Wealth & Money Quote by Martin Scorsese

Scorsese isn’t romanticizing the starving-artist grind so much as exposing the math that governs even “great” cinema. The line lands because it punctures the myth of the all-powerful auteur: here’s a director synonymous with control and precision admitting that most of his films were, in some way, underfunded. Not creatively bankrupt, just chronically short on the one resource that buys you time.

“Another ten days” is deceptively modest. He doesn’t say a bigger budget, a longer shoot, a blank check. He asks for time on set - the space to refine performances, chase a lighting idea, reshoot a beat that didn’t land, or simply let a scene breathe. In film production, time is the currency that converts intention into texture. Cut it, and you don’t just lose shots; you lose options. The subtext is that many of the choices audiences read as style - a hard cut, a jolt of urgency, a rough edge - can be the byproduct of constraint, later alchemized into authorial signature.

There’s also a quiet critique of the industry’s risk calculus. Scorsese, of all people, should be “safe,” yet he’s describing a career spent bargaining for scraps of extra runway. It’s a reminder that filmmaking is less a pure act of expression than a negotiated truce between art and accounting - and that the margin between a masterpiece and “almost” can be ten days long.