I love creating partnerships; I love not having to bear the entire burden of the creative storytelling, and when I have unions like with George Lucas and Peter Jackson, it's really great; not only do I benefit, but the project is better for it.
Documentaries are the first line of education, and the second line of education is dramatization, such as 'The Pacific'.
People have forgotten how to tell a story. Stories don't have a middle or an end any more. They usually have a beginning that never stops beginning.
I want to be the Cecil B. DeMille of science fiction.
When I grow up, I still want to be a director.
It starts with the writer-it's a familiar dictum, but somehow it keeps getting forgotten along the way. No film-maker, irrespective of his electronic bag of tricks, can ever afford to forget his commitment to the written word.
I love editing. It's one of my favorite parts about filmmaking.
Audiences are harder to please if you're just giving them effects, but they're easy to please if it's a good story.
The public has an appetite for anything about imagination - anything that is as far away from reality as is creatively possible.
I think all directors should be animators.
The turning point in my career was Jaws. It was a turning point because I was a director-for-hire before Jaws and because it was such a big hit I could do any movie I wanted and Hollywood just wrote me a cheque.
The essence of what it is to be American is the deep moral urge to be free, to freely express yourself and have the right to do so, and to look at all people as equals.
This is a time when we need to smile more and Hollywood movies are supposed to do that for people in difficult times.
I once said that CGI makes you less inventive. At the time I was bemoaning the loss of the practical stunt. If a stunt can be done practically and safely, I'd rather do it old-style.
The costume the actors wear and if they're in stylized makeup and wigs in a live-action movie let's say, in a big costume drama, even though it does give them a sense of great ambience and environment and they kind of feel like they're in a great court, or if they feel like they're in the old west, or if they feel like they're being chased by hobbits or dinosaurs, it all comes down to the actors looking each other in the eye.
I'm 62 years old. Am I old enough to win a lifetime achievement award? Yes, I am. Thank you very much.
I thought film was more important than life itself for many years. But I was naive to the world until my first child was born in 1985.
Only a generation of readers will span a generation of writers.
All of us every single year, we're a different person. I don't think we're the same person all our lives.
You can be great just by being yourself.
Steve Jobs was the greatest inventor since Thomas Edison. He put the world at our fingertips.
Twenty years from now, there will still be a square screen, maybe even larger, and people will be sitting in a large, dark space, and they won't know each other unless they bring friends along.
All good ideas start out as bad ideas, that's why it takes so long.
Casting sometimes is fate and destiny more than skill and talent, from a director's point of view.
Everybody who works for Amblin Television has to do five jobs.
There are three movies that I am exceptionally proud of in my life, and I rarely commit to a list of films that I like, that I've made... but these are the three films that I was passionately connected to. The first was 'ET,' the second 'Schindler's List,' and third is 'Saving Private Ryan.'
I am an American Jew and aware of the sensitivities involved in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
When I was a kid, there was no collaboration; it's you with a camera bossing your friends around. But as an adult, filmmaking is all about appreciating the talents of the people you surround yourself with and knowing you could never have made any of these films by yourself.
Every time I go to a movie, it's magic, no matter what the movie's about.
I usually do about five cuts as a director. I haven't ever directed a film where I haven't made five passes through the movie, and that takes a long time.
Why pay a dollar for a bookmark? Why not use the dollar for a bookmark?
I get that same queasy, nervous, thrilling feeling every time I go to work. That's never worn off since I was 12 years-old with my dad's 8-millimeter movie camera.
And I may often question choices I make as a producer. But I've never questioned the choices I make as a director.
[The way Stanley Kubrick] tells a story is antithetical to the way we are accustomed to receiving stories.
I think that the perceived downs in my own career come from just managing my time and not feeling that I have enough time for my family or my friends. You could put that in the personal life category but it's all one category because I've got to balance my family.
The love we do not show here on Earth is the only thing that hurts us in the after-life.
The work that I'm proudest of is the work that I'm most afraid of.
I'll probably never win an Oscar, but I'll sure have a lot of fun! I really believe that movies are the great escape.
Tracking action without cutting is the least jarring method of placing the audience into a real-time experience where they are the ones making the subtle choices of where and when to look.
As a Jew I am aware of how important the existence of Israel is for the survival of us all. And because I am proud of being Jewish, I am worried by the growing anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism in the world.
You never really know how good of a leader you are until there is something there is lead us to, toward or through or to overcome.
My problem is that my imagination won't turn off. I wake up so excited I can't eat breakfast. I've never run out of energy. It's not like OPEC oil; I don't worry about a premium going on my energy. It's just always been there. I got it from my mom.
Well, luckily with animation, fantasy is your friend.
I was afraid of small spaces and I was afraid of the tree outside my window, and I had all these phobias. I think many kids have those phobias, but I probably had more than most.
My father had many, many veterans over to the house, and the older I got the more I appreciated their sacrifice.
Even though I get older, what I do never gets old, and that's what I think keeps me hungry.
