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" 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. "

Shane Black

Someone

Run

Gun

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

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

" 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. "

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

" Writers are nerds. "

Shane Black

Writers

Nerds

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

" '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. "

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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.' "

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

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