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" 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. "

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" 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.' "

Shane Black

Living

Personality

Cats

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

" Writing is a black-box proposition. You see actors; you can see what they're doing. You can watch the director on set doing his work. But when a studio says to a writer, 'Give us some pages,' he just goes off and comes back. It's just pages, and suddenly, there's some writing on them. "

" 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. "

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

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

" 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've turned down lots and lots of work. Things that could have made me some money. "

Shane Black

Money

Some

" 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. "

Shane Black

Feel

Movies

" I just want to write movies. And I try very hard. "

" 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. "

" 'Iron Man 3' was very educational. There's a train that starts moving which already has so many moving parts, and it's a constant process of animatics and storyboards and consulting meetings, and it's a very mechanical process once the script is written. It's sprawling, and they're throwing money at it to get these things accomplished. "

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

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

" 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. "

" Estimation, assessment, looking back, retrospecting things - those are intellectual concepts, and they're always so subject to shifts in the wind. "

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

" You have to keep surprising your audience. "

" 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.' "

" The great thing about detective stories, in particular, the case can always be interesting as well as the characters. "

" 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 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

" 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 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. "