Quotes

I had two movies made early in my career. Then, it was as if I had overdrawn at the karma bank. Sports movies were falling out of favor, largely because studios got seduced by international sales.

If I can make people cry in screenplay form, I know we have a serious chance in movie form.

You can't give away the power to other people to define who you are, what you can do, and how valuable your work is.

When I decided I wanted to be in the film business, everybody told me I couldn't do it--the odds were too great, I'd be disappointed--and they meant it in the best way, the people who loved me and cared about me. ... If you ever give away the power to other people to tell you what you're capable of, you'll never be able to be fully realized as a human being.

I don't dwell on anything that has happened in the past, good or bad. I'm only concerned with the future.

[on why writing is difficult] I have to write from an emotional place, and I don't want to go there every day. It's a raw, vulnerable state, and you don't feel so protected.

The reason I like production is because I enjoy the collaboration, the energy of other skilled professionals, and all having the same goal of making a terrific movie. When I think back on Le grand défi (1986) and Rudy (1993), I don't think about writing the screenplay. I don't think about the success we had afterwards. It was being in the trenches with my brethren and making those movies.

[on his initial attempts at writing Le grand défi (1986), his first screenplay] I went to write the script at a summer cottage on Lake Michigan. I was failing. Every day I would write and reread it and just throw it out. I may have gotten 15 pages from two weeks of being up there. I got to the point where I felt like I was the Jack Nicholson character in Shining (1980).

I wasn't into "I wanna prove people wrong." It wasn't that at all. I fell in love with movies. And I wanted to make movies. And Le grand défi (1986) was a movie I wanted to make.

Doing a genre film of any kind, the skill of the filmmaker is to take the familiar and make people feel like they've never seen it before.

[on directing My All American (2015)] I as the director have to be open enough to hear [a suggestion], and to process it, and make a decision about it. ... I look at the filmmaking process as a collaboration. And I want you to feel free to bring any idea to me, to help make this movie better. It's never about me; it's always about the movie. ... At the end of the first week of directing, I was never uncomfortable. I felt complete confidence, because I really worked out a key way of communicating with Finn [Wittrock] and Aaron [Eckhart] and all the people involved.

The most important skill that any director can have is communication--knowing what they want and communicating what they want--specifically, to all the keys [in every department]. If you're clear about what you want, if you have a unified vision about what you want, and you have the confidence to communicate that and be clear about that, the only thing that matters after that is casting the right people.

The only people who successfully make a career [in the film industry] are those who never personalize the word no. If you keep on going despite the no's ... that's when magic can happen.

[on having written many unproduced screenplays] If a screenplay is not made, maybe the timing is not quite right. ... Scripts are never dead to me. These are all children of mine waiting to bloom and grow.

I think I can teach you everything you need to know about making a movie in a week. I certainly believe that I could teach you everything you need to know about writing a screenplay in a couple hours.

The essence of all drama is conflict.

[on being inspired to write Le grand défi (1986)] I found interesting ... the unique fabric of basketball in Indiana--how it's interwoven with the culture, and the meaning and importance of basketball. And I particularly was drawn to the time as well. The early '50s have always interested me because, I suppose, it was the last era or last period of true regionalism, before television sort of homogenized the consciousness, the language of the subcultures of America.

A lot of people ask me about high school basketball and my connections to it and my love and passion for it. But it was really Indiana University basketball which was my first and deepest love, and still most sustaining love. ... It's kind of like how I fell in love with movies. [The games] transported me to another time and place and did so in such an exciting, energizing, adrenalized way that I just had to have it in my life all the time.