Quotes from Peter Berg

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

You know to me, being a good actor, the most important quality is you've got to love to play, and to just be open to anything.

The SEALs rarely call the Taliban 'terrorists' because they respect them as worthy opponents.

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'm pretty upfront about my love and admiration for the military. One of the perks of making movies is that you get to sort of follow your own passions, and I believe quite passionately that we don't pay enough attention and respect to our veterans. Not just our wounded veterans, but all veterans.

Where do you go to buy back your reputation when you lose it?

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.

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.

There's a picture of the real Coach Gary Gaines in the book and he's sitting in the locker room after a game, and he just looks so much like Billy Bob, that we went to him.

Young kids should probably not play tackle football. I know this intellectually, but emotionally, I'm conflicted. I love this sport. I grew up playing and adoring football. I love the brotherhood, teamwork, athletic grace that borders on superhuman, grit, pressure and, yes, contact. I love the contact.

What first caught my eye about Rihanna was an interview she did with Diane Sawyer after the Chris Brown incident, where she was very articulate, very poised, obviously a smart girl who talked about a very traumatic experience.

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.

People know I love to shoot action and that I'm not afraid of emotion.

There's no hidden agenda, no political agenda [in Patriots Day]. The only politics we were really talking about was the politics of community, the politics of social love.

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.

If you're a 50-year-old guy, and you're sitting around the house with - you know, and just getting fatter, feeling sorry for yourself, get up and move your body and see what it does to your life and to your mind and to your happiness and to your energy levels. And I get all that from boxing.

It's always funny to me how your movie becomes no longer yours and people interpret it how they want and react how they want to react to it, and it's fun to kind of watch that happen.

I've spent enough time with soldiers to know that once they get to know you and they loosen up and become themselves, they are some of the biggest hams and most charismatic, cocky, fun, humorous guys I've ever met.

Michael Mann's always been one of my heroes.

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 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.

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 don't go to a lot of other directors' sets; directors don't come to mine. Directors are all very cordial with each other, but they're not necessarily friendly.

You might make a lot of money, but it's very hard to get out from under that rug. The more you can reinvent yourself, the better - and unfortunately TV is designed not to let you redesign yourself.