As a writer, you have to be willing to kill your darlings, and I'm a writer first. As a director, I've got no problem cutting the scenes.
When you talk to people who have been in combat, there's a sensory overload that happens. The color becomes vivid. Sounds become more pronounced. People talk about how, for them, the war was technicolor and real life was black and white after the war.
If you want to know somebody, fight 'em. Have a fistfight with them.
When I make a movie, it's almost a relief to get shooting 'cause the hell is over, or part of the hell is over.
I'm a Veteran. I was in the Navy, in the submarine corps. I come from a military family. Both of my grandparents were in World War II and retired as officers. One fought in the Pacific and one fought in Europe. The whole family was in the war. I grew up exposed to it and hearing the stories, but the stories I heard weren't kind of the whole "Rah, rah, rah! We saved the world!" They were about the personal price and the emotional price.
You hear again and again that audiences want to see movies that are different and critics say we [directors] make the same thing again and again in Hollywood, then you go and make something different and you get kicked in the gut for it.
When you put a movie together, you're continually screening it for yourself and you're screening it for other people. It's like a video game power meter. When the power bar starts going down, you've gotta look at what's going on.
For me, directing is like writing with meat. I can write live, in real time, and change things and be confident that I'm helping the movie.
In the writing phase, normally I try not to envisage any particular actors because I like to let the characters sort of reveal themselves in that process.
For me, I like to show what guys are like when no one is looking and how we really are, and that we can be emotional and have these emotional lives. I think it would be great to do a film where we see some females and what's going on there when we're not around.
Stories of friendship are very interesting to me. Artificial families are something I like to explore. Whether it's a bunch of guys or a bunch of ladies, there's something interesting about that.
The movie has to be going somewhere. Other than that, you want it to be entertaining, but people usually disagree on what entertaining is and everybody has different tastes.
I think great acting is about inhabiting a skin and transforming yourself.
Every movie is different. Every movie requires its own sort of photographic voice.
It was a distortion, a mercenary decision to create this parallel history in order to drive the movie for an American audience, Both my grandparents were officers in World War Two, and I would be personally offended if somebody distorted their achieve.
