Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
Writers are nerds.
I've read a thousand private-eye novels.
You have to keep surprising your audience.
Writing is tough. It's insanely obsessive work.
I have no power, and that's what's so humbling.
I try not to think about anybody's reaction to what I do.
Writing scripts is a laborious job that can be a real pain.
I've turned down lots and lots of work. Things that could have made me some money.
I think it's very admirable, in a superhero movie, to be able to take a few risks.
I hate 'The Professional.' It's one of the worst action/adventure movies ever made.
The only way you can stay on top is to remember to touch bottom and get back to basics.
I love the idea of a super villain that doesn't wear a cape, that doesn't wear a super suit.
'Lethal Weapon' sold apropos of nothing when I was very young, but that was a very different market.
I think it's an obligation to make a movie full, so you have to see it twice to get all the moments.
I wanted at one point to act, which is a weird thing for men to want to do. It's a very vain profession.
Any time anyone fires bullets in an action movie that don't hit the target it immediately undermines the movie.
The great thing about detective stories, in particular, the case can always be interesting as well as the characters.
When you only have $15 million, you have to talk about something interesting. You can't just cut to a helicopter exploding.
I have these guilty pleasures, these failed films that don't work at all, but I'll watch them if they're on. Like 'The Game'.
I try to make all the action in my movies subjective: to give a sense of what it would feel like to actually be a part of it.
I have these guilty pleasures, these failed films that don't work at all, but I'll watch them if they're on. Like 'The Game.'
What strikes me as memorable about 'Predator' was a lot of the decisions that were made so quickly turned out to be so iconic.
For years I was doing the excruciating weightlifting of writing scripts - but then I stayed thin and someone else got all the muscles.
Whatever film I'm making, no matter how harsh or edgy it is, there has to be a core underneath the ebb and flow of it that is heartfelt.
I don't mind women who want to act. That's fine. It's odd that men want to act, in that there's still a degree of vanity associated with it.
I always have humour in my action movies. I think characters that make jokes under fire are more real. It somehow helps put you in their shoes.
I think the most important thing is to, without belligerence, stand up for what want. Argue compellingly if someone tries to change your script.
Estimation, assessment, looking back, retrospecting things - those are intellectual concepts, and they're always so subject to shifts in the wind.
'Nice Guys' has darkness in it and parts that are kind of odd, but there are also parts where it's heartfelt and soulful. You can switch back and forth.
I owe a great deal of thanks to this man who will be gracious enough to say I've helped him with his career and comeback, but it's every bit the opposite.
I would say 'The Chill' by Ross Macdonald is sort of a prototypical example of how the private detective genre elevates itself to the level of literature.
An action film can have too much action; picture an equaliser on a stereo, with all the knobs pegged at 10. It becomes a cacophony and is, ultimately, quite boring.
Once I started selling scripts for a great deal of money - action scripts, no less, which people tend to pooh-pooh anyway - then I started to get some backlash. Which I didn't mind.
I wrote all the time, but the idea of doing it professionally seemed like pie in the sky. Who gets paid to write? I grew up in Pittsburgh, so it wasn't really a notion that a lot of people pursue.
I think, in big-budget movies where everything seems so poured over and restricted and the studio wants to examine every frame to make sure it's vetted properly, you lose a little bit of playfulness.
I think about the audience in the sense that I serve as my own audience. I have to please myself the way, if I saw the movie in a theater, I would be pleased. Do I think about catering to an audience? No.
I go back to read 'Tarzan' books every now and again or 'John Carter,' and you realize Edgar Rice Burroughs is not a great writer by any means. But he was a great storyteller. You wanted to see what happened next.
The worst of the action films are the ones where everything is one shout from beginning to finish. And there's no differentiation between beats, like small or big, or quiet or expansive. It's all just one loud shout.
You can just start writing, but you're gonna go off on 10 or 12 starts and weird tangents, and yeah you'll have those pages to use later - to gift wrap some fish for your mother - but either way you're gonna have pages.
The other thing being at UCLA was just being in California and around the movie business. Which I honestly believe, and I've told this to screenwriters, you have to do. You have to be there in order to write or direct movies.
Directing comes closer than anything I’ve found yet to providing me with a good reason to get up in the morning that goes beyond just getting some money. Because all the money does is buy the bed. Getting out of it is the problem.
Once you've got a concept and a sense of themes and what it's about, then you can start to add your plot and sort of Tetris in all of the elements that you want to see, but also attach them to something that has cohesion, like a mold.
I thought of Joel Silver. He never changes. He's sort of the unmoving, unchanging rock of Gibraltar in the otherwise-shifting world of Hollywood. He's the same as he always was. He looks the same, talks the same, has the same enthusiasm.
I'm ashamed to say this, but I watched every episode of 'Starsky and Hutch' as a kid. I loved that show, but now I think it's stupid - they'd have a car chase for no reason, then Paul Michael Glaser would shoot the car and it would blow up.
If someone fires a gun in a movie, it should always be a big deal. I don't like movies where someone shoots at someone else but they just run away and manage to dodge the bullet. Or people are all firing at each other continuously for 10 minutes.
I love the notion of the feckless sort of knight in tarnished armor who would love to fill the shoes of the legendary hero but just can't. And then find a moment when they do. And I love the idea that there's a myth waiting for each of us to occupy.
You can win more arguments then you might think as a writer, even though you legally have no recourse, and your script can get muddied and altered in any way possible. You can use reason, logic, and passion to argue persuasively for a case in your favor.
I do think the challenge, in a way for me, is to write a narrative film and when you finish watching it you feel like it's a collage. You tell the narrative, you tell the story, but you feel like you've created this tapestry. But it also has a shape, a story.
The reason I took on directing a film myself was because, no matter how skilful a director was or how much I liked the film, there'd always be beats where I'd go, 'Oh... well, that's skilful, in a way, but it doesn't get the flavour I'd intended in the script.'
If you're doing something on an interesting scale that involves an entire universe of characters, one way to unite them is to have them all undergo a common experience, and there is something at Christmas that unites everybody. It already sets a stage within the stage.