You know, you meet some people, and do a lot of interviews, and you come across a Buck O'Neill and you know you are going to know him for the rest of your life. The same thing happened with.

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.

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

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

I have come to the realization that history is not a fixed thing, a collection of precise dates, facts and events (even cogent commencement quotes) that add up to a quantifiable, certain, confidently known, truth. It is a mysterious and malleable thing.

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 way I work, the interview never becomes larger than the person being interviewed.