JFK was leading the world, leading the United States into a new position with the Soviet Union. He was calling for the end of the Cold War. He would have been reelected in 1964 because he was vastly popular.

I might as well be myself. Everyone else is taken.

I want my children to have access to something that looks beyond what I call the tyranny of now. You read the paper, everyone talks about that thing [in the news] that day, and all the subconscious really important stuff that's going on is being neglected. 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.

I may have disparaged the idea that people are looking at films on smaller and smaller screens... it's a shame that people have to watch DVDs with the lights on in a television-type situation where people are wandering in and out of the room. Movies are different from television, and you cannot watch movies like television. It distorts it.

I make my films like you're going to die if you miss the next minute. You better not go get popcorn.

I've been to war, and it's not easy to kill. It's bloody and messy and totally horrifying, and the consequences are serious.

America is the strongest empire ever, with the largest military. We spend ten times what the Russians do. And they have equal nuclear ability as we do, because they're precise.