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.