Rod Lurie Quotes

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

There’s no need to make any film. The word ‘need’ is pretty strong. But if there’s a purpose behind making the film, there can be a justification for it.

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 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 met Joan Allen at an L.A. Film Critics Awards’ dinner, and I said, ‘I want to write a movie for you.’

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

Now, I don’t know about my peers, but I get nervous – okay, I genuinely freak out – when an actor starts trying on a Southern accent. That’s for Brits trying to find the easiest way to sound American.

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 was just nine years old when ‘Straw Dogs’ came out, so I can’t really speak to the women of the time, but I can tell you that the women of 2011 are not put-upon, and they’re not victims.

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

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.

I want to have a movie where people’s eyes are glued to the screen, not when they’re running from the screen.

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?’

You learn quite a bit about your film from test screening audiences.

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.

There was scarcely a month during 1988 when Thomas Harris’ novel, ‘The Silence Of The Lambs,’ was not on or around the top of the ‘New York Times’ list of America’s bestselling books.

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.

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.

‘Monsters of God’ isn’t just a series close to my heart; it is my heart, and I am very much looking forward to working with my fantastic team in New Mexico to create a top-notch series.

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.

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.

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.

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

I think people were a little premature in writing off violent movies. They’re going to continue being made, and audiences will continue going to see them.

I really like iconoclastic casting. I really do.

There seems to be an interest in connecting the history of the past to the present and asking whether things have really changed. Films like ‘The Contender’ and ‘Bulworth’ seem quaint compared with Trump!

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.

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.

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.

You learn quite a bit about your film from test screening audiences. With both comedies and movies that are intense, you need to calibrate the film and see how audiences react.

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.

As much as I like Michael Moore – and I’m on the same political side as him – I think his documentaries are really a batch of manipulations and lies.

I’ll tell you this: you can look at all the masculine toughies you want – the Ben Roethlisbergers, the Russell Crowes, the David Petraeuses – but if you want to look at what a man should be – persevering, honest, a person who manifests his intellect into action – you need look no further than Roger Ebert.

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 think that man is conditioned to violence.

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

The common denominator of the great women leaders in the world – Indira Gandhi, Margaret Thatcher, Golda Meir – is that they’re dramatically nonsexual.

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.

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

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

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.

The ability of the press to print their stories without the government trying to get them to betray their sources is as essential to a free press as the ink it is printed with. Otherwise, who will hold accountable those who hold power over us?

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.

Trump is the opposite of everything Reagan was.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

There’s a difference between ‘political films’ and ‘films about Iraq.’

Just because the boogeyman of the Soviet Union doesn’t exist anymore, it doesn’t mean the world is living angelically.

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

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.

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

Classically, throughout all of our history, the movies in times of crisis have turned to military figures as heroes, because they are the guardians of our nation.

No matter how far they rise, women never stop being the caregiver. At the end of the day, women bear the emotional responsibility for their families.

We need to get young people involved in the running of this country.

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

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

Unfortunately, in this country, when we have the opportunity to be bigots in private, we take it every time.

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.’

When you make a movie like ‘Straw Dogs,’ your goal is to have people’s eyes remain glued to the screen. It serves you no purpose to turn away from the screen.

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.

I still viewed myself as a reviewer when I was on radio. Was it appropriate for me? I think the answer is it’s only inappropriate if I allowed it to affect my film reviewing. I don’t think you will find any studio that said, ‘Yeah, he went easy on us because he was shopping a script.’

‘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.

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.

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

If I have to answer one more time, ‘Why did you want to remake ‘Straw Dogs?” with the emphasis on the word ‘why,’ I’m going to flip out.

Finding out you’re able to do something doesn’t necessarily mean you want to do it.

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.