Top 119 Quotes & Sayings by Edward Zwick - Page 2

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

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

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.

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 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.

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

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

One resists categorization at one's peril.

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.

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.

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.

Movies, as I grew up loving them, were always about something.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

I'm very promiscuous in my tastes.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

Growing up, movies were something my family and, later, my friends and I would stay up all night talking about. The movies I remember moved me and forced you to think about things that made you know yourself better.

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.

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.

People tend not to dwell on drama.

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.

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.

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.'

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.

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?'

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?'

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

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.

Anorexia is pernicious and not something which goes away overnight.

I am a fan of movies and there is something about watching film that is burned into celluloid for all time that is now a piece of history. You go watch, being a fan of classic films and my children and their children are going to be watching these movies.

There is no reason why challenging themes and engaging stories have to be mutually exclusive - in fact, each can fuel the other.

And how deeply do I let business considerations affect [screenwriting] choices that might otherwise be more or less esthetic? . . . Do I choose the upbeat rather than the downer ending because I know it will score better at the preview? Can the idea be sold in a single sentence? Can it compete with space aliens and tornadoes and missions impossible?

You do these movies, you give it out to the world and you really have no idea how people are going to react to you.

I maintain that no movie can be funny enough. I mean even the most serious, even the most intense movie and I know enough about life to know in those dark moments inevitably someone will say something funny and I will be part of the whole experience.

I've been in plenty of situations where I thought the film would turn out one way or my performance would be looked at one way and it was an entirely different situation.

I don't think it's a prize when actors and directors or writers and actors work together more than once. You have a trust and a shorthand and a lot of times you even reach the point, where in the process, you don't even have to talk.

It's always great to do a movie that you find is entertaining, but also can give some sort of political or social message.

However much I may like to talk about or be interested in a more philosophical or moral agenda, [film] is, ultimately, about narrative. And it's about telling stories that are engaging and dramatic.

What I was really overwhelmed with by Africa was its tremendous natural beauty; I got to go to some pretty amazing places. Every other weekend we got a day or two off and go on a safari or the natural wonders of Africa and if anyone gets the opportunity to go there, it's something you have to do in your lifetime.

I never thought about that ever throughout the entire course of my career about choosing a specific role because it would make me seem more man-like.

To make a great movie is such a combination of different things that need to come into play to actually make a memorable film and not have a film to fall by the wayside, to have something live on during the years, and one of those elements is the commitment the actors have to their performance.