Steven Spielberg People Quotations

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.

I love to go to a regular movie theater, especially when the movie is a big crowd-pleaser. It's much better watching a movie with 500 people making noise than with just a dozen.

I've discovered I've got this preoccupation with ordinary people pursued by large forces.

Lincoln's leadership is based on a number of precepts, but my favorite one is that he acted in the name, and for the good, of the people.

Naturally, it is a terrible, despicable crime when, as in Munich, people are taken hostage, people are killed. But probing the motives of those responsible and showing that they are also individuals with families and have their own story does not excuse what they did.

There is something about killing people at close range that is excruciating. It's bound to try a man's soul.

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 intention was never to replace the original film. When people buy 'E.T.' I want them to know they have the original movie, not just for collectors and aficionados, but for everybody who remembers it and wants to continue remembering it just that way.

My film refuses to be a pamphlet. My screenwriter, Tony Kushner, and I were hoping to make it a visceral, emotional and intellectual experience, combined in such a way that it will help you get in touch with what you feel are the questions the film poses. The most important thing about peace in the Middle East is that people surrender their absolute certainty about what's going on.

I think you'll understand the way we feel about it the night of the Academy Awards. I think when Mr. Kazan walks out to accept his award, I think you'll feel from a lot of people in the Academy good support for his work. The body of his work has been a great influence upon me and all of my peers.

Our hope is that the archive will be a resource so enduring that 10, or 50, or even 100 years from now, people around the world will learn directly from survivors and witnesses about the atrocities of the Holocaust.

It would make people more comfortable if I made a film that said all targeted assassination is bad, or good, but the movie doesn't take either of those positions. It refuses to. Many of those pundits on the Left and Right would love the film to land somewhere definite. It puts a real burden on the audience to figure out for themselves how they feel about these issues. There are no easy answers to the most complex story of the last 50 years.

I don't think this collection of films represent everything. We're not delivering a shared point of view. These movies are all so different from each other. We all look at a movie through a prism of everything our parents and teachers taught us and what our children are telling us. You can't make a movie expecting everyone will have the same reaction. Ten people seeing 'Munich' will come out with 10 different points of view. It was always that way, sitting around the Passover table talking about the Middle East.

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'm certainly hoping that 3D gets to the point where people do not notice it because once they stop noticing it, it just becomes another tool and an aid to help tell a story.

Movies principally require the best of everybody, all at the same time, being the best they can be. Not just like five people being the best they've ever been, and 10 people not being the best they could be. It's like if everybody is either doing their greatest work, or the whole house of cards falls apart.

3D needs a trained eye. It can't be done by everybody. People who just do 3D just for the sake of commercializing their movie another five or six percent and they don't know really how to do it, they should care how to do it better by bringing other directors and collaborators into their lives to help teach and instruct how you really make a 3D movie because it's not just like putting a new lens on a camera and forgetting it. It takes a lot of very careful consideration. It will change your approach to where you put the cameras. So, 3D isn't for everybody.

I really trust the authenticity of real people and my job is to get them to be themselves in front of the camera. Often what happens is, you'll get a newcomer in front of the camera and they'll freeze up or they imitate actors or other performances that they've admired and so they stop becoming themselves. And so my job as the director is just to always return them to what I first saw in them, which was simply an uncensored human being.

I've kept the people who've been in my career who I feel are my family. Kathy [Kennedy] had been with me since 1978. Janusz Kaminsky, my cinematographer, has made every movie with me since Schindler's List. Michael Kahn has cut every movie I've directed since 1976 when we made Close Encounters together. Rick Carter has done more than 15 of my directed films as a production designer.

People have forgotten how to tell a story.

I interviewed survivors, I went to Poland, saw the cities and spent time with the people and spoke to the Jews who had come back to Poland after the war and talked about why they had come back.

Lincoln believed in the American people.

I hate that people think it's wrong to say you're inspired by Jaws or by Raiders Of The Lost Ark. You're allowed to be.

The essence of what it is to be American is the deep moral urge to be free, to freely express yourself and have the right to do so, and to look at all people as equals.

This is a time when we need to smile more and Hollywood movies are supposed to do that for people in difficult times...