Quote collection
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"I wish that George W. Bush had gone to Vietnam, because he would have seen history in a different light. He would've experienced it in a different light because I don't think he understood the nature of war."
"When I was a child, I'd see a movie, I took it for what it was, I enjoyed it. And if I believed it I would tend to be more interested in knowing more about it."
"The secret to writing a screenplay is keeping your ass in the chair."
"I don't think most people in the US realize how important WikiLeaks is and why Julian's case needs support."
"I'm terrible at horror movies, by the way. I get scared so easily."
"Independence is a state of mind. Independence is spirit without category."
"Well first of all you have to make the character strong so that people can follow that. And then hopefully that character can integrate with the background of the social situation that people can recognize."
"You do the best job you can. You take it step by step. It's hard enough to make a movie. If it works, that's great. If it means something beyond the moment to somebody, they can take it and it lasts through the years, we'll see."
"I'd love to do historical pictures more, but I don't know if I can."
"The truth is not being aired in the West. It’s a surreal perversion of history that’s going on once again, as in Bush pre-Iraq ‘WMD’ campaign."
"[Nixon] reduced the meaning of his life to nothing but power. In the film, we gave this sad figure consciousness of what he was. We weren't right to do that - I don't think he did have that consciousness. But we did it for movie reasons - to create empathy."
"I've met people who will go to a movie that I can't stand and they say that they saw that movie ten times. There's something they like and identified in that movie, and I don't see it."
"I do have a side as a citizen, and I've always expressed it, and that's where I've gotten into misunderstandings, because some people see me as a leftist nut or whatever. A conspiracy nut. All that stuff. These are definitions that don't really apply to a dramatist, because a dramatist is working from empathy."
"Every time you go into a movie, you go into the point of view of who it is about."
"I've seen my kids' work at school, and I think they're better than when I was young, 'cause I was brainwashed into anti-Communism. This is a much more interesting view of history than I've ever seen, and I hope to God it works. It's classic history, classically told. No talking heads. Just pure archival footage and a storyline."
"I see films in theaters, and I enjoy films. I enjoy the art of storytelling, and the different ways to tell them."
"I was lost, and that war [in Vietnam] was very alienating - not that I was against it or for it, but I was just lost after that war. As were many Americans."
"When you look at the global situation, if America learned to be one of the many countries in the world and to find its way to cooperate with people and bring a global peace that could bring great prosperity to this globe, there is still a chance of that, and that's a big lesson from history. We are not paying attention to that."
"We should look to (Castro) as one of the Earth's wisest people, one of the people we should consult."
"What Chavez has done [in Venezuela] is that he has brought extreme poverty to an end."