Rod Lurie

“I loved going to the movies, especially when I was a teenager in the seventies. How couldn't you in what was perhaps the greatest era of auteur cinema?”

“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.”

“Rehearsing is more about blocking in the case of movies, I think, and blocking, of course, is very important to the beauty of a scene.”

“I don't think I'm equipped enough to be giving anyone a civics lesson or any kind of message.”

“The freer a society becomes, the freer its arts can flourish and be exported.”

“Trump is the opposite of everything Reagan was.”

“I admire how Tarantino finds music that's semifamiliar and not famous: undiscovered gems.”

“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.”

“Unfortunately, in this country, when we have the opportunity to be bigots in private, we take it every time.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.'”

“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.”

“I do have this belief that we all have a chance to be great, beautiful people based on how we are raised and our surroundings.”

“There was never a day at West Point where I didn't ask myself, 'Where would I put the camera?'”

“I remember watching movies like 'Fatal Attraction' and watching the audience go bananas at the end of the film.”

“It's very exciting to continue to work at DreamWorks.”

“I am a liberal. I have always been a liberal.”

“I've been a huge fan of Steven Bochco's for over two decades.”