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

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.

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

I think my expectations for myself are much more severe and much more direct. You can't work on a film for six years without being your own toughest critic. So you can't really be distracted by the expectations based on your previous performance.

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

We strain to listen to the ghosts and echoes of our inexpressibly wise past, and we have an obligation to maintain these places, to provide these sanctuaries, so that people may be in the presence of forces larger than those of the moment.

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.