Quotes

What interested me was putting something on the screen that nobody else had on the screen, which was difficult to find. And I was interested in visuals, and locations that had not been photographed, and I was also interested in leaving California to find those locations, because every rock, every tree within 50 miles of Los Angeles, had been photographed.

[on Ray Harryhausen] It's been a great pleasure of mine to see Ray at work. That power of concentration, his area of creative design, and his ability to do what today crews of 70 or 80 men are doing is certainly unmatched in cinematic history.

Nobody paid any attention to us. Nobody said, "Why did you do this?" and "Why did you do that?" We just did it, and when the picture was finished, they saw it. We had full control, artistic control without any interference. That was worth the price of making a "B" picture, as opposed to an "A" picture.

[on Sam Katzman] [He] knew everything there was to know about making a movie. He was a very enterprising fellow, and was enormously intuitive. But, he was a very tough taskmaster and a real skinflint. I managed to get along well with Sam, because I knew what he was and respected what he did. Unfortunately, all his input was negative. He never contributed anything positive. I would suggest an idea, and he would knock it down. I would argue with him, but I never got very far. He wouldn't say, "Do this instead of that"; he would only say, "'Don't do this"--and I didn't. I certainly learned the value of a dollar from Sam.