73 Quotes by Barry Levinson

You can never squash something and assume it's not going to come back in some fashion. It's going to bubble up until it explodes. Society evolves to find a better way.

It was about a football program that brought in massive amounts of money. They're going to try to cover something up, because it's about money at the end of the day. That's clear. There's no ambiguity to that. Paterno is much more complicated and contradictory, and that's why he's interesting to me.

Writing by committee becomes much less about a vision. It is really about a piece of merchandise.

We excuse movies like 'Independence Day' that really lack logic and say, 'It doesn't make any sense, but it's a ride.' I thought a movie was a movie and a ride was a ride.

Paterno had that almost legendary reputation, and then all of a sudden, the scandal broke. Why would I be interested? You can't quite figure it out at face value.

At the end of the day, you can't do a copy of somebody.

You have to do a version of somebody that's the essence of Paterno. I think that's what Al is so great at. You have to create a man, a life, and the emotions that go with it. He's truly brilliant.

You can't tell the story of the thousands of people whose lives were destroyed by Bernie Madoff because there are thousands of stories. What you can do is to start inside, and that's the picture that you do, which becomes like a Greek tragedy in that regard - that whole collapse.

Now, a lot of people didn't know him at all - it went through feeder funds, so they wouldn't even have known anything about Bernie Madoff. But everybody finds a justification for their behavior, and obviously, Bernie had a half dozen justifications in his own mind.