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I'm definitely drawn to stories of just regular folks, just generally in some kind of horrific situation. I keep saying I want to do a love story in the south of France with a boy and girl and some wine. Then I always end up in an oil rig with four hundred guys or on a mountain with guys shooting at each other.
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I'm pretty upfront about my love and admiration for the military. One of the perks of making movies is that you get to sort of follow your own passions, and I believe quite passionately that we don't pay enough attention and respect to our veterans. Not just our wounded veterans, but all veterans.
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I found at a certain point in my acting career that I was just bored. I had too much energy. I had too many ideas.
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The first movie I literally ever made in my life was about two guys playing Stratego with each other. I had all my friends dressing up like the military characters in the game. So 'Battleship' is really my second board game turned movie!
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You might make a lot of money, but it's very hard to get out from under that rug. The more you can reinvent yourself, the better - and unfortunately TV is designed not to let you redesign yourself.
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Where do you go to buy back your reputation when you lose it?
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I was very impressed with Davis Guggenheim's 'An Inconvenient Truth.' He's inspired me as one of the newer, cutting-edge documentary filmmakers. I see those films, and I'm just instinctively drawn to them.
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People know I love to shoot action and that I'm not afraid of emotion.
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For me, concussion response is pure common sense. We can all probably handle a few mild concussions. I have had at least three, and despite my detractors' opinions, I am mentally and physically fine.
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Sweating the small stuff is important in boxing and life. On a movie, we have production assistants who're 18 and 19 years old. If someone asks you for a cup of coffee, and you bring them a cup of coffee that's cold, I make a big deal of that. I make a really, really big deal of that. You have to pay attention to details.
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Before boxing, I was this angry kid ready to fight if someone said, 'Hello.'
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Truth is, we offered it to Tom Hanks, which pretty much every movie in America does, but Tom passed. Billy Bob said that Hanks recently called and said he's voting for all of us for Oscars, he loved the film.
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What first caught my eye about Rihanna was an interview she did with Diane Sawyer after the Chris Brown incident, where she was very articulate, very poised, obviously a smart girl who talked about a very traumatic experience.
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I've always found boxing to be an incredibly pure sport. The level of character of most fighters I find very high. And it's just the best workout you can get.
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I don't go to a lot of other directors' sets; directors don't come to mine. Directors are all very cordial with each other, but they're not necessarily friendly.
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I wanted to do a naval film and I flirted with different ideas, most of which ended up being too intense. So when the idea of 'Battleship' was first suggested, I was instantly drawn to the challenge - could I invent a movie around the idea of five ships fighting five ships?
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When I look back at it, I'm mostly amazed at how poorly it was shot. David Kelley is a great writer, and I thought the scripts were great, but it just looks so cheap.
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Obama really is a warrior in chief. He's not afraid to get the job done.
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I don't want to be knocked out. But the contact and the focus and the energy I get from sparring gives me energy to make movies, energy to be a dad, energy to be a friend, and, you know, makes me feel, probably, a lot younger and behave a lot younger than I am.
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If you're a 50-year-old guy, and you're sitting around the house with - you know, and just getting fatter, feeling sorry for yourself, get up and move your body and see what it does to your life and to your mind and to your happiness and to your energy levels. And I get all that from boxing.
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What kind of town do we want in the future, and how are we going to plan on that?
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I've had great success and I've had catastrophic failure. It's really how you handle the rough stuff that defines you, I think.
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I think musicians oftentimes have the right skill set to be good actors. And with Rihanna, I noticed her and knew of her obviously, and was very taken with her charisma and her confidence.
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There's a picture of the real Coach Gary Gaines in the book and he's sitting in the locker room after a game, and he just looks so much like Billy Bob, that we went to him.