Seth Gabel Quotes

I personally feel like, if you're watching a film about war, you should get a sense of what it's really like.

Grave of the Fireflies is an emotional experience so powerful that it forces a rethinking of animation... It belongs on any list of the greatest war films ever made.

The fact is that war films, by their very nature, are pitched at a high dramatic range.

As the camera, I try to subordinate every word to be truthful and honest to each character's context.

For me, 'Come and See' is, by a million miles, the best film about war that has ever been made. I would highly recommend, encourage and enforce anyone to watch it.

In 'Letters from Iwo Jima,' there were times when I told Eastwood, 'This is just not believable.'

There's a difference between 'political films' and 'films about Iraq.'

In war films, even more than in other kinds of documentary, we've come to think that shaky, poor-quality footage is somehow more authentic than something classically 'well shot.'

Every good war film, if you want to use that phrase - I don't think it's a good phrase, but if you want to use that phrase - every good film, a first-rate film about war, is an anti-war movie.

There's no such thing as an anti-war film.

You're in a very nice position as an actor when you're portraying a piece of history that actually happened and portraying characters that actually existed. There's so much more to draw on and your research as an actor becomes much easier than if it's some fiction that you're trying to create a world around and background and history.

I would like my book to give people insight to the war before and after, but I don't think anyone could read my book and suddenly make up her mind about the war. I want to write for everybody.

A war film can be propaganda and they're very valuable as propaganda, as we realized in Britain in the Second World War. Film as propaganda is a very valuable tool. It can also demonize, which is the dangerous side of a war film as propaganda. But there are war films that are not propaganda. It's just saying 'This is what it's like.' For 99 percent of us we don't know what it's like. We have no idea. So to reveal that to the audience is powerful.

War is a nasty, dirty, rotten business. It's all right for the Navy to blockade a city, to starve the inhabitants to death. But there is something wrong, not nice, about bombing that city.

"Those who fought know a secret about themselves, and it is not very nice." ... They have experienced secretly and privately their natural human impulse toward sadism and brutality... Not merely did I learn to kill with a noose of piano wire put around somebody's neck from behind, but I learned to enjoy the prospect of killing that way.

I wanted to do a war movie, a western and an alien movie. In reality, there are a lot of ugly things happening in the world.

I collect old first and second World War artifacts and things. I'm a little secret history nerd. I've been lucky enough to do quite a few war movies too so I've taken little things off each film.

The puzzle and conundrums of Emily Dickinson's poetry or The Cantos, by Ezra Pound, is infinitely pleasurable. Or Ronald Johnson's Ark. And the experience extends a whole lifetime. But the intensity of certain vocalized language affects our bodies in a particular way, and that further actualization propels me. The Greeks explored this; there were very particular meters used in making war, different ones for a love chant.

When we blew the first atomic bomb at White Sands near the end of the war, nobody knew what was going to happen. There was a theory that the chain reaction would continue forever. And we would have created a little tiny sun out there in the desert that would burn until the end of the universe. It wasn't a widely held theory but it was a theory that nobody had a way of disproving. There were people who thought it wouldn't go off at all, that it would simply sit out there and melt and produce a great big dirty cloud of radioactivity. Nobody knew.

In my second year of Harvard Divinity School, where I was studying to be a minister like my father, I met a guy named Robert Cox, who had been the editor of the Buenos Aires Herald during the Dirty War in Argentina. Bob used to print the names of those who had been disappeared the day before, above the fold in his newspaper. It was a kind of an awakening to me to see what great journalism can and should do.

We always have the movies that are more toward real life, but they don't have that much drama or suspense, or we have the full of drama or suspense, but they're far away from real life. Always when I was watching a film, films with good drama, I was thinking, "I wish they were more close to real life." But when I was watching real life films I was thinking, "Well I wish it had more drama." I've tried, in the movies that I worked so far, to get these two things closer and closer to each other.

There are two ways to tell the story. Funny or sad. Guys like it funny, with lots of gore and a grin on your face when you get to the end. Girls like it sad, with a thousand-yard stare out to the distance as you gaze upon the horrors of war they can't quite see. Either way, it's the same story.

Let us start with the title of War and Cinema. The important part of the title is not War and Cinema.

The war was won on both sides: by the Vietnamese on the ground, by the Americans in the electronic mental space. And if the one side won an ideological and political victory, the other made Apocalypse Now and that has gone right around the world.