Quotes from Edward Zwick

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

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.

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

I tend not to go look at movies before I make a movie. I'd rather not be specifically influenced.

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.

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

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've done all sorts of different kinds of action. We did a thing in 'Blood Diamond,' the attack on Freetown, where I carefully staged the action but did not show the camera operators what we were going to film - so it has the feel of documentary, trying to capture something, and that gave it a whole different feel.

I think that I am interested in the resonance between character drama and high stakes, either situational or political or social or other kind of elevated drama, and I tend to find that those things combust.

Those of my generation who grew up in the midst of the Cold War had a very, very strong awareness and very much were sort of influenced by the demonization of the Soviet Union, whether that was through the Cuban Missile Crisis or duck-and-cover, or any of those things that so affected us then.

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.

'Milk' doesn't imply that all gay men who stayed in the closet were cowards.

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 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.

Like everyone, I was a kid who played chess when I was young. And I am admittedly old enough to have been around during the fervor of the match in Reykjavik and the rise of Bobby Fischer, so those two things conspired to pique my interest.

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

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

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.

I like to reveal people with some of the niceties of social behavior stripped away and the moral, ethical, and political issues are revealed.

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.

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.

The privilege I've had over 15 movies over a very long time has been to make movies that were ambitious or grown-up, complex, that had themes in them that were sometimes political, sometimes challenging, to make these movies on a scale.

One reason why in Hollywood we are so often inventing heroes is that real heroes are vexing.

I would say that 'Schindler's List,' as powerful as it was, seemed to have continued with a particular iconography of victimization and passivity. That was the iconography with which I had grown up and to which I had grown accustomed.