documenting the documentarian
documenting the documentarian: j. michael hagopian
by paul chaderjian
spring 1998
The images are haunting, familiar, yet still powerful - a long line of deportees ordered to the Syrian desert by Talaat, a display of decapitated heads of men who once talked, smiled, of intellectuals and artists whose lives were cut short by the Ottoman noose. The narration behind the pictures is disturbing, meticulously scripted by a survivor of the catastrophe. Together, the story they tell is of man’s inhumanity to man, a story of strength, survival and character - the story of the Armenians.
The prolific filmmaker bringing history alive through his words and pictures is 84-year-old J. Michael Hagopian. The Southern California resident was hidden in a well by his parents when their lives were in danger in 1915; his childhood dreams were to emulate Katch Vartan and Zoravar Antranig, to conquer the homeland and kick out the Turks.
In 1998, Hagopian is celebrating his 50th anniversary as a documentary filmmaker, an anniversary which comes as he edits the three final installments of documentaries about the Genocide. The making of these films has been a hard task to undertake because only a few images of the atrocities were captured by the audio-visual tools Hagopian uses to tell his stories. Still and moving pictures from that era are few, but Hagopian has been one of a handful to locate and make thorough use of them.
Where Are My People is Hagopian’s first Genocide film and the first film ever produced on the subject. He made the thirty minute piece in 1965 and says the film was “a cry for help. It was like saying look what happened; it was lamenting.” The Forgotten Genocide, narrated by Mike Connors, was the second film in his series; it was made in 1976, and Hagopian’s frank message in his words is “the bastards did this to us. We’ve got a claim.” The third film Hagopian made is called The Armenian Genocide; it was commissioned by the State of California in 1991 and produced to be used in public high schools. Hagopian’s current documentary is called the Witnesses, and it presents the Genocide through eyewitness accounts. “It started out with the notion of having survivors tell the story,” he says.
The cameras began rolling on the Witnesses after the establishment of the Armenian Film Foundation (AFF) in 1979. “The main philosophy of the foundation,” says Hagopian, “was to document the Armenian experience in the Diaspora, primarily, and historically also.” With that goal in mind, Hagopian, with the help of community leaders Walter Karabian, Michael Agbabian and the late Leo Garabedian, created the AFF; the non-profit organization will celebrate its 20th anniversary in October when Hagopian celebrates his 85th birthday.
The AFF has released about a dozen films made by Hagopian since 1979. “To this day,” says Hagopian, “there are not many Armenians who have taken the documentary approach.” The filmmaker says the AFF has the largest library of footage on Armenians and Armenian subjects. “Right now, our emphasis has become, almost exclusively, to make the definitive film on the Armenian Genocide - the Witnesses.”
The raw material Hagopian has compiled for his current project includes interviews with over 350 survivors and witnesses from 13 different countries speaking in as many languages. “We’ve got 15 Arabs who were there and remember what happened to Armenians,” says Hagopian. “I’ve got 23 Greeks. Got a couple of Kurds.” Also in the can are extensive interviews with historians like Christopher Walker, whom Hagopian interviewed during one location shoot in Lebanon. Hagopian and his crew also traveled throughout Northern America, Australia, Greece, Syria, Armenia and seven other countries to interview survivors and witnesses.
The length and number of interviews have made the editing process a challenge for Hagopian; he has already cut down his documentary to under five hours. “I have to throw some good stuff out,” says Hagopian. “There’s no time on television.” Some of the material on the cutting room floor includes interviews with survivors from Kharpert, where Hagopian was born. “The Kharpert part was getting too heavy, not because I was gathering stuff about Kharpert, but there are a lot of survivors from there.”
The abundance of material Hagopian gathered from survivors and witnesses out of Kharpert prompted the filmmaker to think about breaking up the Witnesses into three parts. The first part of the trilogy is called the Last Days of Kharpert, and it will be screened at an upcoming symposium at UCLA. “I was encouraged when I heard professor Richard Hovannisian was going to have a symposium on Kharpert at UCLA.”
Hagopian wrote to Hovannisian and told him about his material on Kharpert. “I’ve got well documented stuff between May 1 and December 25th,” Hagopian wrote, “mayday to Christmas. What happened to Kharpert in those eight months.” Hovannisian viewed the footage and will use it during his symposium, which is to take place on May 16-17.
