The measure of our success will be the condition on which we leave the world for the next generation.

I have faith in the pendulum swinging. Right now it's so far against the wall that it can't go any farther; it's gonna start to swing back. That's my optimism. One of the cures is gonna be getting the American people to fully wake up. All the American people, particularly young people, because they're gonna inherit this earth; they're gonna inherit what we're doing.

Times change; Hollywood is not the same as it was when I first entered the business. It felt to me like it was starting to narrow down and centralize itself around what would... make money.

Right now I am working on something that's pretty important to me. It has to do with my own history in politics. I'd done All the President's Men, and the history of how that came about is a story unto itself. It began with The Candidate. No one knows about that connection. I was on a train, and I was promoting The Candidate going from Jacksonville, Florida, down to Miami to duplicate what candidates in 1972 did.

I think you just keep going. I've been that way, my whole life.

In fact, I think more broadly about what an audience requires, but I want an audience to be fascinated by the process of finding an answer, or finding out there isn't one.

I believe in mythology. I guess I share Joseph Campbell's notion that a culture or society without mythology would die, and we're close to that.