One of the things I really like about Ford's films is how there is always a focus on the way characters live, and not just the male heroes.

The only art form that Americans have created that's recognized around the world is jazz music born in a community that had the peculiar experience of being unfree in a free land.

I don't think that there has been a film that I've done that hasn't been influenced by libraries and archives.

In most films music is brought in at the end, after the picture is more or less locked, to amplify the emotions the filmmaker wants you to feel.

History is malleable. A new cache of diaries can shed new light, and archeological evidence can challenge our popular assumptions.

In a sense I've made the same film over and over again. In all of them I've asked, 'Who are we as Americans?

I subscribe to William Faulkner's' view that history is not just about what we were before but who we are now.