Academic Life
Hagopian’s career and civic involvement go beyond the impressive quantity of work he has amassed throughout his 50 year career. The Harvard graduate began collecting footage about Armenians early in his career when he was a lecturer at several universities. Hagopian taught political science, economics and international organization from the podiums of the University of California, Los Angeles, Oregon State College, his father’s alma mater, the American University of Beirut, and the Benares Hindu University in India.
The future filmmaker earned his doctorate from Harvard in 1943; his thesis was about the Armenian national movement, a movement which had not yet made the full circle that German and British nationalism had experienced. “Ours was cut up by the Genocide,” says Hagopian, who at the time had never thought about going into filmmaking. “I thought at the time I’d be a historian or political scientist. My thesis was on nationalism - what is nationalism, how does it work, and where does it work. I used the Armenians as a case study.” Hagopian earned his master’s degree at Berkeley after completing a thesis on the government of Turkey.
After completing his thesis at Harvard, Hagopian joined the armed services in 1943. “I volunteered,” he says, “but I was going to be drafted anyway. He was in the service for two years and nine months and was stationed in India and China. He was assigned as ground crew for B-29 Bomber and rose to the rank of Sergeant, but it was his introduction to the people of the two countries which would help him later in his filmmaking career.
Upon his return from the military, Hagopian taught in Oregon and Los Angeles, and it was at UCLA where he was introduced to the idea of using audio-visual material in the classroom. The year was 1947, and the films available for use in a classroom were limited. “I saw a film on how Mary votes and Federalism. Somehow they didn’t seem to do the job. They didn’t have the intellectual content, visual impact, or cinematic approach to make it interesting or a challenge.”
Atlantis Productions
While at UCLA, Hagopian conducted an informal survey about educational films and discovered that there was a big demand for films on natural formations, geography, current events and world history. He was already tiring of the academic life, where he says students were interested more in grades then learning; so he decided to try his hand at filmmaking.
Hagopian wrote to universities in China, India, Pakistan, and the American University in Beirut inquiring about teaching opportunities; his goal was to travel to a region he could make films about. An offer from AUB felt right because his father was an alumni. “Prior to going over,” Hagopian says, “I bought a camera, a 16mm used during World War II and experimented with shooting film.” Before traveling, Hagopian also made a deal with a Hollywood educational film producer who was interested in distributing a film about the Nile River.
While teaching American government and international organization at AUB, Hagopian researched and wrote an early draft of a documentary script about the Nile. He also experiment with filming and collected footage about the middle east, political parties, and Armenian issues. “Although I didn’t know how I’d market it, I gathered the material because I was Armenian.” The material gathered at the time was later made into a documentary entitled Problems of the Middle East, a 21-minute film about the forces molding the future of the region. The documentary addressed the issues of cultural harmony, the region’s history, agriculture, industry and education - all themes Hagopian’s future travelogue films would also incorporate.
Once Hagopian knew had finalized his script on the Nile, he traveled to the river to shoot his film and document the river’s geography and the people living on its banks. The year was 1950. “I went up the Nile all the way to the source, Lake Victoria, with one camera. I don’t know how many rolls of films I shot, maybe forty. I shipped them back to the States. The producer developed them and edited the film based on my script.” Once the film was completed, it won first prize at the Cleveland Film Festival. Hagopian had arrived.
His vision to explore filmicly uncharted terrain and people took him to India, where he had an offer to teach at The Binaries Sin University, a center for Hindus and Sanskrit education in the world. “It was one of the great universities of India, and that appealed to me. They gave me a choice of courses to teach. Of course, it was very interesting. I even had cows walk into the classroom.”
By that time, Hagopian was fully dedicated and fully devoted filmmaker. With his background in education, economics and history, along with his passion to travel the world, he’s found his niche in life. “I had to make the really big decision in India,” says Hagopian. The decision was not to remain in political science as a scholar and go into documentary filmmaking instead.
So began a career which spanned several continents and fifty years. Hagopian’s travels included six months in the Himalayan Mountains, where he walked over 2000 miles filming the geography and people living around the mountain chain from Kashmir, Nepal, Sikkim to Assam. He also lived among the people of Nigeria where he made films about the geography and climate of Northern African, the Niger River, village life and the building of a nation. In India, he lived with villagers and chronicles the lives of villagers and their children, their weddings and funerals.
