Roger Corman Quotes

#1. I'm a post-Abner Jay kind of guy mixed with Roger Corman and Frankie Lymon and the Teenagers.

Anthony Braxton

#2. I also have experience working with American producer Roger Corman who knows a lot of secrets in making movies look bigger than their budget.

Timur Bekmambetov

#3. Don't show the monster too much at the beginning." - Roger Corman, 1997

Beverly Gray

#4. Roger Corman exploited all of the young people who worked for him, but he really gave you responsibility and opportunity. So it was kind of a fair deal.

Francis Ford Coppola

#5. I landed a job with Roger Corman. The job was to write the English dialogue for a Russian science fiction picture. I didn't speak any Russian. He didn't care whether I could understand what they were saying; he wanted me to make up dialogue.

Francis Ford Coppola

#6. If Mr. Vincent Price were to be co-starred with Miss Bette Davis in a story by Mr. Edgar Allan Poe directed by Mr. Roger Corman, it could not fully express the pent-up violence and depravity of a single day in the life of the average family.

Quentin Crisp

#7. If you write a movie for Roger Corman, it's going to get made. You saw it almost the next day.

John Sayles

#8. I love the process of making films and an incidental satisfaction is the fact that most of them made money.

Roger Corman

#9. The safest genre is the horror film. But the most unsafe - the most dangerous - is comedy. Because even if your horror film isn't very good, you'll get a few screams and you're okay. With a comedy, if they don't laugh, you're dead.

Roger Corman

#10. What was she doing here? Private detectives were for insecure housewives, parents of troubled teens, bent old ladies who'd forgotten where they parked. She was none of the above. She was a sane, stable, capable adult. Yet here she was.
Desperate times, and all that.

Laura Oliva

#11. Motion pictures are the art form of the 20th century, and one of the reasons is the fact that films are a slightly corrupted artform. They fit this century - they combine Art and business!

Roger Corman

#12. One of the worst things you can do is have a limited budget and try to do some big looking film. That's when you end up with very bad work.

Roger Corman

#13. Once they were men. Now they are land crabs.

Roger Corman

#14. You can make a movie about anything, as long as it has a hook to hang the advertising on.

Roger Corman

#15. There is an alternative. It's an old alternative. It's not for everybody. It's only for people who are smart, limited market. It's enlightenment.

Frederick Lenz

#16. Somebody said, 'Roger doesn't know how to spend money.' And I thought, 'I don't spend money because I don't have it!' If I had it, I could spend money! That's about the only time I was told that!

Roger Corman

#17. The great things of life are what they seem to be, and for that reason, strange as it may sound to you, are often difficult to interpret. But the little things of life are symbols. We receive our bitter lessons most easily through them.

Oscar Wilde

#18. I think the art film, or the auteur-driven film - and not only foreign, but domestic films following that path - can get a small share of the box office. And I think that small share may open up a little bit.

Roger Corman

#19. My father was an engineer, .. But I found out that the film critics for the Stanford Daily got free passes for all the films. So I became first an assistant critic and then the main film critic. Those free passes changed my life.

Roger Corman

#20. People gravitate occasionally to the brilliantly made art low budget films, which is maybe one out of every five hundred low budget films made.

Roger Corman

#21. There are eleven or twelve or thirteen cities in China with populations of over 10 million people and most people in the West have never even heard of these cities.

Roger Corman

#22. Nature avenges herself speedily on the hard pedantry that would chain her waves. She is no literalist. Every thing must be taken genially, and we must be at the top of our condition, to understand any thing rightly.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

#23. Sometimes I think on television, you use maybe a tenth of what you are able to do. So it's nice to go, 'Well, I'm gonna take two months and reinvest in acting and storytelling.' You don't get to do that on television.

Sarah Paulson

#24. Other writers, producers, and directors of low-budget films would often put down the film they were making, saying it was just something to make money with. I never felt that. If I took the assignment, I'd give it my best shot.

Roger Corman

#25. As a producer, I probably am a little stronger than most, since I was a director originally.

Roger Corman

#26. Having an affair with your good friend's wife while he's in an institution and your wife is in a hospital ranks somewhere between Benedict Arnold and the guy who invented Girls Gone Wild on the spectrum of Total Dickheads in American History.

Daniel O'Brien

#27. When I started in the late 1950s, every film I made - no matter how low the budget - got a theatrical release. Today, less that 20-percent of our films get a theatrical release.

Roger Corman

#28. When I grow up, I want to have an exhibit called 'American Motel.'

Morley Safer

#29. I've never made the film I wanted to make. No matter what happens, it never turns out exactly as I hoped.

Roger Corman

#30. Maybe it's just a matter of getting older and being aware that the market for medium-budget and low-budget films, which is of course what I spent most of my life making, has diminished. And maybe the quantity of ideas has diminished a little bit.

Roger Corman

#31. Each other refers to two nouns; one another refers to three or more, a distinction that careful writers generally observe.

Martha J. Kolln

#32. Women's networks are a necessary part of life. A mixture of empathy and brainstorming can move mountains.

Hazel Hawke

#33. Horror films have been with us forever, so you can't say I originated that in any way, but it sort of brought back a classical way to make a horror film.

Roger Corman

#34. I do not want God to give me what I want; I trust Him to give me what I need. The truth is, He is infinitely wiser than I am. If we always get what we ask for, I for one will cease to pray.

Gary Inrig

#35. Jim Cameron is proof that if you are good, you'll get promoted.

Roger Corman

#36. I'm not going to shoot seven days a week. I think it's counterproductive. I think you're going to have people stumbling around after a couple of weeks.

Roger Corman

#37. In science-fiction films the monster should always be bigger than the leading lady.

Roger Corman

#38. I think one of the reasons movies are the quintessential modern art form is that it is partially a business. The director needs a crew - the writer, the producer, etcetera - and to have that, he needs money.

Roger Corman

#39. In order to create art today, you have to compromise your art somewhat and be a businessman.

Roger Corman