MELVIN VAN PEEBLES

Somebody once asked me, 'Melvin, how'd you get to the top?' It was simple. Nobody would let me in at the bottom.

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

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.

Whitey is uptight about offending blacks without really knowing what offends blacks.

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!

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

I'm too short to play basketball and too nervous to steal.

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

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

The graphic novel is a great form that can be used to marry the book format with the movie.

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.

When we talk about 'Sweetback,' yes, it stars the whole black movement, but it's also the first time an independent film made that kind of money and was that successful and taken seriously.

My first feature, I made in France. There's a great respect for the author there - they don't change your stuff.

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.

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.'

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.

I'm pretty much a loner. That's not good, bad, or indifferent.

I said to my kids, 'Learn the business of America if you want to be an artist in America. The rest of that stuff, the art part, you could pick up in an hour and a half.'

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.