Steven Spielberg

He knew how to shock the audience.

And he knew how to make them laugh.

Dr. Strangelove is one of the greatest black comedies ever created for the screen.

And with 2001 A Space Odyssey, he was also...

He was also a wizard technologically.

He was almost an engineer.

His mind had a kind of OCD quality where when he focused in on something, he was doing it for himself, and we were the beneficiaries.

For whatever reason, he was creating these incredibly advanced spacecraft that no one had ever seen before in anybody else's films.

Those spacecraft alone...

kind of works of art, I always felt.

And those spacecraft, especially the Jupiter mission craft, is what inspired

Ralph McQuarrie and myself, to create the mothership in Close Encounters, inspired George Lucas with the Imperial Starship Destroyer, and included, and certainly, certainly, inspired Ridley Scott in creating the space freighter Nostromo.

These wouldn't have existed unless Stanley had come first.

It does.

And I knew Arthur.

I had the honor of meeting and having lunch with Arthur C. Clarke when I was shooting Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom.

We stopped.

We were shooting in Kandy, Sri Lanka.

and and we stopped in colombo before changing airplanes to fly back to the uk to come to continue shooting the film and he lived there for decades and he lived in the botanical gardens where david lena shot bridge in the river quay um and he invited us all to uh lunch at his house and i had a great conversation with him about 2001 a space odyssey wow did so

I wouldn't call it prolific.