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.
The way I work, the interview never becomes larger than the person being interviewed.
I think my expectations for myself are much more severe and much more direct. You can’t work on a film for six years without being your own toughest critic. So you can’t really be distracted by the expectations based on your previous performance.
Jazz is a very accurate, curiously accurate accompaniment to 20th century America.
There are no ordinary lives.
The flame is not out, but it is flickering.
There is no communication in this world except between equals.
I have made all my films for my children with the exception of my first film because my oldest daughter wasn’t born when I was making the film about the Brooklyn Bridge.
I read cover to cover every jazz publication that I could and in the New York Times, every single day reading their jazz reviews even though I didn’t put them in the films. I wanted to know what is going on.
I record all of my music with authentic instruments in a studio before we start editing, doing many, many versions. The music shapes the film as we edit so it has an organic relationship to the content.
Write: write letters. Keep journals. Besides your children, there is no surer way of achieving immortality.
You know, you meet some people, and do a lot of interviews, and you come across a Buck O’Neill and you know you are going to know him for the rest of your life. The same thing happened with Curt Flood.
It follows the seasons, beginning each year with the fond expectancy of springtime and ending with the hard facts of autumn.
You need, as a historian, essential triangulation from your subject and the only way you get that triangulation is through time.
Civics is in fact politics, and politics is how things work not only in the political realm but in every other realm. It may be this simple mechanical glitch that unites everything. This is my philosophy.
History doesn’t repeat itself, but human nature remains the same.
Read. The book is still the greatest manmade machine of all – not the car, not the TV, not the smartphone.
It’s difficult to dispel arrogance if you retain ignorance.
Jackie Robinson stole home and he’s safe.“... Nobody could hurt him again. He wouldn’t hear the name-calling. He would only hear the cheers and somehow I could fantasize my own little story about where he was and how he was doing and let him rest in peace.
There’s always the certainty that the opposite of what I might believe in might also be true.
The black-white rift stands at the very center of American history. It is the great challenge to which all our deepest aspirations to freedom must rise. If we forget that – if we forget the great stain of slavery that stands at the heart of our country, our history, our experiment – we forget who we are, and we make the great rift deeper and wider.