A Quote by Robert Friedland

Promoting a stock is like making a movie. You've got to have stars, props, and a good script. — © Robert Friedland
Promoting a stock is like making a movie. You've got to have stars, props, and a good script.
A script is just a script. A good script can be a bad movie, so easily. It's the process that makes it good. You need a good script, don't get me wrong, but you need all those other things to make a good movie. You really do.
Being movie director you've got the art department, you've got the actors, you've got the camera department, you've got make-up and hair, and props. You've got your finger in all these pies, and you're making sure that everything cooks at the right temperature.
The script is so key to making a good movie. But everything is against you when you're making a movie: the logistics of putting a crew out where you need to go, whether the light is fading; if the weather's not right, something's wrong.
The way I pick movies is, first, if the script is any good. Then, if the script is good, who else is in it, the director, the producer, all that. If you have all that, there's a chance the movie will be great. If the script isn't right, or the director or cast isn't right, you've got no shot in hell.
Any good movie or script usually, if they're doing their job, gives the highest platform possible for an actor to leap off of, and that script was very high up there. It was a very smart, tight script. There was a lot of improv, as well, once we got to the set, but a lot of the original script was also in there.
I've realized that what you think of when you make a 'big movie,' if it's actually a green screen movie, it's like doing independent New York theater because you don't have any backgrounds or props. So it's kind of like making the lowest budgeted film you could possibly imagine, plus $100 million.
Making a movie is like making an ocean voyage, and the script is your ship.
When you hear Treat's [ Williams] doing a movie, or you'd like to work with Treat again, you hope the script is good. And then you find out the script is good. You go and you do it for the fun of it. And you feel like you can be proud of something.
There's this group online that I frequent. It's a group of prop crazies just like me called the Replica Props Forum, and it's people who trade, make and travel in information about movie props.
I read the script for 'Somnia' when I was filming 'Oculus,' and I remember calling my manager going, 'I really need to do this movie,' and he's like, 'How about you finish this one first and then you see it?' I was like, 'I don't need to. I don't need to. You need to read this. I need to do this movie. The script is very good.'
A horrible script 99 percent of the time means a horrible movie. But if you start with a good script, odds are you're going to have a good movie.
Yeah, when you're making a film, the book is a good tool, but once you have the script and you're making a movie, you have to let go of the book.
With a good script a good director can produce a masterpiece; with the same script a mediocre director can make a passable film. But with a bad script even a good director can’t possibly make a good film. For truly cinematic expression, the camera and the microphone must be able to cross both fire and water. That is what makes a real movie. The script must be something that has the power to do this.
Relative to the power that movie stars have, and producers and directors, I would say that even the most respected screenwriters have very little power in Hollywood. I don't think it's in the nature of the writer's profession to go after that power. Writers spend their time alone, hallucinating, writing, making these things up, while these other people are out schmoozing, making connections, meeting each other. They are trotting the corridors of power and making sure they've put their own imprints in it. And they're promoting themselves and their images, as they should.
I'm in awe of directors like the Coen brothers who can shoot their script and edit it, and that's the movie. They're not discovering the movie in postproduction. They're editing the script they shot.
I started making a point earlier that women's cancer rates are skyrocketing, and we have some women movie stars, young women movie stars, who are smoking in many of their movies.
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