I don't want to make a half-assed film. It's not my area of expertise.

I do have a side as a citizen, and I've always expressed it, and that's where I've gotten into misunderstandings, because some people see me as a leftist nut or whatever. A conspiracy nut. All that stuff. These are definitions that don't really apply to a dramatist, because a dramatist is working from empathy.

There is this thing about time that you can't see at the time you're at.

Obama took a bad situation and, in certain ways, made it worse. ... I find Obama scary in a way that I had not done in 2008.

Robert Kagan said the neocons couldn't get a better president than Hillary Clinton, who would enforce the neocon foreign policy. No one's questioned it.

I study history in order to give an interpretation.

[Nixon] reduced the meaning of his life to nothing but power. In the film, we gave this sad figure consciousness of what he was. We weren't right to do that - I don't think he did have that consciousness. But we did it for movie reasons - to create empathy.