Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
When you make a movie like 'Straw Dogs,' your goal is to have people's eyes remain glued to the screen. It serves you no purpose to turn away from the screen.
I have to admit that all of us creatively involved with 'Commander' absolutely intended to put the term 'Madam President' into the zeitgeist. I can't deny it.
Marc Frydman and I are overwhelmed by the confidence Touchstone Television has shown in us, and we're thrilled to continue trying to knock 'em out of the park.
People tend to forget about nuclear weapons. We think they are going to remain in silos for the rest of time. As long as they exist, they are going to be used.
I fell in love with 'Ben Hur' when I was 8 years old, and I just knew I had to be involved in movies, even if I was the guy who melted the butter on the popcorn.
I promise that if there was no Hillary Clinton, there would still be a 'Commander in Chief' - I want to have a hit show that people enjoy, and really, that's it.
Classically, throughout all of our history, the movies in times of crisis have turned to military figures as heroes, because they are the guardians of our nation.
'All the President's Men' is a movie that has a very personal place for me because it made me want to be a journalist, and then it made me want to be a filmmaker.
I think that 'Straw Dogs' as a story is eminently re-makable. It can be modernized and Americanized without a problem and without giving up any artistic integrity.
We make movies to endorse our own personal feelings. I am not, in fact, a documentary filmmaker. I've got my personal beliefs, and I'm ready to put them out on the table.
What actor doesn't want to walk around a set and be called 'Mr. President?' Playing POTUS is a kind of rite of passage among American actors - our version of playing Hamlet.
Somebody - and I'm going to guess it was Hitchcock - once said that everyone has their reasons. If you remember that, as a writer, you'll write better than average villains.
I'm sure when 'Midnight Cowboy' came out, it took a couple of minutes to get used to the voice and the look of Dustin Hoffman, or to even recognize that it was Dustin Hoffman.
You learn quite a bit about your film from test screening audiences. With both comedies and movies that are intense, you need to calibrate the film and see how audiences react.
The way that one feels about the story line of 'Deterrence' can tell us, I believe, about each person's conservatism or liberalism and precisely how tolerant he or she is of racism.
There was scarcely a month during 1988 when Thomas Harris' novel, 'The Silence Of The Lambs,' was not on or around the top of the 'New York Times' list of America's bestselling books.
'Monsters of God' isn't just a series close to my heart; it is my heart, and I am very much looking forward to working with my fantastic team in New Mexico to create a top-notch series.
I was just nine years old when 'Straw Dogs' came out, so I can't really speak to the women of the time, but I can tell you that the women of 2011 are not put-upon, and they're not victims.
I think our nation cannot stomach the notion of a woman in sexual terms whatsoever: that we are so puritanical that we cannot dismiss the notion of sex from our minds when it comes to women.
Former soldiers will almost always gravitate to the anti-war party. This happens for obvious reasons. The men who have been in battle tend not to romanticize it and tend not to take it flippantly.
Now, I don't know about my peers, but I get nervous - okay, I genuinely freak out - when an actor starts trying on a Southern accent. That's for Brits trying to find the easiest way to sound American.
There seems to be an interest in connecting the history of the past to the present and asking whether things have really changed. Films like 'The Contender' and 'Bulworth' seem quaint compared with Trump!
I suppose when any movie dealing with politics is released, there is a knee-jerk assumption that it is propelled by a liberal agenda. That may be true most of the time, but not with 'Nothing but the Truth.'
When reporters are in the business of obtaining hard facts that service the free flow of information, journalists should have a right to obtain that information without fear of personal ruin or incarceration.
The First Amendment is the First Amendment for a reason - our most cherished right. But it often creates muddy and uncomfortable situations, ones that are the source of great drama and national self-reflection.
As for Kate Bosworth, I've always admired her. I watched her in a movie called 'Girl in the Park,' which has never been released - not even on DVD. I had a copy, and it was bravura acting I had not seen from her.
I often found that my favorite scene that I shoot is often one that I cut out, like in 'The Last Castle' and 'The Contender.' If you look at the deleted scenes, some of the best scenes never made it into the film.
If you look at the greatest performances of women, they're usually older... Anne Bancroft in 'The Graduate,' Kathy Bates in 'Misery.' It's a matter of characters having a life experience that makes them interesting.
