I really trust the authenticity of real people and my job is to get them to be themselves in front of the camera. Often what happens is, you'll get a newcomer in front of the camera and they'll freeze up or they imitate actors or other performances that they've admired and so they stop becoming themselves. And so my job as the director is just to always return them to what I first saw in them, which was simply an uncensored human being.

Documentaries are the first line of education, and the second line of education is dramatization, such as 'The Pacific'.

My movies more often are told through pictures, not words. But in this case, the pictures took second position to the incredible words of Abraham Lincoln and his presence [...] I was less interested in an outpouring of imagery than in letting the most human moment of this story evolve before us.

I think every movie I've made after 'Indiana Jones,' I've tried to make every single movie as if it was made by a different director, because I'm very conscious of not wanting to impose a consistent style on subject matter that is not necessarily suited to that style. So I try to re-invent my own eye every time I tackle a new subject.

Twenty years from now, there will still be a square screen, maybe even larger, and people will be sitting in a large, dark space, and they won't know each other unless they bring friends along.

Making a movie is like a stagecoach ride through the Old West: at first you wish for a pleasant trip, and after a while you just hope you reach your destination.

My father had many, many veterans over to the house, and the older I got the more I appreciated their sacrifice.