Fathering is a major job, but I need both things in my life: my job to be a director, and my kids to direct me.
I don't dream at night, I dream at day, I dream all day; I'm dreaming for living.
When I was younger, all I cared about was what people thought of me and my films. Now I care less about catering, hand-serving, hand-feeding the audience. I've gotten to the point now in my life where I'm serving myself.
I was a scared kid... I think I was born a nervous wreck, and I think movies were one way to find a way transferring my own private horrors to everyone else's lives. It was less of an escape and more of an exorcism.
Am I allowed to say I really wanted this? This is fantastic.
Audience members are only concerned about the story, the concept, the bells and whistles and the noise that a popular film starts to make even before it's popular. So audiences will not be drawn to the technology; they'll be drawn to the story. And I hope it always remains that way.
The most expensive habit in the world is celluloid, not heroin, and I need a fix every few years.
When you listen, you learn, You absorb like a sponge - and your life becomes so much better than when you are just trying to be listened to all the time.
Humans are the only hunters who kill when not hungry.
I never felt comfortable with myself, because I was never part of the majority. I always felt awkward and shy and on the outside of the momentum of my friends' lives.
The most amazing thing for me is that every single person who sees a movie, not necessarily one of my movies, brings a whole set of unique experiences. Now, through careful manipulation and good storytelling, you can get everybody to clap at the same time, to hopefully laugh at the same time, and to be afraid at the same time.
I don't really distinguish between a fictional hero and a real life hero as a basis for any comparison. To me, a hero is a hero. I like making pictures about people who have a personal mission in life or at least in the life of a story who start out with certain low expectations and then over achieve our highest expectations for them. That's the kind of character arc I love dabbling in as a director, as a filmmaker.
I dream for a living. Once a month the sky falls on my head, I come to, and I see another movie I want to make.
The age doesn't really matter to me as it seems to matter to other people. A lot of people think that youth or age is the total sum of your knowledge about anything, and it's absolutely untrue. I think I might have even known more five years ago than I do now.
My early exposure to all the leviathans of the Saturday matinee creature features inspired me, when I grew up, to make 'Jurassic Park.'
I can't describe it, what I'm feeling and what I'm thinking. This means something. This is important.
I have made almost as many films in England as I have in America. I will come back to England again and again.
Before I go off and direct a movie, I always look at four films. They tend to be The Seven Samurai, Lawrence Of Arabia, It's A Wonderful Life and The Searchers.
I don't drink coffee. I've never had a cup of coffee in my entire life. That's something you probably don't know about me. I've hated the taste since I was a kid.
When I was very young, I remember my mother telling me about a friend of hers in Germany, a pianist who played a symphony that wasn't permitted, and the Germans came up on stage and broke every finger on her hands. I grew up with stories of Nazis breaking the fingers of Jews.
The person I enjoy working for more than anyone else is George Lucas. He's the best boss I ever had because he's the most talented boss I ever had.
From the day I started to think politically and to develop my own moral values, from my earliest youth, I have been an ardent defender of Israel.
The Internet has been this miraculous conduit to the undeniable truth to the Holocaust.
My filmmaking really began with technology. It began through technology, not through telling stories, because my 8mm movie camera was the way into whatever I decided to do.
Failure is inevitable. Success is elusive.
In the whole history of movies, there has been nothing like Kubrick's vision. It was a vision of hope and wonder, of grace and of mystery, of humour and contradictions. It was a gift to us, and now it's a legacy.
People have forgotten how to tell a story.
I've always been interested in UFOs.
'E.T.' began with me trying to write a story about my parents' divorce.
A lot of kids only know 'E.T.' from the digitally-enhanced version.
The only thing that gets me back to directing is good scripts.
I just had a crazy, wild imagination all my life, and science fiction is the greatest outlet for me.
I turned down 'Harry Potter' and 'Spider-Man,' two movies that I knew would be phenomenally successful, because I had already made movies like that before and they offered no challenge to me. I don't need my ego to be reminded.
From a very young age, my parents taught me the most important lesson of my whole life: They taught me how to listen. They taught me how to listen to everybody before I made up my own mind. When you listen, you learn. You absorb like a sponge - and your life becomes so much better than when you are just trying to be listened to all the time.
Like, I took no poetic license with 'Schindler's List' because that was historical, factual documents.
Lincoln's leadership is based on a number of precepts, but my favorite one is that he acted in the name, and for the good, of the people.
I have never before, in my long and eclectic career, been gifted with such an abundance of natural beauty as I experienced filming 'War Horse' on Dartmoor.
There is a fine line between censorship and good taste and moral responsibility.
Our one goal is to give the world a taste of peace, friendship and understanding. Through the visual arts, the art of celebration of life.
I'm always in favor of Israel responding strongly when it's threatened.
