I had a quite unconventional childhood, in the sense that I traveled a lot and I went to 10 or 11 schools. I was completely confused academically, but wherever I went, I could paint. I painted an inordinate amount.
History is only conjecture, and the best historians try to do it as accurately as they can. They try to accurately reassemble the facts and then put them down on paper.
I always shoot my movies with score as certainly part of the dialogue. Music is dialogue. People don't think about it that way, but music is actually dialogue. And sometimes music is the final, finished, additional dialogue. Music can be one of the final characters in the film.
The Gulf of Mexico, they believe, is a huge asteroid. That was an impact zone, you know that? Yeah, for that big a thing to actually hit our globe, it would have had to adjusted the spin, the axis.
If you believe, you believe; if you're faithful, you're faithful. I don't care what your religion is. The same if you're agnostic. That should be accepted, too.
I'm agnostic because I went through the usual process of parents insisting you go to church, and yet they didn't. So there's me, sitting in the chairs, thinking, 'Jeez, why am I here? I'd rather be playing tennis, seriously.'
The word 'religion' is only a label. What lies behind that, the most important thing of all, is the word 'faith'. You either have faith, or you don't have faith, or you have degrees of faith - and if you have degrees of faith, then you become agnostic. You're kind of in-between, or you're on the fence.
When you think about it, 'Avatar' is almost completely an animated movie.
For 'Prometheus,' I came back to a very simple question that haunted me that appears in the first 'Alien,' and no one answered in subsequent Alien films: who was the 'Space Jockey' - the big guy in the seat? If you really go into that, it becomes the basis for a pretty interesting story.
I don't get attached to anything. I'm like a good antique dealer. I'm prepared to sell my most valuable table.
I had been very impressed with the voiceover of 'Apocalypse Now,' with Martin Sheen's voice. That was a great voiceover; it really internalized the Martin Sheen character, who was essentially fairly low key and didn't say a lot during the whole movie. But he thought a lot, so I always thought that was really great.
If you ever have a kid who doesn't know what to do, stick him in art school. It's amazing what evolves.
When you're doing a big movie, you're gone for 10 months to a year.
There's a big film industry in Egypt, and quite a big one in Syria, and there's a big Muslim community in Paris.
What's interesting to me about Moses isn't the big stuff that everybody knows.
Blade Runner appears regularly, two or three times a year in various shapes and forms of science fiction. It set the pace for what is essentially urban science fiction, urban future and it's why I've never re-visited that area because I feel I've done it.
'Blade Runner' was a comic strip. It was a comic strip! It was a very dark comic strip. Comic metaphorically.
The people who really resurrected 'Blade Runner' was 'MTV.'
Once, I got slaughtered after 'Blade Runner' by Pauline Kael: three pages of slaughter. I was so offended, I would never read any more press.
I think over time I've learned to stop being a screamer and get interactive; otherwise, you get killed in Hollywood. I stopped being a screamer shortly after 'Blade Runner,' kicking doors and things like that, because I wasn't actually getting anywhere.
