I've met people who will go to a movie that I can't stand and they say that they saw that movie ten times. There's something they like and identified in that movie, and I don't see it.

What I've experienced, I'm trying to put in a narrative form, I suppose, to say that it does make sense in this way.

I never put out a history, I put out a dramatic history.

The first casualty of war is innocence.

You look at the Russian side: They're defending their territory from the beginning. They move west to destroy the Nazis. And they take out the guts of the German war machine per Winston Churchill, who said that they won the war. From the beginning, we were hostile to the guys who had saved how many American lives by their repulsion of the Nazis? I think the Americans lost 400,000 in the whole war. And the Americans knew it at the time. They gave Joseph Stalin credit. He was the man of the year, cover of Life magazine in 1943; he was a hero.

Every time you go into a movie, you go into the point of view of who it is about.

Never underestimate the power of jealousy and the power of envy to destroy. Never underestimate that.