It's hard work making movies. It's like being a doctor: you work long hours, very hard hours, and it's emotional, tense work. If you don't really love it, then it ain't worth it.

A talent is a combination of something you love a great deal and something you can lose yourself in - something that you can start at 9 o'clock, look up from your work and it's 10 o'clock at night.

You can't put a title card at the head of the movie and say, "Well, we really had a bad problem. You know, the actor got sick and it rained this day and we had a hurricane."

Although I write screenplays, I don't think I'm a very good writer. I'm very interested in studying cultures and social issues, but as an academic I don't think I would have been too successful.

You have to understand that it's a very cooperative world, not only with the environment, with but our fellow human beings. If you do not cooperate, if you do not work together to keep the entire organism going, the whole thing dies, and everybody dies with it. That's a law of nature, and it's existed forever. We're one of the very few creatures that has a choice, and can intellectualize the process.

You have to find something that you love enough to be able to take risks.

For 'Star Wars' I had to develop a whole new idea about special effects to give it the kind of kinetic energy I was looking for. I did it with motion-control photography.