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.
Movies are always in a state of locomotion. You start with a general idea of how it should feel and then you find you've got a runaway train. You have to race to catch up: the movie is telling you what it wants to become, and when that happens there's no greater feeling.
Audiences are harder to please if you're just giving them effects, but they're easy to please if it's a good story.
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.
When I grow up, I still want to be a director.
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.
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.
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.
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.
All those horrible, traumatic years I spent as a kid became what I draw from creatively today.
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.
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.
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.
Even though I get older, what I do never gets old, and that's what I think keeps me hungry.
The public has an appetite for anything about imagination - anything that is as far away from reality as is creatively possible.
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.
Well, luckily with animation, fantasy is your friend.
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.
One of the gratuities about being a director is that you can volunteer yourself out of difficult details.
There are three movies that I am exceptionally proud of in my life, and I rarely commit to a list of films that I like, that I've made... but these are the three films that I was passionately connected to. The first was 'ET,' the second 'Schindler's List,' and third is 'Saving Private Ryan.'
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.
All through my career I've done what I can to discover new talent and give them a start.
You never really know how good of a leader you are until there is something there is lead us to, toward or through or to overcome.
People have forgotten how to tell a story.
