Sam Mendes Quotes on War & Peace (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.

There'll always be a section of a war movie that gets people pumped up in the same way there will always be men who will want to go to war, ... There is something that entices them there, that can be found in no other walk of life.

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.

Everything about that war seemed so far away, ... The media never really was allowed in. All you'd see were these tiny little bombs like they were hitting toy towns. There was no sense that this was actually a war, that there was a human toll.