It's one of the great gifts of having so little money that you are able to make these kinds of radical conceits that you could never afford to do had you had a reasonable budget,.
I feel despised there, for having so little money; also for once having had so much. I never actually had it, of course. Father had it, and then Richard. But money was imputed to me, the same way crimes are imputed to those who've simply been present at them.
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.
I met my wife, I had no money, I had nothing, and I started my family without really, my career was nowhere, but I had these other businesses, I had these things I was doing to be able to afford a small home.
We had such a small budget making our first record, and the only way we could make it work was that the record company would find studio time in the middle of the night - literally, that was so cheap that we could afford to do it.
I'm a product of state schools. I had a working-class family. We had no books. I was the first to go to college. But I didn't really think about it, or about making money. I was just going to be an artist, and I've been fortunate. I've never had to work for anybody nor have I had to write for money. Maybe that's another reason that I've been able to be productive. I haven't had to use my writing to make a living.
I have been very lucky because I have had the opportunity to see what it's like to have little or no money and what it's like to have a lot of it. I'm lucky because people make such a big deal of it and, if I didn't experience both, I wouldn't be able to know how important it really is for me. I can't comment on what having a lot of money means to others, but I do know that for me, having a lot more money isn't a lot better than having enough to cover the basics.
I guess HBO did a giant 'War in the Pacific' mini-series that cost, like, a fortune, and there was a little moment where they literally had no money. And even though the show had become kind of a cult hit, there was an issue of whether they could actually afford to do it.
Jay and I used to talk about this: we never had a goal of making a lot of money. We had a goal of having a business of our own. And there were many times we could have sold out and had a lot of money. Billions. We just put it in our pocket and go home, OK? But that was never our goal.
For me, the scale of the budget is part of the creative process. 'Swingers' is the movie it is because we made it for exactly the right budget. Had it been made for a higher number, it would not have been as imaginative as we had to make it, given the budget constraints we had.
I never had the help of money in the background - it could be the cherry on the top a little bit - whereas some others had that to offer.
I did what I did not to make money but to help prevent the defeat of a new system which had, at great cost, given ordinary people food and fares which they could afford, a good education and a health service.
When I was 14, I did all kinds of different odd jobs. I had a chicken farm, had an ice cream operation in the summertime, worked as a caddy; all things to make money and save money. Save money in order to invest - that was the first step, though I never really accumulated very much because of other demands like bicycles and things like that.
I never had a budget, I never had a manager, I never had a PR. I never had nothing. I was getting everything straight out the mud.
The biggest shock when I lost it all was the realization that so much of my life had been out of my control. When I started to make the money back, I vowed that it would never happen again. I bought things only when I could afford them. There was no big mortgage, no cars on hire purchase. I remember buying a TR6 sports car for £6,000, and funnily enough it gave me more pleasure than the Porsche ever had.
This is the first time a newly inaugurated president has had any impact on a current budget." What that means is that normally when a president's inaugurated in January, the budget for the first calendar year of his term or the first nine months is already done. So from January 21st all the way 'til October when the new budget's done, the president has to deal with the previous Congress' budget and has nothing to say about it. What they're saying is that Donald Trump has had a record-breaking, never-before-seen thing by having an impact on the budget in his first year.
There are damn few great writers and I'm not one of them. While I could afford to I played with words. When I could no longer afford that I wrote for money.