Citations

[on the plowing up of the Great Plains and resultant dust bowl years] The old ranchers were saying 'Wrong side up'. The Indians knew it was not right, that these buffalo grasses sent their roots five feet down to suck the moisture, but also hold the topsoil evolved over thousands of years. All of a sudden we were turning over that grass in an area larger than Ohio, and this was a marginal area anyway. This was the worst man-made ecological disaster in American history so far.

In so many films that I've done, short-sightedness is one of the major human themes. We live for the moment. No one's willing to do the necessary rolling up the sleeves until the catastrophe happens.

[on the cinematic shooting of still photography] That's the DNA for everything I've done for the past thirty-five years. That attempt to look at a photograph and see time. To hear movement and sound, then search for the close-up, a tilt, a pan, a reveal. To create what the auteurs called 'mise en scene'. I wanted to be one of those auteurs when I was growing up, and abandoned it for the sheer power of fact.

I can look at a still photograph of building the Brooklyn Bridge and hear the workers hammering, the seagulls in the East River, the steam compressors hauling up big blocks of stone. You take an old photograph and you realize it has a past, it has a future. So what would it mean to go inside it?