My wish is to bring my heroes to the big screen, and many of them have already appeared in my films.

We can’t all be heroes, because somebody has to sit on the curb and applaud when they go by.

I think that when you’re making your way up in the music industry, you have all these heroes and the reasons why they are your heroes. As soon as you get into the industry, your guidelines change a little bit. For me, my heroes now are great people first and great artists second.

Some of my foster families used to send me to the movies to get me out of the house and there I’d sit all day and way into the night. Up in front, there with the screen so big, a little kid all alone, and I loved it. I loved anything that moved up there and I didn’t miss anything that happened and there was no popcorn either.

When you are a beginning film maker you are desperate to survive. The most important thing in the end is survival and being able to get to your next picture.

If a star or studio chief or any other great movie personages find themselves sitting among a lot of nobodies, they get frightened – as if somebody was trying to demote them.

None of the films I’ve done was designed for a mass audience, except for ‚Indiana Jones.‘ Nobody in their right mind thought ‚American Graffiti‘ or ‚Star Wars‘ would work.

When you’re doing a film and the majority of the film is cast black, for me, it’s most important to get people to view those movies as just movies, as just good movies. At the end of the day, regardless of the color of the cast, we’re all doing the same thing in this business: trying to make a good film.

In war the heroes always outnumber the soldiers ten to one.

One of the powerful temptations is that of the cinema palace. The cinema has undoubtedly an enormous attraction for boys, and people are constantly cudgelling their brains how to stop it. But it is one of those things which would be very difficult to stop even if it were altogether desirable.

The greatest heroes are those who do their duty in the daily grind of domestic affairs whilst the world whirls as a maddening dreidel.

Over the course of my career in law enforcement, I have witnessed over and over again the selflessness and sacrifice of law enforcement who lay their lives on the line every day to protect people who they will never meet and people who will never know their names.

When trouble breaks out, our men and women in uniform, they don’t just sit around thinking about it or talking about it – they act. They put on that uniform. They leave their loved ones behind. They go out there. They give orders. They follow orders. They do whatever it takes to keep our country safe.

Making a film is like putting out a fire with sieve. There are so many elements, and it gets so complicated.

Age doesn’t bother me. So many of my heroes were older guys. It’s the lack of years left that weighs far heavier on me than the age that I am.

I kind of make a film for myself to sort of express myself.

If you really love films, and you really want to get the full impact, there’s a huge difference between watching something on a small screen with a mediocre sound system and watching it on a giant screen in a giant theater with a huge beautiful sound system. I mean, the difference is electric.

Heroes may not be braver than anyone else. They’re just braver five minutes longer.

Heroes are not known by the loftiness of their carriage; the greatest braggarts are generally the merest cowards.

What with making their way and enjoying what they have won, heroes have no time to think. But the sons of heroes – ah, they have all the necessary leisure.

I loved the material when I first read it, and the experience of making the film was a great one. So when we came around to complete the trilogy, I just signed on board without even reading the scripts because the experience of the first film was so good.

How important it is for us to recognize and celebrate our heroes and she-roes!

Bob Dylan and Leonard Cohen. They’re my biggest heroes. I love everything about Leonard Cohen: his lyrics and his voice. He seems like a really clever man, and Bob Dylan does as well. He’s just really cool.

The movie business is a big gamble.

As you get older it is harder to have heroes, but it is sort of necessary.

If you look at the history of our country over the last 100 years, there have been periods where science and research have been celebrated. They were really kind of held up as heroes in society, which encouraged a generation of people to go into these fields.

The sound and music are 50% of the entertainment in a movie.

My heroes don’t have anything special. They have something to tell other people but they don’t know how, so they talk to themselves.

Heroes need monsters to establish their heroic credentials. You need something scary to overcome.

‚Border‘ was the first movie that I watched on the big screen. It always takes me back to my childhood.

I have a wish. It as a fear as well – that in my end will be my beginning.

I’ve seen too many ups and downs in the movie industry.

When I make a film – I direct my own film, I write my own script – that’s what I want to hear from the audience. ‚Oh, thank you, Jackie!‘

When I was growing up, there was nobody in my family – not even my mother – who I could look to and be like, ‚I know you’ve never said anything homophobic.‘ So, you know, you worry about people in the business who you’ve heard talk that way. Some of my heroes coming up talk recklessly like that.

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.

The best thing I did was to choose the right heroes.

I’ve choreographed all of my movies.

The world is moved along, not only by the mighty shoves of its heroes, but also by the aggregate of tiny pushes of each honest worker.

Sometimes when you make a film you can go away for three months and then come back and live your life. But this struck a much deeper chord. I don’t have the ability yet to speak about it in an objective.

Nobody should come to the movies unless he believes in heroes.

I’ve come to admire our military kids more than you all will know, because you guys are heroes. And the only way your parents are able to serve is because you guys hold it down, and you do it with maturity beyond your years.

My heroes are the ones who survived doing it wrong, who made mistakes, but recovered from them.