I grew up 60 minutes way from Richmond, in Charlottesville, Virginia and, as a child, I was obsessed with the Civil War. I used to do re-enactments and all that stuff.
If you run an Internet search on Vietnam and the war, most of the information you get begins at about 1962. I think this is telling. It is missing the whole period that led up to the reasons the war happened in the first place.
There's no nobility with war. It's tear-'em-up destruction that leaves you frustrated, bitter and angry... If you really knew what it was like for an hour, you wouldn't want anyone to go through it.
There was a war crimes trial because an American prisoner had been shot trying to escape. He had obviously been recaptured and shot, and that violated the Geneva Convention.
I think it's a lot easier to tell a war story about two sides of a conflict with one another as opposed to one side in conflict with itself.
Why is everybody afraid of going to Heaven? You want to be here with the smog and the sin and bad people and the war? Or do you want to be in Heaven, sitting next to Jesus, you know?
The only foreign policy advice I heard from China was when they said to Sudan, 'Don't go back to war.' That's all they said. They didn't push anything else.
I was born into Sudan's civil war, and before I could read or write, I was using an AK47 in the conflict between the Muslim north and Animist/Christian south over the land and natural resources.
The Iraq War. No one took to the streets over it. It certainly would have been appropriate. If anybody even hinted we should... you were called un-American and not supporting the troops.
It was post war. It was very gray, very dreary. Everything was still rationed when I first saw the United States in 1951. I went over to visit my sister who was a war bride.
It was very gray, very dreary. Everything was still rationed when I first saw the United States in 1951. I went over to visit my sister who was a war bride.
I think that Barack Obama faces a level of divisiveness, and I don't mean on a national level in terms of the North and the South and the Civil War; I really mean just politically.
I am passionately interested in understanding how my country works. And if you want to know about this thing called the United States of America you have to know about the Civil War.
In the early 1980s, I got into a war with my management - they just kept on suing me and I lost everything. So I had to go out on tour to make sure the electricity stayed on.
With Vietnam, the Iraq War, so many American films about war are almost always from the American point of view. You almost never have a Middle Eastern character by name with a story.
There must be people who remember World War II and the Holocaust who can help us get out of this rut.
I did do a war movie, 'Windtalkers.' That was a lot of action. But once you've done one big action/war movie, you don't need to do another one.
I grew up during the Revolution of Iran and the war between Iran and Iraq. The things that I saw. The impact. How it changes you. How it changes the way you look at the world.
And in the Second World War, you didn't just read about it in the newspapers because you weren't allowed to read it in the newspapers. It was all censored, you know? So nobody knew what we were doing.
I made 'Saving Private Ryan' for my father. He's the one who filled my head with war stories when I was growing up.
I don't think that anybody in any war thinks of themselves as a hero. The minute anybody presumes that they are heroes, they get their boots taken away from them and buried in the sand.
