I love the game. I love to watch. I watch it with my kids. I'm able to divorce the beauty of the athletics from the corporate entity that is the National Football League.
— Peter Landesman
I love football. I played it into two years of college.
I was a painter before I was a writer, so I was always a visual artist. And my writing, to me, was always visual.
My politics are very centrist and sometimes, especially when it comes to foreign affairs, lean to the right.
You have to find the movie in the editing room, and it can't be four hours; it has to be two hours.
I had a very strong background in journalism, so it's my instinct to try to be as fair and accurate as possible.
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.
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.
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.
I was doing an investigative article on arms trafficking that was taking me through Eastern Europe and the Middle East. And after I had interviewed a helicopter pilot who had been ferrying weapons into Liberia, I realized as I left the restaurant that I was being followed and set up for an ambush.
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.'
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.
There's a constant dialogue going back and forth between the filmmakers and the producers.
I can't worry about the consequences of what I do; that's not my job.
Sony is the only studio without broadcast relationships with the NFL.
I started writing screenplays myself and eventually directing.
Most editors are just worried about their jobs. They're overwhelmed. They're underpaid. They do the best they can.
My personal sources in the intelligence community and the military are very good. They're excellent. I have very high-up, in-depth sources.
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.
I did nothing at the behest of the NFL, for the NFL, against the NFL.
