Like a layer on a pearl, you can't specifically identify the irritant, the moment of the irritant, but at the end of the day, you know you have a pearl.

The genius of our country is improvisation, and jazz reflects that. It's our great contribution to the arts.

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.

It follows the seasons, beginning each year with the fond expectancy of springtime and ending with the hard facts of autumn.

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.

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

History is malleable. A new cache of diaries can shed new light, and archeological evidence can challenge our popular assumptions.