Edward Zwick

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. ”

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

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. ”

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. ”

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 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'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. ”