You can learn as much about the history from reading about the present as you can vice versa, that is learning about the present through history, which is what I do for a living.

I enjoy total creative control right now. Nobody tells me to make it longer, shorter, better, sexier, more violent, whatever.

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.

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

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.

The flame is not out, but it is flickering.