Michael Apted Quotes

I was trying to do like a spaghetti western but using World War II iconography.

I never slept as soundly as the night following Pearl Harbor. For I knew that The American Race would now be entering the war and it would never be the same.

All my life I've been aware of the Second World War humming in the background. I was born 10 years after it was finished, and without ever seeing it. It formed my generation and the world we lived in. I played Hurricanes and Spitfires in the playground, and war films still form the basis of all my moral philosophy. All the men I've ever got to my feet for or called sir had been in the war.

The Second World War is the largest single event in human history, fought across six of the world's seven continents and all it oceans. It killed 50 million human beings, left hundreds of millions of others wounded in mind or body and materially devastated much of the heartland of civilization.

As I have said many times before, I was among the first people to experience the German Occupation of France during the Second World War. I was 7-13 years old during the War and did not really internalise its significance.

I had wanted to make a film about World War II for some time, but I didn't really want to do something that was set in the trenches, so to speak.

World War II was a must win.

The great war that broke so suddenly upon the world two years ago, and which has swept up within its flame so great a part of thecivilized world, has affected us very profoundly.... With its causes and its objects we are not concerned. The obscure fountains from which its stupendous flood has burst we are not interested to search for or explore.

I have never seen an adequate description anywhere of the amazement, the uncomprehending horror of the bulk of the American people which preceded the firing of that gun at Sumter. Politicians or far-sighted leaders on both sides knew what was coming. And it is they who have written histories of the war. But to the easy-going millions, busied with their farms or shops, the onrushing disaster was as inexplicable as an earthquake. Their protest arose from sea to sea like the clamor of a gigantic hive of frightened bees.

Millions of people gave their lives fighting fascism and imperialism, but Pearl Harbor was the event that forever changed the course of human history.

I don't really think much about how I would have fared in the Second World War. It's a topic that has to be treated with respect and subtlety, and you can't just go in all guns blazing and make an epic action film.

There was so little said about the Burmese war. The Forgotten 14th, they called them.

I was born in 1935, so I was quite young when the war started. I remember we were in Bath, and it was 1942. We went down into the cellar of our house, and when we came up, I remember seeing all the glass on the floor where all the windows had been shaken out by the bombs.

I was born in Norwich, which I still regard as the most beautiful city in the world, despite the attempts by the Luftwaffe to destroy it in the Second World War.

I had a question. "Why does the name Pearl Harbor sound so familiar?" The lieutenant colonel's eyes narrowed. "Pearl Harbor is the most famous U.S. military base in the world," he said crisply. "It's the only place on U.S. soil that has been attacked in a wars, since the Revolutionary War." None of this was ringing a bell, but you already know I'm totally uneducated. Gazzy leaned over to whisper, "It was a movie with Ben Affleck." Ah. Now I remembered.

The Crimean War is one of the bad jokes of history.

Boys, it is just like the Alamo. Somebody should have by God helped those Texans. I'm going to Vietnam.

In my opinion, there are two focal points of the war danger. The first focal point is the Far East zone of Japan. The second focal point in the zone is Germany.

World War II synchronizes things for a lot of people. There's a kind of wakeup call.

France and Germany were opposed to a maritime blockade of the Adriatic Sea without a mandate from the United Nations (UN). So, what we witnessed in Kosovo was an extraordinary war, a war waged solely with bombs from the air.

I mean, it [Southern Comfort] is basically a story about the folly of our misadventure into that war, done in the context of these National Guard weekend warriors who wander into a world about which they know nothing and then wind up wreaking havoc on themselves.

Under the Occupation, we in Nantes were denied access to the coast of the Atlantic Ocean. It was therefore not until after the War was over that I saw the sea for the first time, in the vicinity of St Nazaire. It was there that I discovered the bunkers.

In the account book of the Great War the page recording the Russian losses has been ripped out. The figures are unknown. Five millions, or eight? We ourselves know not. All we know is that, at times, fighting the Russians, we had to remove the piles of enemy bodies from before our trenches, so as to get a clear field of fire against new waves of assault.

All Quiet on the Western Front.

I don't want to do a war film per se. Nor do I want to do a political film.