I treat the photograph as a work of great complexity in which you can find drama. Add to that a careful composition of landscapes, live photography, the right music and interviews with people, and it becomes a style.

I can understand why some of these drummers and bass players become cult figures with all of their equipment and the incredible amount of technique they have. But there's very little that I think satisfies you intellectually or emotionally.

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 isn't really about the past - settling old scores. It's about defining the present and who we are.

Filmmaking is essentially about entertainment, but it's amazing to realize that it has this other muscle that could actually help. Do you know what I mean? People permit entertainment to wash over them, but every once and a while, entertainment - and this is entertaining - also galvanizes something else and that would be a really good thing to have happen in this case.

Civics is in fact politics, and politics is how things work not only in the political realm but in every other realm. It may be this simple mechanical glitch that unites everything. This is my philosophy.

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.