A Quote by David Copperfield

For me, I was watching Gene Kelly, Fred Astaire, Orson Welles, Victor Fleming movies, and I said, "I want to tell stories like that. I want to move people like that. But I'm good at magic, so what am I going to do?" So I started using magic for the right reasons - to get the girl.
I spent an entire evening seated between Fred Astaire and Gene Kelly, being charmed from either side. It was pure Hollywood magic.
Astaire was ballroom, basically, and Gene Kelly had such athleticism - that's always what I responded to and what just blew my head open when I watched Gene Kelly's numbers. But, Fred Astaire was just so incredibly inventive and so, so smooth - so smooth.
Like so many people, I only remembered Orson Welles as this huge, fat, bearded figure selling wine in TV commercials. So whenever anyone said I looked like Orson Welles I said that I wasn't that fat, and I would get on a diet, quickly.
Like so many people, I only remembered Orson Welles as this huge, fat, bearded figure selling wine in TV commercials. So whenever anyone said I looked like Orson Welles I said that I wasnt that fat, and I would get on a diet, quickly.
I wanted to meet Orson Welles. So I was like, whatever, somehow get me in on this. I'm able to get cast in it, but Orson Welles worked alone. He worked before all of us worked. He didn't want to work with anyone else.
I've always had an innate ability to dance, but I'm not as spiffy as those cinema legends like Gene Kelly and Fred Astaire.
I've always been inspired by the great actors and actresses of the '30s and '40s like Fred Astaire, Ann Miller and Gene Kelly.
For me, a great fantasy is real people, a world I recognise, human struggle and magic. You've got to have magic to make a fantasy work. But I like my magic to be subtle. I don't want magic coming out of the hands of wizards. I want it to be pervading, sinister somehow.
Some people love magic for the right reasons: They love to experience wonder. They don't want to know how it works. In this day and age, we know how everything works. We can Google anything and the answer is never really far away. Magic is a break from that where you get to enjoy mystery. And then there's the people who watch the trick but don't want to enjoy it because they want to figure it out and they feel like I'm challenging their intelligence, which I'm not doing. Those people are hell-bent on not enjoying magic and probably not enjoying their lives either.
The thing is that my idols have always been the types of guys who could do anything: Gene Kelly, Fred Astaire, Sinatra, Dean Martin; and when you look up to people like that, you don't accept that you need to be compartmentalised.
I'm really influenced by Fred Astaire and Gene Kelly.
I want to try to apply my abilities sometimes to make families happy, so I have to make movies at a venue that are not gratuitously violent, that are not using bullets and bloodshed, but are using things like magic and fantasy and enchantment and the imagination. To me that's just all positive stuff. But I am eclectic and I still like to make movies for the midnight audience as well.
When I was a kid, I loved Nicholas brothers films. It was like skateboarding. Even Gene Kelly: I always preferred him to Fred Astaire, just because he was more athletic, like skateboarding.
I wish I was born in that era: dancing with Fred Astaire and Gene Kelly, going to work at the studio dressed in beautiful pants, head scarves, and sunglasses.
Of course the Disney movies, you know all the soundtracks, and anything Gene Kelly and Fred Astaire were doing - Singing in the Rain was one of my favorite musicals I used to watch a lot because my mom came from a theatre background.
I love the old Fred Astaire and Gene Kelly movies; they're so beautiful to look at. It's such a shame we don't make them anymore. Although, I don't know how you could make tap dancing current and topical.
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