Steven Spielberg Quotes
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Watching violence in movies or in TV programs stimulates the spectators to imitate what they see much more than if seen live or on TV news. In movies, violence is filmed with perfect illumination, spectacular scenery, and in slow motion, making it even romantic. However, in the news, the public has a much better perception of how horrible violence can be, and it is used with objectives that do not exist in the movies.
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I made 'Saving Private Ryan' for my father. He's the one who filled my head with war stories when I was growing up.
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I guess the greatest cliché we've ever heard, but the most important words spoken, is, love, you know, love your neighbor and, as you would yourself. It's a biblical term, it's important, and it's embraced by every religion and yet it seems to be a far cry from what we're experiencing today.
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Money to me is not a factor in my life.
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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.
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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.
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If I weren't a director, I would want to be a film composer.
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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.
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It's funny, you make friends and you lose friends when you're making a movie.
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The creative process is a very collaborative process. I know it might seem that way because so much ink is spilled and the media is obsessed with business and numbers and studios... but filmmakers don't think of it that way. We just go off and we tell our stories. It's the same torture that we adore, it's the same torture that our forefathers endured making movies in the golden era of Hollywood. So, from my perspective it's no different, I'm sure, from the men and women who I admire so much who made the earliest movies.
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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.
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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.
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History is so fleeting and we are so busy consuming media and the contemporary culture, voraciously gobbling it up, that we have no room to look back ever, and our young people have a tough time looking back.
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I've discovered I've got this preoccupation with ordinary people pursued by large forces.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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I think all directors should be animators.