As we began to read more and more journals of men who had been in the Civil War and then been in the Indian Wars, we realized there was a whole universe of men whose souls had been shattered, whose lives had been utterly destroyed by what they had to do.
— Edward Zwick
There is nothing that is so serious that you can't also see its comic side. Comedy is a way of talking about the most serious things.
I would say that 'Schindler's List,' as powerful as it was, seemed to have continued with a particular iconography of victimization and passivity. That was the iconography with which I had grown up and to which I had grown accustomed.
The issue of diamonds in Africa is inseparable from the issue of child soldiers.
I guess television is so much on the word. It's so much closer to playwriting - the scale is more just about the voices and the internal lives. Movies, it's a very different canvas.
If you take away scale, the nature of the story changes. I made a joke the other day: if I were to try to make 'Glory' now, rather than be about a regiment, it would be about a platoon. It would be seven men in the woods rather than all the men on the beach.
If a director is really a director, I think he's interested in more than one thing.
When we did 'Thirtysomething,' television was either about doctors, lawyers, or cops.
I tend not to go look at movies before I make a movie. I'd rather not be specifically influenced.
I do watch 'It's a Wonderful Life' with my children at Christmas, and I liked it long before it went into the public domain and became a cliche.
Those of my generation who grew up in the midst of the Cold War had a very, very strong awareness and very much were sort of influenced by the demonization of the Soviet Union, whether that was through the Cuban Missile Crisis or duck-and-cover, or any of those things that so affected us then.
Sometimes when an actor and director work together for the first time, it's not as if there's a suspicion, but there is tentativeness, a certain amount of a right of passage you have to go through in order to get there. When it's already there from the beginning, it's such a plus.
In my experience of the men of action I have met - whether from the Second World War or Iraq or Vietnam - they often had to do things that they would rather not reflect upon afterwards. This is perhaps one reason why the story of the Bielskis remained untold for so long.
In the necessary memorialisation of the six million dead, there had been precious little attention paid to those who survived and how they survived.
The issue of assault in the military is something that they've gone to great lengths to try to deal with - and have not entirely dealt with yet.
To me this movie is about what is valuable. To one person it might be a stone; to someone else, a story in a magazine; to another, it is a child. The juxtaposition of one man obsessed with finding a valuable diamond with another man risking his life to find his son is the beating heart of this film.
There is a segment of the American population that has been excluded from the national myth, and that should be redressed.
Doctors are kind of this shibboleth in our society. We know what they do, and we depend on them, but we don't know a lot about what it feels like from their side.
Yes, illness is serious, but the indignities are also funny. And that defines my world view.
There's a rising tide of concern among activists, economists, and artists about Africa. Theres a temptation to think of it as a monolith as opposed to all these different countries with different problems.
My job is to tell the truth about what's happening as best I can.
I've always been drawn to all sorts of genres and all sorts of voices.
I know that when I'm writing, I always want to be directing.
People, especially press, want to pigeonhole you.
I'm always interested in the ways in which a character can inhabit either a theme or a premise personally, so that those scenes that are about his character or his relationship with other characters feel in context and don't seem to be apart from or oddly vestigial to the actual drama.
I've always believed that the stories and the performances are more important than I am. I think that the more invisible that my hand is, the more attention people can pay to the story and to those performances.
The idea that things can be serious minded but must be somehow balkanized in the art-house ghetto is very upsetting because I think it limits not just the audience who was already going to see it, but those who might have had their tastes developed at a younger age.
Like everyone, I was a kid who played chess when I was young. And I am admittedly old enough to have been around during the fervor of the match in Reykjavik and the rise of Bobby Fischer, so those two things conspired to pique my interest.
Every day and every scene, it's never the scene that you expect.
One reason why in Hollywood we are so often inventing heroes is that real heroes are vexing.
When I first thought about the military - and this goes all the way back to 'Glory' - I learned really quickly that it isn't a monolith. It is really an institution made up of some people with very different personalities and people of different backgrounds.
I met a lot of women in the military with Meg Ryan, and they were remarkably impressive: Competent and strong and not versions of men, but versions of women. And they had stories to tell about how difficult it had been for them.
There is something universal in the theme of a man trying to save his family in the midst of the most terrible circumstances. It is not limited to Sierra Leone. This story could apply to any number of places where ordinary people have been caught up in political events beyond their control.
Sometimes when we weep in the movies we weep for ourselves or for a life unlived. Or we even go to the movies because we want to resist the emotion that's there in front of us. I think there is always a catharsis that I look for and that makes the movie experience worthwhile.
It's a harder time to make original, less conventional movies. But God, we need them!
'Milk' doesn't imply that all gay men who stayed in the closet were cowards.
When my own son was 12, we didn't want toy guns in the house. So he just picked up a stick and went, 'Bam! Bam! Bam!' That's the testosterone of a 12-year-old boy.
I've never been one of those guys who storyboards every frame, because that would take away some of the mystery and some of the fun.
I was trained in the repertory theater. You would do Moliere one night and Sam Shepard the next.
I might have painted myself into a bit of a corner doing all these big, serious David Lean-esque movies.
My very first job was working on a TV show that was a prestigious TV show and well done - was called 'Family.'
I think that I am interested in the resonance between character drama and high stakes, either situational or political or social or other kind of elevated drama, and I tend to find that those things combust.
When 'The Godfather' comes on, any time of the day or night, I'm lost because I'm incapable of turning it off.
I watched aspirationally. I looked at movies that maybe I didn't entirely understand but which developed in me some thirst for their subjects or for their context, and that became part of how I came to understand the world.
If you don't know each other you spend time doing research together, having dinner, and talking about your lives. You try to find common ground. Once you're shooting, the pressures are so intense; you really want to have a channel of communication open to you already.
I like to do everything I can to avoid rehearsals, even while we're rehearsing.
The funny thing is, when you look at photos of Tuvia Bielski, he was fair, blue-eyed, and could pass for a Gentile.
The military has been actually remarkable at dealing with race, but gender is an issue.
I, for one, suffer from a little bit of superhero fatigue.
There is no reason why challenging themes and engaging stories have to be mutually exclusive - in fact, each can fuel the other. As a filmmaker, I want to entertain people first and foremost. If out of that comes a greater awareness and understanding of a time or a circumstance, then the hope is that change can happen.
