Wynton told us that Miles sold out, just wanted to make more money, just wanted to sell more records. I don't believe that Miles sold out but I'm not in a position to say.

Like a layer on a pearl, you can't specifically identify the irritant, the moment of the irritant, but at the end of the day, you know you have a pearl.

I record all of my music with authentic instruments in a studio before we start editing, doing many, many versions. The music shapes the film as we edit so it has an organic relationship to the content.

I never, ever want to apologize for a film. If it's bad I'll say it's my fault. And that's what I can say so far in all the films that I've done, that if you don't like it, it's entirely my fault.

I am passionately interested in understanding how my country works. And if you want to know about this thing called the United States of America you have to know about the Civil War.

You need, as a historian, essential triangulation from your subject and the only way you get that triangulation is through time.

We want Sarah Vaughan to sell more records. We want Sonny Rollins to sell more records. We want everybody to sell more records. We want the new people to sell more records that aren't treated in the film because they are what's happening. They are the future.

We saw the Civil War as a paradox of love and loss. If we assume a posture that only sees aerial views of war, we might lose a sense of what took place.

To say that an artist sells out means that an artist is making a conscious choice to compromise his music, to to weaken his music for the sake of commercial gain.