A Quote by George Lucas
It took me three, four years, to get from my first film to my second film, banging on doors, trying to get people to give me a chance. Writing, struggling, with no money in the bank, working as an editor on the side. Working as a cameraman on the side. Getting little jobs, eking out a living. Trying to stay alive, and pushing a script that nobody wanted.
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When you screen it the first couple times, you're just trying to get the movie to work, trying to get the story to flow, trying to find out where your areas are where you have enough breath to laugh a little bit. So you're doing that the first two or three screenings, and then finally, you dial the movie in and it's working, and at that point, it's 50/50 as far as what's funny and what's working. Sometimes you'll put something in and it will just die so hard that it'll almost kill the movie.
So, as opposed to getting people in to read the script and read scenes with me, what I wanted to do was sit down and chat to these people and just say, "Okay. Do you share my sense of humor? Do you understand what this film is getting at? Do you know the tone that we're trying to get to?" And it was interesting.
I love TV, don't get me wrong. But with film, you're just banging out this one product, and you're not waiting on another script. You have your script. It's great in that way. It's as close to theater as you can get.
Anything I have blown a lot of money on? Well, I have three daughters and a wife - that's four women, and I'm working on a sitcom, so you could say that I am just trying to stay alive!
I've got to sing for Pops; I've got to keep my father's legacy alive because he started all of this. So I started calling people, and nobody would give me a chance, but I didn't let that stop me. I took money out the bank and I started making me a record, and I did it in this guy's basement.
Unfortunately, I saw a side of humanity I wish I'd remained blissfully ignorant of, including one driver who threw a bottle at me while I was walking my baby to the doctor on the side of the road and yelled out insults. Nurses who made nasty comments about how I should get a job (I was working two of them, in addition to being a published author). It wasn't that I didn't have a job and wasn't working. The jobs in backwoods Mississippi didn't pay enough to cover living expenses.
I love TV, don't get me wrong. But with film, you're just banging out this one product and you're not waiting on another script. You have your script. It's great, in that way.
There hadn't been one done since the late 70s. I was living in Brooklyn, had no connection to Roger Corman, to no one in this movie. I didn't go to film school. I'm like the person who should have never made this film. But I just decided to put one foot in front of the other. I was writing film articles for magazines at the time. I convinced an editor from one of the magazines that I was working for to give me a shot to do a piece on Roger. This was an excuse to go meet him.
I get to work with incredibly talented young filmmakers and students, and their attitudes and relationship with film is still so pure. That re-inspires me and reminds me why I got into it and what I love about film, and allows me a little reprieve from the business side of it. And it rekindles my love of film.
I waited for each film to become important for me. If I had no ideas for a film, I didn't do a film. So I made not that many films for fifty-four years of working.
I've been training fighters about 10 years. And I know I get the kids that nobody else is gonna want. I get kids who violated probation five, six, seven times. Their parents don't want 'em, the police don't want 'em - nobody wants 'em. And so I say, okay, I was like that. Nobody wanted me. Once I found out that a nobody could do what I did, I took a whole bunch of nobodies. When you take a nobody, they're open to anything, so that's what I started working with. I started working with the worst kids that nobody else wants to deal with.
I have more dumb luck thank anybody I know. There must be a convey of guardian angels working twenty-four hours a day looking after me[...] Like the night I first got to Nashville that I laid down in the middle of Broadway, waiting to get run over. It didn't happen [...] I could swear they were keeping me alive just to see what I'd get next, I'm glad they feel that way. I'm trying to help them a little more this days.
I have to have a working knowledge of light, and optics, film emulsions and their properties, and lenses, otherwise I can't create the shoots that are the vocabulary of the films. But it is not necessary for me to be a cameraman, I can hire a cameraman.
I love working with film, whether it's the technical side, the acting side, or the musical side.
When I was in N.W.A. and didn't get paid all the money I was owed, that's when the business side of showbiz hit me. I thought, "Half of this is workin'. I'm famous, but now I need to be famous with some money." That got my brain started at trying to figure out the business end. And once I figured out the business side, I next came to understand that success really comes down to the product, not to me, my personality, or what club I'm seen going into or coming out of. None of that matters.
It took me three albums to get the confidence and to find out what I could do that made me different from other people. And the first record, really, was a process of trying.
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