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.

But I think we’re also just talking about the literacy of the audience. The visual literacy of the audience. They’ve seen so many images now, especially here in the States. There’s so much to look at, to watch. So the visual storytelling literacy is harder to impress.

I think most artists would be happy to have bigger audiences rather than smaller ones. It doesn’t mean that they are going to change their work in order necessarily to get it, but they’re happy if they do get it.

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.

It was the money from ‚Star Wars‘ and ‚Jaws‘ that allowed the theaters to build their multiplexes, which allowed an opening up of screens.

Are we simply waving farewell to the days when some of the most interesting thinking in Europe and America came to us from our fiction film-makers? BBC2, which once introduced and showed great films, now shows none.

Films and television and even comic books are churning out vast quantities of fictional narratives, and the public continues to swallow them up with great passion. That is because human beings need stories.

I guess any movie actor can become a role model for audiences out there who enjoy him.

‚Star Wars‘ is fun, its exciting, its inspirational, and people respond to that. It’s what they want.

I didn’t have to win, and winning wasn’t important to me. Being world champion wasn’t important to me. What was important to me was entertaining the audience, and whether that meant winning, losing, singing, or whatever it was on the live show we were doing every week, which was awesome, I was game for it.

I get to hear the really good or the really bad things in the press, but I don’t read it. I can afford to say that because public opinion does not drive U2’s audience.

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

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.

I don’t think about who the audience is for my books.

If I didn’t have my films as an outlet for all the different sides of me, I would probably be locked up.

My philosophy is, it’s always very rewarding when you can make an audience laugh. I don’t mind making fun of myself. I like self-deprecating comedy. But I’d like you to laugh with me occasionally, too.

The story being told in ‚Star Wars‘ is a classic one. Every few hundred years, the story is retold because we have a tendency to do the same things over and over again. Power corrupts, and when you’re in charge, you start doing things that you think are right, but they’re actually not.

God is a comedian, playing to an audience too afraid to laugh.

That’s when it becomes a business. When you’ve been public a long time, when it’s a career. You do certain films, you sell them.

I thought Star Wars was too wacky for the general public.

Yes, I’m always – I’m always surprised when you make a film and you live with it a while and you put it out, you never dream that anybody is ever going to want to really see it.

I knew by heart all the dialogue of James Dean’s films; I could watch Rebel Without a Cause a hundred times over.

I’ve done films where we don’t rehearse, and I’ve done films where we heavily rehearse. I like rehearsals.

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

I prefer the old theaters because the audience is… trapped.

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.

The difference is slight, to the influence of an author, whether he is read by five hundred readers, or by five hundred thousand; if he can select the five hundred, he reaches the five hundred thousand.

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.

For me, writing a song, I sit down and the process doesn’t really involve me thinking about the demographic of people I’m trying to hit or who I want to be able to relate to the song or what genre of music it falls under.

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

I’ve been really fortunate to be able to do different kinds of films in different scales, different genres, different kinds of roles, and that is important to me.

When the kids are laughing in the audience, I tear up, I’m so happy I did a nice thing.

From my standpoint, being an artist, I want to see what the new construction is between artist and audience.

It’s probably not an accident that the films that I care about happen to be about issues that matter to me, stories that I want to tell.

There are very few people who really appreciate my shows. People come to the show and they pay and they enjoy it, but I don’t really think most people really understand what they’ve seen.

If my films don’t show a profit, I know I’m doing something right.

I like to change characters and then, slowly I believe the audience treat me as, like an actor who can fight. It’s not like an action star.

When you’re singing you can hear the echo of people in the audience singing every single word with you, and that was that big dream that I had for myself. It’s happening.

Write in such a way as that you can be readily understood by both the young and the old, by men as well as women, even by children.

What I’ve discovered is that in art, as in music, there’s a lot of truth-and then there’s a lie. The artist is essentially creating his work to make this lie a truth, but he slides it in amongst all the others. The tiny little lie is the moment I live for, my moment. It’s the moment that the audience falls in love.

I played with two lines of action figures when I was a kid: G.I. Joe and Star Wars.

Obviously, the cinematography of films is art, just as a still shot can be art. If I’m watching a Wes Anderson movie, the colour palettes alone, and the way they’re painted, could be art. With music, you’re a little bit limited, of course, because it’s only audio.

We don’t want people to leave the stadium until the game finishes.

I spoke to a million in one service, in Korea, in Seoul. And that was the largest audience I ever have had.

I have a love interest in every one of my films: a gun.

Everybody thinks making films back to back is a big deal but they did it all the time in the old days.

Sometimes when you take strong stands, if you’re not called to do it, you’re dividing the audience you’re trying to reach.

The thing that’s made me open my eyes to what was happening to the environment and climate was films and documentaries.

We need to try to unite audiences, unite countries, join musical tastes, unite people.

When I was making ‚Star Wars,‘ I wasn’t restrained by any kind of science. I simply said, ‚I’m going to create a world that’s fun and interesting, makes sense, and seems to have a reality to it.‘

Not bragging by any means, but I could have done a lot of other stuff as far as working in films go and working in television… I had chances to do that stuff, but I like baseball, I really do.

Hanging out with politicians and corporations is very unhip work. But I think that the U2 audience have turned out to be incredibly subtle in their understanding.

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.

I love almost everything about my work except conferences. I am too shy in front of an audience. But I love signings and having eye contact with a reader who already knows my soul.

I never have an intended audience. I just write, you know.

Being shoved into the top-40 scene was an unusual experience. It was great I’d become accessible to a huge audience but not terribly fulfilling.

The movie business is a big gamble.

Taylor Swift’s audience can listen to me, but so can the street kids. I want to touch it all.

When a family film is done well, there’s a character that every member of the audience can relate to. I want to be one of those guys.

One thing about ‚Star Wars‘ that I’m really proud of is that it expands the imagination. That’s why I like the ‚Star Wars‘ toys.

I got my love of animals from the Dr. Doolittle books and my love of Africa from the Tarzan novels. I remember my mum taking me to the first Tarzan film, which starred Johnny Weissmuller, and bursting into tears. It wasn’t what I had imagined at all.