Wealth & Money Quote by Bill Forsyth

Greed would be the obvious read here, but Forsyth’s line is sneakier: it’s about bargaining with reality by aiming past it. “Three times” isn’t just exaggeration, it’s a survival tactic. In film, the number you “really want” is often the number that will get cut first by producers, financiers, or circumstances. Ask for exactly what you need and you’ve already surrendered leverage; ask for triple and you might land on the original figure after everyone takes their bite. The joke is that the only reliable path to modest ambition is inflated ambition.

Forsyth, a director associated with wry, humane storytelling, frames the maneuver with disarming simplicity. He doesn’t dress it up as strategy; he presents it as personal ease, as if the system has trained him into a particular kind of absurd honesty. That’s the subtext: creative work isn’t funded by purity of intention but by performance. You don’t just make movies, you make cases for movies, and the pitch has to be bigger than the product because the gatekeepers’ reflex is to shrink.

There’s also a psychological tell. “The amount I really want” suggests a private, perhaps reasonable desire, while “three times” signals the public self you’re forced to become: bolder, hungrier, less apologetic. It’s comic, but the comedy is coping. The industry rewards the person who can turn need into swagger, even if everyone knows it’s theater.