I began to feel that the drama of the truth that is in the moment and in the past is richer and more interesting than the drama of Hollywood movies. So I began looking at documentary films.
History's just been made for sale to an inside deal.
History is malleable. A new cache of diaries can shed new light, and archeological evidence can challenge our popular assumptions.
Good history is a question of survival. Without any past, we will deprive ourselves of the defining impression of our being.
By its very nature, no one person can ever be the center of jazz.
I don't use composers. I research music the way I research the photographs or the facts in my scripts.
A jazz beat is a dynamic changing rhythm.
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.
You don't work on something for six years and be blind to the myriad of other approaches.
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.
Jazz is a very accurate, curiously accurate accompaniment to 20th century America.
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.
In a sense I've made the same film over and over again. In all of them I've asked, 'Who are we as Americans?
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.
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.