The ronin were those masterless men who roamed around, and yet they found themselves getting involved in circumstances they hadn't expected.
I'm very promiscuous in my tastes.
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.
The most interesting thing to me in chess are not the gambits. Or the moves. It's the mental toughness.
You have to make choices always. It's about the omission of something for the sake of another.
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.
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.
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.
If I try to think objectively about myself and my work, I would say I want to be intuitive and distinctive.
You can't help but reveal your bias, and you can't but invest personally in any story that you tell.
I like to reveal people with some of the niceties of social behavior stripped away and the moral, ethical, and political issues are revealed.
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 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.
Often, romantic comedies exist in a vacuum, and it's kind of odd.
Forgive me, but what is the purpose of drama but catharsis?
There's a great tradition of actors taking on parts of much less obvious sympathy.
People tend not to dwell on drama.
The promise of an action movie to a certain audience is not a bad thing.
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.
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.
