Sam Mendes Quotes on Man (4 Quotes)

I found that it was one of the things that attracted me to this project. It's the idea that you train a huge group of men to go to war, and then what happens when you take away the war, what happens during that period of time, which is really at the center of the movie. They turned on themselves and each other. They create their own warsAll the war literature that I had read had been about combat, and here was a story about there being no combat even though you're trained to kill.

Tony's book confronts head-on the idea that the reason the men joined up is because of these movies. It gave me the opportunity to shoot this moment where you're shooting a bunch of guys about to go to war who are watching a movie about a bunch of guys at war, knowing that our film will be seen by a bunch of guys who are possibly going to go to war. It's all a weird discussion of how movies affect us.

There is an immense, childlike enthusiasm about the man. It's inspiring when you work with a 77-year-old man who has that kind of love and excitement still in him about what he does. And like Paul Newman, each day is like the first day of his career.

There's good and bad in everybody. I wasn't looking for the good, or looking for the bad. This is a man who signed his pact with the devil 20 years ago, and he's learned to live with it. He's tried to protect his family from it.