Very few people know that there is a whole school of historians that have existed in the United States from the 1940s and the early '50s that were revisionists. They were attacking the whole basis of the history of the Cold War. People like D.F. Fleming, William Appleman Williams.

There is a narrative to every life, and I believe in the classic mode of storytelling that goes back to Homer and carries through to today.

If you make the movie from your heart and it stands over time, that's what matters to me.

I'd like to do a story about the medieval ages where in every scene you'd sort of feel that you were in the 12th century. That would be great to get that feeling.

I knew that one day I would come to this point that I would make something so outrageous and so ambitious that... it'd be that Don Quixote feeling, that I'd have to tilt at a windmill. Sometimes you've got to do it. That's the only way you can do things.

When I'm working with another writer, I tend to make a lot of effort. When I collaborate with a writer, I'm not interested in credit, but I'm feeding him stuff all the time that I feel is important to shaping the script.

The beauty of history is that historians have the ability to find patterns, the big picture. When you make a movie, you try to find that. I'm doing in the cinema what historians try to do in their own media.