Quotes from Morgan Neville

To be a backup singer, you have to walk into any situation and just be perfect from the first take to the 50th take.

If I told my 14-year-old self that I'd be hanging out with Keith Richards talking about records, my head would've exploded.

The easiest way to subjugate a people is to erase a culture. I've seen it in war zones.

One of the challenges was to make a cinematic movie about literally talking heads and to try to make it feel like something you want to see in a theater.

Like the ancient Silk Road itself, 'The Sound of Silk' will make the foreign familiar while challenging long-held notions of identity and our place in the world.

There's no cultural revolution by mistake.

So much of what we get on our news debate shows is really people spinning one way or the other, giving their talking points one way or the other.

Now, you watch cable news, and you know what everybody's going to say before they open their mouth.

When you come to documentaries, the stakes are too low for it to be cutthroat. You're all doing it for the right reasons.

Sometimes we have our perfect foils, or you can call them their bete noir: the person who brings out both the best and the worst in you because you disagree with them so completely. Yet, you understand and respect them enough to give it your all.

If we can't agree on objective truth, then how are we ever going to agree on opinions?

The presidential and vice-presidential debates are those rare moments when people come together, but to even call them debates is a stretch because they're played by such negotiated rules, and they're so over-rehearsed.

I love Memphis, and just being there affects one's outlook.

If the Olympic Spirit is about overcoming every hurdle and accepting no limits, then I think Samsung is a great ambassador for these values.

I always like learning the small details about a subject.

If you're making a film about a band or a songwriter or whomever, there's a publisher, there's a record label, and there are people who are vested interests in that film. But with back-up singers, because they did stuff for everybody, there's no one party that has any vested interest in seeing the story told.

You always want to make the best film you can. If anything I feel more relaxed after the Oscar. I feel like I have a chance to just tell the stories I want to tell and it's actually been really nice.

In a weird way, our satirists probably have the most complicated, nuanced views of our politics now - Jon Stewart, Stephen Colbert, John Oliver. I don't know what that says about our country.