Steven Spielberg Quotes

Technology can be our best friend, and technology can also be the biggest party pooper of our lives. It interrupts our own story, interrupts our ability to have a thought or a daydream, to imagine something wonderful, because we're too busy bridging the walk from the cafeteria back to the office on the cell phone.
The delicate balance of mentoring someone is not creating them in your own image, but giving them the opportunity to create themselves.
I love editing. It's one of my favorite parts about filmmaking.
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.
Every time I go to a movie, it's magic, no matter what the movie's about.
Remember, science fiction's always been the kind of first level alert to think about things to come. It's easier for an audience to take warnings from sci-fi without feeling that we're preaching to them. Every science fiction movie I have ever seen, any one that's worth its weight in celluloid, warns us about things that ultimately come true.
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.
You shouldn't dream your film, you should make it!
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.
Whether in success or in failure, I'm proud of every single movie I've ever directed.
Well, luckily with animation, fantasy is your friend.
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.
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.
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.
I dream for a living.
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.
All of us every single year, we're a different person. I don't think we're the same person all our lives.
When I felt like an outsider, movies made me feel inside my own skill set.
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.
Cell phones tend to bring us more inside of our lives whereas movies offer a chance to escape, so there are two competing forces.
There were so many odd, strange things about Abraham Lincoln that I think nobody knew how to pigeonhole him.
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 head's not in the clouds, but I think I've gotten too much credit for being an astute businessman.
I love to go to a regular movie theater, especially when the movie is a big crowd-pleaser. It's much better watching a movie with 500 people making noise than with just a dozen.
There is a fine line between censorship and good taste and moral responsibility.
I've discovered I've got this preoccupation with ordinary people pursued by large forces.
I made 'Saving Private Ryan' for my father. He's the one who filled my head with war stories when I was growing up.
The public has an appetite for anything about imagination - anything that is as far away from reality as is creatively possible.
The greatest films ever made in our history were cut on film, and I'm tenaciously hanging on to the process. I just love going into an editing room and smelling the photochemistry and seeing my editor wearing mini-strands of film around his neck.
I don't make unconventional stories; I don't make non-linear stories. I like linear storytelling a lot.
Because of how much movies cost, it's dangerous to be experimental on one film after the other. But we can experiment with television. We can do things that are fringe and bring ideas to the table that are offbeat and original.
My dad took me out to see a meteor shower when I was a little kid, and it was scary for me because he woke me up in the middle of the night. My heart was beating; I didn't know what he wanted to do. He wouldn't tell me, and he put me in the car and we went off, and I saw all these people lying on blankets, looking up at the sky.
I'm not a great man to my children. I'm just 'Pop.' The more involved I am with my kids, it keeps my head flat on top.
There is something about killing people at close range that is excruciating. It's bound to try a man's soul.
Social media has taken over in America to such an extreme that to get my own kids to look back a week in their history is a miracle, let alone 100 years.
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.
Why pay a dollar for a bookmark? Why not use the dollar for a bookmark?
One of the gratuities about being a director is that you can volunteer yourself out of difficult details.
I don't really have a schedule of when I want to show my children my movies.
In high school, I got smacked and kicked around. Two bloody noses. It was horrible.
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.
I've always been interested in how we survive and how resourceful we are as Americans.
The only thing that gets me back to directing is good scripts.
Television has a different biorhythm than movies. I love the biorhythm of TV.
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.
If I weren't a director, I would want to be a film composer.
If the world ran the way a crew runs a set, we'd have a better, more progressive world.
My dad's been responsible for a lot of my issues.
Making a movie where the central character is a horse was a challenge. Because I'm scared of riding. I was thrown as a kid. One of my daughters is a competitive jumper, we live with horses, we have stables on our property. But I don't ride. I observe, and I worry.
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.
Casting sometimes is fate and destiny more than skill and talent, from a director's point of view.
The Israeli-Palestinian conflict and Jihadism have nothing to do with each other.
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.
I'd rather direct than produce. Any day. And twice on Sunday.
If Bush, as I believe, has reliable information on the fact that Saddam Hussein is making weapons of mass destruction, I cannot not support the policies of his government.
I am an American Jew and aware of the sensitivities involved in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
Naturally, it is a terrible, despicable crime when, as in Munich, people are taken hostage, people are killed. But probing the motives of those responsible and showing that they are also individuals with families and have their own story does not excuse what they did.
I interviewed survivors, I went to Poland, saw the cities and spent time with the people and spoke to the Jews who had come back to Poland after the war and talked about why they had come back.
I'm not really interested in making money.
I want to be the Cecil B. DeMille of science fiction.
When war comes, two things happen - profits go way, way up and all perishables go way, way down. There becomes a market for them.
