Growing up, movies were something my family and, later, my friends and I would stay up all night talking about. The movies I remember moved me and forced you to think about things that made you know yourself better.
— Edward Zwick
Anorexia is pernicious and not something which goes away overnight.
One of the great tragedies is that there is so much less open land available in Japan today. Many Japanese come to New Zealand because of its beauty.
I've enjoyed the singular focus of not going back and forth between the two mediums. It isn't about the screen size so much as film being where the stories I'm most interested in telling happen to be at.
I really look forward to that opportunity to be a student and discover things. That keeps it interesting for me. And I sometimes get easily bored, and there are still some things I wanna talk about instead of repeating something.
The thing that has always interested me - amidst the scale, the historical spectacle, or the social significance or the political resonance - has been the relationships.
The promise of an action movie to a certain audience is not a bad thing.
There's a great tradition of actors taking on parts of much less obvious sympathy.
Often, romantic comedies exist in a vacuum, and it's kind of odd.
I think every culture - you can call it an American Ronin, a medieval knight errant, you could talk about 'Shane.' There is an archetype that I think is actually common to a lot of cultures, and even the Clint Eastwood stuff was probably as influenced by the Japanese stuff, and yet done by an Italian.
Stories are one of the means by which a culture preserves its identity.
If I try to think objectively about myself and my work, I would say I want to be intuitive and distinctive.
I had known a couple of people in college who went off the rails, who had significant bouts with mental illness.
The most interesting thing to me in chess are not the gambits. Or the moves. It's the mental toughness.
The ronin were those masterless men who roamed around, and yet they found themselves getting involved in circumstances they hadn't expected.
Ironically, it's easier to raise the money to make the film than it is to have the film find wide distribution.
In my office, we were talking about the fact that they'd announced a remake of 'A Star is Born,' and I was bemoaning the idea of a fourth remake. And the young guys who work in my office were giving me blank looks, like, 'What's 'A Star is Born?'
Movies, as I grew up loving them, were always about something.
Adolescence is a time in which you experience everything more intensely.
I think it's easier to be cynical. I think the temptation, often, among writers is to write about anything other than real, true, deep feelings.
People who have any kind of illness use humor as a type of coping.
There's only a certain number of movies I'm going to get made, and it's important to me that they each be original somehow.
Romantic comedy has come to mean a couple of moderately talented actors placed in implausible situations obliged to go through a set of paces that are all too familiar, the end result being neither romantic nor comedic.
In my experience, the men of World War II, the vets of Vietnam, even guys coming back from Iraq, are loath to talk about their experiences. And the survivors of the Holocaust, particularly, are often very close-mouthed about their stories, even to their own children.
We've suspended the willing suspension of disbelief. We have given up that relationship, that almost hypnotic engagement, with the characters up on the screen.
The Mitch Rapp novels are as thrilling and entertaining as they are relevant. I am delighted to be given the opportunity to translate them to the screen.
I think there is a very powerful wish that we all have of being self-contained and having sort of opted out or choosing to remove ourselves from society and to have no ties and no obligations, and even no possessions. To be free in a particular way.
I like to reveal people with some of the niceties of social behavior stripped away and the moral, ethical, and political issues are revealed.
Scale is not just something that a director wants so as to play with all the toys. Scale also lends verisimilitude, to put together a real world.
The Beatles in 1963 came to America and became international celebrities, but Bobby Fischer was one of the first, as Elvis was, more in terms of the message created around him.
When you're in a fight, and you get hit, it hurts. And as you get older, you begin to take on the aches and the bruises of doing that.
There have been bombings by extremists. They are not representatives of Islam. They're not representative of the vast majority of people who love this country, but nonetheless, they exist.
You can spend an extraordinary amount of time raising independent money to do a movie for very little means. I've done it with 'Pawn Sacrifice.'
I think most Americans probably believe that our relationship with Japan began in 1941. In fact, obviously, it began in 1854 when Commodore Perry sailed into Yokohama harbor and threatened to burn it down unless they would open up to trade with us. The imperial impulse was first ours historically.
It's hard not to want to become Ken Burns at times. I'm interested in being a Ken Burns who reaches that 17-year-old who goes to the multiplex just to see a good story well-told. And if there's history in it, all the better.
It's one thing to plan and imagine what you want on a film, but when you actually arrive and survey the scene, there's a moment of, 'Oh my God, what was I thinking?'
A lot of superhero sequel movies, they resemble each other greatly.
People make the assumption that you're only interested in one thing based on the most recent thing you've done. But some directors can be pretty promiscuous about their tastes, and that's how I want to challenge myself.
A sex scene is gratuitous when it only exists for its own sake.
One resists categorization at one's peril.
People tend not to dwell on drama.
Forgive me, but what is the purpose of drama but catharsis?
I think it's too easy often to find a villain out of the headlines and to then repeat that villainy again and again and again. You know, traditionally, America has always looked to scapegoat someone as the boogie man... there is a tradition in the most simplistic of action movies for there to be some horrible villain.
The phone that you carry around with you. It's not just that it's a locator for anybody who wants to actually find out where you are, but it's also a leash. It's a reminder just how tethered you are.
You can't help but reveal your bias, and you can't but invest personally in any story that you tell.
The privilege I've had over 15 movies over a very long time has been to make movies that were ambitious or grown-up, complex, that had themes in them that were sometimes political, sometimes challenging, to make these movies on a scale.
You have to make choices always. It's about the omission of something for the sake of another.
I'm very promiscuous in my tastes.
I think to see American troops in an American city is, you know, the sum of all of our fears.
I've done all sorts of different kinds of action. We did a thing in 'Blood Diamond,' the attack on Freetown, where I carefully staged the action but did not show the camera operators what we were going to film - so it has the feel of documentary, trying to capture something, and that gave it a whole different feel.
