Wealth & Money Quote by Alanis Morissette

Morissette’s line lands like a polite reality check to the romantic myth of the lone auteur. Coming from a musician whose breakthrough was powered by a voice, a pen, and a producer’s ear, she’s pointing at the structural difference between making art and manufacturing an event. Music can be solitary, fast, and relatively cheap; film is a small city that has to agree on lunch, lighting, and liability.

The specificity of “20 to 500 people” does two things. First, it demystifies cinema by giving it a headcount, turning “vision” into payroll. Second, the wide range signals how elastic the machine is: even a “small” movie is still a coordinated bureaucracy, and the bigger it gets, the more it resembles an institution with its own gravity. That’s the subtext: once you’re coordinating hundreds of livelihoods, creative choices stop being purely aesthetic. They become risk management.

“A lot of money” and “the stakes are a lot higher” isn’t just about budgets; it’s about permission. In music, failure can be private, even generative. In film, failure is public and expensive, so it invites gatekeeping: executives, insurers, marketers, test screenings. Morissette isn’t complaining so much as explaining why movies so often feel designed by committee. When more people need certainty, art gets nudged toward consensus.

It also reads as a self-protective boundary. She’s implicitly defending why an artist might hesitate to jump mediums: not because of lack of ambition, but because the medium itself raises the cost of experimentation.