I think experience will teach you a combination of liberalism and conservatism. We have to be progressive and at the same time we have to retain values. We have to hold onto the past as we explore the future.

We're all divided, but some of us have children, and we are invested in the future and would like to see good things happen.

I look at Homer and The Odyssey and all the disparate adventures this guy goes through, and then he returns home and the question is, is he the same man who left?

I think there's a whole older generation that will go to movies still. People like me; people over 45.

The worst nightmare I ever had about Vietnam was that I had to go back. I woke up in a sweat, in total terror.

If we [Americans] are a strong people, a united people, why do we always have to hear how great we are? What is this self-love? Where does this come from? It got worse, because after the war we thought we'd won it. That's the first myth. Frankly, Russia won it. The Soviet Union sacrificed far greater form than anyone else to win that war. Secondly, we had the atomic bomb. We should not have dropped it on Japan. We did as an example to the Soviets, not to defeat Japan and to save American lives. These are myths that we explode with a lot of research early on.

[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.