Think of my movies as heightening our awareness, not confusing the difference between truth and fiction, but heightening our awareness of how confused we can become about what is real.

Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it without a sense of ironic futility.

I actually like doing commercials. I don't like doing them to the exclusion of everything else, but I like doing them. The 30-second format is very hard. I sometimes call it American Haiku. And I think some of the commercials I've done are not so bad.

In fact, part of the Netflix series is drama.Beyond re-enactments. Why not invent something new?

All alone - shorn of context, without captions - a photograph is neither true nor false.... For truth, properly considered, is about the relationship between language and the world, not about photographs and the world.

War is such a peculiar thing - inaugurated by the whims of few, affecting the fate of many. It is difficult, if not impossible, thing to understand, yet we feel compelled to describe it as though it has meaning - even virtue. It starts for reasons often hopelessly obscure, meanders on, then stops

I used to say that interviewing others was perhaps the way I could stop talking and start listening. It's a kind of enforced silence.