In a new interview with THR, mega-producer Jerry Bruckheimer broke his silence regarding The Lone Ranger, as he spoke at length about what it took to finally get the project green-lit.

As you’ll remember, production for the film was shut down due to an inflated budget back in August. But a month later the film was back on after Bruckheimer, directer Gore Verbinski, and Johnny Depp were able to cut the budget enough to satisfy Disney.

Here’s an excerpt of the interview:

THR: How did you [cut the budget]?

Bruckheimer: We redid the production plan. We originally laid it out to avoid winter. Every single location we had, there was winter — 30s at night, 50s during the day, best-case scenario. We were jumping around. California, New Mexico, Arizona, Utah. If we had a big crowd scene and then the next day we were shooting just Tonto and the Lone Ranger, we still had the crew “on” because you have them weekly. So we bunched the sequences that were big together, and for the smaller scenes [we] laid off the extras, the effects people, the makeup people. It costs an enormous amount with 150 extras on the set. It’s not the extras, it’s the people that support the extras. You’re still carrying all the wardrobe, makeup and hair people. We bunched together scenes with Tonto and the Lone Ranger, so we had a much smaller crew. We saved about $10 million just by doing that.

You can read the entire interview with The Hollywood Reporter, right here.

What do you think of this news? Do you think that the cuts in budget will hurt the project too much?