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" Even the two novels I've written were based on true stories. It's how I'm wired - real life is fascinating and fantastical enough. The kind of journalism I did unpeeled lids from cans otherwise sealed. "

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" 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. "

Peter Landesman

Data

Evidence

You

" Our brains have this habit of quilting dreams from the fabrics of our lives. As a filmmaker, I get to do it for a living. "

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

" Refugees tend to avoid planes, airports and fake passports, even though flying may appear to be the most obvious way to flee. For one thing, security procedures at airports are far stricter than at land borders. "

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

" 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. "

" Modern art, in particular, seems especially vulnerable to fraud. Its abstractions are sometimes difficult to understand or grasp, and a modern painting is often loved less because of its intrinsic quality - its beauty, as conventionally understood - than because of the identity of the painter, its mark of social status. "

" Hard information on the quantity of bogus art sold is difficult to come by, in part because fraud, when discovered by dealers and auction houses, is usually kept secret to boost public confidence in the art market. "

" 'Writing' is the wrong way to describe what happens to words in a movie. First, you put down words. Then you rehearse them with actors. Then you shoot the words. Then you edit them. You cut a lot of them, you fudge them, you make up new ones in voice-over. Then you cut it and throw it all away. "

" I'm Jewish, not Catholic, but I'm a spiritual person. "

" People go to the movies to have an emotional experience, not to learn information they could look up on Wikipedia. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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.' "

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

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

" Salvador Dali, lying on his deathbed in a stupor, is said to have been fed thousands of sheets of blank paper to sign for fake lithographs. "

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

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

" 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

Story

Learn

" 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 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. "

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

" 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. "

" 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 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. "

" 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. "

" 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

Filmmaking

Performance