Quotes from Peter Landesman

I started writing screenplays myself and eventually directing.

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.

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.

My politics are very centrist and sometimes, especially when it comes to foreign affairs, lean to the right.

Even the two novels I've written were based on true stories. It's how I'm wired - real life is fascinating and fantastical enough. The kind of journalism I did unpeeled lids from cans otherwise sealed.

14th- and 15th-century drawings are almost unheard-of - and as a result, they generate jealous desire among dealers and curators. Museums in particular value rarity and pedigree more than attractiveness.

There will always been the prurient rubbernecking aspect to disasters: people who just can't get enough gore.

Our brains have this habit of quilting dreams from the fabrics of our lives. As a filmmaker, I get to do it for a living.

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.

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.

Most editors are just worried about their jobs. They're overwhelmed. They're underpaid. They do the best they can.

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.

Tom Hanks comes with a lot of credibility.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.'

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.

'Writing' is the wrong way to describe what happens to words in a movie. First, you put down words. Then you rehearse them with actors. Then you shoot the words. Then you edit them. You cut a lot of them, you fudge them, you make up new ones in voice-over. Then you cut it and throw it all away.

I always spend a good deal of time with the people I write about. I try and smell the normalcy of their lives. I try to look at the normal rhythm of their life.

I had a very strong background in journalism, so it's my instinct to try to be as fair and accurate as possible.

I've been writing screenplays for a long time, and a lot of it came out of the journalism I was doing.

As a journalist, as a screenwriter and as a director, I'm trying to tell compelling and truthful stories.