It's a professional military. You sign up and agree to allow your countrymen to use your life as they see fit for the next four years. And I think we all should have a greater role in ensuring that we use those lives wisely.

Prayer in a combat zone serves exactly the same purpose as it does in peacetime. In war, the stakes are life and death, true; but if you believe in God and in the notion of a human soul, then we are always making decisions of tremendous significance.

I don't want to act as though my deployment was particularly rough, because it wasn't. I had a very mild deployment; I was a staff officer.

There's a tendency to look at anybody who joined the military as if they underwrote everything that happened policy-wise. That's not really the case. I have a friend who both protested the Iraq War and joined the military, and ended up serving two deployments in Afghanistan.

If you're going to write about war, the ugly side is inevitable. Suffering and death are obviously part of war.

There's a tradition in war writing that the veteran goes over and sees the truth of war and comes back. And I'm skeptical of that.

With fiction, you can take something that bothers you, or that you don't have in clear focus, and you can put it under as much stress as you want. Really get underneath the skin. With nonfiction, you're restricted to what happened.

There's a very particular way that the military speaks. There's a lot of profanity and a lot of acronyms.

I got to travel around Anbar Province, had a great group of Marines who worked for me who traveled around Anbar Province. I got to hang out with a lot of different types of Marines and soldiers and sailors.

'Redeployment' is a military term. It means to transfer a unit from one area to another.

The civilian wants to respect what the veteran has gone through. The veteran wants to protect memories that are painful and sacred to him from outside judgment.

In war, it feels like everything you're doing is more important because you're in the proximity of violence and death, and that proximity changes your relationship to America because it changes the way you see the world.

I don't believe in any Greatest Generation. I believe in great events. They sweep ordinary people up, expose them to extremes of human behavior and unimaginable tests of integrity and courage, and then deposit them back on the home front.

Resilience is, of course, necessary for a warrior. But a lack of empathy isn't.

The films of which I'm most proud I've written are the ones that pivot on forgiveness.

Robert Bolt's storytelling is the kind that I grew up with and aspired to.

As historians write more and more histories, it's a sort of self-fulfilling prophecy that other historians read their histories and then make synthesis, and certain things just get forgotten and left out and neglected.

Sometimes it's okay for an audience not to understand everything that's going on.

There's something about the soul of a country that is somehow connected to the head of state.

You can't ask someone to act middle-aged. Someone has to bring their own fatigue to it.

Most leading actresses have this energy, this 'Look at me. Here I am.' They're powerful; they're beautiful.

In some shape or form, we do have an emotional connection to our head of state, even if, for the most part, they seem very remote.

Barack Obama winning the election had an instant impact on everything - race relations, national self-esteem, tolerance. It also had an instant affect on 'Frost/Nixon.' At a stroke, instead of being a piece that reminded people of the agony they were in, it became an uplifting message about the agony they had escaped.

As a European from a different, younger generation, the trauma that was Nixon's presidency never really had a hold over me. For one thing, I never voted for him.