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.
History is so fleeting and we are so busy consuming media and the contemporary culture, voraciously gobbling it up, that we have no room to look back ever, and our young people have a tough time looking back.
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.
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 don't play online games. 'Warcraft,' I've played that, but I mainly play action games.
Movies become living organisms that graduate from a filmmaker's sphere of influence and pretty much look back and tell you how they need to be said goodbye to. A movie often turns around and looks at you and says, "Here is who I am, and that's maybe now how you see me, but that's who I've become." And you've got to be open enough to go with that.
I think the key divide between the interactive media and the narrative media is the difficulty in opening up an empathic pathway between the gamer and the character, as differentiated from the audience and the characters in a movie or a television show.
I didn't read reviews earlier in my career, but I read them now as I'm older. I read them all.
The greatest films ever made in our history were cut on film, and I'm tenaciously hanging on to the process. I just love going into an editing room and smelling the photochemistry and seeing my editor wearing mini-strands of film around his neck.
The older I get, the more I look at movies as a moving miracle.
Bloated budgets are ruining Hollywood - these pictures are squeezing all the other types of movies out of Hollywood. It's disastrous.
So I try to re-invent my own eye every time I tackle a new subject. But it's hard, because everybody has style. You can't help it.
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 basically went into business for myself. But it never amounted to anything. I learned a lot about editing and dubbing by watching all the professionals do it, but I never got a job out of my imposition.
When my children were born, I made the choice I wanted them to be raised as Jews and to have a Jewish education.
I made 'Empire of the Sun' in Shanghai in the 1980s and want to come back one day to make a movie in China.
In the re-creation of combat situations, and this is coming from a director who's never been in one, being mindful of what these veterans have actually gone through, you find that the biggest concern is that you don't look at war as a geopolitical endeavor.
My first reaction every time I delve into an episode of history that I don't know very much about is... my first reaction is anger that my teachers never taught me about it.
I dont work weekends. Weekends are for my kids. And I have dinner at home every night when Im not physically directing a movie - I get home by six. I put the kids to bed and tell them stories and take them to school the next morning. I work basically from 9.30 to 5.30 and Im strict about that.
I'm very used to working with first time actors - you can just look back at 'E.T.' with Drew Barrymore, and Christian Bale from 'Empire of the Sun,' who'd never made a movie before.
You look at war as something that is putting your best friend in jeopardy. You are responsible for the person in front of you and the person behind you, and the person to the left of you and the person to the right of you.
Everybody loves a winner, but nobody loves a winner.
Unprotected sex just feels better in a Waffle House bathroom.
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.
If the world ran the way a crew runs a set, we'd have a better, more progressive world.
