“If you’ve been involved in professional football or even football at any level, you can’t not be interested in this movie.”
Concussion writer/director Peter Landesman
Comingsoon.net interview
“I did nothing at the behest of the NFL, for the NFL, against the NFL. When I was writing and shooting the movie, the NFL wasn’t a single consideration, in any regard. Whether it was the portrayal of a character, or the story. In terms of what was cut or left out, any movie that’s about a true story, whether it’s Social Network, Zero Dark Thirty, or Moneyball to a slightly lesser degree, goes through a process of fair representation weighed against the power of the story you want to tell. There’s a constant dialogue going back and forth between the filmmakers and the producers. The one thing you don’t want to do is to be unfair or inaccurate. I had a very strong background in journalism, so it’s my instinct to try to be as fair and accurate as possible. We had scenes, dialogue coming out of the mouths of characters that simply didn’t happen. As a former journalist and now a filmmaker telling a story of this importance that has entered the zeitgeist in such a profound way, I wanted to simply tell a story in the most incisive and fair way possible. I can tell you this. The movie pulls no punches. In fact, anybody who see it would say exactly the opposite.”
Journalist turned painter, turned novelist, turned writer/director Peter Landesman
Deadline Hollywood interview by Mike Fleming Jr.
The starting point for the Concussion movie (which opens December 25) was the 2009 GQ article Brain Game by Jeanne Marie Laskas (@jmlaskas). Her book version Concussion comes out November 24.