Quotes

I was raised a Catholic on the South Side of Chicago, and I felt I had to undo a lot of serious damage. But as I was getting older, I began coming off my absolutely young, arrogant, agnostic beliefs. I was thinking more about coming to terms with human spirituality.

No matter how many obstacles that are thrown in our path, there are ways to accept them and to live through them. Understand life's mysteries, - as mysteries to be lived.

It's the most unrealistic thing you can do to shoot a close-up, and it's the most unrealistic place you can be as a performer. And yet, actors grouse about having to do visual effect shots. But they love close-ups.

From where I sit, I see the digital cinema creating sloppiness on the part of filmmakers because they know if they really get in trouble they can fix it later. So they don't pay that much attention, and of course it costs a lot of money.

I guess you can say, I have been remaking my student films forever.

I'm addicted to documentaries. That's all I watch on television.

Most actors that I work with are wonderful. Jodie Foster or Tom Hanks will make anything work.

I can't see any reason why a dramatic story can't be in 3-D. I think Lawrence of Arabia (1962) would have been fabulous in 3-D.

I Wanna Hold Your Hand (1978) and Used Cars (1980) were absolute failures at the box office. Complete disasters. I learned some sad news: it's not an automatic thing that, if you make a good movie, everyone wants to see it.

I feel that one of the reasons I enjoy having films that are historical or revisionist history or a period film is because I think it's one of the things that cinema can do best. It can do it [well] in two areas. One is that you can recreate the past in a movie and present it in a fictional way, because we know what it looked like. And the second reason is, by having time pass, you can examine the truth about something that happened in the past, because you've been able to look at it through the prism of time.