I'm always in favor of Israel responding strongly when it's threatened. At the same time, a response to a response doesn't really solve anything. It just creates a perpetual-motion machine.
You know, I don't really do that much looking inside me when I'm working on a project. Whatever I am becomes what that film is. But I change; you change.
When I grow up, I still want to be a director.
I like the smell of film. I just like knowing there's film going through the camera.
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.
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.
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.
Once a month the sky falls on my head, I come to and I see another movie I want to make.
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.
And I may often question choices I make as a producer. But I've never questioned the choices I make as a director.
I love my kids as individuals, not as a herd, and I do have a herd of children: I have seven kids.
Most of my presumptions about a production are usually wrong.
So I try to re-invent my own eye every time I tackle a new subject. But it's hard, because everybody has style. You can't help it.
I committed to directing 'Catch Me If You Can' not because of the divorce component, but principally because Frank Abagnale did things that were the most astonishing scams I had ever heard.
Like, I took no poetic license with 'Schindler's List' because that was historical, factual documents.
I was making a lot of 8mm home movies, since I was twelve, making little dramas and comedies with the neighborhood kids.
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.
One of my daughters is a competitive jumper, we live with horses, we have stables on our property. But I don't ride. I observe, and I worry.
It all starts with the script: it's not worth taking myself away from my family if I don't have something I'm really passionate about.
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 documentaries are the greatest way to educate an entire generation that doesn't often look back to learn anything about the history that provided a safe haven for so many of us today.
Documentaries are the first line of education, and the second line of education is dramatization, such as 'The Pacific'.
For one thing, I don't think that anybody in any war thinks of themselves as a hero.
In the re-creation of combat situations, and this is coming from a director who's never been in one, being mindful of what these veterans have actually gone through, you find that the biggest concern is that you don't look at war as a geopolitical endeavor.
I am a very impatient director.
I've always been interested in UFOs.
A lot of kids only know 'E.T.' from the digitally-enhanced version.
I even get inspired by movies that aren't very good, because there's always something good in movies that are collectively thought of as a failure. There's good in everything, I find.
I simply adore 'The Simpsons.' I go to bed in a 'Simpsons' T-shirt.
I'm always in favor of Israel responding strongly when it's threatened.
There's nothing self-serving about what motivated me to bring 'Schindler's List' to the screen.
When my children were born, I made the choice I wanted them to be raised as Jews and to have a Jewish education.
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.
All presidents swear an oath to the Constitution to keep this country united, and when the country fell apart, Lincoln had to put it back together again, with a lot of help. But he bore total responsibility.
Lincoln believed in the American people.
I think that a movie can only be an adjunct or only a supplement to books, to different points of view, to scholars, historians and your own teachers.
I missed my dad a lot growing up, even though we were together as a family. My dad was really a workaholic. And he was always working.
It's still a mystery to me, but even though my mother was like an older sister to me, I kind of put her up on a pedestal.
The machinery of the democratic process is really no different today from what it was 150 years ago.
I think Lincoln had a unique parenting style. He let his kids run free and wild.
Even if I'd had a really happy relationship with my father and there was no emotional hiatus for a decade and a half, I probably would still have made some of the same choices for movies that I've made.
My father had many, many veterans over to the house, and the older I got the more I appreciated their sacrifice.
The baby boomers owe a big debt of gratitude to the parents and grandparents - who we haven't given enough credit to anyway - for giving us another generation.
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 think we need to take responsibility for the things we put on this planet, and also take responsibility for the things we take off the planet. We need to have limiters on how far we allow ourselves to go - ethical, moral limiters.
'E.T.' began with me trying to write a story about my parents' divorce.
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.
I had a great time creating the future on 'Minority Report,' and it's a future that is coming true faster than any of us thought it would.
The only time I have a good hunch the audience is going to be there is when I make the sequel to 'Jurassic Park' or I make another Indiana Jones movie. I know I've got a good shot at getting an audience on opening night. Everything else that is striking out into new territory is a crap shoot.
I always think if it's a good story, the audience can't wait to run out of the theater and go tweet somebody with the gist of a story, in a nutshell, almost, because it was that interesting.
I guess my first digital movie was 'Tintin' because 'Tintin' has no film step. There is no intermediate film step. It's 100% digital animation, but as far as a live-action film, I'm still planning to shoot everything on film.
I would love to do a musical. I would love that. I would have to find the right book, the right story, but some day I'm going to make one. I would really like to go off and direct a musical. That's what I would really like to do when I grow up.
Everybody who works for Amblin Television has to do five jobs.
I made 'Empire of the Sun' in Shanghai in the 1980s and want to come back one day to make a movie in China.
