I am paid a good amount of money to not blink for 12 hours. It's fun, but I don't take it very seriously.
I've passed on a lot of huge-money jobs. Money doesn't enter into the decision-making. If I do a big blockbuster, it's about how big an audience you'll get and where you can take them.
Without doing the big blockbusters, I wouldn't be able to find the money to go after little projects that I want to do.
No man but a blockhead ever wrote except for money.
Having money is rather like being a blond. It is more fun but not vital.
If we're all together, we have money, and we start to organize, you're going to see the Teamsters Union start to bloom.
If the Chinese economy can be opened so that currencies are convertible, Chinese tourists can take money and go see the world. Chinese businessmen can go and buy property in the U.S. and France and every place. All of a sudden, it's just going to be a blossoming global economy. I think it's going to be good for everybody.
We can still do a stop motion feature for about one-third of what it costs Pixar or DreamWorks or Blue Sky to make a feature. But nobody is interested in a film that cost $50 to 60 million with the potential to do $120 million. They want to risk big money to make huge money.
My father had a series of blue-collar jobs and never made more than $20,000 a year. When I was seven, he got injured on a job. That was a very important point - because of the injury, he couldn't walk, and the company he was working for did not pay him. There was no compensation. So there was no money and no food.
In Britain, the idea one could go from blue-collar beginnings to the university was so far out, it was quite unthinkable. I took a variety of jobs to pay for tuition - from ice-cream salesman to night-club bouncer. Whatever earned the most money in the least time.
The blues is losing someone you love and not having enough money to immerse yourself in drink.
If you want to be a good blues singer, people are going to be down on you, so dress like you're going to the bank to borrow money.
When I made my first film, I had hardly ever seen a camera before, and I was a young man when I arrived in Paris from the suburbs. At the time, I didn't talk much. I was very shy, so the bluff served me. I was telling people that I had no money, and that I knew how to make films, but I had no proof.
Boarding school didn't feel like my world, I felt like an alien; people there had a lot of money.
My father raised me to build computers, hardware. Literally, as an 8 year old, I had a soldering iron and circuit boards, and this was in neighbourhoods that wouldn't have a whole lot of money or anything. And I figured out ways to just hustle.
It's fine to discuss money in France, as long as you're complaining that you don't have enough, or boasting about getting a bargain.
I think the people who end up being extraordinarily successful - it's been my observation - tend to care enormously about status, particularly business people, right? Because the only point of money, you know, the only reason to have a 300-foot-long boat is because they're bigger than 200-foot-long boats.
Before I got into grad school, I used to work as a deck hand on these ferry boats in San Francisco, and they did day tours. It wasn't a bad job. I made decent money. But you were sitting down all day, tying up the boat, wiping it down. For some guys, that's a dream job, but for me it was kind of torture.
I'm glad I was born when I was. My time was the golden age of variety. If I were starting out again now, maybe things would happen for me, but it certainly would not be on a variety show with 28 musicians, 12 dancers, two major guest stars, 50 costumes a week by Bob Mackie. The networks just wouldn't spend the money today.
When George W. Bush was president, his daddy was raising money for the Bush library. I thought that was fine. When Bob Dole was Majority Leader, Elizabeth Dole was the president of American Red Cross. I didn't say anything.
