Forty years ago this country went down a rabbit hole in Vietnam and millions died. I fear we're going down a rabbit hole once again - and if people can stop and think and reflect on some of the ideas and issues in this movie, perhaps I've done some damn good here!

You can think of my films as cautionary tales, but you might even think of them as despairing tales, because at least in a cautionary tale, you have this idea that by listening to the story you can assure a better outcome. Whereas I'm not at all convinced that's the case. In fact, if anything, I'm convinced that it's the opposite.

Everything is a reenactment. We are reenacting the world in the mind. The world is not inside there. It does not reside in the gray matter of the brain.

You can't really trust anybody who doesn't talk a lot, because how would you know what they're thinking?

You can talk about a caption underneath a photograph being true or false, because there is a linguistic element. You can claim that a photograph is a picture of a horse or a cow, but it is the sentence that expresses the claim, which is true or false, not the photograph.

What's great about documentary genre, it seems to me, is that it can be experimental filmmaking. You have a license to do a lot of diverse things under the umbrella of "documentary."

One of the strengths of my interviews is that I really, honest to God, have no idea what people are going to say.