Most editors are just worried about their jobs. They're overwhelmed. They're underpaid. They do the best they can.
Peter Landesman
I had a very strong background in journalism, so it's my instinct to try to be as fair and accurate as possible.
Large corporations have the ability to distract people with controversy that just distracts people from what's great about the movie or what works about the movie.
You have to find the movie in the editing room, and it can't be four hours; it has to be two hours.
Serious collectors and art experts, among the world's most educated, often cannot fathom the possibility of being rooked, and then once taken, cannot face the humiliation of admitting it.
Life only has narrative when we frame it and edit it and call it certain things.
Salvador Dali, lying on his deathbed in a stupor, is said to have been fed thousands of sheets of blank paper to sign for fake lithographs.
When it came to 'Concussion,' I found myself with so many threads to weave. So integral to the whistle-blower's tale were spirituality, the cost of hero-worshipping, what it means to be an American, and just how dangerous the truth can be.
Film is probably the medium best suited to reach the most people - the visual, the aural, the limbic, the intellectual: it captures all these parts of our mind and soul. No other art form comes close.
Like every other industry or institution, the journalism world is populated by the petty and fearful, in addition to the courageous and brilliant.
There was absolutely zero discourse between me or anybody at the studio with the NFL. None. The only exchange was one-sentence e-mails trying to arrange a meeting, before deciding to cancel the meeting. Period. End of story.
Once you turn on the camera, making a movie is making a movie. I don't care if it's $9 million dollars or $50 million dollars. You have bigger toys, bigger set, actors who are better paid, but once you turn on the camera, it's director and performance, and I don't find a big difference.
Documentaries for me always felt kind of limiting. I wanted to go bigger. And I also love actors, and I love performance. So feature filmmaking was always the intent.
Each year, tens of millions of museumgoers walk through the entrance of the Getty, or the Metropolitan or the Prado or the Hermitage, and never consider the possibility of having to arbitrate for themselves the authenticity of what they have come to see.
Refugees tend to avoid planes, airports and fake passports, even though flying may appear to be the most obvious way to flee. For one thing, security procedures at airports are far stricter than at land borders.
I can't worry about the consequences of what I do; that's not my job.
I did nothing at the behest of the NFL, for the NFL, against the NFL.
There's a constant dialogue going back and forth between the filmmakers and the producers.
When a director is also a writer, everyone on the production looks to him, knowing he gave birth to the idea. There's a different level of viability.
My personal sources in the intelligence community and the military are very good. They're excellent. I have very high-up, in-depth sources.
When you're researching something for a movie, you get a very different kind of reaction than when you're researching something for an article for 'The New York Times.'
My politics are very centrist and sometimes, especially when it comes to foreign affairs, lean to the right.
I was doing an investigative article on arms trafficking that was taking me through Eastern Europe and the Middle East. And after I had interviewed a helicopter pilot who had been ferrying weapons into Liberia, I realized as I left the restaurant that I was being followed and set up for an ambush.
I was a painter before I was a writer, so I was always a visual artist. And my writing, to me, was always visual.
I started writing screenplays myself and eventually directing.
I love football. I played it into two years of college.
Sony is the only studio without broadcast relationships with the NFL.
Will Smith is the most successful money-making movie star on planet Earth, in terms of just how many people have gone to see his films, so Will is a guy who gets movies made.
I love the game. I love to watch. I watch it with my kids. I'm able to divorce the beauty of the athletics from the corporate entity that is the National Football League.
What interested me was the story of Bennet Omalu. You hear his narrative: Immigrant from Nigeria, landing in Pittsburgh, only to learn and tell the truth about this most American - and sacrosanct - cultural institution: the NFL.
I am an old journalist, so I always do a lot of research and dive deep into people's character, who they are, and their motivation.
To me, film is the most complete method of storytelling.
Film brings together framing and light and color and performance and music and all of that. To me, everything I've done in my life has been preparing me for filmmaking.
I don't actually see that much difference between telling stories in journalism and telling them on film. The tools are very different, but the basic idea is the same.
As a journalist, as a screenwriter and as a director, I'm trying to tell compelling and truthful stories.
Sometimes, in a fictional story, you can be more honest and truthful, actually. As a journalist, you're a prisoner of the data, in effect. You have to tell the story with evidence you can verify.
I played football the whole time I was growing up, and through two years of college. I think it's a beautiful game in many respects, one that allows you to follow a player from boyhood through manhood.
I was a war correspondent. I've watched great people crumble under pressure and make bad decisions.
Tom Hanks comes with a lot of credibility.
I'm Jewish, not Catholic, but I'm a spiritual person.
It's very dangerous for a storyteller to walk into a situation with a political agenda because you end up telling a story about issues instead of telling a story about people.
I'd followed the strange deaths of pro football players for years, sensing something odd going on.
I start each of my scripts by going on a journey of painstaking research and discovery, much as I do a piece of long-lead journalism.
As a filmmaker, it's not my intent to trigger or shape national discourse. My task is to make as powerful and understandable a film as I can. What happens next is what happens next.
Life is itself an occupational hazard. Sometimes the things we love hurt us. Embracing and navigating around that contradiction is part of what it is to be alive.
The village of Polgardi is a dusty roadside settlement northeast of Lake Balaton, a resort area in western Hungary popular with German tourists.
The itinerary of most antiquities from their source - tomb, temple, quarry - to the shelves of museums or private collectors is murky and often purposely concealed.
Melted down, silver is worth a little more than four dollars an ounce. But carved, inlaid, and engraved, and identified with a particular year, it becomes the direct reflection, often the literal record, of human history, our movement through time.
The story of Bennet Omalu is a riveting story; it's just a riveting tale. I knew from the beginning if I stayed close to that kind of storytelling and focussed on the character, then the other stuff comes along with it, and the message becomes baked into the journey.
People go to the movies to have an emotional experience, not to learn information they could look up on Wikipedia.
