Quotes from Rod Lurie

I grew up in the home of a political cartoonist, so I was a junkie for politics.

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.

I grew up during Watergate. I was enamored of the study of that.

I think that maybe human beings are conditioned to violence.

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.

I shot part of 'Resurrecting the Champ' in Denver, and I spent a summer going to survival school in Colorado Springs.

People tend to forget about nuclear weapons. We think they are going to remain in silos for the rest of time. As long as they exist, they are going to be used.

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.

I fell in love with 'Ben Hur' when I was 8 years old, and I just knew I had to be involved in movies, even if I was the guy who melted the butter on the popcorn.

I can be accused of being acerbic as a critic and writer.

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

I often found that my favorite scene that I shoot is often one that I cut out, like in 'The Last Castle' and 'The Contender.' If you look at the deleted scenes, some of the best scenes never made it into the film.

There are a lot of westerns that deal with people standing up for their principles, and that is the predominant theme that has been in my films.

I think our nation cannot stomach the notion of a woman in sexual terms whatsoever: that we are so puritanical that we cannot dismiss the notion of sex from our minds when it comes to women.

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?

I promise that if there was no Hillary Clinton, there would still be a 'Commander in Chief' - I want to have a hit show that people enjoy, and really, that's it.

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

I came to the conviction that film criticism, in and of itself, was an art.

Whenever you make a movie, when it's done, as a filmmaker, you never sit there and say, 'Boy, I really got that right.' It's, 'Where did I screw up?'

Every filmmaker wants to get their audience talking.

We make movies to endorse our own personal feelings. I am not, in fact, a documentary filmmaker. I've got my personal beliefs, and I'm ready to put them out on the table.

Most people with whom I talk, often quite educated, think the military is made up of knife-between-the-teeth grunts, uneducated robots without any kind of free will whatsoever - people who goose step to Republican philosophy and particularly the Bush cowboy mentality.

Take a look at Mila Kunis. When you see her performance in 'Forgetting Sarah Marshall,' you see a beauty there, and also a sadness.

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