During the course of travels, Hagopian shot and eventually made films about Jerusalem, Israel, Ancient Phoenicia, life in the Mexican-American barrios, even kangaroos, noise pollution and piÒatas. His films, numbering over 70, have helped thousands of students from elementary school to college discover and experience foreign lands and foreign people and not find them foreign anymore. Hagopian and his production company, Atlantis, have won dozens of awards and participated in hundreds of festivals ranging from ones in Cleveland, Seattle, to the American Film Festival in New York, where he won the Golden Reel Award. Hagopian has also received Emmy nominations for his work as a documentary filmmaker.
The Armenian Chair
One of the most significant projects undertaken by Hagopian in the 50s was his effort to establish a permanent and endowed Armenian Studies Chair at UCLA. “I was giving lectures and traveling all over the country,” remembers Hagopian. “I had a big lecture agency doing my booking, and they booked me various places. One time they booked me in Boston, and a young guy came up after the lecture and told me about what they were trying to do at Harvard.” Hagopian thought the idea sounded great and started meeting with a group which eventually became the National Association for Armenian Studies and Research (NAASR).
NAASR appointed Hagopian to the position of West Coast Director, which meant Hagopian organized chapters of the organization in LA, San Diego, Fresno, San Diego, Seattle, Portland. “I went up and down telling them how to preserve our heritage through establishing a chair at Harvard. Then I got the idea that we should have one at UCLA, and that’s when I broke with NAASR. They wouldn’t support it.”
Despite NAASR’s disapproval of a chair at UCLA, Hagopian pushed forward with his goal. “After we raised money for Harvard,” he says, “we directed out energies to raising money for a chair here.” The challenge to establishing the first Armenian Studies chair at UCLA was not only raising 200 thousand dollars but also securing a library of books on Armenian subjects. “UCLA had only 50 books on Armenian subjects,” says the filmmaker. “Harvard had 300 at that time, and I’d heard about a man out here, Yasir Khantamoor who had a library of about a thousand books. He wanted to give them away.” Hagopian convinced the donor to allow UCLA to house his books since they’d be close enough for the donor to have access to them. Once Khantamoor had commited the books to UCLA, Hagopian’s efforts paid off.
The Film Foundation
Hagopian had made several films about the Genocide under the Atlantis label before forming the Film Foundation, but since then he has exclusively kept the two realms apart. He has made non-Armenian educational films through Atlantis and Armenian films through the Foundations. “Except,” he says. “when subjects came up which I thought were valid, and our board didn’t feel they were valid.”
The first conflict of interest was when he wanted to bid for funding to make a film about the Genocide for public schools in California. “I was going to put in a bid. I talked to scholars. I talked with Richard Hovannisian. I talked with Sanjian, Dadrian and others, and I got the feeling from them that they would prefer a documentary made for the state be by a non-Armenian entity.” Hagopian submitted his proposal under Atlantis Productions, competed against 35 other companies and won the state funds with which he made “the Armenian Genocide,” a 24-minute piece which was not approved for use in schools after Turkish pressure on government officials.
From the late 80s until the early 90s, Hagopian focused his time specifically toward gathering the oral histories of Genocide survivors. “I documented my first survivors in 1972,” he says. “We stared gathering survivors from 82 on. The material, along with footage he has secured from US, French, and British archives, and 40 hours of footage from present Turkey are not being edited into the Witnesses.
Why Armenia?
Hagopian has a lot to reflect about at age 84. He says his biggest role model was a minister he heard when he was 18-years-old. “Dr. Papazian impacted me. He had finished Yale and was going into the ministry. He had the chance to stay in this country and get an American pulpit or go back to the cruel land of his ancestors. He said, ëI went back to the land of my ancestors because Armenia needed me.’ That apparently made a big impression on me. So I wrote in my diary then that Armenia needs me, too, maybe. I was just a boy, you know. Not knowing how you’re entirely needed.”
