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.'

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?

The fight to get a shield law barring the government from being able to jail journalists is itself a non-partisan battle.

I think that most of the young officers I know are leftists and liberals and Democrats. And the reason is this: All of our soldiers, the men that work for us directly, are minorities - blacks or Latinos. And we empathize with them. Our job is to advise them and help them.

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

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?'

The truth is that I have never created a president to push a political point of view. I am often looking to create aspirational characters; that's true. But, you know, in the end, it is really up to the actor in front of the presidential seal to decide exactly what kind of president you're going to get.

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.

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.

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

I'm sure when 'Midnight Cowboy' came out, it took a couple of minutes to get used to the voice and the look of Dustin Hoffman, or to even recognize that it was Dustin Hoffman.

Sam Peckinpah's movies probably say more about him than anybody's body of work says about that person. There are running themes in his films that I find eminently fascinating, disturbing, exhausting, and exhilarating.

There's a difference between 'political films' and 'films about Iraq.'

I think that maybe human beings are conditioned to violence.

I grew up with an infestation of politics. I'm just nuts about it. It's our form of gladiators in the arena, only they are not in quite as good a shape.

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

He may not have been a good actor, and I personally don't think he was a good president, but I'll tell you this: Ronald Reagan was a helluva character.

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't stand to see myself on TV.

I suppose when any movie dealing with politics is released, there is a knee-jerk assumption that it is propelled by a liberal agenda. That may be true most of the time, but not with 'Nothing but the Truth.'

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

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.

'All the President's Men' is a movie that has a very personal place for me because it made me want to be a journalist, and then it made me want to be a filmmaker.

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 really like iconoclastic casting. I really do.

Every filmmaker wants to get their audience talking.

I believe Sam Peckinpah is one of the greatest filmmakers of all time, and I hold him in high regard.

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.

The United States military is probably the most socialistic institution in the United States.

In my mind, I'm no longer daunted by the idea of a remake. In fact, I now look at it as a genre unto itself - so long as you make it your own.

'Commander in Chief' became a show not about why we should have a woman president but why we should not have a woman president.

The truth is that when a man has a child, and it's a girl, and he doesn't change as a man, he's not much of a man.

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.

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.

Hollywood is enamored of the 20- to 30-year-old actress, but by the very nature of the life experience of the character, the roles cannot be that rich. You can only have Angelina Jolie in a mental hospital so many times.

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

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

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.

The way that one feels about the story line of 'Deterrence' can tell us, I believe, about each person's conservatism or liberalism and precisely how tolerant he or she is of racism.

Marc Frydman and I are overwhelmed by the confidence Touchstone Television has shown in us, and we're thrilled to continue trying to knock 'em out of the park.

Sometimes, anonymous sources, when merely stating opinions or running a smear campaign, are certainly cowards.

I thought I'd give myself 10 years as an entertainment journalist and build up so much clout that there was no way Hollywood could ignore me when I started delivering scripts. Little did I know they were very good at ignoring it.

We are viewed by the world as a quasi-racist state in which we allow natural disasters to obliterate our minority community, in which our penal system is designed to treat blacks unfairly, and in which we let the medical and educational systems in our ghettos fester to the level of some third-world countries.

What actor doesn't want to walk around a set and be called 'Mr. President?' Playing POTUS is a kind of rite of passage among American actors - our version of playing Hamlet.

As for Kate Bosworth, I've always admired her. I watched her in a movie called 'Girl in the Park,' which has never been released - not even on DVD. I had a copy, and it was bravura acting I had not seen from her.

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

Some nights I lie awake at night thinking, 'What's going to stop someone from smashing a chair through my window and coming in the house at two in the morning?' It is very unnerving. It's a realistic scare, which is the worst kind of scare that you could have.

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

When I was a kid, my heroes were not baseball players nor movie stars. My knights in shining armor were film critics.

My mom is an exceptionally wise and kind person.