I don’t drink coffee. I’ve never had a cup of coffee in my entire life. That’s something you probably don’t know about me. I’ve hated the taste since I was a kid.
You know, I don’t really do that much looking inside me when I’m working on a project. Whatever I am becomes what that film is. But I change; you change.
I don’t play online games. ‘Warcraft,’ I’ve played that, but I mainly play action games.
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 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.
The turning point in my career was Jaws. It was a turning point because I was a director-for-hire before Jaws and because it was such a big hit I could do any movie I wanted and Hollywood just wrote me a cheque.
Bloated budgets are ruining Hollywood – these pictures are squeezing all the other types of movies out of Hollywood. It’s disastrous.
I think Lincoln had a unique parenting style. He let his kids run free and wild.
I think in terms of chapters. Every time I finish a movie, it’s a chapter. When one of my kids graduates from school, that’s a chapter.
You can be great just by being yourself.
I simply adore ‘The Simpsons.’ I go to bed in a ‘Simpsons’ T-shirt.
I quit college so fast I didn’t even clean out my locker.
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.
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.
I love my kids as individuals, not as a herd, and I do have a herd of children: I have seven kids.
It all starts with the script: it’s not worth taking myself away from my family if I don’t have something I’m really passionate about.
When I was a kid, there was no collaboration; it’s you with a camera bossing your friends around. But as an adult, filmmaking is all about appreciating the talents of the people you surround yourself with and knowing you could never have made any of these films by yourself.
My filmmaking really began with technology. It began through technology, not through telling stories, because my 8mm movie camera was the way into whatever I decided to do.
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.