Hagopian has done more than serve his nation. He has served generations of public school students in thousands of classrooms. Hagopian, the filmmaker, sought places no one knew existed - not to conquer them like the Turks had conquered his homeland - but to befriend them and help young people have a better understand of the people which share their small little world. “Civilization is a very illusive thing,” says Hagopian. “You can lose it if you’re not careful. Each era achieves things and you built upon. Civilization is great when you honor that - so preservation is important. That’s been my philosophy.”
by paul chaderjian
spring 1998
The images are haunting, familiar, yet still powerful - a long line of deportees ordered to the Syrian desert by Talaat, a display of decapitated heads of men who once talked, smiled, of intellectuals and artists whose lives were cut short by the Ottoman noose. The narration behind the pictures is disturbing, meticulously scripted by a survivor of the catastrophe. Together, the story they tell is of man’s inhumanity to man, a story of strength, survival and character - the story of the Armenians.
The prolific filmmaker bringing history alive through his words and pictures is 84-year-old J. Michael Hagopian. The Southern California resident was hidden in a well by his parents when their lives were in danger in 1915; his childhood dreams were to emulate Katch Vartan and Zoravar Antranig, to conquer the homeland and kick out the Turks.
In 1998, Hagopian is celebrating his 50th anniversary as a documentary filmmaker, an anniversary which comes as he edits the three final installments of documentaries about the Genocide. The making of these films has been a hard task to undertake because only a few images of the atrocities were captured by the audio-visual tools Hagopian uses to tell his stories. Still and moving pictures from that era are few, but Hagopian has been one of a handful to locate and make thorough use of them.
Where Are My People is Hagopian’s first Genocide film and the first film ever produced on the subject. He made the thirty minute piece in 1965 and says the film was “a cry for help. It was like saying look what happened; it was lamenting.” The Forgotten Genocide, narrated by Mike Connors, was the second film in his series; it was made in 1976, and Hagopian’s frank message in his words is “the bastards did this to us. We’ve got a claim.” The third film Hagopian made is called The Armenian Genocide; it was commissioned by the State of California in 1991 and produced to be used in public high schools. Hagopian’s current documentary is called the Witnesses, and it presents the Genocide through eyewitness accounts. “It started out with the notion of having survivors tell the story,” he says.
The cameras began rolling on the Witnesses after the establishment of the Armenian Film Foundation (AFF) in 1979. “The main philosophy of the foundation,” says Hagopian, “was to document the Armenian experience in the Diaspora, primarily, and historically also.” With that goal in mind, Hagopian, with the help of community leaders Walter Karabian, Michael Agbabian and the late Leo Garabedian, created the AFF; the non-profit organization will celebrate its 20th anniversary in October when Hagopian celebrates his 85th birthday.
The AFF has released about a dozen films made by Hagopian since 1979. “To this day,” says Hagopian, “there are not many Armenians who have taken the documentary approach.” The filmmaker says the AFF has the largest library of footage on Armenians and Armenian subjects. “Right now, our emphasis has become, almost exclusively, to make the definitive film on the Armenian Genocide - the Witnesses.”
The raw material Hagopian has compiled for his current project includes interviews with over 350 survivors and witnesses from 13 different countries speaking in as many languages. “We’ve got 15 Arabs who were there and remember what happened to Armenians,” says Hagopian. “I’ve got 23 Greeks. Got a couple of Kurds.” Also in the can are extensive interviews with historians like Christopher Walker, whom Hagopian interviewed during one location shoot in Lebanon. Hagopian and his crew also traveled throughout Northern America, Australia, Greece, Syria, Armenia and seven other countries to interview survivors and witnesses.
The length and number of interviews have made the editing process a challenge for Hagopian; he has already cut down his documentary to under five hours. “I have to throw some good stuff out,” says Hagopian. “There’s no time on television.” Some of the material on the cutting room floor includes interviews with survivors from Kharpert, where Hagopian was born. “The Kharpert part was getting too heavy, not because I was gathering stuff about Kharpert, but there are a lot of survivors from there.”
The abundance of material Hagopian gathered from survivors and witnesses out of Kharpert prompted the filmmaker to think about breaking up the Witnesses into three parts. The first part of the trilogy is called the Last Days of Kharpert, and it will be screened at an upcoming symposium at UCLA. “I was encouraged when I heard professor Richard Hovannisian was going to have a symposium on Kharpert at UCLA.”
Hagopian wrote to Hovannisian and told him about his material on Kharpert. “I’ve got well documented stuff between May 1 and December 25th,” Hagopian wrote, “mayday to Christmas. What happened to Kharpert in those eight months.” Hovannisian viewed the footage and will use it during his symposium, which is to take place on May 16-17.
