What's with the name?

Some readers have puzzled over the title of this site, Good Small Films. A few have emailed to ask from which movie the phrase is taken, assuming it is uttered here or there by an Allen character. While those instincts are good, the phrase is not taken from an Allen film. It was snatched from an Allen interview.

Simon Garfield wrote a good story, perhaps the best we've read in the last decade, for the Observer during the filming of Match Point. While with the American director Garfield recorded these words

'In the United States things have changed a lot, and it's hard to make good small films now,' he says. 'There was a time in the 1950s when I wanted to be a playwright, because until that time movies, which mostly came out of Hollywood, were stupid and not interesting. Then we started to get wonderful European films, and American films started to grow up a little bit, and the industry became more fun to work in than the theatre. I loved it. But now it's taken a turn in the other direction and studios are back in command and are not that interested in pictures that make only a little bit of money. When I was younger, every week we'd get a Fellini or a Bergman or a Godard or Truffaut, but now you almost never get any of that. Filmmakers like myself have a hard time. The avaricious studios couldn't care less about good films - if they get a good film they're twice as happy, but money-making films are their goal. They only want these $100 million pictures that make $500m.