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 funny thing is, when you look at photos of Tuvia Bielski, he was fair, blue-eyed, and could pass for a Gentile.
One reason why in Hollywood we are so often inventing heroes is that real heroes are vexing.
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.
I like to do everything I can to avoid rehearsals, even while we're rehearsing.
Every day and every scene, it's never the scene that you expect.
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.
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.
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.
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.
When 'The Godfather' comes on, any time of the day or night, I'm lost because I'm incapable of turning it off.
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.
I tend not to go look at movies before I make a movie. I'd rather not be specifically influenced.
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.
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.
My very first job was working on a TV show that was a prestigious TV show and well done - was called 'Family.'
People, especially press, want to pigeonhole you.
If a director is really a director, I think he's interested in more than one thing.
I might have painted myself into a bit of a corner doing all these big, serious David Lean-esque movies.
I know that when I'm writing, I always want to be directing.
