I look at 'Straw Dogs' as a very imperfect movie. It's a little bit slow, and its themes are a little bit murky.

The truth is that we're not remaking Sam Peckinpah's 'Straw Dogs,' we're making 'Straw Dogs.' We're taking this story, and we're putting our own spin on it. The mere fact that I have James Marsden in it is an indication that it's a very different film than the one that had Dustin Hoffman in it.

It's not such a bad thing to bring some naive optimism to Washington.

Somebody - and I'm going to guess it was Hitchcock - once said that everyone has their reasons. If you remember that, as a writer, you'll write better than average villains.

The First Amendment is the First Amendment for a reason - our most cherished right. But it often creates muddy and uncomfortable situations, ones that are the source of great drama and national self-reflection.

I am a liberal. I have always been a liberal.

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

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.

What makes a man is when you go against your own instincts to do to the right thing.

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.

My mom is an exceptionally wise and kind person.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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