Melvin Van Peebles

“If you give people something they want, they'll come and see it.”

“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.”

“As a navigator, I started studying astronomy because sometimes you're not able to use the equipment, so you'd have to do it the old-fashioned way, figuring out what you were seeing in the sky.”

“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.”

“One day, I was sitting in a movie theater, and I said, 'What the hell? I can do better than that.'”

“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.”

“In the morning, I get the paper. I look in the obituary column. If I don't see myself in there, I get up.”

“The studios didn't really take independent films seriously, till 'Sweetback' was such a financial success.”

“A bumblebee can't fly. He's aerodynamically unsound. But he doesn't know that.”

“I went to a number of schools when I was a kid on the south side of Chicago.”

“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.”

“Music - some people just don't know that part of me.”

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

“Truth of the matter is, I can't even read or write music.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“Over time, you accumulate a lot of life material.”

“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!”

“It wasn't really me who invented rap. I stole the idea from Aristide Bruant.”