Peter Berg

“Young boys must be taught to play football without leading with or lowering their heads. Young players must be drilled over and over and over with Heads Up Football skills until that skill set becomes muscle memory and second nature.”

“I've had great success and I've had catastrophic failure. It's really how you handle the rough stuff that defines you, I think.”

“Some directors want to make superhero films. That's what gets them off, and they love it, and they love sci-fi. I prefer putting my hands into non-fiction.”

“If I could find a way to make a film that takes you into the mind of a fighter, where you have 36 minutes of combat with so many different emotions, so many highs and lows, so many obstacles to overcome, I'd do that.”

“I don't want to be knocked out. But the contact and the focus and the energy I get from sparring gives me energy to make movies, energy to be a dad, energy to be a friend, and, you know, makes me feel, probably, a lot younger and behave a lot younger than I am.”

“I had great luck with Tim McGraw twice in 'Friday Night Lights' and 'The Kingdom.' I love finding off-beat casting and finding someone you know in one way and you reinvent them in another way. I like doing that as a director.”

“Obama really is a warrior in chief. He's not afraid to get the job done.”

“The big fun in 'Battleship' is that there are no current battleships in the Navy today. The battleships are about 1,000 feet long and they have huge guns. They were what you saw in WWII. The last battleship that was used was the Missouri, which is what the Japanese surrendered to.”

“Truth is, we offered it to Tom Hanks, which pretty much every movie in America does, but Tom passed. Billy Bob said that Hanks recently called and said he's voting for all of us for Oscars, he loved the film.”

“The first movie I literally ever made in my life was about two guys playing Stratego with each other. I had all my friends dressing up like the military characters in the game. So 'Battleship' is really my second board game turned movie!”

“I believe that anything in this world is fair game for a creative exercise.”

“When I started making films, like almost every filmmaker, I think, you're just so excited to be able to make a movie that you'll do anything.”

“Boxing is not always about standing in the middle going toe to toe. It's about poise and grace under extreme pressure.”

“Head and neck injuries are what parents thinking about letting their children play tackle football should be thinking about, talking about, and demanding answers about, from any coach presenting himself as a worthy custodian for their child's introduction to tackle football.”

“I was very impressed with Davis Guggenheim's 'An Inconvenient Truth.' He's inspired me as one of the newer, cutting-edge documentary filmmakers. I see those films, and I'm just instinctively drawn to them.”

“Then they started pulling me in and I was very resistant. All the other actors would be saying write more, more dialogue for me, and I'd always be saying 'No, less, less'.”

“It's always an interesting sort of adventures that gets someone into a movie.”

“I don't like alien films where you don't get to see the aliens.”

“I love actors. I'm empathetic to them. I understand what they go through. But I didn't want to be an actor.”

“We will play football. We will box and play lacrosse and ice hockey and snowboard and surf and drive fast cars, climb trees, and do dozens of things that we know are potentially concussive. We will do this because we are human and animals, and we like speed and contact and aggressive maneuvering and all such things.”