When a documentary filmmaker, working in the style that I do, suggests that there has been a shooting ratio of 40 hours to every one hour of finished film, that doesn't mean that the other 39 are bad.

I record all of my music with authentic instruments in a studio before we start editing, doing many, many versions. The music shapes the film as we edit so it has an organic relationship to the content.

Good history is a question of survival. Without any past, we will deprive ourselves of the defining impression of our being.

It is the great arrogance of the present to forget the intelligence of the past

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.

Jazz is a very accurate, curiously accurate accompaniment to 20th century America.