When I was a kid in London there was just something about the light and there's something about the way London went onto film in those days, whether it was Technicolor or Technicolor plus the flatness of the light, or whatever.

My gratitude to Ridley [Scott] isn't anything new. I named one of my kids after him. But he's a very important person to me.

Henry Adams was scared shitless, politically, by the discovery that England isn't alien to a boy from Boston, but it was true, and it is true. It's a Boston and coastal Massachusetts thing. Henry Adams blocked it out.

If you need someone to come out of the sewer with a wire you don't hire someone who needs laborious collective instruction. You let someone do his job, whether he's a focus puller or a surgeon.

On historical you take the known facts, dramatize them, and then stitch them together by invention. It's a projective thing.

I don't think you need $35 million bucks to make a movie. I think what people should do is make a lot more movies for a lot less money. You can really do it.

I think that gambling is a synthetic experience and that if you have any balls you gamble with your life. I have. So can everybody else.