What is our life: (Pause.) it’s looking forward or it’s looking back. And that’s our life. That’s it. Where is the moment? - David Mamet

My motto is “Be Prepared.” I am told this is also the motto of the Boy Scouts, but, if so, this only proves that they were acting according to my motto earlier than I.

We were taught in the sixties to award ourselves merit for membership in a superior group — irrespective of our group’s accomplishments. We continue to do so, irrespective of accomplishments, individual or communal, having told each other we were special. We learned that all one need do is refrain from trusting anybody over thirty — we were the culmination of history, superior to all those misguided who had come before, which is to say all humanity.

The job of the film director is to tell the story through the juxtaposition of uninflected images — because that is the essential nature of the medium.