If you can understand, you can feel compassion.

Sometimes people give away more by not saying something.

The interesting thing to me is that somehow the future of movies will become a more social thing... I think that people will see them communally and will be talking about them as they're watching them, in a way, and immediately after watching them, and they'll all become the conversation. I think that's pretty interesting.

A publisher friend of mine suggested that I write a book about my grandfather, who had just died. I had nothing else to fill my empty days with, so I started work on this book. While researching it - watching lots of movies, talking to moviemakers - I became interested in movies and started making documentaries.

What got me into making movies was that I wanted to be a journalist.

People who die in an untimely way who are artists, somehow that validates their art, we feel. Why culturally we feel that, I don't know.

It feels like we're all so familiar now with the traditional three-act structure that, actually, stories that are more complex, more naughty, that allow for disagreement and discussion, are more interesting to us.

I find it really difficult when you make a movie where it is set in Russia and everyone speaks in English. It drives me crazy.

Everyone's got to make one submarine drama in their life.

The great thing about making a film on a submarine is that it's kind of like making a play. You've got this limited environment.

If there is a tendency in modern television I hate, it is the unstoppable march of the dramatic reconstruction to tell the stories of anything from an ancient Egyptian battle to the early life of Paul Gascoigne.

In film, I believe things should either be documentary or drama.

In war films, even more than in other kinds of documentary, we've come to think that shaky, poor-quality footage is somehow more authentic than something classically 'well shot.'

Despite the limitations of the bulky 16mm camera and 10-minute film magazines, 'The Anderson Platoon' feels as spontaneous and fresh as any films that have come out of the Afghan or Iraq wars.

Although 'The Anderson Platoon' was what we would now call an 'embedded film' - with all the ambiguities that term implies - somehow Schoendoerffer got away with showing things as they really were from a grunt's perspective.

The first documentary I saw that tried to show the actual experience of being a soldier in combat was 'The Anderson Platoon,' by French director Pierre Schoendoerffer, which won the Oscar for best documentary in 1967.

We're all fascinated by the way other people live their lives, how they cope with hardship and triumph, what they put in their home movies and family albums.

The Internet has meant that advertising has migrated; there are hardly any classifieds in newspapers any more because they're all online. If people have a car to sell, for example, they sell it online; they don't go to the newspaper.

For me, the aim of making any film like this, any film about an artist, would be to send you back to the art.

'State of Play' is a romantic story at its heart.

I think the parallels of a giant power with overwhelming military superiority and might, with America and Rome, it seems obvious to me.

I used the same designer and costume designer on 'The Eagle' and 'The Last King of Scotland.'

With 'Black Sea,' I long had an idea that I wanted to do a film about people stuck on the bottom of the ocean. I thought that was a terrifying scenario.

I suppose making documentaries is like doing journalism on film.