My audience loves seeing me pump large amounts of money into action and sets. And it works. I'm not saying that films made within a budget are wrong. But when audiences come to see my film with their families, I guess they are spending at least 10 per cent of their monthly income. I don't want to cheat them.
Seven out of my nine films were hits. 80 per cent of the audience loves my films; the remaining 20 per may be right in their opinion, but that doesn't make me wrong. If I try too hard to woo them, I'd be cheating my core audience.
The top 10 per cent of the US population appropriated 91 per cent of income growth between 1989 and 2006, while the top 1 per cent took 59 per cent.
I owe 90 per cent of my life to people because I am a public figure, but 10 per cent is private to me. And I am not saying it in a defensive way. I feel my life has been made into a TV serial.
Here's the truth. The proposed top rate of income tax is not 50 per cent. It is 50 per cent plus 1.5 per cent national insurance paid by employees plus 13.3 per cent paid by employers. That's not 50 per cent. Two years from now, Britain will have the highest tax rate on earned income of any developed country.
When I said that something was going to cost a certain amount of money, I actually knew what I was talking about. The biggest problem that we were having on the financing front was people with lots of money saying "you need more money to make this film [Moon]," and us saying "no this is the first feature film we want to do it at a budget where we sort of prove ourselves at the starting end of making feature films; we can do this for $5 million." That is where the convincing part between me and Stuart came, we had to convince people with money that we could do it for that budget.
Our royalty statement has been minimal and menial. Really. We don't collect more than a per cent of a per cent of a per cent of a per cent of a per cent of a per cent of a per cent. We get maybe the seventh of 1 percent.
Depression is 80 per cent of my condition, and 10 per cent is mania, and 10 per cent is what we call normal. I say that must be when I am buying groceries. Or vacuuming.
This is a wrong notion that I work in big budget films. Infact, usually low budget films are offered to me, they come and say it's a good story but they don't have the money.
If we want to contrast what we have done in the past few years on delivery with what the right hon. and learned Gentleman delivered, let us remember the interest rates at 10 per cent. to 15 per cent., the 1.5 million fewer people in work, the boom and the bust and the borrowing at 8 per cent.
Captaincy is 90 per cent luck and 10 per cent skill. But don't try it without that 10 per cent.
The only way to learn writing is by writing. Talent, as charming as it sounds, amounts to no more than 12 per cent of the process. Work is 80 per cent. The remaining 8 per cent is 'luck' or 'zeitgeist' - in short, things that are not in our hands.
Ninety-five per cent of films are born of frustration, of self despair, of ambition for survival, for money, for fattening bank accounts. Five per cent, maybe less, are made because a man has an idea, an idea which he must express.
In the olden days films used to become huge hits because of family audiences. But nowadays certain films cater to youth audience and once that is exploited then the film stops. and some films are for a mature audience. My aim is to satisfy all the sections of the audiences.
I enjoy the making of the film and it's something for me to do. If nobody ever comes to my films, if people don't want to give me money to make films, that will stop me. But as long as people come all over the world and I have an audience and I have ideas for films, I will do them for as long as I enjoy the process. And I like the whole process of making a film.
The Bell curve is a fact of life. The blacks on average score 85 per cent on IQ and it is accurate, nothing to do with culture. The whites score on average 100. Asians score more. The Bell curve authors put it at least 10 points higher. These are realities that, if you do not accept, will lead to frustration because you will be spending money on wrong assumptions and the results cannot follow.
At the end of the day, regardless of whether you're doing a huge budget film or a small budget film, you still want the film to do well, and have people see it. That's the whole point. You want to put some kind of message into your films, and you want people to see it.