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.
I was trained in the repertory theater. You would do Moliere one night and Sam Shepard the next.
I've always been drawn to all sorts of genres and all sorts of voices.
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.
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.
My job is to tell the truth about what's happening as best I can.
The issue of diamonds in Africa is inseparable from the issue of child soldiers.
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.
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.
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.
'Milk' doesn't imply that all gay men who stayed in the closet were cowards.
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.
It's a harder time to make original, less conventional movies. But God, we need them!
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.
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.
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.
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?'
Ironically, it's easier to raise the money to make the film than it is to have the film find wide distribution.
I think to see American troops in an American city is, you know, the sum of all of our fears.
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.
