Melvin Van Peebles
Scars are the price you pay for success.Collection: Success
There's something on Wall Street called PIG - panic, ignorance, and greed. Those are the big sins. I'm not greedy, I knew I was ignorant, and I didn't panic.
Somebody once asked me, 'Melvin, how'd you get to the top?' It was simple. Nobody would let me in at the bottom.
Before me, music soundtracks were sort of afterthoughts.
Music - some people just don't know that part of me.
When I was a kid, from 10 years old, I worked every day for my dad, huh? Never played basketball. I never played tennis - never did. We worked so that we could eat.
I work from a subjective palette.
With 'Sweetback,' I just put it together a little bit at a time. I didn't do it on anybody's grant. I did it like any other young executive - by cheating and stealing!
Big publishers want you to change this and change that. I'd rather go to a little publisher - who needs the tsuris.
You have to not let yourself believe you can't. Do what you can do within the framework of what you have, and don't look outside - look inside.
I said to my kids, 'Learn the business of America if you want to be an artist in America. The rest of that stuff, the art part, you could pick up in an hour and a half.'
A bumblebee can't fly. He's aerodynamically unsound. But he doesn't know that.
When I was in the Air Force, if I walked into a restaurant, in about eight or nine minutes the M.P.'s would show up and drag me out because someone had called saying that someone was impersonating an officer.
I didn't even know I had a legacy.
I do what I want to do.
The key to empowerment is no more complicated than what Jesse Jackson said, 'We are somebody.' But the 'We are somebody' I would like to be in the larger sense: not just the urban African-American but homo sapiens in general - We are somebody.
Blacks had a huge role in settling the West, but you'd never know it from Western movies.
It wasn't really me who invented rap. I stole the idea from Aristide Bruant.
I'm too short to play basketball and too nervous to steal.
Don't ask me something if you don't want to know. Because I will tell you.
Why not have fun, man? If I feel like doing something, I just go ahead and do it.
I intend to stay dangerous.
If you look down a barrel of a gun... you don't forget it.
In trying to cross over to the mainstream, some people stopped writing what they witnessed.
It must be horrible to do things that you don't like hoping to please other people, and they don't like it either, and you've got to eat it.
Making 'Sweetback' took an exorbitant amount of energy and time.
I'm not a normal director. You can't look at me that way. What's kept me alive is my technical skill at doing other things.
I've never been to film school. I had to leave this country to make a film. All they would let me do in Hollywood was be a messenger.
My first feature, I made in France. There's a great respect for the author there - they don't change your stuff.
Before I made 'Sweetback,' I had a three-picture deal with Columbia and enough juice, if I was real clever with it, to proclaim that I wanted to do an independent film.
When we talk about 'Sweetback,' yes, it stars the whole black movement, but it's also the first time an independent film made that kind of money and was that successful and taken seriously.
Personally, I do movies the way I cook: I put in what I like in case nobody else likes it and I have to eat it for the rest of the week.
I walk down the street; the garbagemen will shout at me, and we'll talk. That's a pleasure when people feel, 'If he can do it, I can, too.'
There is a downside to affordable technology, and that's mediocrity. I mean, just 'cause you can afford it don't mean you can do it.
You've got to really check on what you're doing: check and recheck it seven other times to be prepared. Sometimes, people get carried away with the artistic-ness of the endeavor and don't quite have their game face on when the time comes. It's always a pretty costly mistake.
Truth of the matter is, I can't even read or write music.
I graduated from college when I was 20. To get enough money to finish college, I went into the ROTC, and I was an officer in the Air Force before I could buy a drink.
I'm pretty much a loner. That's not good, bad, or indifferent.
If you give people something they want, they'll come and see it.
I went to a number of schools when I was a kid on the south side of Chicago.
Me and modesty don't mix.
I have no illusions about running. I hate running. If I could feel as good as I felt at 30 without running, I wouldn't do it, but that's not the way it works! So - no pain, no gain.
Our minds are not our friends when they realize we have work to do - they're our enemies.
What happened when 'Sweetback' made all that money, the studios were in a very difficult position. They wanted the money, but they didn't the message. This marked the advent of the caricatures which became known as blaxploitation.
The studios didn't really take independent films seriously, till 'Sweetback' was such a financial success.
One day, I was sitting in a movie theater, and I said, 'What the hell? I can do better than that.'
I'm from the Southside of Chicago.
What some folks find funny, other folks find tragic.
'Sweetback' represented an economic tour de force because I had no partners; I own it.
If I was just a creator, I would still be back in the Lincoln annex in the Post Office.