My early exposure to all the leviathans of the Saturday matinee creature features inspired me, when I grew up, to make 'Jurassic Park.'
— Steven Spielberg
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.
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 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.
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.
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 made 'Saving Private Ryan' for my father. He's the one who filled my head with war stories when I was growing up.
I made 'Empire of the Sun' in Shanghai in the 1980s and want to come back one day to make a movie in China.
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.
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 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.
My dad's been responsible for a lot of my issues.
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.
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.
One of the gratuities about being a director is that you can volunteer yourself out of difficult details.
I think Lincoln had a unique parenting style. He let his kids run free and wild.
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.
'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.
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'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.
History opens up new worlds to film-makers all the time.
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.
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.
I didn't read reviews earlier in my career, but I read them now as I'm older. I read them all.
Everybody who works for Amblin Television has to do five jobs.
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.
If the world ran the way a crew runs a set, we'd have a better, more progressive world.
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 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.
'E.T.' began with me trying to write a story about my parents' divorce.
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.
My father had many, many veterans over to the house, and the older I got the more I appreciated their sacrifice.
The machinery of the democratic process is really no different today from what it was 150 years ago.
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 quit college so fast I didn't even clean out my locker.
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.
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.
When I don't have a story to tell, I'm a terror to live with.
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.
Money to me is not a factor in my life.
I have a choice - I can either watch all the dailies, or I can follow the social media. I can't do both.
Television has a different biorhythm than movies. I love the biorhythm of TV.
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.
I don't make unconventional stories; I don't make non-linear stories. I like linear storytelling a lot.
You shouldn't dream your film, you should make it!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
