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.

When we did 'Thirtysomething,' television was either about doctors, lawyers, or cops.

People, especially press, want to pigeonhole you.

If a director is really a director, I think he's interested in more than one thing.

I might have painted myself into a bit of a corner doing all these big, serious David Lean-esque movies.

I know that when I'm writing, I always want to be directing.

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.

I was trained in the repertory theater. You would do Moliere one night and Sam Shepard the next.

I've always been drawn to all sorts of genres and all sorts of voices.

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.

I've never been one of those guys who storyboards every frame, because that would take away some of the mystery and some of the fun.

My job is to tell the truth about what's happening as best I can.

The issue of diamonds in Africa is inseparable from the issue of child soldiers.

When my own son was 12, we didn't want toy guns in the house. So he just picked up a stick and went, 'Bam! Bam! Bam!' That's the testosterone of a 12-year-old boy.

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.

'Milk' doesn't imply that all gay men who stayed in the closet were cowards.

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.

It's a harder time to make original, less conventional movies. But God, we need them!

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.

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.

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.

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?'

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.'

Ironically, it's easier to raise the money to make the film than it is to have the film find wide distribution.

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.

The ronin were those masterless men who roamed around, and yet they found themselves getting involved in circumstances they hadn't expected.

I'm very promiscuous in my tastes.

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.

The most interesting thing to me in chess are not the gambits. Or the moves. It's the mental toughness.

You have to make choices always. It's about the omission of something for the sake of another.

The Beatles in 1963 came to America and became international celebrities, but Bobby Fischer was one of the first, as Elvis was, more in terms of the message created around him.

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.

If I try to think objectively about myself and my work, I would say I want to be intuitive and distinctive.

You can't help but reveal your bias, and you can't but invest personally in any story that you tell.

I like to reveal people with some of the niceties of social behavior stripped away and the moral, ethical, and political issues are revealed.

Stories are one of the means by which a culture preserves its identity.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Often, romantic comedies exist in a vacuum, and it's kind of odd.

There's a great tradition of actors taking on parts of much less obvious sympathy.

People tend not to dwell on drama.

The promise of an action movie to a certain audience is not a bad thing.

One resists categorization at one's peril.

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.

A sex scene is gratuitous when it only exists for its own sake.

There's only a certain number of movies I'm going to get made, and it's important to me that they each be original somehow.

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.

People make the assumption that you're only interested in one thing based on the most recent thing you've done. But some directors can be pretty promiscuous about their tastes, and that's how I want to challenge myself.