 The way I work, the interview never becomes larger than the person being interviewed. |
| We're having a hard time understanding where jazz is going. What happened to jazz? |
| You know, you meet some people, and do a lot of interviews, and you come across a Buck O'Neill and you know you are going to know him for the rest of your life. The same thing happened with Curt Flood. |
| I treat the photograph as a work of great complexity in which you can find drama. Add to that a careful composition of landscapes, live photography, the right music and interviews with people, and it becomes a style. |
| I don't use composers. I research music the way I research the photographs or the facts in my scripts. |
| By its very nature, no one person can ever be the center of jazz. |
| Jazz is a very accurate, curiously accurate accompaniment to 20th century America. |
| The stories from 1975 on are not finished and there is no resolve. I could spend 50 hours on the last 25 years of jazz and still not do it justice. |
| Louis Armstrong is quite simply the most important person in American music. He is to 20th century music (I did not say jazz) what Einstein is to physics. |
| 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. |
| Like a layer on a pearl, you can't specifically identify the irritant, the moment of the irritant, but at the end of the day, you know you have a pearl. |
| 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 think my expectations for myself are much more severe and much more direct. You can't work on a film for six years without being your own toughest critic. So you can't really be distracted by the expectations based on your previous performance. |
| In a sense I've made the same film over and over again. In all of them I've asked, 'Who are we as Americans? |
| The genius of our country is improvisation, and jazz reflects that. It's our great contribution to the arts. |
| I have made a film about jazz that tries to look through jazz to see what it tells us about who we are as a people. I think that jazz is a spectacularly accurate model of democracy and a kind of look into our redemptive future possibilities. |
| I read cover to cover every jazz publication that I could and in the New York Times, every single day reading their jazz reviews even though I didn't put them in the films. I wanted to know what is going on. |
| I can understand why some of these drummers and bass players become cult figures with all of their equipment and the incredible amount of technique they have. But there's very little that I think satisfies you intellectually or emotionally. |
| I enjoy total creative control right now. Nobody tells me to make it longer, shorter, better, sexier, more violent, whatever. |
| History's just been made for sale to an inside deal. |
