I haven't lived a perfect life. I have regrets. But that's from a lifetime of taking chances, making decisions, and trying not to be frozen. The only thing that I can do with my regrets is understand them.

I haven't lived a perfect life. I have regrets. But that's from a lifetime of taking chances, making decisions, and trying not to be frozen. The only thing that I can do with my regrets is understand them.

I'm glad movies aren't going to please everybody, they can't. But what they have to be is recognisable. I don't equate myself with a master painter, but I think you can recognise my films.

I wanted very much to do Traffic and at one point it looked like I was going to work on it. And then, of course, Catherine Zeta-Jones had her relationship with Michael Douglas and it suddenly didn't happen.

We all have that burning question about what happens if we lose somebody we love, especially if we lose them tragically. We wonder what fear was going on, we wonder if we could have reached out and touched them, held their hand, looked in their eyes, been there.

I'm proud of all the movies I've made. They're not sequels, they're not franchises. And the reason I pick my films carefully is that I don't want to spit on my life. I like to think of myself as more than that.

When I read Thirteen Days I was moved by it. It was just a great time for the world, in terms of looking back in history and seeing how we got ourselves into trouble and how we got ourselves out of trouble.

I believe people who go into politics want to do the right thing. And then they hit a big wall of re-election and the pettiness of politics. In the end, politics gets in the way of the business of people.

Field of Dreams is probably our generation's It's A Wonderful Life.

I've had some movies that have been ridiculed, but that's OK with me. I don't feel that really defines me. Should I change who I am to be popular?

We stand our best chance of leaving a legacy to those who want to learn, our children, by standing firm. In matters of style, hey, swing with the stream. But in matters of principle, you need to stand like a rock.

I enjoy sports. I get a real joy from playing sports but I don't look for those movies. Oliver Stone wanted to know if I would do Any Given Sunday and it just didn't appeal to me.

There are a lot of things that come to bear on movies now that I don't think are good for movies. They're trying to appeal to the biggest demographic and, when they do that, you sometimes flatten out.