I made one contribution to a film about the 11th of September: there were 11 directors and everyone had a different take on that. Some I thought were valid and some less so, but there was a substantial point that knitted all the films together - a comment on the bombing of the World Trade Center - so there was something to get your teeth into.
In 2003, at the time I made my "Old Europe" comment, the center of gravity in NATO and Europe had long since shifted to the East. With the former Warsaw Pact countries joining NATO, the alliance has a different mix today. Some people were sensitive about my comment because they thought it was a pejorative way of highlighting demographic realities. Apparently they felt it pointed a white light at a weakness in Europe - an aging population. Europe has come some distance since World War II in becoming Europe.
The events of September 11 would have been impossible if there were no airport security system at all. If average Americans were allowed to carry their personal firearms on board our aircraft ..., the chances that several passengers on each flight would have been armed-and thus able to shoot the hijackers, preventing the Trade Center and Pentagon hits-would have been quite substantial.
In September, I left the show. We were going through discussions and negotiations, and I had been on the show for about 11 years, and there were some things that I was asking for that I didn't feel were the moon or the stars.
Even though I was concentrating on that two-week period from September 11th to September 20th, I was seeing the policy for real, happening, that we were talking about in the film.
The same folks that are bombing innocent people in Iraq were the ones who attacked us in America on September the 11th.
The real question was, here we had this information, Bin Laden intends to strike in the United States. We knew they had struck before in 1993 at the World Trade Center in the first bombing of the trade center.
I was turning up at sets where inexperienced people were making these badly written films - but they were doing it; that was the point. They were getting their films out there. And they were paying me, so they obviously had access to money. I just thought, 'I can make something better than this.'
The terrorist attacks on September the 11th were a turning point for our nation. We saw the goals of a determined enemy to expand the scale of their murder and force America to retreat from the world. And our nation accepted a mission. We will defeat this enemy. The United States of America is determined to guard our homeland against future attacks. As the September 11th Commission concluded, our country is safer than we were three years ago, but we are not yet safe
It is a very real concern and my view is that everything changed on September 11th and the procedure, the policies that were in place prior to September 11th no longer should apply.
When the planes crashed into the World Trade Centre on September 11, 2001, Bush immediately identified what he thought was the true cause. It was because the Muslims were jealous of the freedom of the American people. It was because the Muslims were poor. This exposes a lack of understanding of things on his part.
Not everyone in the world is alike. And some of us are a lot more different than others. Some of us were born like this, some of us were changed. But no matter how this happened to you, if you are here it is because this is your destiny. It was chosen for you.
Some directors do recut their films, but I don't if I disagree, and what you suffer is a less passionate marketing campaign, less investment in the film at the other end, which is... fine. I get it.
Some words having to do with the death of the people in the World Trade Center attack had been added, and when I got to it, I had this overwhelmingly emotional experience. I struggled to get through the words; tears were streaming down my cheeks.
About one month before he was killed, when asked by David Frost how his obituary should read: Something about the fact that I made some contribution to either my country, or those who were less well off. I think back to what Camus wrote about the fact that perhaps this world is a world in which children suffer, but we can lessen the number of suffering children, and if you do not do this, then who will do this? I'd like to feel that I'd done something to lessen that suffering.
Don't let some random comment that you wouldn't have even thought about overshadow something important that you were actually trying to say.
Some people had fathers who were bankers or farmers, my father made films, that's how I saw it. As for the movie stars, they were just around, some of them were friends, others weren't, it was all just a part of my everyday life.