Edward Zwick

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.'

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.

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.

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.

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

It's hard not to want to become Ken Burns at times. I'm interested in being a Ken Burns who reaches that 17-year-old who goes to the multiplex just to see a good story well-told. And if there's history in it, all the better.

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 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.

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

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

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.

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