John Dahl Quotes (13 Quotes)

I think MGM was a little worried about some of the parallels. I thought it was a kind of completely different story.

It's about righting a wrong. Somewhere along the line, someone screwed up. The feeling about the POWs was, 'We owe them.' It's not supposed to be political, but it's kind of hard to review your mistakes.

He is the man to go to. He changed the way the military was portrayed in films and made it more accurate.

My father was a combat infantry rifleman in the Philippines, ... Like a lot of World War II veterans, he doesn't talk much about it.

Infantry boot camp was so effective that Dye organized POW simulation exercises as well. We made all the actors take their shoes off, put 'em around their neck and walk 2 miles to the camp, ... In the camp, the actors would only speak Japanese to them -- no English at all -- because we wanted the actors to understand that feeling where you've got somebody screaming at you in Japanese, which I think would be terrifying.

He's good-looking, he's got a great charismatic presence, and he's a very good actor. He hasn't always had the material or opportunity to show just how good. In a lot of ways, he's very underrated. When he came aboard, he went all the way.

In the last few years the Asian securitization market has improved significantly. In the coming years, I would expect there to be an even more robust market for securitization in Asia.

That's fine with me. I like the process of making movies.

He's too busy promoting his nominees.

I did not go to boot camp, ... but our actors did. I am not an actor, so I was spared.

It's a story about American combat in a foreign country, ... and it's a heroic story. Right now, not too many foreign territories are interested in that kind of story, and it has to do well overseas.

The original script envisioned this men-on-a-mission story like 'Guns of Navarone' or 'The Dirty Dozen,' with 12 people instead of 120, ... But the actual events were pretty spectacular, so we told Miramax, 'You've got an amazing piece of material here we should try to tell it as accurately as possible.'

Dale single-handedly chang-ed the way Hollywood makes movies about the military, ... He gives the actors a real sense of obligation about what they're doing. At night he'd play '40s music and talk about some of the history leading up to the war in Japan so he could bring these guys into this frame of thinking.