Words matter. These are the best Melvin Van Peebles Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
‘Sweetback’ represented an economic tour de force because I had no partners; I own it.
A bumblebee can’t fly. He’s aerodynamically unsound. But he doesn’t know that.
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 had to find one characteristic that is most symbolic of me, I think I am tenacious.
Truth of the matter is, I can’t even read or write music.
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.
Whitey is uptight about offending blacks without really knowing what offends blacks.
The studios didn’t really take independent films seriously, till ‘Sweetback’ was such a financial success.
I was getting my Ph.D. in Holland – I speak Dutch – for a number of years before I moved to France because I had one of those offers you couldn’t turn down. They offered me to come and do my films.
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 went to a number of schools when I was a kid on the south side of Chicago.
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.
I didn’t even know I had a legacy.
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.
The artistic world is one of high nuance.
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.
In the morning, I get the paper. I look in the obituary column. If I don’t see myself in there, I get up.
Don’t ask me something if you don’t want to know. Because I will tell you.
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.’
It wasn’t really me who invented rap. I stole the idea from Aristide Bruant.
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!
I’m from the Southside of Chicago.
Blacks had a huge role in settling the West, but you’d never know it from Western movies.
What some folks find funny, other folks find tragic.
My life and career is defined by the constant pursuit of new forms of culture and self-expression.
Music – some people just don’t know that part of me.
I’m too short to play basketball and too nervous to steal.
Big publishers want you to change this and change that. I’d rather go to a little publisher – who needs the tsuris.
I intend to stay dangerous.
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.
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.
I work from a subjective palette.
I do what I want to do.
If you look down a barrel of a gun… you don’t forget it.
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.
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.
If you give people something they want, they’ll come and see it.
Blacks are tired of seeing whites saying, ‘I understand you.’ You need a black to direct a black film.
In trying to cross over to the mainstream, some people stopped writing what they witnessed.
Our minds are not our friends when they realize we have work to do – they’re our enemies.
If I was just a creator, I would still be back in the Lincoln annex in the Post Office.
I used to be the third person in the secret jets we had – they were secret at the time – a jet bomber that flew at immense heights carrying atomic bombs.
Somebody once asked me, ‘Melvin, how’d you get to the top?’ It was simple. Nobody would let me in at the bottom.
Over time, you accumulate a lot of life material.
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.
