I'm not in a contest. I make movies. I'm not a racehorse.
In my experience, there's no such thing as luck.
One of the most telling things about film school is you've got a lot of students wandering around saying, "Oh, I wish I could make a movie. I wish I could make a movie."
Whenever you're making a movie, especially when you're writing, you always have self-doubts.
When my films don't work it's usually because I tried some very experimental idea. I tried new ideas and they just didn't work, as opposed to trying to do something conventional and having it be so conventional nobody wanted to see it.
On the professional side, I've helped move cinema from a chemical-based medium to a digital-based medium. That'll be one of the landmarks. And I've left these stories, these little tales that have been imprinted on the media, which will or will not be of interest to people in the future. I've done the best I can.
Digital technology allows us a much larger scope to tell stories that were pretty much the grounds of the literary media.
Everyone seems to think that digital technology devoids the medium of content, but that is not true at all. If anything, it broadens the content.
Attention should be paid to this question of our soul, and not simply to accounting procedures. Attention should be paid to the interest of those who are yet unborn, who should be able to see this generation as it saw itself, and the past generation as it saw itself.
Although I write screenplays, I don't think I'm a very good writer.
On the Internet, all those same guys that are complaining I made a change are completely changing the movie. I’m saying: ‘Fine. But my movie, with my name on it, that says I did it, needs to be the way I want it.’
I am very concerned about our national heritage, and I am very concerned that the films that I watched when I was young and the films that I watched throughout my life are preserved, so that my children can see them.
I wanted to race cars. I didn't like school, and all I wanted to do was work on cars. But right before I graduated, I got into a really bad car accident, and I spent that summer in the hospital thinking about where I was heading. I decided to take education more seriously and go to a community college.
I was going to go to a four-year college and be an anthropologist or to an art school and be an illustrator when a friend convinced me to learn photography at the University of Southern California. Little did I know it was a school that taught you how to make movies! It had never occurred to me that I'd ever have any interest in filmmaking.
For 'Star Wars' I had to develop a whole new idea about special effects to give it the kind of kinetic energy I was looking for. I did it with motion-control photography.
In 3-D filmmaking, I can take images and manipulate them infinitely, as opposed to taking still photographs and laying them one after the other. I move things in all directions. It's such a liberating experience.
Luke: Boy, it's lucky you have these compartments. Han: I use them for smuggling. I never thought I'd be smuggling myself in them. This is ridiculous.
Football games are on TV, and it doesn't affect stadium attendance at all. It's the same with movies. People who really love movies and like to go out on a Saturday night will go to the movie theater.
Impressive, most impressive. (Darth Vadar)
There are a few critics overseas, and occasionally a critic will write an astute analysis of the movie. There is value in reading critics that actually have something intelligent to say, but the journalistic community lives in a world of sound bites and literary commerce: selling newspapers, selling books, and they do that simply by trashing things. They don't criticize or analyze them. They simply trash them for the sake of a headline, or to shock people to get them to buy whatever it is they're selling.
I grew up in San Francisco. And so I'm informed in a certain kind of way about, you know, believing in democracy and believing in America. And I'm a very ardent patriot.
Even in high school I was very interested in history - why people do the things they do. As a kid I spent a lot of time trying to relate the past to the present.
I like to say that films are never finished, they're only abandoned.
The ideals and principles for which Martin Luther King Jr. fought have never been forgotten and are as relevant today as they were 40 years ago.
Han Solo: Wonderful girl. Either I'm going to kill her or I'm beginning to like her.
