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" 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. "

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" '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. "

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

" 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. "

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

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

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

" You have to keep surprising your audience. "

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

" 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.' "

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

" Writers are nerds. "

" 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. "

" 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.' "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" Writing scripts is a laborious job that can be a real pain. "

" 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 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. "

" '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 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. "

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

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

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