John Dahl Quotations

I did not go to boot camp, ... but our actors did. I am not an actor, so I was spared.

He's good-looking, he's got a great charismatic presence, and he's a very good actor. He hasn't always had the material or opportunity to show just how good. In a lot of ways, he's very underrated. When he came aboard, he went all the way.

He is the man to go to. He changed the way the military was portrayed in films and made it more accurate.

Matt and I talked about that when we first started. He said, 'How do we convey the emotion in this story if i've got to be poker-faced?' I think really, if you think about being poker-faced, it's being a good actor.

I think MGM was a little worried about some of the parallels. I thought it was a kind of completely different story.

The original script envisioned this men-on-a-mission story like 'Guns of Navarone' or 'The Dirty Dozen,' with 12 people instead of 120, ... But the actual events were pretty spectacular, so we told Miramax, 'You've got an amazing piece of material here; we should try to tell it as accurately as possible.'

That's fine with me. I like the process of making movies.

It's a story about American combat in a foreign country, ... and it's a heroic story. Right now, not too many foreign territories are interested in that kind of story, and it has to do well overseas.

It was a great experience. We were dedicated to the authenticity of the story.

In the last few years the Asian securitization market has improved significantly. In the coming years, I would expect there to be an even more robust market for securitization in Asia.