As a kid in Africa, you were so connected to nature itself because you went farming, watched the moon out at night, observed how the sky was different, and how the birds chanted different songs in the evening and the morning.
But of course when people watch morning television, Terry, it's a very different animal. You know, they're running around, they're getting their kids ready for school, they're probably doing eight million things, they're brushing their teeth.
Poverty is a solved problem - all they have to do is abolish taxes and regulations which cripple those intelligent, capable, and responsible men and women and destroy their productive capacity, then stand back and watch the economy boom.
Four of my children are daughters, and I've watched them devote themselves to reading books about how little girls learn to become women - how they learn to deal with boys and men, and the different hurdles females have to go over.
When I watch my kids, and I see the primal level at which the sibling relationships are formed, then I completely understand what these unresolved adult sibling problems are based on. You know, 'Mom liked you better' and, 'You got your own room and I...
I remember watching Regis and Kathie Lee interview celebrities, and my mom looked so happy. I just did the math. I wanted to make my mom happy, and I wanted to talk to celebrities. Basically, I wanted Kathie Lee's job!
I can't watch 'Titanic' without breaking down within the first 10 minutes. You know, when it got re-released in 3D, I went to see it again. My mom came to pick me up from the cinema, and I was just bawling my eyes out.
My mom would give me a piece to play, but I wouldn't do any theory because when it came time to do it I would sneak back upstairs and watch TV. So, I had these kind of nonchalant lessons for years, then it just started soaking in.
A lot of the films I like are more than fantasies - they're movies fascinated by the technology of space exploration, and they try to honor the laws of physics. I watched the Gregory Peck movie 'Marooned' over and over when I was a kid.
I know people watch our movies and they'll see a lot of images - they call it gross-out - that they don't like, and I understand that. It's an important movie and one that's extremely well done, but the amount of violent imagery was not for me.
Saturday night at my house, I often trot out classic movies and force the urchins to watch them. There is much wailing and gnashing of teeth, but I think it's important to teach kids about American culture, and films are certainly a big part of it.
I want to do movies that I'm proud of where my kids, at some point, can see and I can feel comfortable sitting there watching it with them. And just that move people. That make people feel a little bit better about themselves when they leave the thea...
The earliest movies that I loved were French movies and Italian movies. I grew up watching those kind of movies and often find the truest looks at human nature - you can find them in another country's movies.
We don't make movies for critics. I've done four movies; there's millions upon millions upon millions of people who've paid to see them. Somebody likes them. My greatest joy is to sit anonymously in a dark theater and watch it with an audience, a pay...
I learned English at school, or at least that's how it started. Also, in Holland - as opposed to some other European countries - we don't dub anything, so as a kid growing up, always watching English and American movies in their original language rea...
I have a really hard time watching gory stuff and horror movies. I have said no to some horror movie things. I wouldn't rule it out; I could probably be convinced to do one. But sometimes, I just get ill.
I think Woody Allen calls it 'anxiety of influence.' When you're in your formative years and you watch a movie that makes you want to make movies... For Wes Anderson, it's Truffaut. I'm sure for P.T. Anderson it was Scorsese and Jonathan Demme.
Woody Allen's movies are so much a part of me. I grew up watching them over and over and would read all his comic pieces for the New Yorker. In some ways, his influence is so much there that I can't even locate it any more.
Stephen Hawking's been watching too many Hollywood movies. I think the only kind aliens in Hollywood are the ones created by Steven Spielberg - 'Close Encounters of the Third Kind' and 'E.T.,' for example. All other aliens are trying to suck our brai...
When I went to Paris, I had a lot of ideas about it that were formed in the sort of ether that flows about if you watch too many recent Woody Allen movies or took French classes as a kid. I was certainly full of those.
We grew up as kids watching those movies and we were exposed to themes of civil rights, unfairness, bigotry and fathers struggling against the kind of mob of the town, so you remember how you felt as a kid being taken seriously, that you are part of ...