like the idea of working in different genres and transcending genres and hopefully finding success, and ultimately make movies people like.

I always felt that if I was going to do a movie, I wanted it to be authentic.

It is not how much one makes but to what purpose one spends.

I like the anonymity that directors can have about their films.

Yes, I’m always – I’m always surprised when you make a film and you live with it a while and you put it out, you never dream that anybody is ever going to want to really see it.

It would be great to be 105 and still making films.

If my films don’t show a profit, I know I’m doing something right.

Thrift is of great revenue.

Through my films I’m eventually trying to one day tell the truth. I don’t know if I’m ever going to get there, but I’m slowly letting pieces of myself out there and then maybe by the time I’m 85, I’ll look back and say, ‚All right, that about sums it up.‘

Because my career is so important, I think I make a lot of – I wouldn’t call them sacrifices, but just concessions for my job. I love what I do, and I want to do it for a long time.

I like having my hands in the clay. I like the movie-making process.

When I first starting making money, when I first made my first six-digits, I was – my big thing was I went to put super unleaded in my truck for the first time.