I think we continually need to understand how important an event the war was - how defining, how central to who we are. Everything that came before it led up to it, and everything of importance to this country - at least up to 1940 - was a consequence of it. Even now there's an echo of the war, however faint, in almost everyone's life.

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

I read cover to cover every jazz publication that I could and in the New York Times, every single day reading their jazz reviews even though I didn't put them in the films. I wanted to know what is going on.

I never, ever want to apologize for a film. If it's bad I'll say it's my fault. And that's what I can say so far in all the films that I've done, that if you don't like it, it's entirely my fault.

I'm a filmmaker. I'm an artist. I've chosen to work in history the way someone might choose to work in still lifes or landscapes.

The stories from 1975 on are not finished and there is no resolve. I could spend 50 hours on the last 25 years of jazz and still not do it justice.

Do not lose your enthusiasm. In its Greek etymology, the word enthusiasm means, "God in us."