I knew that one day I would come to this point that I would make something so outrageous and so ambitious that... it'd be that Don Quixote feeling, that I'd have to tilt at a windmill. Sometimes you've got to do it. That's the only way you can do things.
Forget the grand plan. Forget the master scheme. Forget control. That is the bleak but true basis of independent cinema. Inch by motherfuking inch we must, because we have no other choice.
I love films. I love fiction films, too. I do. I love making them, but it has to be the right one. Hopefully, I'll never become a director for hire. It's horrible to make a film that you're not really interested in.
We are seeing entertainment become politics and we're seeing people acting out in ways that are extremely violent and destabilizing. No rules apply. We're in an era of no rules now, it seems.
The first casualty of war is innocence.
I'm not an activist. I'm a filmmaker. I'm a dramatist. My strength is to tell a story, to find a way to tell a story that makes it exciting. Our Untold History was a huge challenge. Snowden was no piece of cake, because writing code and breaking code is some of the most boring stuff you've ever seen.
The beauty of history is that historians have the ability to find patterns, the big picture. When you make a movie, you try to find that. I'm doing in the cinema what historians try to do in their own media.
I think everyone has the same question on their mind: Is the glass half-full or half-empty?
Now, we live in an age where we have so much information that we do tend to overload. The Greeks did too, though.
We all know what we know. We experience with our minds and breath.
In trying to make a broader historical point about the range of atrocities the Germans committed against many people, I made a clumsy association about the Holocaust, for which I am sorry and I regret. Jews obviously do not control media or any other industry. The fact that the Holocaust is still a very important, vivid and current matter today is, in fact, a great credit to the very hard work of a broad coalition of people committed to the remembrance of this atrocity - and it was an atrocity.
Each year, the The U.S. Army & its contractors SHOOT, STAB, MUTILATE, & KILL more than TEN THOUSAND live animals in cruel training exercises.
There are a few versions of the Alexander movie on video, only two that matter. One is from 2007, and then the one from 2014. It's called "the Ultimate Cut." That is the best version in my opinion. I was unsatisfied with the original theatrical release. It was rushed. It was my fault. I accepted it. I always felt it should have been done the way Tarantino did Kill Bill. I thought, we should release this in two parts with an intermission. But at that time, in 2004, it was impossible.
Fear may very well be a caveman fear of the predator, of the giant lizard chasing them - maybe that's what Steven Spielberg connects with so well in Lost World.
Money itself isn't lost or made, it's simply transferred from one perception to another. This painting here. I bought it 10 years ago for 60 thousand dollars. I could sell it today for 600. The illusion has become real and the more real it becomes, the more desperately they want it.
I feel like I am what I am.
I am a storyteller, and I do love ideas.
But in answer to your question about the conspiracy angle, I think that any historian worth his salt, and this is where I fault Stephen Ambrose and a lot of these guys who attack me - not all of life is a result of conspiracy by any means! Accident occurs alongside conspiracy.
There is a Greco-Buddhist school of architecture and sculpture that you find everywhere in the world. It's fascinating, because Alexander died in 323 B.C. and Buddha existed around 500 B.C. But Alexander met Buddhist-type sages. And they had a different view of the world, as you know. They saw it in circular terms. They didn't need to conquer any land. And there are blond people who live in that region who are said to be descended from the soldiers who stayed. He left garrisons all over the world as he went.
In digital, you can maintain the quality.
Robert Kagan said the neocons couldn't get a better president than Hillary Clinton, who would enforce the neocon foreign policy. No one's questioned it.
Cynicism was a school in Greece - the Cynics. Diogenes is a famous Cynic. There was a strong belief in nihilism and narcissism. Those are old schools too.
There is this thing about time that you can't see at the time you're at.
America is the strongest empire ever, with the largest military. We spend ten times what the Russians do. And they have equal nuclear ability as we do, because they're precise.
We could learn a lot from the ancients, and we should go back there.
