'Lincoln' director Spielberg speaks at Gettysburg

GETTYSBURG, Pa., Nov. 20 (UPI) -- "Lincoln" director Steven Spielberg spoke at a Pennsylvania ceremony marking the 149th anniversary of the 16th president's delivery of the Gettysburg Address.

"The murder of [President] Abraham Lincoln, the loss of Lincoln, is heartbreaking," EW.com reported Spielberg told the crowd gathered for Monday's event commemorating the president's famous 1863 speech at the dedication of Soldiers' National Cemetery in Gettysburg.

"And I admit that one of the reasons I wanted to make this film, I wanted -- impossibly -- to bring Lincoln back from his sleep of one-and-a-half centuries even if only for two-and-a-half hours, and even if only in a cinematic dream. ...

"I've never stood any place on earth where it's easier to be humble than here. Gettysburg. Delivering an address," Spielberg said. "Humble hardly covers it. It's not just that I'm standing near where Lincoln stood when he delivered what many people, myself included, consider the most perfect prose poem ever penned by an American. It's not just that I'm speaking where Lincoln uttered words that helped change the course of American history by changing how we understand ourselves and the whole point of American democracy. ... All the glory and all the tragedy we associate with the Civil War resides most palpably, and most indelibly here."