The issue of assault in the military is something that they've gone to great lengths to try to deal with - and have not entirely dealt with yet.

The military has been actually remarkable at dealing with race, but gender is an issue.

In the necessary memorialisation of the six million dead, there had been precious little attention paid to those who survived and how they survived.

The funny thing is, when you look at photos of Tuvia Bielski, he was fair, blue-eyed, and could pass for a Gentile.

One reason why in Hollywood we are so often inventing heroes is that real heroes are vexing.

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.

I like to do everything I can to avoid rehearsals, even while we're rehearsing.

Every day and every scene, it's never the scene that you expect.

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.

If you don't know each other you spend time doing research together, having dinner, and talking about your lives. You try to find common ground. Once you're shooting, the pressures are so intense; you really want to have a channel of communication open to you already.

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.

The idea that things can be serious minded but must be somehow balkanized in the art-house ghetto is very upsetting because I think it limits not just the audience who was already going to see it, but those who might have had their tastes developed at a younger age.

I do watch 'It's a Wonderful Life' with my children at Christmas, and I liked it long before it went into the public domain and became a cliche.

When 'The Godfather' comes on, any time of the day or night, I'm lost because I'm incapable of turning it off.

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.

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.

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.