Nicolas Cage

So we took four geographically distributed American towns worldwide.

Waterbury, Connecticut, Mobile, Alabama, Sacramento, California, and tiny, tiny La Verne, Minnesota, and said, let's see the war through their eyes, how they went off to the war.

It didn't mean that it was any limited in that way.

The scope could be global, but you could find the universe in a grain of sand.

Yeah, I know I actually...

My mom died when I was 11, and my dad had a really strict curfew.

But if there was a movie on TV that lasts till 1 a.m.

on a school night, he'd let me stay up and watch it, like an old movie.

Or he'd take me to the Cinema Guild or to the Revival House where I'd see European stuff as well.

And I watched my dad cry for the first time, and I realized, like 12 or 13 years old,

this is what I want to do.

Because I understood why.

He hadn't been able to deal with the stuff going on in our family, but he could deal with it through a movie.

And I realized the power of the medium.

So I wanted to be Howard Hawks or John Ford or some such other director.

And then I went to Hampshire College in Amherst, Massachusetts in 71, and everybody was a social documentary still photographer.

They were interested in the truth of what is and what was.

And all of a sudden I had my molecules rearranged, and I'm now interested in doing documentaries.

And that combined with a completely untrained interest in history to start doing this sort of stuff.

And that's where it came from.