Peter Landesman Quotes

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.

Tom Hanks comes with a lot of credibility.

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.

The trains that travel the Chunnel are massive machines. The Eurostars are bullet-shaped and a quarter-mile long. They are pulled by a 136,000-pound locomotive and move in the open air at 185 m.p.h. and through the tunnel at 100 m.p.h.

Film is probably the medium best suited to reach the most people – the visual, the aural, the limbic, the intellectual: it captures all these parts of our mind and soul. No other art form comes close.

Sony is the only studio without broadcast relationships with the NFL.

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.

I was a war correspondent and journalist for a long time, and I was very near the towers on 9/11 and very shortly after in Afghanistan.

My personal sources in the intelligence community and the military are very good. They’re excellent. I have very high-up, in-depth sources.

I love football. I played it into two years of college.

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.

A museum‘s meticulous presentation – exhaustive captions, hushed lighting, state-of-the-art armature – creates an institutional authority that is constructed to seem impregnable.

As a journalist, as a screenwriter and as a director, I’m trying to tell compelling and truthful stories.

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.

Each year, tens of millions of museumgoers walk through the entrance of the Getty, or the Metropolitan or the Prado or the Hermitage, and never consider the possibility of having to arbitrate for themselves the authenticity of what they have come to see.

My politics are very centrist and sometimes, especially when it comes to foreign affairs, lean to the right.

I was a painter before I was a writer, so I was always a visual artist. And my writing, to me, was always visual.

I can’t worry about the consequences of what I do; that’s not my job.

Serious collectors and art experts, among the world‘s most educated, often cannot fathom the possibility of being rooked, and then once taken, cannot face the humiliation of admitting it.

The story of Bennet Omalu is a riveting story; it’s just a riveting tale. I knew from the beginning if I stayed close to that kind of storytelling and focussed on the character, then the other stuff comes along with it, and the message becomes baked into the journey.

I’ve been writing screenplays for a long time, and a lot of it came out of the journalism I was doing.

The itinerary of most antiquities from their source – tomb, temple, quarry – to the shelves of museums or private collectors is murky and often purposely concealed.

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.

Like every other industry or institution, the journalism world is populated by the petty and fearful, in addition to the courageous and brilliant.

I love writing in compressed time periods because the act of survival in the midst of panic and fear, that’s where true heroism comes. If you have a uniform, and you’re expected to do things, it’s a sort of incremental heroism.

‘Parkland’ is not out to pick a fight and start a dialogue about conspiracy.

Sometimes, in a fictional story, you can be more honest and truthful, actually. As a journalist, you’re a prisoner of the data, in effect. You have to tell the story with evidence you can verify.

I started writing screenplays myself and eventually directing.

To me, film is the most complete method of storytelling.

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.

I consider myself neither liberal nor conservative when it comes to foreign policy.

What I learned is that there are indeed some stories that are too true to tell, too revealing for the general population to metabolize. And too challenging to your reporter colleagues, whose turf or toes you might have tread upon.

I’d followed the strange deaths of pro football players for years, sensing something odd going on.

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.

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.

When you’re researching something for a movie, you get a very different kind of reaction than when you’re researching something for an article for ‘The New York Times.’

The village of Polgardi is a dusty roadside settlement northeast of Lake Balaton, a resort area in western Hungary popular with German tourists.

I had a very strong background in journalism, so it’s my instinct to try to be as fair and accurate as possible.

Life only has narrative when we frame it and edit it and call it certain things.

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.