Quotes from Melvin Van Peebles

Many times, I get young people asking, 'What do you think about black movies?' And I say, 'What are you talking about? You mean Hollywood movies that have black people in them?' It's gone back to that, and that's not the same thing as a black movie.

'Sweetback' represented an economic tour de force because I had no partners; I own it.

Blacks had a huge role in settling the West, but you'd never know it from Western movies.

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.'

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.

No one - black, white, or any different - walks away from a three-picture deal with a studio. That's every filmmaker's dream. But it wasn't mine.

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.

After 'Don't Play Us Cheap,' I got very busy with theater and Wall Street.

I'm from the Southside of Chicago.

Music or sound in a film is a character as important as another character.

I make a film like I cook for friends. I hope they like it, but if they don't, I'm prepared to enjoy it all by myself.

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.

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.

If I was just a creator, I would still be back in the Lincoln annex in the Post Office.

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.

When I got to Paris, they welcomed me and showed my films. It was August of 1960, and I didn't have a penny in my pocket. But they had done something very dangerous: They had given me encouragement.

Scars are the price you pay for success.

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.

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.

Blacks are tired of seeing whites saying, 'I understand you.' You need a black to direct a black film.

Why not have fun, man? If I feel like doing something, I just go ahead and do it.

If I had to find one characteristic that is most symbolic of me, I think I am tenacious.

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.

Big publishers want you to change this and change that. I'd rather go to a little publisher - who needs the tsuris.