ROD LURIE

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.'

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

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

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

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'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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

I really like iconoclastic casting. I really do.

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

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.

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.

'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.

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!

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

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

There's a difference between 'political films' and 'films about Iraq.'