The Importance of Understanding America's Role in the World

I think for both of us, that film was our getting our training wheels off to be able to make this film. It had to do partly with understanding and sort of internalizing America's sense of itself in the world. And so understanding the sort of zeitgeist of American idealism and desire to project ourselves around the world is very much an outgrowth of what our experience was in the Second World War. The realities of the war were so horrendous and so terrible that the best way to honor the sacrifice and the service of the people who went into it wasn't to shy away from them.