Top 104 Quotes & Sayings by Rod Lurie

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

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.

When you do a freeze frame, you have the opportunity to find the exact shot that you want - no guessing.

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

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

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.

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.

'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.

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

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 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.

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.

Trump is the opposite of everything Reagan was.

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?

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.

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.

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 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 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.'

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

Every filmmaker wants to get their audience talking.

I think that 'Straw Dogs' as a story is eminently re-makable. It can be modernized and Americanized without a problem and without giving up any artistic integrity.

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.

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.

'Nothing But the Truth' is a journalistic thriller that is set during the end of days for print media.

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

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

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 can be accused of being acerbic as a critic and writer.

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

I think that maybe human beings are conditioned to violence.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

The election of Obama will say as much about the American people as it does about Obama himself - that our Declaration of Independence means what it says in its opening lines, that being the world's greatest nation means that we offer the world's greatest opportunities.

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

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.

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.

Simply stated, sometimes journalists can only get their information from informants who must remain anonymous in order to protect their careers and sometimes even their lives: Watergate: Confidential sources. The Pentagon Papers: Confidential sources. Enron: Confidential sources.

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

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.

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

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?

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.

When reporters are in the business of obtaining hard facts that service the free flow of information, journalists should have a right to obtain that information without fear of personal ruin or incarceration.

You will never - and I mean never - be able to figure out if I was an Obama guy or a Hillary guy.

I really like iconoclastic casting. I really do.

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.

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

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.

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?'

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

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

I have to admit that all of us creatively involved with 'Commander' absolutely intended to put the term 'Madam President' into the zeitgeist. I can't deny it.