I don't go through a torturous intellectual process to decide what to direct. I know what I want to direct the second I read something or hear a story. I just know when it grabs me in a certain way I want to direct it. And then I spend the next four to six months trying to talk myself out of it, because directing is really hard! But it's true, I know essentially when and what I want to do next... it's an undeniable feeling I get and it's not the same feeling I get when I wind up producing something.
I've always sort of time-locked and mind-blocked myself in my 30s, and that's always the age I feel.
I always like to play with my kids. I always have the time to do that. That's my priority, always has been, so just interacting with my kids, and being with them is great.
One of the gratuities about being a director is that you can volunteer yourself out of difficult details.
I dream for a living.
I am a very impatient director.
It is important to know who your friends are and to stay, remain loyal to your friends, despite what you hear, despite the mistakes that are made in friendships and misunderstandings that commonly occur, to be able to forgive and to move on, you have to be able to remember the values of friendship.
There's been more written about Lincoln than movies made about him or television portraying him. He's kind of a stranger to our industry, to this medium. You have to go back to the 1930s to find a movie that's just about Abraham Lincoln. I just found that my fascination with Lincoln, which started as a child, got to the point where after reading so much about him I thought there was a chance to tell a segment of his life to to moviegoers.
All through my career I've done what I can to discover new talent and give them a start.
The Japanese had a very strong belief in Bushido, death before dishonour. They were fighting for their country; they were the aggressors in World War II.
I don't think any movie or any book or any work of art can solve the stalemate in the Middle East today. But it's certainly worth a try.
I believe in 3D for certain kinds of films. I certainly believe in using 3D for all things in animation because animation has such clarity and so much depth of focus. It worked great with 'Avatar' because 70 percent of that film is animated.
Lincoln believed in the American people.
You shouldn't dream your film, you should make it!
I go out and look for a good story to tell and if I like it enough and I decide to direct it, I become dangerously involved in becoming a part of that story.
I've always been very hopeful which I guess isn't strange coming from me. I don't want to call myself an optimist. I want to say that I've always been full of hope. I've never lost that. I have a lot of hope for this country and for the entire world. . .
I wouldn't have filmed The Color Purple if the book had been a big fat novel. The reason I read it is because it is thin.
When war comes, two things happen - profits go way, way up and all perishables go way, way down. There becomes a market for them.
The delicate balance of mentoring someone is not creating them in your own image, but giving them the opportunity to create themselves.
I'm not really interested in making money. That's always come as the result of success, but it's not been my goal.
You have many years ahead of you to create the dreams that we can't even imagine dreaming. You have done more for the collective unconscious of this planet than you will ever know.
My dad took me to my first movie. It was 'The Greatest Show on Earth' in 1952, a movie of such scale it was actually a traumatic experience.
I think the secret of great acting is that you have to bring your imagination to the party. You have to have a great imagination and you have to bring it every day when you're working. Your imagination and your skills as an actor are what see you through, not what you're wearing or where you are.
We all feel that if we have a crazy idea that might get laughed at, there's nothing wrong with seeing if there's a crazy writer out there who agrees with us and can take it to a crazy network and somehow bring something that's a little bit daft and edgy to life.
I wanted to do another movie that could make us laugh and cry and feel good about the world. I wanted to do something else that could make us smile. This is a time when we need to smile more and Hollywood movies are supposed to do that for people in difficult times.
My movies more often are told through pictures, not words. But in this case, the pictures took second position to the incredible words of Abraham Lincoln and his presence [...] I was less interested in an outpouring of imagery than in letting the most human moment of this story evolve before us.
I always like to think of the audience when I am directing. Because I am the audience.
The internet is watching us now. If they want to. They can see what sites you visit. In the future, television will be watching us, and customizing itself to what it knows about us. The thrilling thing is, that will make us feel we're part of the medium. The scary thing is, we'll lose our right to privacy. An ad will appear in the air around us, talking directly to us.
The only time I'm totally happy is when I'm watching films or making them.
Movies are always in a state of locomotion. You start with a general idea of how it should feel and then you find you've got a runaway train. You have to race to catch up: the movie is telling you what it wants to become, and when that happens there's no greater feeling.
The best time of my life has been the three instances where I have been there for the birth of my children. That is, nothing [else] has ever come close.
I think one of the worst things that happened to me was, you know, my voluntary fallout with my father. And then the greatest thing that happened to me was when I saw the light, and realized I needed to love him in a way that he could love me back.
Some movies I make for myself. I just sort of make them for myself. I do that sometimes when the subject matter is very sensitive and very personal and I really can't imagine I'm an audience.
You can't start a movie by having the attitude that the script is finished, because if you think the script is finished, your movie is finished before the first day of shooting.
I've always been interested in how we survive and how resourceful we are as Americans.
Money to me is not a factor in my life.
All those horrible, traumatic years I spent as a kid became what I draw from creatively today.
I simply adore 'The Simpsons.' I go to bed in a 'Simpsons' T-shirt.
A lot of the films I've made probably could have worked just as well 50 years ago, and that's just because I have a lot of old-fashion values.
