But when you have a dream, it doesn't often come at you screaming
in your facе. “This is who you are,
this is what you must be for the rest of your life”.
Sometimes a dream almost whispers, аnd I've always said to my kids,
the hardest thing to listen to your instincts,
ѕour human personal intuition always whispers, it never shouts.
You know, when a journalist asked me years ago a question I really couldn't answer.
They said, “what do you do, why do you do this?” And and I don't know where it came from,
but I sort of turned to the journalist in a flipped kind of way, I said,
“I dream for a living”. And years later, I realized,
well, that's exactly what I do, I dream for a living.
This is what I've done all my life, this is what I wanted to do with my life.
And I think it all started out when I was maybe six or seven years old
and my father came over to me and said. “I'm going to take you to see,
“The Greatest Show On Earth”. It was a movie about a circus
and I had never seen a movie before, that was the first movie I ever saw,
Cecil B. DeMille, “The Greatest Show On Earth”. I had never seen a motion picture before.
So I knew television, but I didn't know movies, that was my first movie experience.
Now, in the center of this movie, if any of you remember
the Cecil B. DeMille’s film, “The Greatest Show on Earth”,
there's a tremendous train wreck. A train speeding along the tracks,
is encountered by a car, a person trying to stop a
train to flag down the train and the train hits the car.
The car flips over the top of the engine and the train goes off the tracks and
there's a tremendous disaster where all the cars pile up,
it was a special effect sequence, later, I learned it was a miniature
train, but it was as real as I've ever seen anything in my life,
it was the greatest disaster I ever beheld and for me, it began my
interest not in making movies, but in asking my dad to get me a electric train.
So I went from wanting to become part of this incredible experience
to wanting to own my first electric train. And that holiday season,
my dad got me my first lionel engine, and a couple of caboose
and a few passenger cars. And the next year, I asked for the same thing,
I said, I'd like another engine, so I had two trains.
And as I got older, I began to collect, every year more and more cars and
people and semaphores and crossing signals,
I became a complete electric train nut. And I was really interested in
seeing what it would look like if I could recreate that memory,
now, several years old, “The greatest show on Earth”,
and could I recreate the train wreck? And I actually took my two trains
and I just rammed them into each other. And they broke and I told my
dad the trains had broken, and he said, “how did it happen?”
I said, “I rammed him into each other”, and my dad had them repaired.
And the next week I crashed my trains into each other again
and the other train broke and my dad said, “look,
I'm going to take the train set away, if you crash these things
into each other one more time, you're not going to have trains anymore”.
But there was something about whatever the primal
sense of wanting to destroy something because of that movie, whatever got into me,
I needed to see those trains crash into each other.
And I also didn't want to lose my train set. My dad had sitting around the house,
which I always had taken for granted, this little 8mm Kodak film movie camera
with a turret that had three lenses kind of wide, medium and close up lens,
I never really bothered with the camera. But I thought, well, I know what I can do.
What if I filmed the trains crashing into each other,
I can just watch the film over and over and over again.
And that's how I made my first movie. I shot one train, I just own the camera,
I didn't have an editing machine, I just put the camera low to the track,
the way we as children like to put our eyes
close to the toys we're playing with so the scale seems to be,
you know, the scale seems to be realistic. And I just filmed one train going left to right,
I filmed the other train, cut the camera, turn it around,
the other train coming right to the left. And intuitively, I figured out if I put
the camera in the middle and they met in the middle,
I'd have my train wreck. And that's exactly what I did,
luckily, the trains didn't break, but I looked at that film over and
over and over again. And then I thought,
I wonder what else I could do with this camera. And that's how it began.
And that's how I became a director, I didn't have a choice.
When you have a dream and the dream
isn't something you dream, then it happens, the dream is something you never knew
was going to come into your life, Dreams always come from behind you,
not right between your eyes, it sneaks up on you. But when you have a dream,
it doesn't often come at you screaming in your face.
“This is who you are, this is what you must be for the rest of your life”.
Sometimes a dream almost whispers. And I've always said to my kids,
the hardest thing to listen to, your instincts, your human personal intuition
always whispers, it never shouts, very hard to hear.
So you have to every day of your lives, be ready to hear
what whispers in your ear, it very rarely shouts. And if you can listen to the whisper
and if it tickles your heart and it's something you think you want
to do for the rest of your life, then that is going to be
what you do for the rest of your life, and we will benefit from everything you do.