Parenting & Family Quote by Antoine Fuqua

Fuqua is talking about cinema as a formative drug: not escape, but ignition. By pairing Akira Kurosawa with Sergio Leone, he’s sketching a personal origin myth that’s also a map of influence across borders. One is often treated as high art humanism, the other as operatic genre spectacle; Fuqua refuses the hierarchy. The point isn’t that he “liked movies.” It’s that movies rearranged his nervous system early enough to become a moral and aesthetic compass.

The phrasing matters. “What it could do to you” frames film as an active force, almost bodily, not a passive pastime. “Influence you” isn’t code for trivia or references; it’s about learning how to look at the world. Kurosawa’s weather, motion, and ethical clarity; Leone’s patience, faces, and mythic violence. Together they teach a young viewer that style is not decoration - it’s how emotion gets engineered. Dreaming, here, isn’t naïveté. It’s permission: to imagine yourself inside stories larger than your neighborhood, your circumstances, your assigned future.

There’s also a quiet argument about lineage. Fuqua, often read through the lens of contemporary American action and crime dramas, positions himself in a global conversation of filmmakers who elevated genre into poetry. The subtext is aspiration without apology: he’s staking a claim that his love of spectacle has serious ancestry, and that the movies’ most radical power is still the oldest one - to make a kid believe another life is possible.