I think that 'Straw Dogs' as a story is eminently re-makable. It can be modernized and Americanized without a problem and without giving up any artistic integrity.
Unfortunately, in this country, when we have the opportunity to be bigots in private, we take it every time.
I often found that my favorite scene that I shoot is often one that I cut out, like in 'The Last Castle' and 'The Contender.' If you look at the deleted scenes, some of the best scenes never made it into the film.
The way that one feels about the story line of 'Deterrence' can tell us, I believe, about each person's conservatism or liberalism and precisely how tolerant he or she is of racism.
It's very exciting to continue to work at DreamWorks.
The truth is that we're not remaking Sam Peckinpah's 'Straw Dogs,' we're making 'Straw Dogs.' We're taking this story, and we're putting our own spin on it. The mere fact that I have James Marsden in it is an indication that it's a very different film than the one that had Dustin Hoffman in it.
I'm sure when 'Midnight Cowboy' came out, it took a couple of minutes to get used to the voice and the look of Dustin Hoffman, or to even recognize that it was Dustin Hoffman.
We are viewed by the world as a quasi-racist state in which we allow natural disasters to obliterate our minority community, in which our penal system is designed to treat blacks unfairly, and in which we let the medical and educational systems in our ghettos fester to the level of some third-world countries.
I came to the conviction that film criticism, in and of itself, was an art.
When reporters are in the business of obtaining hard facts that service the free flow of information, journalists should have a right to obtain that information without fear of personal ruin or incarceration.
Every weekend from, like, 1974 to 1978, I'd trudge over to the Greenwich library, which gathered up almost every major newspaper in the country. I would sit there all day long and read and read and read the reviews. I remember being twelve or thirteen and writing to Judith Crist, Pauline Kael, and Roger Ebert.
Most people with whom I talk, often quite educated, think the military is made up of knife-between-the-teeth grunts, uneducated robots without any kind of free will whatsoever - people who goose step to Republican philosophy and particularly the Bush cowboy mentality.
He may not have been a good actor, and I personally don't think he was a good president, but I'll tell you this: Ronald Reagan was a helluva character.
I really like iconoclastic casting. I really do.
When I was a kid, my heroes were not baseball players nor movie stars. My knights in shining armor were film critics.
There was scarcely a month during 1988 when Thomas Harris' novel, 'The Silence Of The Lambs,' was not on or around the top of the 'New York Times' list of America's bestselling books.
I have to admit that all of us creatively involved with 'Commander' absolutely intended to put the term 'Madam President' into the zeitgeist. I can't deny it.
I look at 'Straw Dogs' as a very imperfect movie. It's a little bit slow, and its themes are a little bit murky.
I'll tell you this: you can look at all the masculine toughies you want - the Ben Roethlisbergers, the Russell Crowes, the David Petraeuses - but if you want to look at what a man should be - persevering, honest, a person who manifests his intellect into action - you need look no further than Roger Ebert.
There are a lot of westerns that deal with people standing up for their principles, and that is the predominant theme that has been in my films.
