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.

You can never judge how the film will be taken; you can only make your best effort, and put out what you feel. How it's read, you never can tell. Or remembered for that matter.

My protest against digital has been me saying, "What's going to happen to film?" The result is that Kodak is out of business. That's a national tragedy. We've got to keep making film.

The first casualty of war is innocence.

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.

When I was a child, I'd see a movie, I took it for what it was, I enjoyed it. And if I believed it I would tend to be more interested in knowing more about it.

Horses are very difficult to shoot.