I try to do what I call the three E's - educate, entertain, and enlighten. If you don't entertain, no one will show up. But you also have to educate, because people want to discover specific things about a world unlike their own - whether it's how hard it is to go to the moon or how scary it is to be on Omaha Beach.

Even if a story has nothing to do with my life, if I can recognise something of myself in the character and think, 'Oh yeah, that's what I'd do...' yeah, that's what I look for.

Hold the mirror up to nature. Human behavior is worthy of examination and celebration.

An animatic is a process where every voice and every sound effect is added to rough animated drawings and it lasts exactly as long as the final movie. So you actually get to go into a screening room with the rest of the cast and you get to see it all at the same time.

I am a lay historian by nature. I seek out an empirical reflection of what truth is. I sort of want dates and motivations and I want the whole story. But I've always felt, unconsciously, that all human history is that connection from person to person to person, event to event to event, and from idea to idea.

Truth is, I'll never know all there is to know about you just as you will never know all there is to know about me. Humans are by nature too complicated to be understood fully. So, we can choose either to approach our fellow human beings with suspicion or to approach them with an open mind, a dash of optimism and a great deal of candour.

A hero is somebody who voluntarily walks into the unknown.