Edward Zwick Quotes
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Scale is not just something that a director wants so as to play with all the toys. Scale also lends verisimilitude, to put together a real world.
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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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My very first job was working on a TV show that was a prestigious TV show and well done - was called 'Family.'
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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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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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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 think most Americans probably believe that our relationship with Japan began in 1941. In fact, obviously, it began in 1854 when Commodore Perry sailed into Yokohama harbor and threatened to burn it down unless they would open up to trade with us. The imperial impulse was first ours historically.
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The promise of an action movie to a certain audience is not a bad thing.
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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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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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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.
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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 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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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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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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I, for one, suffer from a little bit of superhero fatigue.
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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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The funny thing is, when you look at photos of Tuvia Bielski, he was fair, blue-eyed, and could pass for a Gentile.
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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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In my office, we were talking about the fact that they'd announced a remake of 'A Star is Born,' and I was bemoaning the idea of a fourth remake. And the young guys who work in my office were giving me blank looks, like, 'What's 'A Star is Born?'
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I don't think movies can ever be too intense, but people have to understand why you're showing them the things you are showing them.
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You can spend an extraordinary amount of time raising independent money to do a movie for very little means. I've done it with 'Pawn Sacrifice.'