I am passionately interested in understanding how my country works. And if you want to know about this thing called the United States of America you have to know about the Civil War.
I grew up certain for a while that I was going to be an anthropologist, until film turned my head.
I enjoy total creative control right now. Nobody tells me to make it longer, shorter, better, sexier, more violent, whatever.
Nothing in our daily life offers more of the comfort of continuity, the generational connection of belonging to a vast and complicated American family, the powerful sense of home, the freedom from time’s constraints, and the great gift of accumulated memory than does our National Pastime.
The only art form that Americans have created that’s recognized around the world is jazz music born in a community that had the peculiar experience of being unfree in a free land.
We strain to listen to the ghosts and echoes of our inexpressibly wise past, and we have an obligation to maintain these places, to provide these sanctuaries, so that people may be in the presence of forces larger than those of the moment.
I treat the photograph as a work of great complexity in which you can find drama. Add to that a careful composition of landscapes, live photography, the right music and interviews with people, and it becomes a style.
The stories from 1975 on are not finished and there is no resolve. I could spend 50 hours on the last 25 years of jazz and still not do it justice.
I’m a filmmaker. I’m an artist. I’ve chosen to work in history the way someone might choose to work in still lifes or landscapes.
In most films music is brought in at the end, after the picture is more or less locked, to amplify the emotions the filmmaker wants you to feel.
You don’t work on something for six years and be blind to the myriad of other approaches.
To say that an artist sells out means that an artist is making a conscious choice to compromise his music, to to weaken his music for the sake of commercial gain.
I never, ever want to apologize for a film. If it’s bad I’ll say it’s my fault. And that’s what I can say so far in all the films that I’ve done, that if you don’t like it, it’s entirely my fault.
A jazz beat is a dynamic changing rhythm.
History’s just been made for sale to an inside deal.
I don’t use composers. I research music the way I research the photographs or the facts in my scripts.
I have made a film about jazz that tries to look through jazz to see what it tells us about who we are as a people. I think that jazz is a spectacularly accurate model of democracy and a kind of look into our redemptive future possibilities.
Like a layer on a pearl, you can’t specifically identify the irritant, the moment of the irritant, but at the end of the day, you know you have a pearl.
One of the things I really like about Ford’s films is how there is always a focus on the way characters live, and not just the male heroes.
I think the problem with a lot of the fusion music is that its extremely predictable, its a rock rhythm and the solos all play the same stuff and they play it over and over again and theres a certain musical virtuosity involved in it.