Dalton Trumbo was obsessed with justice.

[Dalton] Trumbo himself was a terrible Communist.

Hedda's Hopper attitude was 'once a Commie, always a Commie.'

I just always look for stuff that has a character-driven thing.

I think we'll all keep pushing each other, which is a great thing.

Even modern wars are fought like revenge tales from some petty grievance.

The first thing we noticed was how flamboyant [Dalton] Trumbo was in real life.

Once you're a public figure, there's a certain amount of privacy you do give up.

Sometimes you fall in love with some things and then you fall out of love with it.

In his life, [Dalton] Trumbo uses wit and comedy to fight these very high-stakes battles.

Sometimes perfecting the one thing can be the enemy of getting any traction on anything else.

I've recently enjoyed the Paul Thomas Anderson commentaries and the David Fincher commentaries.

I am partisan to some extent on the Democratic side, but I consider myself more of an independent.

I think sequels should be earned and we won't do it unless the script is better than the first one.

I'm developing some other things in other genres, including one dramatic piece. So, anything's possible.

When something so unjust as the black list happened, [Dalton Trumbo] would come to life in a certain way.

It seems like you can't actually have really bad hair or be bald and run for President of the United States.

That's why we had Louis C.K. portray the harder line Communist, to accuse [Dalton] Trumbo of being a hypocrite.

I'm pretty opinionated sometimes although my political views change all the time, too. So I'm not very zealous.

Dalton Trumbo was constantly criticizing the membership [in the Communist Party], and was opposite to being a loyalist.

I'm a patriot, and I think democracy is the best system available. It's very flawed, but it works better than anything else.

[Lyndon Baines ] Johnson is a big and larger-than-life guy, we just tried to give him the dynamic range that he actually had.

[ Dalton Trumbo] always said he fought so many fights, all seemingly different, but all about the concepts of fairness and justice.

Mini-Me was the pint sized clone that was the perpetuation of Dr. Evil's own legacy [in Austin Powers]. That concept earned the sequel.

I wish I was sort of someone like Woody Allen who can stage everything in one long master shot, no coverage; just, you know, that's it.

Bryan [Cranston] created something completely unique, that was earned by its authenticity. That's what gave us the license to push it a bit.

I always had a respect and an admiration for people who got into politics. I certainly have always been interested in law and political science.

To this day, people ask me where is Austin Powers 4? I don't have that answer, it so hard to come up with a story that deserves an encore like that.

To his credit John Wayne was open about it, he even portrayed a member of the House UnAmerican Activities Committee in a film called 'Big Jim McClain.'

The DVD does make it a little easier for myself to trim things that are otherwise very difficult to let loose of - knowing that they'll make it on the DVD.

We collaborate on everything. I'm involved in the writing and pre-production. There's a whole bunch of people who keep in touch at every step about everything.

People have an actual bias against there being some kind of popularity for political films, and when they get acknowledged, it helps keep the conversation going.

I do understand the free market, having my economics degree, and if someone on the right had some good ideas, I'm not so dogmatic that I wouldn't listen to them.

We had to do the same thing here. To top that sequel was quite a task. Mike had a couple of good conceptual humour and character ideas, which got me back into it.

I learn so much from watching films like that with commentary and then when you get to hear another filmmaker talk about their films it's a really great experience.

But I couldn't cut that whole septic tank scene out because the audience liked it so much. So I sort of fell right back into getting a cheap laugh, but I still loved it.

From our perspective now, there is a not a huge understanding about the totalitarian Communism that Soviet Russia practiced during the 1950s - it was an atrocious system.

You can make an idea spread for good but you can also make an idea spread for bad and the power to make an idea spread, memetics, you know which now people talk about memes.

It was an interesting process trying to get Bob to talk about the film because he's such a shy person. He generally likes to talk when he really knows he has something to say.

People are willing to throw our civilization under the bus to discredit the existing system, without any proposed solution to the problems that they're willing to pointing at.

When I'm shooting, really the audience I'm thinking the hardest about is that first test screening audience who I want to like the film and that first opening weekend audience.

I figure if it's turns out well the film will have its own momentum and will carry into the video release. So it's hard to really picture the DVD version when I'm in production.

It was a way to try and shut down what the unions were negotiating for, like better hours and pay. [Dalton] Trumbo and his friends joined the Communists mostly for these reasons.

I'm not one of these directors, so far, that wants to have a whole separate director's cut of these things. So far they've turned out to be kind of the length that they wanted to be.

I like to shoot a lot of choices. I like a lot of stuff - and so I push to go faster, to shrink the time between the takes so that the takes are what you're spending all your time on.

I hope I can now use my ability to communicate, without being too precious or serious. It's good to have some levity, even as you're facing some really dark times, to mix it up a bit.

John Wayne was just a very conservative guy, who had not served in World War II, and he was defensive about that - he almost overcompensated his anti-Communism because of that reason.

The success of the second 'Austin Powers' caught us by surprise a little bit. We had decided not to do even a second one, unless the audience wanted it and we could do something better.

John Wayne was never shy about that fervor, but because he was never overly zealous about his politics, and of course his status as a movie, he was embraced by both the right and the left.

There's people who actually have a whole science devoted to what makes a sticky meme and that idea of that question of why some ideas about how civilizations work catch on and others don't.

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