Edward Zwick Quotes
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I think it's too easy often to find a villain out of the headlines and to then repeat that villainy again and again and again. You know, traditionally, America has always looked to scapegoat someone as the boogie man... there is a tradition in the most simplistic of action movies for there to be some horrible villain.
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Ironically, it's easier to raise the money to make the film than it is to have the film find wide distribution.
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The thing that has always interested me - amidst the scale, the historical spectacle, or the social significance or the political resonance - has been the relationships.
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I really look forward to that opportunity to be a student and discover things. That keeps it interesting for me. And I sometimes get easily bored, and there are still some things I wanna talk about instead of repeating something.
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I'm always interested in the ways in which a character can inhabit either a theme or a premise personally, so that those scenes that are about his character or his relationship with other characters feel in context and don't seem to be apart from or oddly vestigial to the actual drama.
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There is something universal in the theme of a man trying to save his family in the midst of the most terrible circumstances. It is not limited to Sierra Leone. This story could apply to any number of places where ordinary people have been caught up in political events beyond their control.
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I think that I am interested in the resonance between character drama and high stakes, either situational or political or social or other kind of elevated drama, and I tend to find that those things combust.
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I think one of the privileges of being a filmmaker is the opportunity to remain a kind of perpetual student.
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Sometimes when an actor and director work together for the first time, it's not as if there's a suspicion, but there is tentativeness, a certain amount of a right of passage you have to go through in order to get there. When it's already there from the beginning, it's such a plus.
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In my experience of the men of action I have met - whether from the Second World War or Iraq or Vietnam - they often had to do things that they would rather not reflect upon afterwards. This is perhaps one reason why the story of the Bielskis remained untold for so long.
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Adolescence is a time in which you experience everything more intensely.
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People tend not to dwell on drama.
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As we began to read more and more journals of men who had been in the Civil War and then been in the Indian Wars, we realized there was a whole universe of men whose souls had been shattered, whose lives had been utterly destroyed by what they had to do.
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A lot of superhero sequel movies, they resemble each other greatly.
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I tend not to go look at movies before I make a movie. I'd rather not be specifically influenced.
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There have been bombings by extremists. They are not representatives of Islam. They're not representative of the vast majority of people who love this country, but nonetheless, they exist.
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It seems that almost every time a valuable natural resource is discovered in the world-whether it be diamonds, rubber, gold, oil, whatever-often what results is a tragedy for the country in which they are found. Making matters worse, the resulting riches from these resources rarely benefit the people of the country from which they come.
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The ronin were those masterless men who roamed around, and yet they found themselves getting involved in circumstances they hadn't expected.
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You have to make choices always. It's about the omission of something for the sake of another.
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I think there is a very powerful wish that we all have of being self-contained and having sort of opted out or choosing to remove ourselves from society and to have no ties and no obligations, and even no possessions. To be free in a particular way.
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When 'The Godfather' comes on, any time of the day or night, I'm lost because I'm incapable of turning it off.
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There is no reason why challenging themes and engaging stories have to be mutually exclusive - in fact, each can fuel the other. As a filmmaker, I want to entertain people first and foremost. If out of that comes a greater awareness and understanding of a time or a circumstance, then the hope is that change can happen.
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Samurai culture did exist really, for hundreds of years and the notion of people trying to create some sort of a moral code, the idea that there existed certain behaviors that could be celebrated and that could be operative in a life.
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I've enjoyed the singular focus of not going back and forth between the two mediums. It isn't about the screen size so much as film being where the stories I'm most interested in telling happen to be at.