Edward Zwick Quotes

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Edward Zwick

Profession : Director

Birth : October 8, 1952

There is no reason why challenging themes and engaging stories have to be mutually exclusive - in fact, each can fuel the other. As a filmmaker, I want to entertain people first and foremost. If out of that comes a greater awareness and understanding of a time or a circumstance, then the hope is that change can happen.

Edward Zwick

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.

Edward Zwick

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.

Edward Zwick

I, for one, suffer from a little bit of superhero fatigue.

Edward Zwick

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.

Edward Zwick

The issue of assault in the military is something that they've gone to great lengths to try to deal with - and have not entirely dealt with yet.

Edward Zwick

The military has been actually remarkable at dealing with race, but gender is an issue.

Edward Zwick

When I first thought about the military - and this goes all the way back to 'Glory' - I learned really quickly that it isn't a monolith. It is really an institution made up of some people with very different personalities and people of different backgrounds.

Edward Zwick

In the necessary memorialisation of the six million dead, there had been precious little attention paid to those who survived and how they survived.

Edward Zwick

The funny thing is, when you look at photos of Tuvia Bielski, he was fair, blue-eyed, and could pass for a Gentile.

Edward Zwick

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

Edward Zwick

In my experience of the men of action I have met - whether from the Second World War or Iraq or Vietnam - they often had to do things that they would rather not reflect upon afterwards. This is perhaps one reason why the story of the Bielskis remained untold for so long.

Edward Zwick

I like to do everything I can to avoid rehearsals, even while we're rehearsing.

Edward Zwick

Every day and every scene, it's never the scene that you expect.

Edward Zwick

Sometimes when an actor and director work together for the first time, it's not as if there's a suspicion, but there is tentativeness, a certain amount of a right of passage you have to go through in order to get there. When it's already there from the beginning, it's such a plus.

Edward Zwick

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.

Edward Zwick

I watched aspirationally. I looked at movies that maybe I didn't entirely understand but which developed in me some thirst for their subjects or for their context, and that became part of how I came to understand the world.

Edward Zwick

The idea that things can be serious minded but must be somehow balkanized in the art-house ghetto is very upsetting because I think it limits not just the audience who was already going to see it, but those who might have had their tastes developed at a younger age.

Edward Zwick

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

Edward Zwick

I've always believed that the stories and the performances are more important than I am. I think that the more invisible that my hand is, the more attention people can pay to the story and to those performances.

Edward Zwick