Edward Zwick Quotes
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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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I have nothing against diamonds, or rubies or emeralds or sapphires. I do object when their acquisition is complicit in the debasement of children or the destruction of a country.
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There is a segment of the American population that has been excluded from the national myth, and that should be redressed.
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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 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've always been drawn to all sorts of genres and all sorts of voices.
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Like everyone, I was a kid who played chess when I was young. And I am admittedly old enough to have been around during the fervor of the match in Reykjavik and the rise of Bobby Fischer, so those two things conspired to pique my interest.
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The promise of an action movie to a certain audience is not a bad thing.
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Doctors are kind of this shibboleth in our society. We know what they do, and we depend on them, but we don't know a lot about what it feels like from their side.
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I would say that 'Schindler's List,' as powerful as it was, seemed to have continued with a particular iconography of victimization and passivity. That was the iconography with which I had grown up and to which I had grown accustomed.
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One resists categorization at one's peril.
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Movies, as I grew up loving them, were always about something.
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I know that when I'm writing, I always want to be directing.
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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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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.
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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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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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If you take away scale, the nature of the story changes. I made a joke the other day: if I were to try to make 'Glory' now, rather than be about a regiment, it would be about a platoon. It would be seven men in the woods rather than all the men on the beach.
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Every day and every scene, it's never the scene that you expect.
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Romantic comedy has come to mean a couple of moderately talented actors placed in implausible situations obliged to go through a set of paces that are all too familiar, the end result being neither romantic nor comedic.
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Often, romantic comedies exist in a vacuum, and it's kind of odd.
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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.'
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One reason why in Hollywood we are so often inventing heroes is that real heroes are vexing.
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'Milk' doesn't imply that all gay men who stayed in the closet were cowards.