You want to take yourself seriously, and you want to make something that you hope will have resonance with the audience. You want to bring your perspective and what you consider your talent to that piece of work, and you move forward in that direction. Sometimes that's easy, and sometimes it's met with resistance because you're dealing with situations where, for everybody else, it's a piece of business.

Antoine Fuqua

I just think you can't shut your life off to just, you know, one thing. You gotta be open-minded. Explore things. Feed your artist.

Antoine Fuqua

open-minded artist thinking

Being a kid growing up with Kurosawa films and watching Sergio Leone movies just made me love what it could do to you, and how it could influence you - make you dream.

Antoine Fuqua

growing-up dream kids

I'm a product of older filmmakers I guess, the past where you get to make movies and scenes are what they are. You know if you think about Scorsese back in the day when he was making Taxi Driver, or Coppola or Frankenheimer, Sidney Lumet, they're making films where you witness violence in a real way.

Antoine Fuqua

real past thinking

I think people go to the movies to be entertained, to have an experience, to disappear from their own reality for a couple of hours. If the film truly succeeds in everything the filmmaker sets out for it to be, then it's elevated to art. It's elevated to something special, because it gives people a visceral feeling of something they're experiencing as a collective group. You feel something and that's what turns it into what you may call art.

Antoine Fuqua

couple art thinking

I'd seen too many shrines in South Central and thought it was worth asking where the first bullet came from that started all this violence.

Antoine Fuqua

bullets shrines asking

Cinema Paradiso, because it reminds me of why I make movies, the magic of movies, the romance of movies.

Antoine Fuqua

romance magic cinema

What I learned is, don't forget who you are, because that's what's going to make you a filmmaker.

Antoine Fuqua

filmmaker who-you-are forget

Tupac Shakur is something that, of course I want to make the Tupac movie, I love Tupac, but when that movie was announced, we didn't even have a script yet. It was just being written. People announce things too soon. If you go to any filmmaker - Clint Eastwood, Oliver Stone, Martin Scorsese, Ben Affleck, Michael Mann - you go in their offices and there are scripts everywhere and there's about four or five of them you really want to make.

Antoine Fuqua

filmmaker office people

I started studying mythology, just on my own. Joseph Campbell, mysticism.

Antoine Fuqua

mythology my-own study

My experience of test screenings is that you don't know what kind of mood people are going to be in, and sometimes the studios accept what Joe Blo says - and this guy could just be a frustrated filmmaker, or not paying attention.

Antoine Fuqua

frustrated guy people

I only pay to take my son to the movies, because most of the time I only watch European movies, independent movies, or screen them privately. But I like to go to movies with my son because it's still fun; it reminds me of why I make movies.

Antoine Fuqua

independent fun son

I love movies; I grew up loving movies. I've always loved movies. I never thought about making movies until I took art classes and then I started studying different artists. As you study paintings, you see light and shadow, of course - Rembrandt, Eugène Delacroix. You start to understand the relationship between people and art, and images. For me, between movies that I watched and art, it was like, I'd love to make moving art. Moving pictures.

Antoine Fuqua

people art moving

So it's hard to be an artist and be true to the reality of the world you want to create and also make it entertaining and successful financially.

Antoine Fuqua

artist successful reality

I became a director just for the love of movies, because of the power of cinema.

Antoine Fuqua

cinema directors

Some men don't gel when it comes to work - you have different work ethics, different opinions, different points of views, different methods of filmmaking - and we didn't gel.

Antoine Fuqua

movie views men

I don't think the audience goes and thinks of the movie as a piece of art - there are some independent people who may go and have a higher appreciation for filmmaking. It is a great art form, but I don't think you look at a painting and a movie with the same eye.

Antoine Fuqua

independent appreciation art

I believe in God, absolutely.

Antoine Fuqua

believe-in-god i-believe believe

I've become friends with Michael Mann and Oliver Stone; I've seen those guys work and that was great to see.

Antoine Fuqua

guy stones

I like making movies.

Antoine Fuqua

Even the Westerns that I grew up with, the Sergio Leone's and all that, there was always a sort of anti-hero, a guy reluctant to shame even, to pick up the gun again because he wants to help other people, and he does, he uses his skills for that.

Antoine Fuqua

gun helping-others hero