Top 75 Edward Zwick Quotes

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.

You have to make choices always. It’s about the omission of something for the sake of another.

There’s only a certain number of movies I’m going to get made, and it’s important to me that they each be original somehow.

My very first job was working on a TV show that was a prestigious TV show and well done – was called ‘Family.’

I had known a couple of people in college who went off the rails, who had significant bouts with mental illness.

Samurai culture did exist really, for hundreds of years and the notion of people trying to create some sort of a moral code, the idea that there existed certain behaviors that could be celebrated and that could be operative in a life.

I think it’s easier to be cynical. I think the temptation, often, among writers is to write about anything other than real, true, deep feelings.

I, for one, suffer from a little bit of superhero fatigue.

When my own son was 12, we didn’t want toy guns in the house. So he just picked up a stick and went, ‘Bam! Bam! Bam!’ That’s the testosterone of a 12-year-old boy.

The military has been actually remarkable at dealing with race, but gender is an issue.

There is nothing that is so serious that you can’t also see its comic side. Comedy is a way of talking about the most serious things.

I have nothing against diamonds, or rubies or emeralds or sapphires. I do object when their acquisition is complicit in the debasement of children or the destruction of a country.

I’ve enjoyed the singular focus of not going back and forth between the two mediums. It isn’t about the screen size so much as film being where the stories I’m most interested in telling happen to be at.

I do watch ‘It’s a Wonderful Life’ with my children at Christmas, and I liked it long before it went into the public domain and became a cliche.

I think to see American troops in an American city is, you know, the sum of all of our fears.

I really look forward to that opportunity to be a student and discover things. That keeps it interesting for me. And I sometimes get easily bored, and there are still some things I wanna talk about instead of repeating something.

I watched aspirationally. I looked at movies that maybe I didn’t entirely understand but which developed in me some thirst for their subjects or for their context, and that became part of how I came to understand the world.

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.

The Beatles in 1963 came to America and became international celebrities, but Bobby Fischer was one of the first, as Elvis was, more in terms of the message created around him.

Sometimes when we weep in the movies we weep for ourselves or for a life unlived. Or we even go to the movies because we want to resist the emotion that’s there in front of us. I think there is always a catharsis that I look for and that makes the movie experience worthwhile.

Anorexia is pernicious and not something which goes away overnight.

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

There is something universal in the theme of a man trying to save his family in the midst of the most terrible circumstances. It is not limited to Sierra Leone. This story could apply to any number of places where ordinary people have been caught up in political events beyond their control.

The phone that you carry around with you. It’s not just that it’s a locator for anybody who wants to actually find out where you are, but it’s also a leash. It’s a reminder just how tethered you are.

I guess television is so much on the word. It’s so much closer to playwriting – the scale is more just about the voices and the internal lives. Movies, it’s a very different canvas.

People make the assumption that you’re only interested in one thing based on the most recent thing you’ve done. But some directors can be pretty promiscuous about their tastes, and that’s how I want to challenge myself.

When I first thought about the military – and this goes all the way back to ‘Glory’ – I learned really quickly that it isn’t a monolith. It is really an institution made up of some people with very different personalities and people of different backgrounds.

I think it’s too easy often to find a villain out of the headlines and to then repeat that villainy again and again and again. You know, traditionally, America has always looked to scapegoat someone as the boogie man.

The thing that has always interested me – amidst the scale, the historical spectacle, or the social significance or the political resonance – has been the relationships.

When ‘The Godfather’ comes on, any time of the day or night, I’m lost because I’m incapable of turning it off.

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.

Doctors are kind of this shibboleth in our society. We know what they do, and we depend on them, but we don’t know a lot about what it feels like from their side.

I’ve never been one of those guys who storyboards every frame, because that would take away some of the mystery and some of the fun.

I think there is a very powerful wish that we all have of being self-contained and having sort of opted out or choosing to remove ourselves from society and to have no ties and no obligations, and even no possessions. To be free in a particular way.

One resists categorization at one’s peril.

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.

The most interesting thing to me in chess are not the gambits. Or the moves. It’s the mental toughness.

Scale is not just something that a director wants so as to play with all the toys. Scale also lends verisimilitude, to put together a real world.

I look at modern life and I see people not taking responsibility for their lives. The temptation to blame, to find external causes to one’s own issues is something that is particularly modern. I know that personally I find that sense of responsibility interesting.

People, especially press, want to pigeonhole you.

The issue of diamonds in Africa is inseparable from the issue of child soldiers.

Often, romantic comedies exist in a vacuum, and it’s kind of odd.

Ironically, it’s easier to raise the money to make the film than it is to have the film find wide distribution.

To me this movie is about what is valuable. To one person it might be a stone; to someone else, a story in a magazine; to another, it is a child. The juxtaposition of one man obsessed with finding a valuable diamond with another man risking his life to find his son is the beating heart of this film.

Stories are one of the means by which a culture preserves its identity.

When you’re in a fight, and you get hit, it hurts. And as you get older, you begin to take on the aches and the bruises of doing that.

One of the great tragedies is that there is so much less open land available in Japan today. Many Japanese come to New Zealand because of its beauty.

I met a lot of women in the military with Meg Ryan, and they were remarkably impressive: Competent and strong and not versions of men, but versions of women. And they had stories to tell about how difficult it had been for them.

I like to do everything I can to avoid rehearsals, even while we’re rehearsing.

You can’t help but reveal your bias, and you can’t but invest personally in any story that you tell.

In my experience of the men of action I have met – whether from the Second World War or Iraq or Vietnam – they often had to do things that they would rather not reflect upon afterwards. This is perhaps one reason why the story of the Bielskis remained untold for so long.

The funny thing is, when you look at photos of Tuvia Bielski, he was fair, blue-eyed, and could pass for a Gentile.

Forgive me, but what is the purpose of drama but catharsis?

I’m very promiscuous in my tastes.

There’s a great tradition of actors taking on parts of much less obvious sympathy.

Romantic comedy has come to mean a couple of moderately talented actors placed in implausible situations obliged to go through a set of paces that are all too familiar, the end result being neither romantic nor comedic.

I think every culture – you can call it an American Ronin, a medieval knight errant, you could talk about ‘Shane.’ There is an archetype that I think is actually common to a lot of cultures, and even the Clint Eastwood stuff was probably as influenced by the Japanese stuff, and yet done by an Italian.

When we did ‘Thirtysomething,’ television was either about doctors, lawyers, or cops.