Wealth & Money Quote by Marguerite Moreau

Moreau frames indie work as a kind of personal lab: small films are the place where an actor can test the limits of craft without the safety rails of a big budget. The line lands because it refuses the usual Hollywood euphemisms about "passion projects". She’s blunt about the trade: these movies are harder and they’re not for profit. That honesty is the point. In an industry built on spin, naming the money question upfront reads like a quiet act of realism.

The subtext is about leverage and survival. "You definitely want to do the little films" isn’t naive encouragement; it’s a strategy for staying artistically solvent when mainstream roles can flatten you into a type. Smaller productions often demand more from everyone: fewer takes, less time, less infrastructure, more problem-solving. That difficulty becomes a feature, not a bug, because it forces invention.

Her most interesting move is the phrase "the research that you have". Actors rarely get credited as researchers, but that’s what she’s talking about: the accumulated work of observing, reading, interviewing, rehearsing, and living with a character. In studio projects, that research can get sanded down by market logic or brand management. In little films, you can actually spend it. The intent isn’t to romanticize struggle; it’s to argue that the payoff is proof-of-concept: evidence of what you can build when curiosity, not commerce, is the primary engine.