I am an old journalist, so I always do a lot of research and dive deep into people’s character, who they are, and their motivation. – Peter Landesman
Once you turn on the camera, making a movie is making a movie. I don’t care if it’s $9 million dollars or $50 million dollars. You have bigger toys, bigger set, actors who are better paid, but once you turn on the camera, it’s director and performance, and I don’t find a big difference. – Peter Landesman
It’s very dangerous for a storyteller to walk into a situation with a political agenda because you end up telling a story about issues instead of telling a story about people. – Peter Landesman
The village of Polgardi is a dusty roadside settlement northeast of Lake Balaton, a resort area in western Hungary popular with German tourists. – Peter Landesman
My personal sources in the intelligence community and the military are very good. They’re excellent. I have very high-up, in-depth sources. – Peter Landesman
My politics are very centrist and sometimes, especially when it comes to foreign affairs, lean to the right. – Peter Landesman
Melted down, silver is worth a little more than four dollars an ounce. But carved, inlaid, and engraved, and identified with a particular year, it becomes the direct reflection, often the literal record, of human history, our movement through time. – Peter Landesman
Documentaries for me always felt kind of limiting. I wanted to go bigger. And I also love actors, and I love performance. So feature filmmaking was always the intent. – Peter Landesman
One way to test a picture’s integrity is to turn it upside down – a technique used not only by connoisseurs but also by artists trying to see their work with a fresh eye. – Peter Landesman
Large corporations have the ability to distract people with controversy that just distracts people from what’s great about the movie or what works about the movie. – Peter Landesman
You have to find the movie in the editing room, and it can’t be four hours; it has to be two hours. – Peter Landesman
I start each of my scripts by going on a journey of painstaking research and discovery, much as I do a piece of long-lead journalism. – Peter Landesman
I was a war correspondent. I’ve watched great people crumble under pressure and make bad decisions. – Peter Landesman
Will Smith is the most successful money-making movie star on planet Earth, in terms of just how many people have gone to see his films, so Will is a guy who gets movies made. – Peter Landesman
When a director is also a writer, everyone on the production looks to him, knowing he gave birth to the idea. There’s a different level of viability. – Peter Landesman
I was a painter, then a novelist, then a journalist, then a screenwriter, and now I’m a director, and it feels all part of the same continuum. One led to the other, and it just feels like the natural confluence of all the ways of storytelling that I’ve been doing for almost 30 years. – Peter Landesman
I’d followed the strange deaths of pro football players for years, sensing something odd going on. – Peter Landesman
What interested me was the story of Bennet Omalu. You hear his narrative: Immigrant from Nigeria, landing in Pittsburgh, only to learn and tell the truth about this most American – and sacrosanct – cultural institution: the NFL. – Peter Landesman
Life is itself an occupational hazard. Sometimes the things we love hurt us. Embracing and navigating around that contradiction is part of what it is to be alive. – Peter Landesman
As a filmmaker, it’s not my intent to trigger or shape national discourse. My task is to make as powerful and understandable a film as I can. What happens next is what happens next. – Peter Landesman
I don’t actually see that much difference between telling stories in journalism and telling them on film. The tools are very different, but the basic idea is the same. – Peter Landesman
There’s a constant dialogue going back and forth between the filmmakers and the producers. – Peter Landesman
Film brings together framing and light and color and performance and music and all of that. To me, everything I’ve done in my life has been preparing me for filmmaking. – Peter Landesman
There was absolutely zero discourse between me or anybody at the studio with the NFL. None. The only exchange was one-sentence e-mails trying to arrange a meeting, before deciding to cancel the meeting. Period. End of story. – Peter Landesman
