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" I hate 'The Professional.' It's one of the worst action/adventure movies ever made. "

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" 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. "

" I'll say, what makes me happy about making movies is, every once in a while through movies we find a kind of honesty. There's an honesty in fiction that's as effective or even more powerful than the honesty of our lives. We can find something that's genuinely true, like a chemistry between people or a statement that speaks to an audience. "

" I've read a thousand private-eye novels. "

" What strikes me as memorable about 'Predator' was a lot of the decisions that were made so quickly turned out to be so iconic. "

" 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. "

" For years I was doing the excruciating weightlifting of writing scripts - but then I stayed thin and someone else got all the muscles. "

" You have to keep surprising your audience. "

" 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. "

" For me, the stamp that I impose on stuff comes from the fact that in the '80s, when I was starting to write movies, I looked back to the '70s. So the films I enjoyed as a kid were the thrillers that came out of the '70s. Back then, you didn't have action movies; you had adventure films or thrillers. "

" 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 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. "

" 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 try not to think about anybody's reaction to what I do. "

" No one cares about your ideas. They're not going to come knocking on your door looking for ideas. They're going to want some concrete evidence that you have the potential to serve them or give them value for money. So that's my advice: write your spec scripts, no matter what. They're essential as a calling card, even if they don't get produced. "

" I'm cynical about the type of girl that swirls in the Hollywood community. "

" Probably my favorite piece of music, as an album taken as a whole, is Bruce Springsteen's 'Greetings from Asbury Park.' I just think it's incredibly pure. It's a sound that sort of broke new ground, and I think it paved the way for a hundred people that sound very similar. "

" 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. "

" Any time anyone fires bullets in an action movie that don't hit the target it immediately undermines the movie. "

" 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. "

" One of my favorite L.A. movies is 'Ed Wood,' and it's about how Bela Lugosi went from being this movie star personality to living in a little bungalow with his cats in the valley where, if you walked by, you'd have no idea. He'd come out and get his paper, and you'd go, 'That guy looks familiar.' "

" 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. "

" I love the idea of a super villain that doesn't wear a cape, that doesn't wear a super suit. "

" Writing is tough. It's insanely obsessive work. "

" An action movie should, like any other, follow the narrative traditions of literature. That means there should be subtlety, a slow build and a gradual bringing together of all the separate threads of the plot. To see all of it coming together slowly is very rewarding for the audience. "

" 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. "

" 'Lethal Weapon' sold apropos of nothing when I was very young, but that was a very different market. "

" 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'm the kid in school who always, you know, got the straight A's. I got to be that, you know, alpha aggressive work-ethic guy. And to have people assume that I was just this blithe, in-your-face guy writing crap, tossing it off, garnering insane amounts of money, and laughing all the way to the bank - frankly, I guess I got sensitive. "

" 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. "