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.

I've always wanted to tell a story about Lincoln. I saw a paternal father figure; I saw someone who was completely, stubbornly committed to his ideals, to his vision.

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.

If movies generically don't work, you immediately start to pick apart what ingredients contributed to that. If any movie is working, hopefully how it was made will be the least of your concern. You'll only want to have a god time.

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

One of the gratuities about being a director is that you can volunteer yourself out of difficult details.

We all feel that if we have a crazy idea that might get laughed at, there's nothing wrong with seeing if there's a crazy writer out there who agrees with us and can take it to a crazy network and somehow bring something that's a little bit daft and edgy to life.