I landed a job with Roger Corman. The job was to write the English dialogue for a Russian science fiction picture. I didn't speak any Russian. He didn't care whether I could understand what they were saying; he wanted me to make up dialogue.
Anyone who's made film and knows about the cinema has a lifelong love affair with the experience. You never stop learning about film.
I think cinema, movies, and magic have always been closely associated. The very earliest people who made film were magicians.
Steven Spielberg is unique. I feel that the kinds of movies he loves are the same kinds of movies that the big mass audience loves. He's very fortunate because he can do the things he naturally likes the best, and he's been very successful.
I associate my motion picture career more with being unhappy and scared, or being under the gun, than with anything pleasant.
I'm no longer dependent on the movie business to make a living. So if I want to make movies as other old guys would play golf, I can.
I think it's better to be overly ambitious and fail than to be underambitious and succeed in a mundane way. I have been very fortunate. I failed upward in my life!
When I was sixteen or seventeen, I wanted to be a writer. I wanted to be a playwright. But everything I wrote, I thought, was weak. And I can remember falling asleep in tears because I had no talent the way I wanted to have.
I probably have genius. But no talent.
I had an older brother who was very interested in literature, so I had an early exposure to literature, and and theater. My father sometimes would work in musical comedies.
When I was about 9, I had polio, and people were very frightened for their children, so you tended to be isolated. I was paralyzed for a while, so I watched television.
My company and people think I'm wacky when I have an idea... I know if I have an idea, no one will want to go through it. But if I persist, people will go through it.
I like to work in the morning. I like to sometimes go to a place where I'm all alone where I'm not going to get a phone call early that hurts my feelings, because once my feelings are hurt, I'm dead in the water.
I thought I wanted to be a playwright because I was interested in stories and telling stories.
Lots of people have criticized my movies, but nobody has ever identified the real problem: I'm a sloppy filmmaker.
Everything I do is personal. I have never made a movie that didn't have very strong personal resonance.
If you're a person who says yes most of the time, you'll find yourself in the hotel business and the restaurant business.
Ten Days That Shook The World, by Eisenstein, I went to see it, and I was so impressed with this film, so impressed with what cinema could do.
I was never sloppy with other people's money. Only my own. Because I figure, well, you can be.
Some critics are stimulating in that they make you realise how you could do better, and those are valued.
