It Only Takes One Buyer

There are a great many scripts, and only a certain number of movies get made. You just do the math. It’s like if you’re an actor. You go out for fifty jobs, and if you’re lucky, maybe you’ll get one of them. The math is against you, and the rejection is part of what you do, so you keep doing it. It only takes one buyer, and sometimes it takes years to find that buyer. When you’re starting out, you’re sort of curious about why they passed, but you never get the right answer anyway, so you just learn to say, “Okay, so they passed. Next?”

PAUL SCHRADER