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.

Good history is a question of survival. Without any past, we will deprive ourselves of the defining impression of our being.

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.

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?

Louis Armstrong is quite simply the most important person in American music. He is to 20th century music (I did not say jazz) what Einstein is to physics.

We're having a hard time understanding where jazz is going. What happened to jazz?

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