Academic Life
Hagopian’s career and civic involvement go beyond the impressive quantity of work he has amassed throughout his 50 year career. The Harvard graduate began collecting footage about Armenians early in his career when he was a lecturer at several universities. Hagopian taught political science, economics and international organization from the podiums of the University of California, Los Angeles, Oregon State College, his father’s alma mater, the American University of Beirut, and the Benares Hindu University in India.
The future filmmaker earned his doctorate from Harvard in 1943; his thesis was about the Armenian national movement, a movement which had not yet made the full circle that German and British nationalism had experienced. “Ours was cut up by the Genocide,” says Hagopian, who at the time had never thought about going into filmmaking. “I thought at the time I’d be a historian or political scientist. My thesis was on nationalism - what is nationalism, how does it work, and where does it work. I used the Armenians as a case study.” Hagopian earned his master’s degree at Berkeley after completing a thesis on the government of Turkey.
After completing his thesis at Harvard, Hagopian joined the armed services in 1943. “I volunteered,” he says, “but I was going to be drafted anyway. He was in the service for two years and nine months and was stationed in India and China. He was assigned as ground crew for B-29 Bomber and rose to the rank of Sergeant, but it was his introduction to the people of the two countries which would help him later in his filmmaking career.
Upon his return from the military, Hagopian taught in Oregon and Los Angeles, and it was at UCLA where he was introduced to the idea of using audio-visual material in the classroom. The year was 1947, and the films available for use in a classroom were limited. “I saw a film on how Mary votes and Federalism. Somehow they didn’t seem to do the job. They didn’t have the intellectual content, visual impact, or cinematic approach to make it interesting or a challenge.”
Atlantis Productions
While at UCLA, Hagopian conducted an informal survey about educational films and discovered that there was a big demand for films on natural formations, geography, current events and world history. He was already tiring of the academic life, where he says students were interested more in grades then learning; so he decided to try his hand at filmmaking.
Hagopian wrote to universities in China, India, Pakistan, and the American University in Beirut inquiring about teaching opportunities; his goal was to travel to a region he could make films about. An offer from AUB felt right because his father was an alumni. “Prior to going over,” Hagopian says, “I bought a camera, a 16mm used during World War II and experimented with shooting film.” Before traveling, Hagopian also made a deal with a Hollywood educational film producer who was interested in distributing a film about the Nile River.
While teaching American government and international organization at AUB, Hagopian researched and wrote an early draft of a documentary script about the Nile. He also experiment with filming and collected footage about the middle east, political parties, and Armenian issues. “Although I didn’t know how I’d market it, I gathered the material because I was Armenian.” The material gathered at the time was later made into a documentary entitled Problems of the Middle East, a 21-minute film about the forces molding the future of the region. The documentary addressed the issues of cultural harmony, the region’s history, agriculture, industry and education - all themes Hagopian’s future travelogue films would also incorporate.
Once Hagopian knew had finalized his script on the Nile, he traveled to the river to shoot his film and document the river’s geography and the people living on its banks. The year was 1950. “I went up the Nile all the way to the source, Lake Victoria, with one camera. I don’t know how many rolls of films I shot, maybe forty. I shipped them back to the States. The producer developed them and edited the film based on my script.” Once the film was completed, it won first prize at the Cleveland Film Festival. Hagopian had arrived.
His vision to explore filmicly uncharted terrain and people took him to India, where he had an offer to teach at The Binaries Sin University, a center for Hindus and Sanskrit education in the world. “It was one of the great universities of India, and that appealed to me. They gave me a choice of courses to teach. Of course, it was very interesting. I even had cows walk into the classroom.”
By that time, Hagopian was fully dedicated and fully devoted filmmaker. With his background in education, economics and history, along with his passion to travel the world, he’s found his niche in life. “I had to make the really big decision in India,” says Hagopian. The decision was not to remain in political science as a scholar and go into documentary filmmaking instead.
So began a career which spanned several continents and fifty years. Hagopian’s travels included six months in the Himalayan Mountains, where he walked over 2000 miles filming the geography and people living around the mountain chain from Kashmir, Nepal, Sikkim to Assam. He also lived among the people of Nigeria where he made films about the geography and climate of Northern African, the Niger River, village life and the building of a nation. In India, he lived with villagers and chronicles the lives of villagers and their children, their weddings and funerals.
