What I love about writing is the contradictions we all embody as human beings.

Walk through Santa Monica and try to find somebody who knows a young man or woman who's in this war. Here, war is an intellectual concept. If you lose your son or daughter, it's no longer an intellectual matter.

I really wanted to make a nonpolitical political film. I wanted something that folks in red states and blue states could look at and not ask if this is the right thing to do to be in this war, but what this war is doing to the fabric of our society.

I like taking genres and subverting them. I did that with In the Valley of Elah. I said, "Okay, this is just a murder mystery. Relax." And then, two thirds of the way through, I broke every convention of a murder mystery.

You don't do pictures because the audience is ready for them. You do them because there's something gnawing at you, something inside.

It turns out that good actors can make anything believable.

What I love about writing is the contradictions we all embody as human beings.