Mark Boal

“I write on a computer, on a laptop or whatever.”

“For weeks after 9/11 you could smell the dust and pulverised concrete in New York, and the National Guard came in, so there was a military presence on the streets. It was intense. Overwhelming. Heartbreaking.”

“One big, glaring difference I can think of between Iraq and Vietnam is the news coverage. During the Vietnam War era, you had TV coverage of the war saturating the airwaves every night, and that coverage wasn't put through a military filter at all.”

“The fact is that war films, by their very nature, are pitched at a high dramatic range.”

“Passage of time can be mind-numbing to figure out in a screenplay. It's the easiest thing to do in prose, not just by writing 'four years later', but you can shift time in a sentence or two.”

“I actually think every war movie is an antiwar movie in its own way - with the exception of some of the propaganda movies.”

“Film-makers are always going to be interested in making movies that plug into society around them. That's what a vibrant, artistically alert community should be doing. After all, it would be sad if we only made films about alien robots.”

“I mean, journalism is very detailed... you try to get down in the weeds and sort out exactly what happened. And I don't think that a feature film is really a place where that happens.”

“9/11, the wars and terrorism have affected all of us in different ways: people who lost family on 9/11, the people who lost family in the wars and people who lost family in various terrorist attacks that have occurred since.”

“I suck at titles.”

“I had no idea what it would be like to be a bomb tech in Baghdad until I got there so I didn't know what to expect. It was very eye-opening.”

“I've always been a fan of books that create an interesting blend of fact and fiction - whether it's Norman Mailer, or 'The Short Timers,' or 'In Cold Blood.' I'm a fan of that genre.”