I'm not the most sophisticated person. I'm not the smartest person in the world. But, I know what makes me excited about life, from Spielberg movies to Michael Jackson music videos to cartoons on Saturday mornings, which made my childhood.
Occasionally I do movies with other directors. I did 'The Diving Bell and the Butterfly' for Julian Schnabel. I did a movie with Jim Brooks ('How Do You Know'). I did a movie with Judd Apatow ('Funny People'). So I do get a chance to work with other people, which is always enjoyable, always pleasant. But still, Steven [Spielberg] makes the types of movies that I'm interested in as well.
Sitting at the table during Color Purple and looking up and suddenly realizing I was acting in front of Steven Spielberg, was pretty cool. It was pretty good.
[Spielberg and I] had a disagreement over what God was. . . . He thought God was Stephen Spielberg, but that thought had never occurred to me.
I'm a humorist. A guy like Paul Simon just makes my life so much simpler. When I was there, he had a hearing against hate. Steven Spielberg came and testified against hate. Paul Simon said hate was bad. Orrin Hatch was there, and he was against hate too. Everyone was opposed to hate. Is this really a wonderful way to spend our tax dollars, to have these men drone away about how against hate they are?
I've worked with Steven Spielberg three times. I'm proud to say that I'm one of those actors that continues to get hired by the same directors.
It's just such an honor to say that I was in something by Steven Spielberg. I feel so blessed I got to meet such great people, and I got to go to a beautiful place, Vancouver, and I had a great time.
I'd love to go to school and have a normal life, but I don't see any professor at Yale being able to teach me more than Steven Spielberg.
My strength, if it's anything, is that I can lure some big-name actors in. That's probably the strength of almost any director now. On your own, as a director, you've only got so much weight. James Cameron, George Lucas, Steven Spielberg, Michael Bay. . . that's about it. Everybody else depends on the star power that they can draw.
I read Animal House and I said, "I will burn down a house to be in this. I have to be in this movie. " I read 1941 and I went, "Well, if Steven Spielberg likes it. . . " But it just wasn't on the page. It was a very big, unwieldy thing, and there were so many characters. It was fun to shoot, but I didn't know what the core of it was.
I like Soderbergh, Spielberg, Lucas. There's a lot of talented guys out there obviously, and if you're a fan of films, you have to look at that stuff and learn from them.
Spielberg knows his craft so well, he can also improvise, and that is a lot of fun.
Spielberg was very young and starting up when we did Sugarland Express and I loved that, but the main thing was that I really loved his talent.
[Spielberg] surrounds himself with great crew members who are at the top of their game and know their stuff. He motivates us by liking what we do, and he doesn't get paralyzed by the process or by new ideas. He embraces them and uses them.
Growing up, I had the weird fantasy list: I wanted to be Alice Cooper, Steven Spielberg, and Stan Lee. You have to have almost psychotic drive, because you're going to have years of failure.
Regardless of the business aspect of things, is there a reason that there isn't a female Hitchcock or a female Scorsese or a female Spielberg? I don't know. I think it's a medium that really is built for the male gaze and for a male sensibility.
I'm not surprised that Spielberg was able to capture the heroism of Schindler; so many of his movies are about the better part of mankind.
Steven Spielberg and I have tremendous amounts of money.
A large part of the people in Hollywood are sheep - and I don't say that unkindly, I say that politically - if Spielberg and Streisand and Geffen and the others were Republicans tomorrow, you would see a shortage of paper to try and change registrations.
Well, you don't make any demands to Steven Spielberg.