You don't work on something for six years and be blind to the myriad of other approaches.

You need, as a historian, essential triangulation from your subject and the only way you get that triangulation is through time.

I'm a filmmaker. I'm an artist. I've chosen to work in history the way someone might choose to work in still lifes or landscapes.

It is the great arrogance of the present to forget the intelligence of the past

There are no ordinary lives.

The reason why you do history, and particularly why you do war, is that you want to make sure that in the next war, some lessons were learned. There's a saying: "History doesn't repeat itself, but it does rhyme." Or Ecclesiastes: "What has been will be again. What has been done will be done again." Human nature always superimposes itself - its strength and its frailty over the rush of chaos of ongoing events - and we can perceive patterns and themes and motifs.

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