I go out and look for a good story to tell and if I like it enough and I decide to direct it, I become dangerously involved in becoming a part of that story.

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

I feel like Ive been engaged to the British Empire since 1980 and tonight you have given me the ring knighthood.

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.

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.

Lincoln believed in the American people.

The animal has no intellectual capacity to justify or to find reasons to exist. An animal just exists because it's the natural thing to do.