The country is so wounded, bleeding, and hurt right now. The country needs to be healed-it's not going to be healed from the top, politically. How are we going to heal? Art is the healing force.

I think "quiet" sometime is a greater power than noise. It can harbor and reveal feelings that can't be expressed.

Journalism has changed tremendously because of the democratization of information. Anybody can put something up on the Internet. It's harder and harder to find what the truth is.

It's an honor putting art above politics. Politics can be seductive in terms of things reductive to the soul.

I was never a good student. I had to be dragged into kindergarten. It was hard to sit and listen to somebody talk. I wanted to be out, educated by experience and adventure, and I didn't know how to express that.

Usually I like to improvise. Sometimes, depending on the nature of the piece, I like to improvise because I think it brings a certain freshness and a reality to it, as long as it doesn't go too far out of the box.

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.