Edward Zwick

The idea that things can be serious minded but must be somehow balkanized in the art-house ...
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I like to do everything I can to avoid rehearsals, even while we're rehearsing.

When I first thought about the military - and this goes all the way back to ...
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A sex scene is gratuitous when it only exists for its own sake.

Adolescence is a time in which you experience everything more intensely.

A lot of superhero sequel movies, they resemble each other greatly.

Adolescence is a time in which you experience everything more intensely.

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

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.

Anorexia is pernicious and not something which goes away overnight.

Forgive me, but what is the purpose of drama but catharsis?

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

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.

I don't think movies can ever be too intense, but people have to understand why you're showing them the things you are showing them.

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.

I had known a couple of people in college who went off the rails, who had significant bouts with mental illness.

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

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

I met a lot of women in the military with Meg Ryan, and they were remarkably impressive: Competent and strong and not versions of men, but versions of women. And they had stories to tell about how difficult it had been for them.

I look at modern life and I see people not taking responsibility for their lives. The temptation to blame, to find external causes to one's own issues is something that is particularly modern. I know that personally I find that sense of responsibility interesting.

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

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.

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

I think it's easier to be cynical. I think the temptation, often, among writers is to write about anything other than real, true, deep feelings.

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.

I tend not to go look at movies before I make a movie. I'd rather not be specifically influenced.

I think it's too easy often to find a villain out of the headlines and to then repeat that villainy again and again and again. You know, traditionally, America has always looked to scapegoat someone as the boogie man... there is a tradition in the most simplistic of action movies for there to be some horrible villain.

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.

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 think one of the privileges of being a filmmaker is the opportunity to remain a kind of perpetual student.

I think to see American troops in an American city is, you know, the sum of all of our fears.

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 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.

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

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

I, for one, suffer from a little bit of superhero fatigue.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

In my experience, the men of World War II, the vets of Vietnam, even guys coming back from Iraq, are loath to talk about their experiences. And the survivors of the Holocaust, particularly, are often very close-mouthed about their stories, even to their own children.

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'm very promiscuous in my tastes.

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

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?'

It seems that almost every time a valuable natural resource is discovered in the world-whether it be diamonds, rubber, gold, oil, whatever-often what results is a tragedy for the country in which they are found. Making matters worse, the resulting riches from these resources rarely benefit the people of the country from which they come.

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

It's one thing to plan and imagine what you want on a film, but when you actually arrive and survey the scene, there's a moment of, 'Oh my God, what was I thinking?'

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

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

I've enjoyed the singular focus of not going back and forth between the two mediums. It isn't about the screen size so much as film being where the stories I'm most interested in telling happen to be at.

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.

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

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.

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 very first job was working on a TV show that was a prestigious TV show and well done - was called 'Family.'

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

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

One of the great tragedies is that there is so much less open land available in Japan today. Many Japanese come to New Zealand because of its beauty.

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.

One resists categorization at one's peril.

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

People who have any kind of illness use humor as a type of coping.

People tend not to dwell on drama.

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.

People, especially press, want to pigeonhole you.

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.

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.

Samurai culture did exist really, for hundreds of years and the notion of people trying to create some sort of a moral code, the idea that there existed certain behaviors that could be celebrated and that could be operative in a life.

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.

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

Sometimes when we weep in the movies we weep for ourselves or for a life unlived. Or we even go to the movies because we want to resist the emotion that's there in front of us. I think there is always a catharsis that I look for and that makes the movie experience worthwhile.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

The privilege I've had over 15 movies over a very long time has been to make movies that were ambitious or grown-up, complex, that had themes in them that were sometimes political, sometimes challenging, to make these movies on a scale.

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 thing that has always interested me - amidst the scale, the historical spectacle, or the social significance or the political resonance - has been the relationships.

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

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.

There is no reason why challenging themes and engaging stories have to be mutually exclusive - in fact, each can fuel the other. As a filmmaker, I want to entertain people first and foremost. If out of that comes a greater awareness and understanding of a time or a circumstance, then the hope is that change can happen.

There is a segment of the American population that has been excluded from the national myth, and that should be redressed.

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

There is something universal in the theme of a man trying to save his family in the midst of the most terrible circumstances. It is not limited to Sierra Leone. This story could apply to any number of places where ordinary people have been caught up in political events beyond their control.

Those of my generation who grew up in the midst of the Cold War had a very, very strong awareness and very much were sort of influenced by the demonization of the Soviet Union, whether that was through the Cuban Missile Crisis or duck-and-cover, or any of those things that so affected us then.

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.

There's a rising tide of concern among activists, economists, and artists about Africa. Theres a temptation to think of it as a monolith as opposed to all these different countries with different problems.

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.

We've suspended the willing suspension of disbelief. We have given up that relationship, that almost hypnotic engagement, with the characters up on the screen.

To me this movie is about what is valuable. To one person it might be a stone, to someone else, a story in a magazine, to another, it is a child. The juxtaposition of one man obsessed with finding a valuable diamond with another man risking his life to find his son is the beating heart of this film.

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

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.

Yes, illness is serious, but the indignities are also funny. And that defines my world view.

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.

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

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

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.'

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