Dicks and Borat director Larry Charles says huge movie budgets are “offensive”

Larry Charles’ films and TV shows tend to have some kind of satirical bent—the man has worked with Sacha Baron Cohen and Larry David a bunch of times, after all—but while speaking with Marc Maron on a recent episode of WTF (via The Hollywood Reporter), Charles revealed that there’s a much more subtle statement he’s making with his movies than anything he had Borat doing. (As if you can get more subtle than Borat.)

Charles, whose new movie Dicks: The Musical started a limited rollout this week, said that he finds it “politically” and “ethically” offensive that some movies cost $250 million when the world is “in the state that it’s in.” He acknowledges that people have to “make their art in the way they can, and they reach each other in the way they can,” but these big media companies know that they can get people to give them money if they’re “seduced by great TV shows and great movies,” so we get “distracted by those things” and forget that what makes them possible is this nefarious capitalist system—which he calls “an authoritarian Big Brother sort of thing” because of how powerful it is.

But, since he wants to make stuff (even though everything is “owned by someday,” he bemoans), Charles says he pushes back against the evil of capitalism is by keeping his budgets as low as possible. That way, he can prove that it’s possible to make a movie with a low-budget and force movie studios to recognize that a “radical little work” that doesn’t cost any money can still make money. In other words, if he can make something for really cheap, it means that the whole practice of dumping millions of dollars into a project just so you can make millions of more dollars is stupid and unnecessary.