Well, when I was about 15 years old, I was living in Phoenix, Arizona. My second cousin had a friend who had a friend who was the creator of Hogan's Heroes. [Through this connection, Spielberg visited the man at his office.] This guy said, "Well, do you want to be a picture maker?" and I said, "Yes," and he said, "I'm in television. You want to talk to the guy next door. That's the guy you should talk to. It's John Ford." I said, "You have John Ford next door?" He said, "Yeah, his secretary's really nice." So I went next door, and the secretary said, "Well, Mr. Ford's at lunch, but he'll be back any minute now, so why don't you have a seat and wait." So we waited and we talked, and I told her about my little 8mm movies I was making back in Phoenix, Arizona, and all of a sudden the door opens and a man in a complete safari outfit, with a patch over his eye, with a cigar between his fingers comes walking into the room. She says, "Mr. Ford will see you for a couple of minutes." So I walk into the room and he is sitting there with his big cowboy boots on his desk. It reminded me of the scene in It's a Wonderful Life when Jimmy Stewart sits across from Mr. Potter. Mr. Potter purposely has the chair across from him so Jimmy Stewart looked like one of the Little Rascals once he sat in the seat, and shrank down. I did the same thing. Ford said to me, "So you want to be a picture maker?" And I said, "Yes." "What have you done so far?" I said I was 15 years old, and I said, "I've made some films in 8mm and I go to school in Phoenix, Arizona." "Well, what do you know about picture making?" "What do you know about pictures?" "What do you know about art?" "You've got to know about art." I guess I was quiet. "Well, get up and look around the room. What do you see on the walls there?" I said, "Art." "Go to the first painting." And, by the way, these were all Western paintings, probably Russells, Remingtons, but I didn't know those names then.

He said, "Tell me what you see?" I said, "Well, there's a cowboy sitting on a horse—" He said, "No, no, no, no, where is the horizon?" I said, "Well, the horizon is just a couple of inches above the bottom of the picture." He said, "OK. Go to the next painting, what do you see in that painting?" I said, "There's a lot of Indians on horseback—" "No, no, where's the horizon?" "Well, the horizon's at the very top of the painting?" "Go to the next painting. What do you see there?" I said, "There's no horizon at all." He said, "No, no, what objects are in the painting?" I said, "There's an Indian and a cowboy." And then, still sitting in his chair, he turns around, he said, "Look, kid, when the day comes in your life when you can tell that a shot is great when the horizon is at the very bottom of the frame with all that sky, or the horizon is at the very top of the frame with all that ground, and when you can recognize the fact when the horizon goes directly in the center of the frame, it's a lousy painting, when you recognize that, you might have a future in the picture business."

Steven Spielberg