Top 70 Rod Lurie Quotes

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

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.

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

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.

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.’

Hollywood is enamored of the 20- to 30-year-old actress, but by the very nature of the life experience of the character, the roles cannot be that rich. You can only have Angelina Jolie in a mental hospital so many times.

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

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 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?

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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 think that maybe human beings are conditioned to violence.

Trump is the opposite of everything Reagan was.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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’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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

‘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.

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

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

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.

‘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.

I really like iconoclastic casting. I really do.

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.

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?

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

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.

Every filmmaker wants to get their audience talking.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

I grew up in the home of a political cartoonist, so I was a junkie for politics.

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.