I have a choice - I can either watch all the dailies, or I can follow the social media. I can't do both.
I didn't read reviews earlier in my career, but I read them now as I'm older. I read them all.
Money to me is not a factor in my life.
This whole thing about reality television to me is really indicative of America saying we're not satisfied just watching television, we want to star in our own TV shows. We want you to discover us and put us in your own TV show, and we want television to be about us, finally.
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.
I think producers are more interested in backing concepts than directors and writers. I don't think that's the right way of making a decision about whether you're going to back a film or not.
You can't intellectually purge yourself of who you are. Whatever that is, it's going to come out in the wash, the film wash. What you are is going to be relevant, if not to yourself, to the movies you make.
When I don't have a story to tell, I'm a terror to live with.
History opens up new worlds to film-makers all the time.
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.
I'm not in a race with anybody to make the biggest hit movie anymore. I am just trying to tell stories that I can stay interested in for the two years it takes me to supervise the writing and to direct them.
Before statehood was achieved, Syria and Egypt had their tanks and military equipment lined up to invade Tel Aviv and destroy it; but the Israelis scrambled together an air force, some of it from old Second World War Messerschmidts, and the invasion was halted.
I quit college so fast I didn't even clean out my locker.
'The Color Purple' is the kind of character piece that a director like Sidney Lumet could do brilliantly with one hand tied behind his back.
My early exposure to all the leviathans of the Saturday matinee creature features inspired me, when I grew up, to make 'Jurassic Park.'
I feel I'm all over my movies. I know my movies are all over me.
Making a movie and not directing the little moments is like drinking a soda and leaving the little slurp puddle for someone else.
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.
The Internet has been this miraculous conduit to the undeniable truth to the Holocaust.
I think every movie I've made after 'Indiana Jones,' I've tried to make every single movie as if it was made by a different director, because I'm very conscious of not wanting to impose a consistent style on subject matter that is not necessarily suited to that style. So I try to re-invent my own eye every time I tackle a new subject.
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.
I've always wanted to tell a story about Lincoln. I saw a paternal father figure; I saw someone who was completely, stubbornly committed to his ideals, to his vision.
I just had a crazy, wild imagination all my life, and science fiction is the greatest outlet for me.
I love history, so I do a lot of movies about history.
Because television doesn't offer the kind of budget that a movie offers, you've got to be a little more careful where you spend the money to put the fiction in science.
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.
For the most part, everybody who fights in war fights to survive.
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.
There are so many rumours about so many of us in the public eye. Sometimes it's too hard to deny what is not true.
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.
Even though I get older, what I do never gets old, and that's what I think keeps me hungry.
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've always sort of time-locked and mind-blocked myself in my 30s, and that's always the age I feel.
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.
The bones of the story of 'War Horse' is a love story. That's what makes it universal.
There's no better way to test a person than to put them in the middle of a war. That's clearly going to show what kind of a character you're telling a story about.
People often tell me how much they love the digital skies that we obviously painted for 'War Horse.' Well, there's not a single sky that we put in through special effects. The skies you see in the movie are the skies that we experienced - but it was definitely challenging at times.
I'm very used to working with first time actors - you can just look back at 'E.T.' with Drew Barrymore, and Christian Bale from 'Empire of the Sun,' who'd never made a movie before.
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.
I feel there is no substitute for going out to the movies. There is nothing like it.
When I don't have a movie, I don't take a job just for the sake of working. I just sit it out until I find something I'm passionate about.
In '83, not only was there no such thing as performance motion capture technology, there was no such thing as digital animation. This was the analog era.
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.
I think the key divide between the interactive media and the narrative media is the difficulty in opening up an empathic pathway between the gamer and the character, as differentiated from the audience and the characters in a movie or a television show.
I don't think that anybody in any war thinks of themselves as a hero. The minute anybody presumes that they are heroes, they get their boots taken away from them and buried in the sand.
It is not my job to compare my movies. I don't like to compare my films with other movies because I don't really have that perspective. It is an intellectual exercise, but it doesn't intuitively come to me.
My first reaction every time I delve into an episode of history that I don't know very much about is... my first reaction is anger that my teachers never taught me about it.
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.
The only movie that I would ever even consider retrofitting is the first 'Jurassic Park,' which I think would look pretty spectacular in 3D. That's the only one of my films that I would consider doing in 3D.
I think in terms of chapters. Every time I finish a movie, it's a chapter. When one of my kids graduates from school, that's a chapter.
Bloated budgets are ruining Hollywood - these pictures are squeezing all the other types of movies out of Hollywood. It's disastrous.
I don't play online games. 'Warcraft,' I've played that, but I mainly play action games.

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