My ego is nothing - look what Alexander the Great achieved. And I felt he was a figure outside time, a figure we don't even understand, because he's frankly pre-Christian, and his concepts of honor go back to Homer.

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.

We should look to (Castro) as one of the Earth's wisest people, one of the people we should consult.

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.

I will come out with my interpretation. If I'm wrong, fine. It will become part of the debris of history, part of the give and take.

I think you can maintain two tracks. I think you have to. That's what this kind of filmmaking is about. If you're not aware of the limitations of what you're up against... it's like a general: you have to know your artillery and you have to know your infantry. You have to know what you have. You have to marshal your forces and use them well. It comes down to the personal and the intimate, but at the same time you have to have the big picture.

It's very important to understand that World War II is at the base of this new policy. From the 1890s on, the U.S. was always imperialistic. We went after the Philippines, and we did the same in Cuba, in Hawaii. We controlled South America. Woodrow Wilson was not what he was supposed to be. He was very much a white man first. "The world must be made safe for democracy." It really accelerates after World War II.