Conflict Portrayal Quotes

In the re-creation of combat situations, and this is coming from a director who's never been in one, being mindful of what these veterans have actually gone through, you find that the biggest concern is that you don't look at war as a geopolitical endeavor.

When you make a war movie, the other side has to be the enemy. You're making a war movie from the point of view of a soldier fighting it.

From Vietnam's 'Deer Hunter' to Iraq, films are never about the person who has had his house destroyed.

I grew up with the Gene Kelly look at war. The cheerful kind of stories you tell about a horrendous war.

Both of our wars in Iraq were, on American television, largely bloodless.

I'm proud of 'Black Hawk Down' because I think it told a provocative story and it was honest. It could have had more opportunity to tell both sides of the story, but I'm still proud of it.

Violence in drama is an external contextualization of internal conflicts.

By employing a certain sense of humor, you essentially get more serious about things and show conflict more effectively than if you were overly dramatic or only violent because that's a one-way approach that just forces audiences to watch something appalling.

If you're playing someone who's got marital problems, you have to play someone who's trying not to have marital problems. So, you've got to get into the problem first.

If you're writing a scene for a character with whom you disagree in every way, you still need to show how that character is absolutely justified in his or her own mind, or the scene will come across as being about the author's views rather than about the character's.