Eric Fellner Quotations

You can't develop a great car and sell it as an independent. You can develop a great car and make a deal with Mercedes.

'Billy Elliot' embodies the idea that anyone can achieve anything regardless of their socio-economic background.

Somebody has to invest in creating the movies of the future.

Technical problems are like gremlins. They come and go.

There's so much competition for leisure time, more than ever.

The idea that the Tony committee and the New York theater community as a whole have embraced Billy Elliot is very, very exciting.

Apart from 'Stoned,' I can't think of a film that's made me think, 'Blimey, that should have been at Cannes.'

The more you keep costs down, the more freedom you have creatively.

For us in England, the relative value of the pound against the dollar, that has a huge impact on how easy it is to get our films made in the U.K.

I'm a blind optimist when going into things.

You can get swept away by a musical, but real tears are rare.

Film is not a national business. It's international. And its centre will always be Hollywood.

I have always thought we should think less about the British film industry as an entity, and more about getting British talent working.

I think Cannes is usually pretty fair in choosing what will play well to the home festival crowd.

With 'Anna Karenina,' I just think it's a stunning visual tour de force for a director who is at the top of his game.

You never get time at Working Title, sadly, to enjoy any film's success, because you're worrying about the next lot.

It is rare that you read scripts that genuinely move you and make you feel that, regardless of the commercial possibilities, you have to make the film.

When you watch a Coen brothers movie, it is always so certain about what it is trying to portray. That is their strength. The minute they write a word, they know how it will look on-screen. They are very purposeful, with no kind of mistakes.

'Billy Elliot' prides itself on being a family show, and it made sense to specifically cater to a family audience with an earlier evening curtain time.

I think it would be a good thing in the creative community if there was less embarrassment of this word 'commercial' because that's how you make a business.

Mike Leigh and Ken Loach are the people I look up to. They are quality film-makers making interesting, controversial, ground-breaking movies with very little eye on the marketplace.

My theory is, I don't know how long it's going to be, five or ten years, there will be only two ways to see a movie, and that will either be on your computer through your TV screen or in the cinema, end of story. There will be no DVD; that's it - simple.

Do we have good writers, producers and actors in the U.K.? Yes we do.

It's fantastic to see 'Les Miserables' become the top-grossing film at the U.K. box office.

It might sound a small thing, but if you want to get Tom Cruise into your movie, without a track record or without those agents knowing you, it's almost impossible. Now I can get through to pretty much anyone I want. Of course, 90 per cent of the time they still say no.

If there's a British film in the marketplace that is successful on a worldwide basis - whether it's 'A Room with a View,' 'Four Weddings' or 'The Full Monty' - money follows, and everyone tries to emulate that success.

The U.K. needs more first class studio space to encourage the growth of the film and TV sector.

So, to me, it does shift, but it goes round. It just keeps going round and round and round. So if you have the longevity you have the belief and you have the resources to just keep at it you just ignore all that and just keep going where you're at.

Then something fails and they're all out again, but DVD revenue is disappearing, you know, it's not disappearing but it's going off a cliff and what that's done is it's polarized the industry in a way that I've never seen before where studios are making less, they're bifurcating their choices where they're either going very, very big or they're just picking up a few rights on an acquisition basis or making really small things.

That middle ground of films used to be 70, 80, 90, 100; now it's like anything over 20 or under 140, the middle ground has become this huge area where they don't really want to be.

Now there's always exceptions to that and the reason is if the film doesn't really work, whereas before you could rely on a decent amount of DVD sales to prop up the revenue to ensure that you got out in a decent manner, now if the film doesn't work, the film doesn't work and there's none of that DVD revenue to fall back on and you can lose a huge, huge sum of money on a big budget movie.

The shifts happen on a regular basis, but it's like a cycle. So things come in and out of vogue and then five years later they're back in vogue. Or there seems to be a theory that this is the way the industry will go and everybody goes over that way and then something happens to the country and you're back again at the place you were.

People are piling into England, there's lots of studio films happening there. When we budget our films we multiply it by 1.55 it's much easier than when we multiply it by 2 so the cost looks a lot less in dollars, because everybody talks in dollars in terms of finance. And then the shift that I think is coming, I hope is coming, is movies made in a..."simple" is the wrong word, you visit movie sets all the time I imagine, the whole process has just got so big.

I think everyone's going to really try to keep costs down. The more you keep costs down, the more freedom you have creatively. I can protect my filmmakers from any form of creative interference, be it from anywhere, if we're all acting in a responsible way and making the pain of a failure be as little as possible.

My theory is, I don't know how long it's going to be five or ten years, there will be only two ways to see a movie and that will either be on your computer through your TV screen or in the cinema, end of story. There will be no DVD, that's it, simple.

The pay window will be: you can choose how and when you see, whether you see it on Comcast or Warner's Cable delivery system or Sky in the UK or you can buy it through Apple, or you might even buy it directly from the studio's site. Who knows? But that will be it. You'll go to the cinema and you'll find a way of digitally interacting with the piece; you'll either buy it or rent it or whatever.

For me, I can't tell you if the film is good or bad, all I can say is for me the film is way better than I had expectation of us being able to make. So for me that's the most important thing. Have we exceeded our dream in terms of what it could be?

The dream was to not only make a good-looking film that engaged, but also had the DNA of the show so the fans would love it and also as important had the opportunity to cross over out of the fans because of the price-point. You make a film that's 60 million dollars you can't just appeal to musical theater fans.

There's always that possibility. But, it would take a hell of a lot of work. Because unlike a movie where you just have to do a little ADR and then some mixing, we've actually got to bring the orchestra back because there is music, as you probably noticed, right the way through the film so you have to orchestrate all of that extra time.

It wasn't like we cut songs out; we cut bits of songs, bits of action or bits of whatever. So we would have to go back in get a full orchestra re-orchestrate it, re-score it, re-record it. It's a massive job. But, if there's a demand we can always discuss it.

In terms of putting the cast together, no problems. You know, the only problem always is just price-point. Our ambitions as we get older, all of us, is to try and do more.

Oh, IMDB, yeah; there's a few things on there that are TV, they're not film, some things they think we did that we didn't. There's a few inaccuracies in there. It's terrifying though, isn't it?

The problem with Hot Fuzz and Shaun of the Dead is that they worked brilliantly in the UK, the US, and Australia; internationally they haven't worked so well because people don't know the films as well as in the English speaking languages. So when it comes to putting the budgets together it's quite challenging. So those are the problems you have.

Something like small English films were in vogue you had something like The Crying Game and everyone piled into London and wanted to make small English movies.

So that is new in terms of where I've seen the shifts. Otherwise, it's all about taste and taste just keeps going round and round and round.

The U.K. needs more first class studio space to encourage the growth of the film and TV sector.

But in the former, those movie sets that you've been on like that, even if they're huge movies and most of its being spent in special effects afterwards, I think that's the way that we're going.

Making movies is like herding cats.

I love all my Wrights and it would be impossible to say which one I love more, but if you really pushed me, it would be Joe.

Do we have good writers, producers and actors in the U.K.? Yes we do.

The writer Richard Curtis is a genius.