Edward Zwick Quotes

If you look at American studios, the big productions have nothing to do with reality.

Maybe entertainment is not supposed to be reality.

Hollywood large is so different than real-life large.

A lot of people... kind of make heroes that are separate from us, people who are, you know, like... John Wayne and Errol Flynn and, you know, Denzel Washington... people who are different, who are larger than life.

Don't let the Disney princess hair fool you.

After two years in Washington, I often long for the realism and sincerity of Hollywood.

I feel, since 2001, this huge need for Americans to have superheroes on the screen. This idea that a super-being will protect you. That this being can go above the law but, at the end of the day, would be a good force and defeat the evil. This idea that this half-god exists. This need in the subconscious of America to find these gods.

King Arthur was one of my heroes because he was such a marvelous, heroic, courageous, and magnificent person that I had to admire him even though I knew perfectly well that I could never be in any way like that.

Hollywood is an image. We project these fantasies on to it, but people are just people.

I am just tired of writing about heroes that we're dragging down to our level, and I want to write about heroes that we want to be.

I wanted to be like the heroes of the books I read. That's why I wanted to go to the jungle. I wasn't interested in danger from the adrenaline aspect, I was more interested in the romance.

It is very dangerous to make a person larger than life because, then, young men and women are tempted to believe, well, if he was that great, he's inaccessible, and I can never try to be that or emulate that or achieve that.

Men are always doomed to be duped, not so much by the arts of the other as by their own imagination. They are always wooing goddesses, and marrying mere mortals.

Heroes, it would seem, exist always and a certain worship of them.

I didn’t care…about heroes who could read minds or walk through walls or do magic. The heroes I liked had courage and knew more real stuff than those who opposed them.

We see what we want to see. We idealize each other with our own fantasies.

But the makers of legend have seldom rested content to regard the world's great heroes as mere human beings who broke past the horizons that limited their fellows and returned such boons as any man with equal faith and courage might have found.

And the more she could imagine this island, the less she liked the real world. The more she could imagine the people, the less she liked any real people.

We moderns do not believe in demigods, but our smallest hero we expect to feel and act as a demigod.

The hero is suffered to be himself.

Hollywood has nothing to do with real life.

Heroes betray us. By having them, in real life, we betray ourselves.

I think the idea of a heightened reality and then the fantasy that we're able to be swept up in, and then these larger than life heroes and the possibility of someone much more powerful than we are and greater, that can come and save the day, so to speak, is inspiring.

He can't possibly live up to the person you've built him to be

The real problem with being around James was that he was always the hero. And what did that make you? Either the sidekick or the villain.