When I was a kid, from 10 years old, I worked every day for my dad, huh? Never played basketball. I never played tennis - never did. We worked so that we could eat.
— Melvin Van Peebles
Somebody once asked me, 'Melvin, how'd you get to the top?' It was simple. Nobody would let me in at the bottom.
After 'Don't Play Us Cheap,' I got very busy with theater and Wall Street.
Blacks are tired of seeing whites saying, 'I understand you.' You need a black to direct a black film.
I used to be the third person in the secret jets we had - they were secret at the time - a jet bomber that flew at immense heights carrying atomic bombs.
Many times, I get young people asking, 'What do you think about black movies?' And I say, 'What are you talking about? You mean Hollywood movies that have black people in them?' It's gone back to that, and that's not the same thing as a black movie.
The graphic novel is a great form that can be used to marry the book format with the movie.
If I was just a creator, I would still be back in the Lincoln annex in the Post Office.
I work from a subjective palette.
One day, I was sitting in a movie theater, and I said, 'What the hell? I can do better than that.'
Our minds are not our friends when they realize we have work to do - they're our enemies.
I went to a number of schools when I was a kid on the south side of Chicago.
I graduated from college when I was 20. To get enough money to finish college, I went into the ROTC, and I was an officer in the Air Force before I could buy a drink.
You have to not let yourself believe you can't. Do what you can do within the framework of what you have, and don't look outside - look inside.
I walk down the street; the garbagemen will shout at me, and we'll talk. That's a pleasure when people feel, 'If he can do it, I can, too.'
Before I made 'Sweetback,' I had a three-picture deal with Columbia and enough juice, if I was real clever with it, to proclaim that I wanted to do an independent film.
With 'Sweetback,' I just put it together a little bit at a time. I didn't do it on anybody's grant. I did it like any other young executive - by cheating and stealing!
Music - some people just don't know that part of me.
There's something on Wall Street called PIG - panic, ignorance, and greed. Those are the big sins. I'm not greedy, I knew I was ignorant, and I didn't panic.
My life and career is defined by the constant pursuit of new forms of culture and self-expression.
No one - black, white, or any different - walks away from a three-picture deal with a studio. That's every filmmaker's dream. But it wasn't mine.
I was getting my Ph.D. in Holland - I speak Dutch - for a number of years before I moved to France because I had one of those offers you couldn't turn down. They offered me to come and do my films.
In the morning, I get the paper. I look in the obituary column. If I don't see myself in there, I get up.
Over time, you accumulate a lot of life material.
'Sweetback' represented an economic tour de force because I had no partners; I own it.
What some folks find funny, other folks find tragic.
The studios didn't really take independent films seriously, till 'Sweetback' was such a financial success.
I have no illusions about running. I hate running. If I could feel as good as I felt at 30 without running, I wouldn't do it, but that's not the way it works! So - no pain, no gain.
If you give people something they want, they'll come and see it.
Truth of the matter is, I can't even read or write music.
There is a downside to affordable technology, and that's mediocrity. I mean, just 'cause you can afford it don't mean you can do it.
Personally, I do movies the way I cook: I put in what I like in case nobody else likes it and I have to eat it for the rest of the week.
My first feature, I made in France. There's a great respect for the author there - they don't change your stuff.
I'm not a normal director. You can't look at me that way. What's kept me alive is my technical skill at doing other things.
Before me, music soundtracks were sort of afterthoughts.
The artistic world is one of high nuance.
Whitey is uptight about offending blacks without really knowing what offends blacks.
As a navigator, I started studying astronomy because sometimes you're not able to use the equipment, so you'd have to do it the old-fashioned way, figuring out what you were seeing in the sky.
When I got to Paris, they welcomed me and showed my films. It was August of 1960, and I didn't have a penny in my pocket. But they had done something very dangerous: They had given me encouragement.
Big publishers want you to change this and change that. I'd rather go to a little publisher - who needs the tsuris.
If I had to find one characteristic that is most symbolic of me, I think I am tenacious.
A bumblebee can't fly. He's aerodynamically unsound. But he doesn't know that.
I'm from the Southside of Chicago.
What happened when 'Sweetback' made all that money, the studios were in a very difficult position. They wanted the money, but they didn't the message. This marked the advent of the caricatures which became known as blaxploitation.
Me and modesty don't mix.
I'm pretty much a loner. That's not good, bad, or indifferent.
You've got to really check on what you're doing: check and recheck it seven other times to be prepared. Sometimes, people get carried away with the artistic-ness of the endeavor and don't quite have their game face on when the time comes. It's always a pretty costly mistake.
Scars are the price you pay for success.
When we talk about 'Sweetback,' yes, it stars the whole black movement, but it's also the first time an independent film made that kind of money and was that successful and taken seriously.
I've never been to film school. I had to leave this country to make a film. All they would let me do in Hollywood was be a messenger.