Sam Peckinpah's movies probably say more about him than anybody's body of work says about that person. There are running themes in his films that I find eminently fascinating, disturbing, exhausting, and exhilarating.
Hollywood is enamored of the 20- to 30-year-old actress, but by the very nature of the life experience of the character, the roles cannot be that rich. You can only have Angelina Jolie in a mental hospital so many times.
I thought I'd give myself 10 years as an entertainment journalist and build up so much clout that there was no way Hollywood could ignore me when I started delivering scripts. Little did I know they were very good at ignoring it.
When you hire Sam Jackson, he'll figure out the character, and he'll figure out the character's look, and he'll provide it to you. With Sam Jackson, you basically yell 'action', you go get a sandwich, and you come back and yell 'cut.'
Anything about Iraq is a death sentence at the box office... You can't make movies about an unpopular war while the war is still going on - people don't want to pay to get depressed, though they sometimes will go to movies to get educated.
The ability of the press to print their stories without the government trying to get them to betray their sources is as essential to a free press as the ink it is printed with. Otherwise, who will hold accountable those who hold power over us?
The point of remaking 'Straw Dogs' is not to replicate the philosophies of Sam Peckinpah at all. What made that film singular was the attitude that he brought to the characters. Oddly enough, that's the one thing that I really wanted to change.
Some nights I lie awake at night thinking, 'What's going to stop someone from smashing a chair through my window and coming in the house at two in the morning?' It is very unnerving. It's a realistic scare, which is the worst kind of scare that you could have.
Most people with whom I talk, often quite educated, think the military is made up of knife-between-the-teeth grunts, uneducated robots without any kind of free will whatsoever - people who goose step to Republican philosophy and particularly the Bush cowboy mentality.
The election of Obama will say as much about the American people as it does about Obama himself - that our Declaration of Independence means what it says in its opening lines, that being the world's greatest nation means that we offer the world's greatest opportunities.
I think that most of the young officers I know are leftists and liberals and Democrats. And the reason is this: All of our soldiers, the men that work for us directly, are minorities - blacks or Latinos. And we empathize with them. Our job is to advise them and help them.
Simply stated, sometimes journalists can only get their information from informants who must remain anonymous in order to protect their careers and sometimes even their lives: Watergate: Confidential sources. The Pentagon Papers: Confidential sources. Enron: Confidential sources.
I still viewed myself as a reviewer when I was on radio. Was it appropriate for me? I think the answer is it's only inappropriate if I allowed it to affect my film reviewing. I don't think you will find any studio that said, 'Yeah, he went easy on us because he was shopping a script.'
The truth is that we're not remaking Sam Peckinpah's 'Straw Dogs,' we're making 'Straw Dogs.' We're taking this story, and we're putting our own spin on it. The mere fact that I have James Marsden in it is an indication that it's a very different film than the one that had Dustin Hoffman in it.
The truth is that I have never created a president to push a political point of view. I am often looking to create aspirational characters; that's true. But, you know, in the end, it is really up to the actor in front of the presidential seal to decide exactly what kind of president you're going to get.
I'll tell you this: you can look at all the masculine toughies you want - the Ben Roethlisbergers, the Russell Crowes, the David Petraeuses - but if you want to look at what a man should be - persevering, honest, a person who manifests his intellect into action - you need look no further than Roger Ebert.
We are viewed by the world as a quasi-racist state in which we allow natural disasters to obliterate our minority community, in which our penal system is designed to treat blacks unfairly, and in which we let the medical and educational systems in our ghettos fester to the level of some third-world countries.
Every weekend from, like, 1974 to 1978, I'd trudge over to the Greenwich library, which gathered up almost every major newspaper in the country. I would sit there all day long and read and read and read the reviews. I remember being twelve or thirteen and writing to Judith Crist, Pauline Kael, and Roger Ebert.
A reckoning is coming on the state of the internet journalism, because right now, the way it's set up, there is so much room for libel to squeak through that you're going to see...they're going to rewrite the rule book on journalism very soon. They have to, because the bloggers are getting away with so much rumor-mongering about public officials and even private figures because they don't have editors and they don't have fact checkers and they don't have lawyers. There is going to be a price to pay somewhere down the line.