During the course of travels, Hagopian shot and eventually made films about Jerusalem, Israel, Ancient Phoenicia, life in the Mexican-American barrios, even kangaroos, noise pollution and piÒatas. His films, numbering over 70, have helped thousands of students from elementary school to college discover and experience foreign lands and foreign people and not find them foreign anymore. Hagopian and his production company, Atlantis, have won dozens of awards and participated in hundreds of festivals ranging from ones in Cleveland, Seattle, to the American Film Festival in New York, where he won the Golden Reel Award. Hagopian has also received Emmy nominations for his work as a documentary filmmaker.
The Armenian Chair
One of the most significant projects undertaken by Hagopian in the 50s was his effort to establish a permanent and endowed Armenian Studies Chair at UCLA. “I was giving lectures and traveling all over the country,” remembers Hagopian. “I had a big lecture agency doing my booking, and they booked me various places. One time they booked me in Boston, and a young guy came up after the lecture and told me about what they were trying to do at Harvard.” Hagopian thought the idea sounded great and started meeting with a group which eventually became the National Association for Armenian Studies and Research (NAASR).
NAASR appointed Hagopian to the position of West Coast Director, which meant Hagopian organized chapters of the organization in LA, San Diego, Fresno, San Diego, Seattle, Portland. “I went up and down telling them how to preserve our heritage through establishing a chair at Harvard. Then I got the idea that we should have one at UCLA, and that’s when I broke with NAASR. They wouldn’t support it.”
Despite NAASR’s disapproval of a chair at UCLA, Hagopian pushed forward with his goal. “After we raised money for Harvard,” he says, “we directed out energies to raising money for a chair here.” The challenge to establishing the first Armenian Studies chair at UCLA was not only raising 200 thousand dollars but also securing a library of books on Armenian subjects. “UCLA had only 50 books on Armenian subjects,” says the filmmaker. “Harvard had 300 at that time, and I’d heard about a man out here, Yasir Khantamoor who had a library of about a thousand books. He wanted to give them away.” Hagopian convinced the donor to allow UCLA to house his books since they’d be close enough for the donor to have access to them. Once Khantamoor had commited the books to UCLA, Hagopian’s efforts paid off.
The Film Foundation
Hagopian had made several films about the Genocide under the Atlantis label before forming the Film Foundation, but since then he has exclusively kept the two realms apart. He has made non-Armenian educational films through Atlantis and Armenian films through the Foundations. “Except,” he says. “when subjects came up which I thought were valid, and our board didn’t feel they were valid.”
The first conflict of interest was when he wanted to bid for funding to make a film about the Genocide for public schools in California. “I was going to put in a bid. I talked to scholars. I talked with Richard Hovannisian. I talked with Sanjian, Dadrian and others, and I got the feeling from them that they would prefer a documentary made for the state be by a non-Armenian entity.” Hagopian submitted his proposal under Atlantis Productions, competed against 35 other companies and won the state funds with which he made “the Armenian Genocide,” a 24-minute piece which was not approved for use in schools after Turkish pressure on government officials.
From the late 80s until the early 90s, Hagopian focused his time specifically toward gathering the oral histories of Genocide survivors. “I documented my first survivors in 1972,” he says. “We stared gathering survivors from 82 on. The material, along with footage he has secured from US, French, and British archives, and 40 hours of footage from present Turkey are not being edited into the Witnesses.
Why Armenia?
Hagopian has a lot to reflect about at age 84. He says his biggest role model was a minister he heard when he was 18-years-old. “Dr. Papazian impacted me. He had finished Yale and was going into the ministry. He had the chance to stay in this country and get an American pulpit or go back to the cruel land of his ancestors. He said, ëI went back to the land of my ancestors because Armenia needed me.’ That apparently made a big impression on me. So I wrote in my diary then that Armenia needs me, too, maybe. I was just a boy, you know. Not knowing how you’re entirely needed.”
Hagopian has done more than serve his nation. He has served generations of public school students in thousands of classrooms. Hagopian, the filmmaker, sought places no one knew existed - not to conquer them like the Turks had conquered his homeland - but to befriend them and help young people have a better understand of the people which share their small little world. “Civilization is a very illusive thing,” says Hagopian. “You can lose it if you’re not careful. Each era achieves things and you built upon. Civilization is great when you honor that - so preservation is important. That’s been my philosophy.”
