You know, the common stories, one plus one equals two, we get it.
But all stories are really, the real, genuine stories, are about one and one equaling three.
That's what I'm interested in.
We live in a rational world. We're absolutely certain that one and one equals two, and it does.
But the things that matter most to us, some people call it love, some people call it God,
some people call it reason.
Is that other thing where the whole is greater than the sum of the parts?
And that's the three.
Oh, great story. They're everywhere.
There are millions of them. Abraham Lincoln wins the Civil War.
And then he decides he's got enough time to go to the theater.
That's a good story.
He said we hold these truths to be self-evident that all men are created equal.
He owned a hundred human beings and never saw the hypocrisy, never saw the contradiction,
and more important, never saw fit in his lifetime to free any one of them.
That's a good story.
You know, the stories that I like to tell are always interesting because the good guys have really serious flaws
and the villains are very compelling.
My interest is always in complicating things.
Jean-Luc Godard said cinema is truth 24 times a second.
Maybe it's lying 24 times a second, too, all the time.
All story is manipulation.
Is there acceptable manipulation? You bet.
People say, oh boy, I was so moved to tears in your film.
That's a good thing. I manipulated that.
That's part of storytelling.
I didn't do it just genuinely. I did it sincerely.
I am moved by that, too.
That's manipulation.
Truth is, we hope, a byproduct of the best of our stories.
And yet there are many, many different kinds of truths.
And an emotional truth is something that you have to build.
I made a film on baseball once and it seemed to me that there was a dilemma for the racist
of what to do about Jackie Robinson.
If you were a Brooklyn Dodger fan and you were a racist, what do you do when he arrives?
You can quit baseball altogether.
You can change teams or you can change.
And I think that the kind of narrative that I subscribe trusts in the possibility that people could change.
I hope it's a positive version of manipulation,
but I do think that we do coalesce around stories that seem transcendent.
I don't know why I tell stories about history.
I mean, there's kind of classic dime store, Ken Burns' Wolf at the Door things.
My mother had cancer all of my life.
She died when I was 11. There wasn't a moment from when I was aware, two and a half, three,
that there was something dreadfully wrong in my life.
It might be that what I'm engaged in in a historical pursuit is a thinly or perhaps
stickly disguised waking of the dead that I try to make Abraham Lincoln and Jackie Robinson
and Louis Armstrong come alive and it may be very obvious and very close to home
who I'm actually trying to wake up.
We have to keep the wolf from the door.
We tell stories to continue ourselves.
We all think an exception is going to be made in our case and we're going to live forever.
And being a human is actually arriving at the understanding that that's not going to be.
That story is there to just remind us that it's just okay.
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