The bones of the story of ‘War Horse’ is a love story. That’s what makes it universal.
Even if I’d had a really happy relationship with my father and there was no emotional hiatus for a decade and a half, I probably would still have made some of the same choices for movies that I’ve made.
Before statehood was achieved, Syria and Egypt had their tanks and military equipment lined up to invade Tel Aviv and destroy it; but the Israelis scrambled together an air force, some of it from old Second World War Messerschmidts, and the invasion was halted.
Because television doesn’t offer the kind of budget that a movie offers, you’ve got to be a little more careful where you spend the money to put the fiction in science.
Because of how much movies cost, it’s dangerous to be experimental on one film after the other. But we can experiment with television. We can do things that are fringe and bring ideas to the table that are offbeat and original.
All presidents swear an oath to the Constitution to keep this country united, and when the country fell apart, Lincoln had to put it back together again, with a lot of help. But he bore total responsibility.
I’m always in favor of Israel responding strongly when it’s threatened. At the same time, a response to a response doesn’t really solve anything. It just creates a perpetual-motion machine.
I think one of the worst things that happened to me was, you know, my voluntary fallout with my father. And then the greatest thing that happened to me was when I saw the light, and realized I needed to love him in a way that he could love me back.
I committed to directing ‘Catch Me If You Can’ not because of the divorce component, but principally because Frank Abagnale did things that were the most astonishing scams I had ever heard.
I always think if it’s a good story, the audience can’t wait to run out of the theater and go tweet somebody with the gist of a story, in a nutshell, almost, because it was that interesting.
I don’t think that anybody in any war thinks of themselves as a hero. The minute anybody presumes that they are heroes, they get their boots taken away from them and buried in the sand.
I even get inspired by movies that aren’t very good, because there’s always something good in movies that are collectively thought of as a failure. There’s good in everything, I find.
I think the key divide between the interactive media and the narrative media is the difficulty in opening up an empathic pathway between the gamer and the character, as differentiated from the audience and the characters in a movie or a television show.
I think that a movie can only be an adjunct or only a supplement to books, to different points of view, to scholars, historians and your own teachers.
I think producers are more interested in backing concepts than directors and writers. I don’t think that’s the right way of making a decision about whether you’re going to back a film or not.
I once said that CGI makes you less inventive. At the time I was bemoaning the loss of the practical stunt. If a stunt can be done practically and safely, I’d rather do it old-style.
I love to go to a regular movie theater, especially when the movie is a big crowd-pleaser. It’s much better watching a movie with 500 people making noise than with just a dozen.
I love creating partnerships; I love not having to bear the entire burden of the creative storytelling, and when I have unions like with George Lucas and Peter Jackson, it’s really great; not only do I benefit, but the project is better for it.
I interviewed survivors, I went to Poland, saw the cities and spent time with the people and spoke to the Jews who had come back to Poland after the war and talked about why they had come back.
I guess my first digital movie was ‘Tintin’ because ‘Tintin’ has no film step. There is no intermediate film step. It’s 100% digital animation, but as far as a live-action film, I’m still planning to shoot everything on film.
In the re-creation of combat situations, and this is coming from a director who’s never been in one, being mindful of what these veterans have actually gone through, you find that the biggest concern is that you don’t look at war as a geopolitical endeavor.