Edward Zwick Quotes
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I've always believed that the stories and the performances are more important than I am. I think that the more invisible that my hand is, the more attention people can pay to the story and to those performances.
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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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The Mitch Rapp novels are as thrilling and entertaining as they are relevant. I am delighted to be given the opportunity to translate them to the screen.
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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 every culture - you can call it an American Ronin, a medieval knight errant, you could talk about 'Shane.' There is an archetype that I think is actually common to a lot of cultures, and even the Clint Eastwood stuff was probably as influenced by the Japanese stuff, and yet done by an Italian.
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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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There is nothing that is so serious that you can't also see its comic side. Comedy is a way of talking about the most serious things.
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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.
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In the necessary memorialisation of the six million dead, there had been precious little attention paid to those who survived and how they survived.
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The phone that you carry around with you. It's not just that it's a locator for anybody who wants to actually find out where you are, but it's also a leash. It's a reminder just how tethered you are.
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Those of my generation who grew up in the midst of the Cold War had a very, very strong awareness and very much were sort of influenced by the demonization of the Soviet Union, whether that was through the Cuban Missile Crisis or duck-and-cover, or any of those things that so affected us then.
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I watched aspirationally. I looked at movies that maybe I didn't entirely understand but which developed in me some thirst for their subjects or for their context, and that became part of how I came to understand the world.
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When I first thought about the military - and this goes all the way back to 'Glory' - I learned really quickly that it isn't a monolith. It is really an institution made up of some people with very different personalities and people of different backgrounds.
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When you're in a fight, and you get hit, it hurts. And as you get older, you begin to take on the aches and the bruises of doing that.
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I guess television is so much on the word. It's so much closer to playwriting - the scale is more just about the voices and the internal lives. Movies, it's a very different canvas.
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You can't help but reveal your bias, and you can't but invest personally in any story that you tell.
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I think it's easier to be cynical. I think the temptation, often, among writers is to write about anything other than real, true, deep feelings.
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The promise of an action movie to a certain audience is not a bad thing.
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It's hard not to want to become Ken Burns at times. I'm interested in being a Ken Burns who reaches that 17-year-old who goes to the multiplex just to see a good story well-told. And if there's history in it, all the better.
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I had known a couple of people in college who went off the rails, who had significant bouts with mental illness.
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I like to reveal people with some of the niceties of social behavior stripped away and the moral, ethical, and political issues are revealed.
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In my experience, the men of World War II, the vets of Vietnam, even guys coming back from Iraq, are loath to talk about their experiences. And the survivors of the Holocaust, particularly, are often very close-mouthed about their stories, even to their own children.
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I might have painted myself into a bit of a corner doing all these big, serious David Lean-esque movies.
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I've done all sorts of different kinds of action. We did a thing in 'Blood Diamond,' the attack on Freetown, where I carefully staged the action but did not show the camera operators what we were going to film - so it has the feel of documentary, trying to capture something, and that gave it a whole different feel.