- All Quotes
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I think Lincoln had a unique parenting style. He let his kids run free and wild.
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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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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.
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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.
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I like the smell of film. I just like knowing there's film going through the camera.
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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.
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The most expensive habit in the world is celluloid, not heroin, and I need a fix every few years.
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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.
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I've always sort of time-locked and mind-blocked myself in my 30s, and that's always the age I feel.
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Like, I took no poetic license with 'Schindler's List' because that was historical, factual documents.
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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.
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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.
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I did 50 takes on Robert Shaw assembling the Greener Gun on 'Jaws.' The shark wasn't working, so I just kept shooting to make the production report look like we were accomplishing something and to keep cast and crew from going crazy from boredom. It was a strategic indulgence.
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I think every film I make that puts characters in jeopardy is me purging my own fears, sadly only to re-engage with them shortly after the release of the picture. I'll never make enough films to purge them all.
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I think all directors should be animators.
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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.
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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 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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This is a time when we need to smile more and Hollywood movies are supposed to do that for people in difficult times.
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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.
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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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Every movie you're going to forget that it's 3D whether it's widescreen or whatever it is, you're going to forget everything if the movie is working. If the movie doesn't work or if the movie generically doesn't work then immediately you start to pick apart whatever has contributed to that.
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I see some parallels between then Lincoln's era and now. Certainly the division of ideologies between two parties, the Democratic Party and the Republican Party. In 1865, the Democrats were the Conservatives and the Republicans were the progressives, and today it's just the opposite.
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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.