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Refugees tend to avoid planes, airports and fake passports, even though flying may appear to be the most obvious way to flee. For one thing, security procedures at airports are far stricter than at land borders.
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Life is itself an occupational hazard. Sometimes the things we love hurt us. Embracing and navigating around that contradiction is part of what it is to be alive.
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Salvador Dali, lying on his deathbed in a stupor, is said to have been fed thousands of sheets of blank paper to sign for fake lithographs.
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People go to the movies to have an emotional experience, not to learn information they could look up on Wikipedia.
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I'd followed the strange deaths of pro football players for years, sensing something odd going on.
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I don't actually see that much difference between telling stories in journalism and telling them on film. The tools are very different, but the basic idea is the same.
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To me, film is the most complete method of storytelling.
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My personal sources in the intelligence community and the military are very good. They're excellent. I have very high-up, in-depth sources.
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There's a constant dialogue going back and forth between the filmmakers and the producers.
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A museum's meticulous presentation - exhaustive captions, hushed lighting, state-of-the-art armature - creates an institutional authority that is constructed to seem impregnable.
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What interested me was the story of Bennet Omalu. You hear his narrative: Immigrant from Nigeria, landing in Pittsburgh, only to learn and tell the truth about this most American - and sacrosanct - cultural institution: the NFL.
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I was a painter, then a novelist, then a journalist, then a screenwriter, and now I'm a director, and it feels all part of the same continuum. One led to the other, and it just feels like the natural confluence of all the ways of storytelling that I've been doing for almost 30 years.
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I had a very strong background in journalism, so it's my instinct to try to be as fair and accurate as possible.
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I was a painter before I was a writer, so I was always a visual artist. And my writing, to me, was always visual.
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You have to find the movie in the editing room, and it can't be four hours; it has to be two hours.
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I'm Jewish, not Catholic, but I'm a spiritual person.
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I consider myself neither liberal nor conservative when it comes to foreign policy.
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Tom Hanks comes with a lot of credibility.
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When a director is also a writer, everyone on the production looks to him, knowing he gave birth to the idea. There's a different level of viability.
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Sony is the only studio without broadcast relationships with the NFL.
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Once you turn on the camera, making a movie is making a movie. I don't care if it's $9 million dollars or $50 million dollars. You have bigger toys, bigger set, actors who are better paid, but once you turn on the camera, it's director and performance, and I don't find a big difference.
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Documentaries for me always felt kind of limiting. I wanted to go bigger. And I also love actors, and I love performance. So feature filmmaking was always the intent.