Money to me is not a factor in my life.

I think that a movie can only be an adjunct or only a supplement to books, to different points of view, to scholars, historians and your own teachers.

I'm always in favor of Israel responding strongly when it's threatened.

I thought film was more important than life itself for many years. But I was naive to the world until my first child was born in 1985.

With all the movies I've made about history, it's not really fun because you're trying to get it right. You've got history telling how it was, and then my imagination is telling me how I wish it had been, but I can't go there, so I have to censor myself. I'm very good about stopping myself from creating history that never occurred, but it's frustrating.

Bloated budgets are ruining Hollywood - these pictures are squeezing all the other types of movies out of Hollywood. It's disastrous.

Audiences are harder to please if you're just giving them effects, but they're easy to please if it's a good story.