From a very young age, my parents taught me the most important lesson of my whole life: They taught me how to listen. They taught me how to listen to everybody before I made up my own mind. When you listen, you learn. You absorb like a sponge - and your life becomes so much better than when you are just trying to be listened to all the time.

I've been shooting movies and television shows for now 47 years and I've worked with the best of them and [Kirk Douglas] is the only movie star I ever met.

3D is not a fire and forget tool. It takes a lot of very careful consideration and it will change your approach to where you put the camera so 3D isn't for everybody.

I've discovered I've got this preoccupation with ordinary people pursued by large forces.

I love history, so I do a lot of movies about history.

The creative process is a very collaborative process. I know it might seem that way because so much ink is spilled and the media is obsessed with business and numbers and studios... but filmmakers don't think of it that way. We just go off and we tell our stories. It's the same torture that we adore, it's the same torture that our forefathers endured making movies in the golden era of Hollywood. So, from my perspective it's no different, I'm sure, from the men and women who I admire so much who made the earliest movies.

I love editing. It's one of my favorite parts about filmmaking.