107 Quotes by Sam Mendes

He really went from being a boy to being a man. It happened to him during the shooting of the movie, so a lot of it surprised me and I was really thrilled with what he came up with.

It always gets worse as you get older. You get more nervous, there's more to lose. He's got to live up to being Paul Newman.

I think that's a wonderful thing when there's somebody at the top of their game but they still want to test themselves.

People are capable of good and bad. As long as we continue perpetrating these absurd two-dimensional stories that everything is black and white - you're either good or bad - then the longer we'll misunderstand how many interesting stories you can tell in the space that exists between the two.

We did ask, ... And luckily, instead of saying, 'Well, maybe, if you make a few adjustments,' there was some intelligent person at the Pentagon who flat-out said, 'No way.' Which is what you want, because there are lots of stories about them saying yes, then at the last minute wanting changes and, before you know it, everything's compromised.

You have to have a secret... There is a hidden movie in all the best films. The secret is in every frame... in a good movie, there is always a shadow movie underneath the text, which allows the film to float above reality.

You do things bit by bit. That's the only way to play something really original, where the details stand out. You're not just showing us a cliched, generic character that you've seen before.

Violence is something that's very deliberately chosen - who sees it, the effect it has on the person watching, and the person performing the act of violence is more important than the violence itself. It's not about a gore-fest or how much blood you can show.

Everything about that war seemed so far away, ... The media never really was allowed in. All you'd see were these tiny little bombs like they were hitting toy towns. There was no sense that this was actually a war, that there was a human toll.