Peter Landesman Quotes
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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.
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What I learned is that there are indeed some stories that are too true to tell, too revealing for the general population to metabolize. And too challenging to your reporter colleagues, whose turf or toes you might have tread upon.
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As a journalist, as a screenwriter and as a director, I'm trying to tell compelling and truthful stories.
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When it came to 'Concussion,' I found myself with so many threads to weave. So integral to the whistle-blower's tale were spirituality, the cost of hero-worshipping, what it means to be an American, and just how dangerous the truth can be.
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Life only has narrative when we frame it and edit it and call it certain things.
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'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.
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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.
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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.
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The trains that travel the Chunnel are massive machines. The Eurostars are bullet-shaped and a quarter-mile long. They are pulled by a 136,000-pound locomotive and move in the open air at 185 m.p.h. and through the tunnel at 100 m.p.h.
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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.
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As a filmmaker, it's not my intent to trigger or shape national discourse. My task is to make as powerful and understandable a film as I can. What happens next is what happens next.
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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.
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I was doing an investigative article on arms trafficking that was taking me through Eastern Europe and the Middle East. And after I had interviewed a helicopter pilot who had been ferrying weapons into Liberia, I realized as I left the restaurant that I was being followed and set up for an ambush.
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The village of Polgardi is a dusty roadside settlement northeast of Lake Balaton, a resort area in western Hungary popular with German tourists.
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Film is probably the medium best suited to reach the most people - the visual, the aural, the limbic, the intellectual: it captures all these parts of our mind and soul. No other art form comes close.
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We've all seen 'Network' and 'Wag the Dog,' but we were somehow insulated by the fact that those were just movies, fictions, and we could rest easy that the Real News doesn't operate that way. Well, it does - sometimes.
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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.
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14th- and 15th-century drawings are almost unheard-of - and as a result, they generate jealous desire among dealers and curators. Museums in particular value rarity and pedigree more than attractiveness.
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I've been writing screenplays for a long time, and a lot of it came out of the journalism I was doing.
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Most editors are just worried about their jobs. They're overwhelmed. They're underpaid. They do the best they can.
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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.
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The itinerary of most antiquities from their source - tomb, temple, quarry - to the shelves of museums or private collectors is murky and often purposely concealed.
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I started writing screenplays myself and eventually directing.
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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.